Features
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.
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Designing Ethical Experiences: Understanding Juicy Rationalizations
Published: June 23, 2008
From “The Big Chill”: [1]
Michael: “I don’t know anyone who could get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations. They’re more important than sex.”
Sam Weber: “Ah, come on. Nothing’s more important than sex.”
Michael: “Oh yeah? Ever gone a week without a rationalization?”
Designers rationalize their choices just as much as everyone else. But we also play a unique role in shaping the human world by creating the expressive and functional tools many people use in their daily lives. Our decisions about what is and is not ethical directly impact the lives of a tremendous number of people we will never know. Better understanding of the choices we make as designers can help us create more ethical user experiences for ourselves and for everyone.
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Constructing a User Experience: The Cost-Benefits Compass
Published: June 23, 2008
A common frustration among UX professionals who are employed in the software development industry is the perception that executive-level management gives lip service to user experience rather than supporting specific UX activities by allocating sufficient resources for them.
This perception is seldom a reality. Competent management does realize that the user experience is critical to the long-term health of their company. Unfortunately, when developing software, the temptation to steal from the feature-list cookie jar and try to squeeze just one more feature into the current development cycle by skipping UX work is simply too great for most Product Managers. This strategy, however nearsighted, can and often does make money in the short term by achieving a temporary increase in sales. The only way to win resources in this situation is to bring the discussion back to dollars.
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Helping the Experts
Published: June 9, 2008
When creating Help for any application, the typical starting point is user profiling. We create user personas, find out what tasks users perform, and identify which tasks are more frequent. We also note users’ preferences for delivery format and language.
However, as applications become more and more sophisticated, their Help systems tend to be equally complex. Some of the reasons for complexity in a Help system are that, more often than not, users have a variety of roles, with different sets of permissions for changing configurable options, and different levels of expertise. The result is an intricate and multilayered Help system. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of managing this complexity is providing Help that is really helpful to expert users.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Designing Ethical Experiences: Social Media and the Conflicted Future
Published: February 11, 2008
“Ethical dilemmas occur when values are in conflict.”
From the American Library Association Code of Ethics [1]
Questions of ethics and conflict can seem far removed from the daily work of user experience (UX) designers who are trying to develop insights into people’s needs, understand their outlooks, and design with empathy for their concerns [2]. In fact, the converse is true: When conflicts between businesses and customers—or any groups of stakeholders—remain unresolved, UX practitioners frequently find themselves facing ethical dilemmas, searching for design compromises that satisfy competing camps. This dynamic is the essential pattern by which conflicts in goals and perspectives become ethical concerns for UX designers. Unchecked, it can lead to the creation of unethical experiences that are hostile to users—the very people most designers work hard to benefit—and damaging to the reputations and brand identities of the businesses responsible.
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User Experience in India
Published: January 22, 2008
The usability and user experience communities of practice are experiencing great growth and have emerged in countries throughout the world. These developing practices have brought about a huge economic boom in the UX market as both customers and clients are beginning to understand the business benefits they bring. In India, we have undoubtedly seen the growth of these practices. Indian UX companies are delivering designs that satisfy users’ needs to their clients.
This article shares some experts’ thoughts on the Indian UX market. Through interviewing several international UX experts, I have gained deeper insights into the growth of user experience in India and its future development path from here. These insights have changed my perspective, my beliefs, and the way I think.
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Motorcycle UX: Riding in the Fast Lane
Published: January 7, 2008
As a UX designer, understanding what contributes to a great user experience, how to define who users are, what their mental models consist of, and what kinds of interactions encourage them to succeed—all of these things make me happy. But the thing that makes me the happiest is spending time riding my Moto Guzzi Breva 1100—a rare, handmade Italian motorcycle. For me, it’s the ultimate user experience.
Riding my motorcycle lets me experience the world through many senses: the fecund smell of Virginia farmland in June; the ripply heat of the Arkansas Delta region in the middle of a heat wave; the sound of a thunderstorm as I race to beat it, heading for shelter from the storm; and the feel of the road, the bike, and the wind as I ride wherever it is I’m going.
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Documenting the Design of Rich Internet Applications: A Visual Language for State
Published: December 17, 2007
Ajax and Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) have revolutionized the way users interact with Web sites. However, documenting the design of any page that uses Ajax is a challenge, because the page—and, more importantly, components on the page—can have different states, depending on how users interact with the page’s components.
When I use the term state, I refer to a page or a page component that displays different information—content or user interface (UI) elements—depending on a user’s interactions or the information available to the system.
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The Repertory Grid: Eliciting User Experience Comparisons in the Customer’s Voice
Published: December 3, 2007
Chances are that, if you do user research, you conduct a fair number of user interviews. When conducting interviews, our training tells us to minimize bias by asking open-ended questions and choosing our words carefully. But consistently asking unbiased questions is always a challenge, especially when you’re following a participant down a line of questioning that is important, and you haven’t prepared your questions ahead of time. Also, if you do a lot of interviews, you might fall into a pattern of asking the same types of questions for different studies. This might not bias participants, but you can bias yourself if you always investigate the same types of issues. Finally, are you sure you are asking the right questions? Your interview questions might be relevant to you and your project team, but are they the questions that will get at important issues from a user’s perspective?
In an effort to address some of these considerations, I’ve experimented with the Repertory Grid method—an interview technique that originated in clinical psychology and is useful in a variety of domains, including user experience design.
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Mobile Usability for Teens Who Are Going Mobile
Published: December 3, 2007
Want to know the future of mobile device use? Talk to your tweener or teenager.
Mobile device use is reaching down into younger demographics. A July 2006 study by iGR showed that, among 15–17-year-old teens, most had been using a cell phone for two years or more. In the 12–14-year-old bracket, 50–70% of these young people already own and use mobile phones, and the mobile phone market is beginning to reach down to kids who are ten or younger.
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Trust in the Little Things
Published: November 19, 2007
Despite nearly a decade of research into the fragile nature of trust relationships in online user experiences, we continue to see organizations implementing devices such as abbreviated link URLs that jeopardize trust relationships for little or no benefit.
What is a trust relationship? One widely accepted definition of trust comes from the classic book Foundations of Social Theory, by James S. Coleman.
Coleman offers a four-part definition of trust.
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Customer Support on the Web: Don't Call Us, We'll Call You
Published: November 5, 2007
When customers arrive at a Web site, they have goals and tasks they want to complete—for example, buying a movie ticket, transferring money, signing up for a service, applying for a loan, asking for help, and so on. An important requirement for a Web site is the ability for customers to serve themselves, so they can generally complete their tasks without needing to contact Customer Support or ask a friend for help. However, understandably, there are times when customers do need help from Customer Support—by either speaking over the phone or using live chat—so they can solve more complex problems or complete tasks they cannot complete on their own. In such cases, customers need email addresses and phone numbers that let them contact Customer Support directly.
Sometimes, however, when a customer looks for contact information for Customer Support, it is hidden from view or buried beneath layers of menus. Some companies even deliberately hide their contact information, because they simply don’t want customers to contact them.
So, what factors should you consider if your goal is providing more optimal customer support on the Web?
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The Five Competencies of User Experience Design
Published: November 5, 2007
Throughout my career as a user experience designer, I have continually asked myself three questions:
- What should my deliverables be?
- Will my deliverables provide clarity to me and their audience?
- Where do my deliverables and other efforts fit within the spectrum of UX design?
I have found that, if I do not answer these questions prior to creating a deliverable, my churn rate increases and deadlines slip.
