Design Critique

Timothy Keirnan interviews Andy Budd, author of CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions and creative director of Clearleft, a user experience design consultancy in Brighton, England.
Andy and Tim discuss the following items:

* Giving site builders wireframes and prototypes instead of text-intensive design specifications.
* How guerilla usability testing fits into the user experience design process and how it may offer more value than big-budget summative testing.
* Where Andy will be speaking across England, New Zealand, and Australia over the next several weeks.
* The value of attending small or large professional conferences and how Clearleft designs its annual d.Construct conference.

You can see Andy at the following conferences over the next few weeks:

www.futureofwebdesign.com

www.chinwag.com/events/2008/04/chinwag-live-real-world-usability

http://webstock.org.nz/upcoming/

http://ux08.webdirections.org/

One of Tim's favorite professional books is the oldie-but-goodie Interface Design: The Art of Developing Easy-to-Use Software by Peter Bickford. You can find used copies of this out-of-print gem easily enough online.

Clearleft is at www.clearleft.com

Andy mentioned Silverback and you can learn about it at
www.andybudd.com/archives/2008/02/silverback/

Andy mentioned "bar camps":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BarCamp

And finally, you can learn more about the annual D.Construct conference at
www.dconstruct.org