Prompted by a mention in Stephen P Anderson’s recent article, I’ve been playing with Track Your Happiness. Part application, part experiment, it’s an idea I’ve always found fascinating. A scrobbler for emotion so that, by matching patterns, we can try to understand what drives us.

I’ve learned that Sundays fill me with dread, that sleep makes no difference to my mood and that my leisure activities don’t make me happy. Am I wasting my time on them, or is happiness not my motivation? Let’s take the example of games, marked Playing at the foot of the graph.

Games can be infuriating. I’m frequently shot by teenagers, eaten by ravenous Turing machine monsters or beaten courtesy of a defensive howler. So why play? Because games provide other rewards. They’re an outlet for stress, and provide the challenge of competition and a feeling of mastery. By focusing on their unimportant syntax, I can break from quotidian thoughts without idly wandering into boredom, and experience emotions that contrast my collaborative professional work.

So do games make me happy? Apparently not. But they’re important vitamin supplements, making up for the deficiencies in my mental diet.

At last, the big announcement. I’m delighted to confirm that Undercover User Experience, written by myself and fellow Clearleftie James Box, will be published by New Riders this autumn.

Once you catch the user experience bug, the world changes. Doors open the wrong way, websites don’t work, and companies don’t seem to care. Fortunately, anyone can learn the UX remedies – usability testing, personas, prototyping and so on – but, unless your organization ‘gets it’, putting them into practice is trickier.

Undercover User Experience will show you how to do great UX work with tiny budgets, no time, and even without official clearance.

The idea came about in a Utrecht hotel, where James and I got talking about the early stages of our careers, when we didn’t have the luxury of doings things ‘by the book’. Through the IA Institute mentoring scheme I’ve met several people in the same situation. For them, what makes UX work difficult isn’t lack of skill, but not knowing how to make headway in companies that don’t appreciate the need. Pioneering UX and inspiring colleagues who’ve never cared about design takes improvisation, persistence and diplomacy. So we’ll cover guerrilla approaches to the UX techniques we know and love, along with frank advice on how to make them most of them in your business.

On a personal note, I’m thrilled to be partnering with New Riders. They were our first choice publisher due to their outstanding UX portfolio, including the classics Don’t Make Me Think!, Designing for Interaction and Elements of User Experience.

The writing experience is already demanding and rewarding. There’s been much to-ing and fro-ing over titles and much confusion over the US tax system and self-assessment, but we’re well under way and hoping to wrap the writing up by June.

But enough – I’ve no wish to turn this blog into a marketing vehicle. If you want to keep up to date with our progress and be the first to hear when the book’s due out, follow UndercoverUX on Twitter or visit the Undercover User Experience website and sign up for updates.

Spring’s finally poking its head round the corner: I fly off for my first South By Southwest in less than three weeks and I’m hoping that winter will have finally given up by the time I return. From the outside, SXSW gives off a Glastonbury-like vibe: an enormous cauldron of distraction, where carefully-planned itineraries are discarded within hours. With so many sessions and the endless attractions that “geek spring break” bring, I never knew how people chose which sessions and parties to attend.

Fortunately, this year the SXSW team have introduced curated workshops, which bring together panels under a common theme, meaning when Jason Beaird asked me to present my talk Beauty In Web Design as part of his curated theme, I jumped at the chance.

Great web design is all around us, but can we go beyond ‘cool’, ‘usable’ & ‘fun’ to create something truly beautiful? This session examines our changing attitudes to beauty, art and meaning, and why the web is ideally suited to become a vehicle for true beauty in the Information Age.

To add to the pressure, I’m the first thing on: 2pm on Friday 12 March. Directly following me are the talented Samantha Warren, presenting Get Stoked on Web Typography, and Matthew Smith of Squaredeye with Simple Steps to Great Web Design.

So if you’re heading Austin-wards, grab your conference pass early and join us in the glamorously-named Ballroom E for an afternoon of beautiful thrills.

Read this post

Read this post

Read this post

Read this post

Read this post