It is a true honour to finally be part of the long & brilliant list of contributor to UX Magazine: an online publication focused on highlighting numerous topics from various fields –all revolving around the field of User Experience Design.

The UX Mag article is based on the mixed-fidelity prototyping technique I developed as part of my HCI Masters thesis at Indiana University: “Paper in Screen” Prototyping.

I say it was was “a long time coming” because this article was meant to be published a couple of months ago, but moving to NYC, starting a new job and going to a few UX/IxD conferences here and there certainly delayed its release.

Back when Dr. Davide Bolchini, Dr. Anthony Faiola and I had our “Paper in Screen” Prototyping article published in ACM’s Interactions Magazine, we had just proposed the idea behind the technique. The new approach to (mobile) prototyping was made by practitioners, for practitioners. It even offers the the steps to implement the technique, but it was lacking any of the testing results or conclusions I gathered once I completed my graduate thesis.

UX Magazine has now given me the opportunity to share those results with the rest of the UX community. After testing the technique with practitioners and a long affinity diagramming session, it was discovered that although the newly proposed technique managed to enhance the mobile user experience of simple low-fidelity prototypes, it was slightly more difficult to achieve (when compared to high-fidelity prototypes).

The following graph clearly shows where “Paper in Screen” Prototyping is located when compared to low and high fidelity prototypes:

I cordially invite you to read the article and provide me with feedback on it –either here or UX Magazine’s web site directly.

As I mentioned before, this idea came to be when I was still a graduate student at IUPUI’s School of Informatics. This is why I feel compelled to thank Dr. Bolchini and Dr. Faiola once again for being part of such a great graduate programme and having assisted me throughout my time there. It was an honour and a pleasure working with them.

If you are a student considering the field of Human-Computer Interaction as something you’d like to pursue for your graduate degree and/or PhD., I highly recommend you explore the options IUPUI’s School of Informatics has to offer. Not only it has an incredible group of professors and advisors, but lately it has been expanding at an incredible rate with a growing number of publications, presentations and interesting projects –something I am extremely proud of as an alumni.

The latest TaskFlo.ws post is dedicated to a rather interesting situation that unfolded earlier this week, involving Twitter, unpleasant surprises, and a 17-year old kid named James Cunningham.

If you are active in the Twitterverse, you may have come across something called Twifficiency –a site that offers to calculate out Twitter efficiency percentage based on how you interact with the world in 140 characters or less.

The post highlights some observations I made after (seemingly) accidentally tweeting my “efficiency” score to all my followers on Twitter via Twifficiency’s web site. It addresses a couple of issues that are relevant to user experience design on the web and clearly haven’t yet been entirely solved.

Head over to TaskFlo.ws for the full post:

Click Happy

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Interesting related  anecdote: The entire post was completed –and lost once I finished writing it because I selected the “Save as draft” drop-down menu option without actually clicking in the “Save” button (in Tumblr), to my utterly gutting surprise.

As I waited for some of my mates to join me at one of my new favourite bars in the city centre last night, I could not help the urge to try and rewrite the post while the ideas were still fresh in my mind as I sipped on a fully-loaded Mojito. For this used the always practical Evernote iPhone app and got to more than half of what is now the final post in TaskFlo.ws.

I must remember to type everything into Evernote first –for security/posterity purposes.

So far, I haven’t had the chance to attend two of the most important conferences related to user experience and interaction design. (a.k.a Interaction 09 in Vancouver and IA Summit 09 in Memphis)

Gladly, some of the speakers from both of this conferences will be in Washington, DC to offer a “lite” version of those conferences –and it’s called RedUX DC

Considering that conferences of this sort are generally hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars; a $5 dollar fee at the door seems beyond a steal. The flight from Indianapolis wasn’t even close in price to some of these conferences.

It’s only from around mid day until 7 pm…but again: it’s a great chance to meet some of the most relevant people in the field –as well as a chance to the U.S capital to catch up with old friends and get a breathe of fresh air from the Indy routine.

I hope to meet many of you IxDers and UxDers at RedUX DC!