Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D.
Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D. is Chief UX Strategy Officer for ICS and Boston UX. She is focused on designing natural user interfaces to achieve simple-but-compelling user experiences for emerging technologies and the Internet of Things. Dorothy has 30+ years of experience in a broad range of user experience (UX) skills, including UX strategy, user research, interaction design, visual design, and programming. Dorothy is passionate about creating usable beauty and beautiful usability.
Articles by Author
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Seeing Red - Why Red Is a Good Contrasting Color for an Effective User Experience
Tuesday, April 15, 2014 - 09:57 "> • By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D. • UX Design, User Experience, red, contrasting color, UX
When designers create user experiences, red is the color most often chosen in interface design to draw attention and signify an alert or warning. A message in red text might say, “Email is a required field” or “Invalid username or password." Sometimes red is just used to draw attention. The question becomes, is red especially suited to this task, or just a handy contrasting color that is not often used for primary interface elements?
The Blue Landscape of Our Imagination
Wednesday, February 19, 2014 - 15:09 "> • By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D. • UX Design
Generations of operating systems have heavily utilized shades of blue and gray. On my current Mac desktop, I can set a preference for the “Appearance” to be “blue” or “gray.” However, even if I choose gray, the folder icons are light blue.
Visceral Appeal in UX – Part 4: The Design
Wednesday, January 8, 2014 - 11:54 "> • By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D. • UX Design
To understand how to create visceral appeal in a user experience (UX) it helps to compare and contrast other forms of media that preceded the digital medium.
Visceral Appeal in UX – Part 3: The Aesthetics
Wednesday, December 4, 2013 - 17:20 "> • By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D. • UX
Visceral Appeal in UX – Part 2: Some Science
Tuesday, October 22, 2013 - 15:05 "> • By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D. • UX, UI, Visceral
When we say that a user experience (UX) has “visceral appeal”, we mean that it elicits an immediate “I like it” response. A visceral response is an emotional reaction that involves little or no active thought. It is often called a “gut feeling,” and it can be either positive or negative. According to Merriam-webster.com, visceral is defined as: 1. felt in or as if in the internal organs of the body: deep 2. not intellectual: instinctive, unreasoning
Visceral Appeal in UX – Part 1: The Mystery
Wednesday, September 25, 2013 - 13:40 "> • By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D. • UX
Our Vision Sense Outshines and Overshadows
Wednesday, August 28, 2013 - 16:41 "> • By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D. •
Have you ever wondered why graphical user interfaces (GUIs) have been the primary interface to computing? Why not use aural (sound), or haptic (touch) and gesture? A simple answer might be that technological evolution drove us in the direction of GUIs; where cathode-ray tubes CRTs met typewriters and never looked back. It also seems intuitively obvious. All of us want to see something first in order to touch it or move it with a gesture.
UX Designers are Pattern Thinkers
Tuesday, July 9, 2013 - 12:10 "> • By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D. •
Even though user experience (UX) design must accommodate the needs of the user, which seem on the surface to be idiosyncratic, UX designs are built using user interface patterns, which are highly rule-based. It’s confusing and annoying to live in a world with no rules or inconsistent rules. Dreams are like that; you go through a door but are back in the same room or you run but you stay in the same place. The rules of physics define the behavior of the physical world.
The Tricky Thing about Free-form Gestures
Monday, June 17, 2013 - 12:00 "> • By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D. •
The tricky thing about free-form gestures… adding a few obvious gestures to an otherwise touch interface is easy. However, if you begin adding more gestures, the usability design challenges increase exponentially.
The Most Important Reason For Consistency in the Design of a UX
Wednesday, May 15, 2013 - 11:15 "> • By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D. •
There are numerous blogs arguing for consistency in a UX design mostly for soft reasons, such as "it's good for company branding," "it’s just good design," and “it’s easier to learn.” Here is the most important reason for UX design consistency, based on how the brain works: Lack of consistency in a UX design leads to added “cognitive load” for the user and breaks the “transparent to task” effect.
Conflating Increment and Iterate? Use Common Sense!
Monday, April 22, 2013 - 08:50 "> • By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D. •
I’m an advocate of UX + Agile but it has led to some “can’t-see-the-work-for-the-methodology” blindness. People are wrapped-up in doggedly following the mechanics of the methodology and lose sight of essential common sense about how best to get the work done that initially inspired the creation of the methodology. This not very thoughtful behavior tends to dumb-down the value of the methodology, diminishing the promised gains in project efficiency… bad for any company.
Observations on Touch Usability for Large Displays
Friday, April 12, 2013 - 07:43 "> • By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D. •
A physical demonstration of a touch enabled coverflow drag on an ICS kiosk.
To Touch or Not to Touch
Tuesday, February 26, 2013 - 13:43 "> • By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D. •
At Integrated Computer Solutions [ICS], we are proud of the many projects we develop and although we would like to display all of them, often we are restricted due to confidentiality clauses or because they run on specialized hardware. So recently we decided to create a touchscreen demo to exhibit some of our user experience [UX] and software development expertise. The demo was written in Qt and QML and can run on a variety of hardware.
Effective Team Collaboration
Thursday, January 3, 2013 - 13:46 "> • By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D. •
Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D., leads UX R&D at ICS. She brings skills from traditional design practices, and experience in UX design/build research environments.
Configuring a UX team – are "super designers" the way to go?
Thursday, January 3, 2013 - 13:45 "> • By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D. • UX
To see what new UX projects ICS has been working on, come by our booth at DESIGN East September 18 and 19 at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. At ICS, we’ve cultivated a cross-disciplinary UX team. To be more specific, everyone has UX skills of some flavor and everyone has at least some experience with coding. To be even more specific, some of us are designers that learned to code and some of us are engineers that acquired UX skills.