UX Café » english

How to write the perfect pop song

Stefan — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 21:41:57 +0000

According to our secret holiday schedule, it’s time for another episode! At UXcamp Holger talked about song-writing, creativity, shitty first drafts, and teaching stuff. The title is »How to write the perfect pop song« – and yes, indeed, this has a lot to do with User Experience!

A video recording of Holger’s talk is available on Vimeo, thanks to Marian Steinbach (uxzentrisch.de).

Links for this episode – and go watch those videos on YouTube!!

Holger’s example for song-writing is Feel by Robbie Williams.
The B section in a thirty-two-bar form is called middle eight and common in Tin Pan Alley songs.
You’ll find lots of Pachelbel rants on YouTube – named after Johann Pachelbel – e.g. this one by Rob Paravonian or this one by the Axis of Awesome.
Randy Pausch used two head fakes in his Last Lecture called Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams. You also might want to watch Time Management by him.
The term »Shitty First Draft« was coined by Anne Lamott in her book Bird by Bird.
We also mentioned the TED conference (great talks online!)…
…and the Service Design Conference. Holger will give his talk again at the conference (13th + 14th October 2010 in Berlin).
The song Holger played after the questions & answers was »A Decade In The Making« and is available on MySpace.

Listen:

If you enjoyed listening we would appreciate if you’d spread the word!

Zombie Personas

Stefan — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 19:00:44 +0000

This is by far the nerdiest episode we ever did, so fasten your seat belts. In his session at UXcamp, Tom said: "Personas – love ‘em or hate ‘em – you can’t not use ‘em. Either you have zombies, or you have living ones." In this recording of his session he talks about different kinds of zombies like Mirror Personas, Undead Personas, Unicorn Personas or Stupid User Personas. He gives advice on how to avoid these fellas and how to make good use of living personas during a project. As a bonus, Tom explains why 37signals doesn’t need personas at all.

Links for this episode:

Slides of Tom’s Zombie Persona talk
Another presentation by Tom icludes more info about the Target Persona Exercise and Story Cards
The book "About Face 2" by Alan Cooper (current edition is "About Face 3")
The book "The Inmates are running the Asylum", also by Alan Cooper
The New York Times article about the use of personas by the Ford Motor Company: "Before Creating the Car, Ford Designs the Driver"
37signals, makers of Basecamp and Backpack

Listen:

UXcamp Europe 2010

Stefan — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 23:39:58 +0000

Note: This is a special, hour-long episode entirely in English. We’d like to thank the organizers of UXcamp Europe 2010 as well as all the attendees who made UXcamp such a great event. Spread the word about UXcamp and see you all next year!

End of May, 400 UX pros from all over Europe came together in Berlin to discuss User Experience and exchange knowledge. Volker Gersabeck and Henning Grote, two of the organizers, answered all the curious questions by Holger, Tom and Stefan: How the idea for UXcamp was born, what they had to organize upfront, what the BarCamp spirit is like, and what feedback they’ve got from sponsors and attendees.

Links for this episode:

UX Camp Europe 2010 Sponsors
XING profiles of both Volker Gersabeck and Henning Grote
uxcampeurope.org – the Mixxt site where you can register and read all about the camp.
Session Grid for this year’s UXcamp
Follow twitter.com/uxcampeurope for the latest news about next year’s conference
UPA – the UPA conference which took place in Munich the week prior UXcamp.
#uxce10 is the hashtag for UXcamp, e.g. for images on Flickr and presentations on Slideshare.
UXcamp sponsors mentioned in this episode: Humboldt University (Institute of Psychology), Centigrade, Designerdock, Melt, Tobii
Fjord Open Doors by Fjord Berlin
TED conference
SurveyMonkey

Listen: