websites and blogs

Yelp provides a suite of tools connecting people to local business through community contributed reviews is at the frontier of motivating to users to contribute. They currently boast about 25 million unique hits per month, and growing quickly, thanks in part to the efforts of their Community Managers.

SOCHI was privileged to hold a brown-bag lunch with two such community managers, Mariah Cherem and Colleen Curtis from Yelp.com. Mariah is the current Metro Detroit Community Manager, and Colleen was the Chicago Community Manager. They provided a great view of what's it like to work for one of the country's best known social media companies. They talked about how they foster the sense of community and keep their users happy and reviewing.

Looking for some inspiration or guidance as you are figuring out what it means to be an interaction designer? One great source for advice is designers currently in the field. The blog for the Interaction Design MFA program at the School for Visual Arts recently collected the thoughts of several noteworthy designers and researchers including Jared Spool, Jon Kolko, Whitney Hess, Robert Hoekman Jr, and more in their a post "Video Notes from the Field".

They were all asked to answer the question "So you’re thinking about becoming a designer? If I could tell you only one thing about going into the field, my advice would be _______ ."

Check out the blog post to view their video responses - Kevin Cheng's (Director of UX for raptr and ok-cancel) video is below.

If I could tell one thing to designers-to-be … from Kevin Cheng on Vimeo.

There seems to be no shortage lately of blog posts about recommended books for those in the field of User Experience. So, here's another link to a list of recommendations, this time from UX Booth: http://www.uxbooth.com/blog/recommended-books-for-your-user-experience-and-usability-library/ Notice that across these lists, many of the books are the same! That really shows that several of these books are the 'gold standard' resources for HCI.

Wondering what books, websites, blogs, conferences, and workshops can help prepare you for a career as a User Experience Designer? Designer Whitney Hess recently put together an excellent resource repository on her UX blog, Pleasure & Pain.

The following list of books was recommended by SI students, for SI students. HCI books and websites are listed first, and then recommendations for other specializations follow. Check 'em out and let us know if you have anything to add!

• About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, David Cronin (HCI)