Bella Martin :: UX Design Manager

Welcome!

kbellamartin — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 04:23:17 +0000

Visualizing Research Methods

kbellamartin — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 04:23:07 +0000

User-centered research is the power supply behind every tool in the UX toolbox. However, the benefits of research can only be unlocked if organizations know which methods to use, when, with whom, and how to interpret the results. Imagine a hand-held set of tools that are designed to introduce User-Centered Research Methods to organizations who are new to research. The tools will demystify a set of reliable methods that can be beneficially adopted into an organization’s existing design processes. Stay tuned for updates on this project…

A Blog for the UX Community

kbellamartin — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 04:22:16 +0000

I live and breathe User Experience Design and User-centered Research. It isn’t just a career for me, in truth, I feel it is my calling. My blog, UX Groundswell, provides me a platform to write about the topics and ideas that I love most. My hope is that this blog will provide resources to strengthen our ever-growing UX community, but also discuss the issues that we UX practitioners face, along with concrete ways to bring balance and forward-momentum to our discipline.

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Designing with Time

kbellamartin — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 12:05:57 +0000

For a “Visualizing Information Space” graduate project, each Design CMU grad student was asked to visualize the information space of a different artifact…some of us received a page from the Wall Street Journal, a game board, or a book. The artifact that I was given was a 45 minute, interactive, CD-ROM that contained a lecture Dan Boyarski gave in 2002 when he was awarded the Muriel Cooper Prize by the Design Management Institute. The title of the lecture was “Designing with Time.”

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Kinetic Type :: Catch 22

kbellamartin — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 12:04:33 +0000

Design students in Carnegie Mellon’s Graduate Typography II course were asked to choose and then interpret a dialogue across two mediums—a digital kinetic typography movie, and a 16-page printed book. Issues of type selection, legibility, space, pacing, duration and placement were also to be considered in both deliverables. My dialogue was pulled directly out of the book “Catch 22” by Joseph Heller.

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Discovering Typography

kbellamartin — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 12:03:57 +0000

For this graduate Design project at CMU, I was inspired by the beauty of the Bauer Bodoni typeface, so I selected it as the basis of my research for my project. The project asked me to reach back into the typeface’s historical context, researching the use of type and the trends of communication design relative to the time of the typeface’s creation. The research was to inform our use of grid systems, hierarchy, type as image, points of entry, and appropriateness…as well as to inspire us.

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Type as Voice :: “She Surrenders”

kbellamartin — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 12:02:32 +0000

Our “Graduate Typography” class was presented with a verbal rendition of a short story that was told by Jackie Jonas, a professional storyteller. That was our raw material…from there, our goal was to convey our interpretation of the story using type as something not only to be read, but also felt and heard.

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Nature as a Model

kbellamartin — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 12:01:27 +0000

All designers know that there is much inspiration to be found in the natural world around us. Using the organizational stucture of either a natural artifact or process, our “Graduate Typography” class was asked to tap into this inspiration, then organize and visualize 44 random names from 20th Century to bring context and meaning to the data.

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J. J. Keller’s Prospera

kbellamartin — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 06:06:09 +0000

As Prospera’s Internet Product Design Manager, I had the lead role in developing the high-level designs of Prospera, with a focus on information architecture, content planning, end-user functionality, and usability. I relied on user-centered research methods, direct customer feedback, legislative activity out of Washington D.C. and over 13 years of industry experience to inform and guide design decisions for Prospera.

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Microsoft Research :: Sharing Personal Media

kbellamartin — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 06:05:34 +0000

The Sharing Personal Media project, sponsored by the Microsoft’s Social Computing Research Group, asked first year graduate students from CMU’s School of Design to explore the creation, connection, and behavior of future mobile devices, and the ways in which such devices could facilitate information sharing.

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