July 2008 Issue
Excel Hacks for Help Writers
Published: July 21, 2008
One of my earlier careers was in manufacturing management,
and it grounded me in the principles of project planning and management. When I
moved into technical communication, I brought my project management disciplines
with me, and I embraced the prevailing tools of my new profession. I dutifully
produced documentation plans in Microsoft Word and supported them with detailed
project plans in Microsoft Project. However, the problem is that—like bad
relationships—these artifacts never gave back results that were sufficient to
reward the effort I put into creating them.
Read more
Category: Columns
Designing a Different Kind of Intranet: An Intranet for a UX Team
Published: July 21, 2008
Most of us who are working as part of a design team in a services company, a product company, or even a design boutique have to live with a generic intranet. In this article, I’ll
describe how to leverage your company’s intranet and how to build a community
around an intranet for a UX team.
Read more
Category: Features
How to Succeed As a First-Time UX Manager
Published: July 7, 2008
In my last column, I suggested that being a manager of UX is no better—and no worse—than being a great designer or user researcher, but the roles are very different. In fact, as the book The First 90 Days [1] points out, the skills that make you successful as an individual contributor are not the same skills you need as a leader.
Still, I was glad to see that a couple of people who talked
with me after reading my column are being offered the opportunity to move into
management roles and have decided to take the plunge. They asked me how they
could make this transition a positive experience for them, their teams, and
their companies. They were asking the right questions. This column discusses
what attributes can help someone become a successful first-time UX
manager—though these attributes are foundational elements for all managers.
Read more
Category: Columns
Preparing for User Research Interviews: Seven Things to Remember
Published: July 7, 2008
Interviewing is an artful skill that is at the core of a wide variety of research methods in user-centered design, including stakeholder interviews, contextual inquiry, usability testing, and focus groups. Consequently, a researcher’s skill in conducting interviews has a direct impact on the quality and accuracy of research findings and subsequent decisions about design. Skilled interviewers can conduct interviews that uncover the most important elements of a participant’s perspective on a task or a product in a manner that does not introduce interviewer bias. Companies hire user researchers and user-centered designers because they possess this very ability.
There is a wide variety of literature regarding best
practices for user research interviews. For example, in their book User and Task Analysis for Interface Design, Hackos and Redish devote an entire section to the formulation of unbiased questions. They advise interviewers to avoid asking leading questions, to ask questions that are based
on a participant’s experience, and to avoid overly complex, lengthy questions.
Read more
Category: Columns
Convergence and Emergence: 2008 IA Summit
Published: July 7, 2008
The 2008 IA Summit was held April 10–14, at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Miami, Florida, shown in Figure 1. It had the highest attendance in the conference’s nine-year history: Over 600 people signed up for the conference run by ASIS&T (American Society for Information Science and Technology). All the signs are that information architecture (IA) is a community and a practice that is growing, and that its sister disciplines—interaction design (IxD) and experience design—are well-represented at the conference—not just in terms of attendees, but also speakers.
Read more
Category: Reviews