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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Category: Reviews
Recent Articles from the June Issue
The State of the UX Community
Published: June 23, 2008
“An organization’s reason for being, like that of any organism, is to help the parts that are in relationship to each other, to be able to deal with change in the environment.”—Kevin Kelly
Over the past three decades of computer/human interaction, we’ve seen digital technology evolve from a curiosity to a convenience to an integral part of our everyday lives. For UX professionals, the demand for our skill sets and the opportunities to practice seem only to grow, whether we be designers or developers, usability specialists or information architects, working in fields as diverse as Web, mobile, desktop, and embedded software systems. The UX professions are at a stage that could very well be a tipping point—where the rapid rise of digital devices, services, and connectivity converge to create a massive need for UX professionals. The mobile space alone could generate demand that we can only begin to imagine.
As the need for UX professionals grows and our fields evolve, so too does the nature of our professional community. With an increased demand for our services comes a pressing need to advocate for our profession’s business value and secure a strategic role for UX, train and mentor new practitioners, exchange knowledge among peers, and find ways to positively affect our society.
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Category: Columns
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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Category: Features
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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Category: Features
International Address Fields in Web Forms
Published: June 9, 2008
As enablers of online conversations between businesses and customers, Web forms are often responsible for gathering critical information—email addresses for continued communications, mailing addresses for product shipments, and billing information for payment processing to name just a few. So it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that one of the most common questions I get asked about Web form design is: “How do I deal with international addresses?”
But before we get into the nuances of address variations, it’s worth pointing out that addresses have a commonly understood structure. Through years of experience with mailing and postal systems, people have a pretty concrete idea of what constitutes an address block. This common understanding is so definitive that eyetracking data suggests, once people begin filling in a set of input fields that make up an address, they often cease looking at their labels. The basic structure of an address is so familiar, people don’t need the guidance labels provide.
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Category: Columns