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The Composite Intelligence of Virtual Assistants
Published: October 8, 2007
As early as 1968, influenced by visionary movies such as Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its fictional computer character HAL 9000, we envisioned omniscient, intelligent machines that could easily contain the whole range of human knowledge. Then, in 1987, the Knowledge Navigator video
from Apple Computer struck our imaginations and greatly boosted our expectations of what computers would be able to do for us in a few years’ time.
It is now 20 years later, but technology is still very far from fulfilling such hopes regarding virtual assistants:
- Voice recognition isn’t immediate.
- People adapt to machines’ lexicons rather than the other way around.
- Computers cannot easily transcend the scope for which they have been programmed.
- Self-learning machines are still experimental.
- The generation of high-quality graphics representing emotionally rich, 3-D avatars is far from being real time, cheap, or extensively available.
Card Sorting: Mistakes Made and Lessons Learned
Published: September 10, 2007
Card sorting is a simple and effective method with which most of us are familiar. There are already some excellent resources on how to run a card sort and why you should do card sorting. This article, on the other hand, is a frank discussion of the lessons I’ve learned from running numerous card sorts over the years. By sharing these lessons learned along the way, I hope to enable others to dodge similar potholes when they venture down the card sorting path.
Card sorting is a deceptively simple method. The beauty of card sorting is that it just makes sense. I normally get enthusiastic nods of approval when explaining it to others. But therein lies one of the key problems with card sorting: our expectations of what it can do.
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Home Page Design
Published: August 6, 2007
It is time to review a company home page design. There are a number of stakeholders involved in home page design, and each of them wants a piece of the home page real estate. Are there questions you can ask before approaching home page design that can move it beyond the influence of specific stakeholders in the company toward a common vision? Are there tips to consider when designing a home page? This is article will help you better understand how to approach home page design.
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What Puts the Design in Interaction Design
Published: July 10, 2007
“Most design jargon deals with how to design rather than what to design and why.”—John Arnott
“I prefer design by experts—people who know what they are doing.”—Donald Norman
Interaction design is a blended endeavor of process, methodology, and attitude. Discussions of process and methodology are pervasive in the interaction design milieu and often revolve around a perceived tension between process and methodology and the role of design within this discipline. To be clear, process is the overarching design framework—for example, an iterative, or spiral, process or a sequential, or waterfall, process. Conversely, a methodology is a prescribed design approach such as user-centered design or genius design.
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Comparing UXD Business Models
Published: July 10, 2007
When leaders of UX organizations get together, we always seem to talk about how our UX groups are structured and why. Just as designers solve user interface design problems, their leaders solve organizational design problems. It’s what we do. At CHI 2005, Kartik Mithal, Director of User Experience at Sun Microsystems, and Jim Nieters, Senior Leader of User Experience at Cisco, spent hours sharing insights about how to best structure their groups for future success. Kartik and Jim agreed that the opportunity to learn from one another was one of the more valuable reasons for leaders of UX groups to attend CHI.
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Walking Through Your Product Design With Stakeholders
Published: June 4, 2007
You are the lead designer—or perhaps even the sole designer on a product team. You have just completed your product design, and it’s time to walk through your design approach with the project stakeholders, including management, developers, and users. What do you need to do to prepare for your presentation?
This article provides some basic tips to help you better prepare to walk through your product designs with stakeholders.
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Four Factors of Agile UX
Published: June 4, 2007
On a quiet spring morning, one of our clients—the director of a small firm with ten employees—called our office and wanted to see me the very same day to discuss a new project. When we met in the afternoon, he told me his firm needed a new Web site for the launch of their latest product, which they would promote—and, hopefully, sell—only on the Web. The site was to include communications tools for interacting with customers, Help, and a blog on which they’d announce new versions of the product.
Nothing strange so far. The firm meant to invest, as it had previously done, in user-centered design, online promotion, and development by my firm and two other partners. However, toward the end of the meeting, the director told me that everything must be online in three weeks’ time for a fair, and the whole site must be completed on a budget of less than $15,000.
