In a successful collaboration with Substantial here in Seattle, UIarchitect recently lead a “substantial” revamp of the Internet Week New York website for 2012. The site now sports a more rational information architecture and refined visual style providing much more flexibility for the events’ varied content requirements. We also dug deep, providing major improvements to the site’s event calendar, browsing, searching as well as registration, voting and other features. The folks at both Internet Week and Substantial were great to work with and we’re very proud of the process and the results.

We are happy to announce the UIArchitect and Attentive Design are merging our user experience design practices. Scott Neilson and I have collaborated on many projects together, providing user experience consulting for both technology giants and startups.

Scott brings with him 18 years of experience. He was one of the first designers at Amazon and has been a designer on many Microsoft products. He has also worked with a number of startups, giving them the competitive edge in the marketplace that world-class user experience provides.

We sat down yesterday and talked about what we are as a team and what we hope to bring into the world. What came out was a MANIFESTO of SORTS.

• Promote the human experience above the customer experience and the user experience.
• Make the experience ideal. This is more than being a competitive market leader. We are being bombarded with more and more cognitive clutter everyday. Bad user experience forces us to spend more time sitting at our desk or looking at our phone instead connecting with our friends and families.
• Highfalutin, overwrought, design is careless with the hot commodity of a user’s attention. User research and analytics still require the human touch. We don’t believe that AB testing, crowd sourcing or some newfangled design methodology can replace the tough part – getting it right.
• We don’t want our chair designed by our collective asses unless we’re sitting on the subway or a park bench. In that case we’ll take what we can get and gladly offer it to someone who needs it.

We continue to offer end-to-end user experience design and consulting.