May 2008 Issue
User Assistance: Writing for a High-Context Culture
Published: May 19, 2008
Jean-Luc Dumont is a respected authority in international technical communications, but he is most renowned for a particularly entertaining presentation he gives about road signs. This genre of tight communications that are written for small spaces and meant to read by users in motion holds many lessons for those of us who write user assistance.
Especially enlightening is the distinction Jean-Luc makes between high-context cultures and low-context cultures and how that difference in cultures influences the language of road signs. While technical communicators tend to write in a low-context style, user assistance occurs in high-context situations. So, in this column, I’ll discuss the need to reexamine how we write user assistance in light of this cultural proclivity.
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Category: Columns
Everything in Moderation: Using Content Units to Manage UX
Published: May 19, 2008
The Roman philosopher Cicero stated, “Never go to excess, but let moderation be your guide.” The trouble is, even though people have repeated this particular quotation over the past couple of millennia, our clients often push the limits excessively—beyond moderation—for both content and presentation.
As a UX professional, how do you demonstrate to your clients the benefits of moderation in user experience? You show them.
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Category: Features
Breaking Down the Silos: Usability Practitioners Meet Marketing Researchers
Published: May 19, 2008
Being a consultant with experience in both traditional marketing
research and user experience and usability gives me a unique perspective on a
broad range of issues relating to customer experience. Not only do I have a
good idea of what the other discipline does, I am a practitioner of the other discipline. However, in attempting to play both roles at once, I often find that client companies keep these two
disciplines locked up in separate silos—usability research within IT and
marketing research within the Marketing Services department. This can have a
serious impact on the sharing of information relating to customer experience.
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Category: Features
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