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Sharing Ownership of UX
Published: May 28, 2007
A UX architect, or lead UX designer, is the member of a product team who is primarily responsible for ensuring all aspects of a digital product that users experience directly—including its form, behavior, and content—are learnable, usable, useful, and aesthetically pleasing. Thus, a UX architect has an important role to play from a product’s conception to its launch. But creating truly great products requires an entire product team to place the needs of users foremost when making product decisions—or even better, a user-centered corporate culture. If you find yourself in a less enlightened company or on a product team that just does’t get how creating great user experiences contributes to a company’s success, you should take every opportunity to evangelize the value of UX to people in your company—from the executive management team to your peers in other disciplines on product teams. If you need help making the case for UX, have a look at my article on UXmatters, “Why UX Should Matter to Software Companies.”
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When ROI Isn’t Enough: Making Persuasive Cases for User-Centered Design
Published: May 7, 2007
Making the case for user-centered design (UCD) is a topic of recurring discussion for UX professionals. Much of the discussion has centered on strictly objective approaches such as cost-benefit or return-on-investment (ROI) analysis. However, recent commentary suggests proving ROI is not always enough. For example, Dray, Karat, Rosenberg, Siegel, and Wixon have raised concerns about significant weaknesses of the ROI argument, including their concern it ties UCD to tactical, not strategic initiatives. [1]
How can UX professionals address these weaknesses and make their case for UCD convincing? Promising sources of help are the fields of rhetoric and argumentation, specifically the range of persuasive appeals, the consideration of audience, and the structure of informal reasoning. There has been some discussion of rhetoric and UCD. For instance, Carter and Yeats explored the rhetorical function of a video showing highlights from usability testing. [2] However, until recently, there was little in depth discussion about using rhetoric and argumentation to make the case for UCD. A Special Interest Group session at CHI 2006 tackled this subject, resulting in a lively and useful discussion. [3] Additionally, during management panels at CHI 2006, executives at major corporations such as Intuit and Reed Elsevier stressed the need for UX professionals to articulate arguments and be persuasive in a range of situations on projects and in organizations. One even flatly said that the ROI argument “doesn’t work.” [4]
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When Observing Users Is Not Enough: 10 Guidelines for Getting More Out of Users’ Verbal Comments
Published: April 9, 2007
One of the principles underlying usability testing is that observing a user perform a task provides more reliable information than simply asking the user how easy it would be to perform the task. By observing users, you can assess whether they are actually able to use a product. By asking them, you simply cannot.
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Wireframing With Patterns
Published: March 20, 2007
When you’re starting out as an information architect (IA), being part of a strong community of fellow practitioners helps immensely. A little over a year ago, on Sunday, February 22, 2006, I participated in an informal workshop on wireframing techniques that took place here in Toronto. Bryce Johnson, Director of User Experience Design at Navantis Inc., facilitated and hosted the workshop at his workplace. The knowledge sharing and the wireframing best practices that emerged from the workshop, plus the sense of community I experienced there, helped me build a foundation as an information architect and got me started on developing my own design workflow. Now, I’d like to share the techniques I’ve learned with a broader community of information architects.
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Effective User Assistance Design: Ten Best Practices
Published: February 20, 2007
In a utopian world, a product would be so perfect it would not need any user assistance at all. But in reality, products aren’t perfect, and users need assistance through different stages of their use. User assistance (UA)—in the form of manuals or online Help—guides users in their tasks, suggests better ways of getting their work done, and provides directions for troubleshooting their problems.
Designing effective user assistance is a challenge, especially within the available resources and time constraints. If you make a little extra effort and follow certain best practices, you can make your product’s user assistance a big success.
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Ensuring Accessibility for People With Color-Deficient Vision
Published: February 5, 2007
This article is Part IV of my series “Color Theory for Digital Displays.” It describes how you can use color in applications and on Web pages to ensure that they are accessible to people who have color-deficient vision.
If you do not consider the needs of people with
color-deficient vision when choosing color schemes for applications and Web pages, those you create may be difficult to use or even indecipherable for about one in twelve users.
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Applying Color Theory to Digital Displays
Published: January 20, 2007
This article is Part III of my series “Color Theory for Digital Displays.” It describes how you can apply color theory to application program user interfaces and Web pages and provides many guidelines for the effective use of color.
For backgrounds behind text, use solid, contrasting colors, and avoid the use
of textures and patterns, which can make letterforms difficult to distinguish
or even illegible. Choose combinations of text color and background color with
care. Value contrast between body text and its background
color should be a minimum of about eighty percent.
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Connecting Cultures, Changing Organizations: The User Experience Practitioner As Change Agent
Published: January 20, 2007
Readers of UXmatters probably know that user-centered design (UCD) and usability activities have the most positive impact when they’re carried out early in the ideation, design, and development cycle. Probably, many of you have worked in organizations that weren’t very experienced in UCD or usability engineering. You may have experienced something like the following the interchange with a development manager.
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Wireframing With InDesign and Illustrator
Published: January 8, 2007
There are a variety of tools used for interaction design. I’ve used them all and have settled on a framework using InDesign® and Illustrator®. It will require a series of articles to fully describe the framework I’ve developed. So, in this article, I’m going to focus on what led to the development of this framework and give you a brief overview.
With all the wireframing tools out there like Visio®, OmniGraffle®, Illustrator, InDesign, Flash®, Fireworks®, and HTML/CSS, why create a framework based on InDesign and Illustrator? Design solutions are about context. So, let’s start there.
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User Assistance in the Role of Domain Expert
Published: January 8, 2007
This article explores the role of user assistance in providing domain-centric online Help—rather than Help that simply explains obvious user interactions with well-designed user interfaces—and provides a pattern for and examples of expert guidance.
It took two aha! moments for me to get the importance of providing domain expertise in Help. The first came at a conference for writers of user assistance when the technical communications manager for a company that makes home accounting software said, “My challenge isn’t teaching people how to use our software; it’s teaching carpenters how to be accountants.”
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Clash of the Titans: Agile and UCD
Published: December 18, 2006
Agile software development [1] has become fairly popular in the last few years, leaving many UX professionals wondering how user-centered design (UCD) can fit into an extremely fast-paced development process that uses little documentation. User-centered design can involve a variety of techniques that provide insights into users’ wants, needs, and goals, including ethnography, contextual inquiry, contextual interviewing, usability testing, task analysis, and others. But all of these take time—time that an agile development process might not allow. There is hope, though. Agile and UCD methods are not completely at odds with each other—and in some cases, agile development can even enable a more user-centered approach. By taking the time to understand the differences and similarities between agile development and UCD, it’s possible to devise a process that is both user-centered and agile.
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Improving User Workflows with Single-Page User Interfaces
Published: November 20, 2006
Over the last two years, Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) have been a hot topic of discussion. While the sheen has already begun to wear off the buzzword Ajax a bit among Web application designers, RIAs are bigger than ever with our clients and their customers. Everyone seems to love slider-based filtering, drag and drop, fisheye menus, and auto-completion for input fields. Web application designs that include none of these typical Ajax features are not well received. Sometimes, one gets the feeling that Web developers implement richness just for the sake of making a Web site and the company that commissions it look cool. Obviously, user experience design should be about a lot more than creating cool controls.
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Designing Breakthrough Products: Going Where No User Has Gone Before
Published: October 9, 2006
For UX designers, some of the most exciting projects to work on are new-to-the-world or breakthrough products that solve real problems people didn’t even realize they had. Get them right and they may be hugely successful in the marketplace, but they’re also the riskiest projects. While user-centered design (UCD) techniques can sometimes be valuable on new-product projects, more often, they don’t seem to work particularly well when designing breakthrough products. Here are some lessons I’ve learned from my own work on new-product projects.
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