May 2008 Issue
Bite-Sized UX Research
Published: May 7, 2008
It’s not uncommon for projects to lack the time, money, or resources to conduct ideal user research activities. There are many reasons why this occurs:
- Sometimes we’re brought onto a project late.
- Perhaps we’re new to an organization that doesn’t really get UX.
- Maybe a company is rushing to bring a product to market for some reason—and there are plenty of good and bad reasons this might be so—and there simply isn’t time to “go big”.
- Perhaps your client or organization is following an Agile development methodology.
At such times, it can be tempting to just throw up our hands in dismay and do nothing or lament the fact that everything isn’t perfect. But the simple fact is that, as UX professionals, we can always add value, at any stage in a project—even if a project team can’t act on our advice straight away.
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Category: Columns
Rosenfeld Media: UX Publishing Startup: An Interview with Lou Rosenfeld and Liz Danzico
Published: May 7, 2008
After working on five books as an editor or co-author, Lou Rosenfeld became disenchanted with the traditional book publishing model. So, in late 2005, he founded Rosenfeld Media, a new publishing house that develops short, practical, useful books on user experience design. Rosenfeld Media published their first book, Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior, in early 2008. I recently had the opportunity to interview Lou—along with Liz Danzico, Senior Development Editor at Rosenfeld Media—about starting a new publishing house and “eating their own dog food.”
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Category: Features
Simplicity in Your Mind
Published: May 7, 2008
There is increasing interest in the simplification of information technology (IT). The IT industry is recognizing the need to simplify software technology as businesses express their increased interest in governing the return on their IT investments. Two goals are surfacing as explicit mandates to which all software vendors are responding:
- lowering the skills required of software users
- increasing their productivity
Although this simplification mandate is most essential to small- and medium-sized businesses, where people with high-end technical skills may not be affordable, an awareness of the damage complexity inflicts on users is spreading to the enterprise market as well. Commoditization pressures make it necessary for the IT industry to reduce skills requirements as well as service and maintenance costs.
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Category: Features
Recent Articles from the April Issue
So You Want to Be a UX Manager—Seriously?
Published: April 22, 2008
This is my first column on the management of UX. In my column, I’ll articulate what I’ve learned from my experience as a senior leader and several years in intensive senior leadership development programs.
Have you ever known a manager you felt shouldn’t manage people? Maybe you’ve worked for one. Most of us have at one point or another. On the other hand, most of us have also had great managers. What sets great managers apart from bad ones? That’s one of the questions I’ll explore in this article.
Almost weekly, I talk with a UX designer or researcher who wants to become a manager of a UX team. For some people, this is a good choice. Both they and their teams thrive. But for many, it’s honestly not the right goal, and the end result is that neither they nor their teams are happy. The book Now, Discover Your Strengths [1] suggests that we tend to be good at the things we love doing, and we love activities at which we excel. I find that we do our best work when we’re in a playground. (I’ll explore this idea more in my next column.) Isn’t life too short to pursue a path we don’t enjoy?
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Category: Columns
Recycle These Pixels: Sustainability and the User Experience
Published: April 22, 2008, Earth Day
Whether we’re designing the user experience for a digital product or a physical one, as UX professionals, we are uniquely positioned to influence the behavior of other people, for good or ill. Our employers or clients charge us with responsibility for not only defining a design problem from multiple perspectives, but also finding solutions that are better than the ones that came before.
Increased energy consumption, materials waste, and the resulting climate change are the chief difficulties our generation of designers and thinkers must address—or ignore at our own peril. But for most UX professionals, sustainability—unlike usability, technical feasibility, aesthetic appeal, and even business viability—is not yet a baseline factor that we take into account when designing a product or service.
In honor of Earth Day—which occurs this year on April 22, 2008—let’s explore some different ways we can think about, influence, and change the design of digital products in ways that will alter both our own behavior and that of others and foster respect for our planet and its resources.
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Category: Columns
Winning Content Persuades, Not Manipulates
Published: April 12, 2008
When you think of persuasion, what comes to mind? Tricks such as the name repetition and personality mirroring touted by Dunder Mifflin sales representatives? Devious emotional pleas like those Bart Simpson wields on his dad? The constantly shifting rhetoric of unctuous politicians? Deceptively “free” software that actually is spyware?
Such funny and frightening examples are not really persuasion at all. They are forms of manipulation, and they give persuasion a bad name. As I discussed in my previous column, elements of persuasion are important to creating winning content. To help safeguard content from becoming manipulation, we need to understand its distinction from persuasion.
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Category: Columns
Designing Ethical Experiences: Some Practical Suggestions
Published: April 12, 2008
In the first installment of this series on ethics, I examined the way ethical dilemmas can impact the design of user experiences, describing how one scenario played out in the unfortunate experiences of some social networking service users in 2007. With that cautionary tale as reference, I explored how unresolved conflicts between stakeholders’ values or perspectives frequently manifest themselves as ethical challenges for designers. Looking ahead at the future of UX design, I described fundamental shifts that are occurring in our culture and technology around permeability and centralization. In the future, designers will lead the creation of increasingly multilateral, multidimensional, and co-created experiences. Such integrated experiences could introduce substantial, new potential sources of conflict—thanks to their greater interconnectedness and complexity. Therefore, I suggested this clear imperative in response to this potentially conflicted future: Design must find effective ways of managing conflict, encourage the creation of ethical experiences, and avoid ethically unsatisfactory compromises. Finally, I offered three goals designers must work toward.
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Category: Features
Defining Experience: Clarity Amidst the Jargon
Published: April 12, 2008
The word experience has gained significant traction over the past 15 years. Beginning with the mainstreaming of the term user experience in the software industry and, later, extended to the work of marketing professionals who began thinking about marketing as being experiential, the idea of experience as a focused professional area of endeavor is alive, well, and growing rapidly. However, the more our space grows, the more confused and chaotic is our collective understanding of the meaning of these terms. To try to help clarify this murkiness, I want to share my definitional model for the fields of experience and provide guidelines for the use of various terms.
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Category: Columns
Experience Partners: Giving Center Stage to Customer Delight
Published: April 12, 2008
Today, the design industry is at the threshold of a new epoch—a point of theoretically limitlessness potential for expansion. We must decide just how, going forward, we will relate to the people who use our designs—as people who are “busy and eager to get on with it” yet “alert and caring” or, much less constructively, as people who are merely “simple-minded and stupid.” Therefore, I want to propose the concept of experience partners as a whole new way of thinking about our customers as partners in holistic product experiences. We need new terminology to describe this concept, because the term users limits us to old ways of thinking about the world we live in and the products we develop. The term experience partners reflects an emerging paradigm shift from a focus on product features to instead conceptualizing holistic product experiences and embodies our best understanding of how to design products that create delight and become integral, harmonious parts of people’s lives.
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Category: Features