Currently Reading: Usability of iPad Apps and Websites
by Raluca Budiu and Jakob Nielsen

This is interesting in that it’s some early insight into iPad apps and website usabilty. It’s interesting where the best practices for the iPad differs to those for the iPhone – though it seems that they share a lot of the same issues.

It’s kindly offered up as a free download: Usability of iPad Apps and Websites

Currently Reading: Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior.
by Indi Young

This is a book from a series from Rosenfeld Media. The series includes Design is the Problem:The Future of Design must be Sustainable, Prototyping: A Practitioner’s Guide and Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks.

What I’m enjoying most about this book is the practical advice for integrating UCD into less formal design processes. I’m only part way through, and there’s a lot of “real” information.

A highly enjoyable (and scholarly) collection of folktales retold by the inimitable Italo Calvino. As there are 200 tales – my strategy has been to read a few stories between reading other books. As with any collection of folktales – there are plenty of kings, princesses, beheadings and maiming – morbid but almost always with a happy ending. Each story is preceeded by a brief description of the story’s sources, influences and an explaination as to how Calvino decided to synthesize various regional versions in his transcription. Some note worthy titles: “Quack, Quack Stick to My Back”, “The Chicken Laundress” and “Three Tales by Three Sons of Three Merchants”.

You can read some excerpts on Google Books.

The Cheese Monkeys & The Learners
by Chip Kidd

Fun reading – especially for anyone who has ever been to art school or worked in advertising. Not often you encounter a passage on time sheets, billable and non-billable hours, or a pitch in a novel…

My Last Sigh (The Autobiography of Luis Bunuel).
Translated by Abigail Israel

I’m actually re-reading this excellent book, having read it for the first time long ago. It’s a testament to my good manners that I gave the book back to the friend I’d borrowed it from – I’d enjoyed reading it so much that I knew I regret giving it up.

More about Bunuel at Wikipedia

Cloud Atlas
by David Mitchell

This book has been in the queue for a for few years now – there’s nothing to make be avoid reading a book than having it recommended it to me. Perverse of me, I know. If you’re unaware of the book’s structure, the first section’s content and pace might weaken your resolve. Well worth your perseverance.

Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano

The Savage Detectives: A Novel
by Roberto Bolaño

An excellent book by Roberto Bolaño – who’s work I only know from short stories published in the New Yorker. Not to be mistaken for your average crime or detective fiction – although there is an element of mystery. As a translation this book’s all the more impressive. The term Visceral Realists makes smile.

I wish they’d gone a step further and mapped specific tasks/skills to each job title since there’s to be a lot of confusion as to what the difference is between an IA or an ID, or and UXD. The activities outlined in the Wikipedia definition of user experience design – for example – could easily apply to any of the above.

I think it also would have been worth while to have respondents indicate the environment they work in (interactive agency, consulting company or inhouse design team) and their primary focus (micro-sites, web sites, web apps, software or hardware development). The later particularly would have done more to distinguish the respondents than some highfalutin job titles.

The two pieces of data I’m referring to (below) and the survey results:

4. Which of the following job titles best represents your current position?

12. How much your time do you spend on these tasks: