January 2013 Issue
Are Personas Still Relevant to UX Strategy?
Published: January 21, 2013
Personas have been a popular approach for guiding the design of Web sites and mobile apps. However, some in the UX community are now saying that personas have been superseded by the availability of more accurate data or by newer UX design and development methods. In this column, I’ll give a quick overview of how my team and I formulate personas, then discuss the three reasons I most often hear for abandoning personas as a design tool.
The Early Days of Web Design
During the first wave of Web design, before most people called it UX design, there were few standards or tools to rely on for strategic guidance. One of the earliest tools for introducing strategy into the more or less free-form creative process was the company brand book. A brand book is a detailed description of how to express brand attributes in visual design and content. Typically, a Creative Director would distribute the brand book of a company for whom we were designing a Web site at the beginning of a project and expected all subsequent design work to conform to its standards.
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Topic: Columns | UX Strategy | User-Centered Design (UCD)
When Agile and User Experience Click
Published: January 21, 2013
Try this test: Find three UX friends and ask them about the compatibility of UX design with agile development. Odds are that one of them believes UX design and agile can work well together, one swears that they can’t, and one has yet to decide. There are many reasons for the divided opinion on this issue.
In the same way that consumers’ experiences are highly contextual, no two software development teams are the same. They may vary in their composition, experience level, the proximity of their members, and their organizations’ willingness to embrace agile development methods. To be successful, it is necessary to apply strategies that best serve our team’s context. In this article, we share our recent experience trying to make UX design and agile click by examining the design and development of the Android app Find MyHeadset™ and highlighting the strategies and activities that we found most helpful.
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Topic: Agile UCD
Designing Tablet Apps
Published: January 21, 2013
In this edition of Ask UXmatters, our experts discuss what is the best approach to designing tablet apps.
Every month in Ask UXmatters, our panel of UX experts answers our readers’ questions about a variety of user experience matters. To get answers to your own questions about UX strategy, design, user research, or any other topic of interest to UX professionals in an upcoming edition of Ask UXmatters, please send your questions to: ask.uxmatters@uxmatters.com.
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Topic: Columns | Mobile UX Design | UX Design
Collaborative Interaction Design and Specification
Published: January 21, 2013
In this article, I want to propose a new UX term: Collaborative Interaction Design and Specification, or CIDS. But first, it would be helpful to provide some background on how and why I came to invent this term, starting with a few words about communication and user experience.
Communication and User Experience
Those UX professionals who have a psychology background or have read seminal works on human communication such as Grinder and Bandler’s The Structure of Magic 2: A Book About Communication and Change know that interpersonal communication is key to virtually all endeavors that involve more than one person. But interpersonal communication is a difficult and complex business. Paradoxically, many seem oblivious to this fact, ploughing on regardless through an unending stream of miscommunications in both their personal and business lives. Or maybe it’s precisely because we unconsciously know just how difficult accurate communication is that we often seem reluctant or unable to address communication issues.
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Topic: Communicating Design | Prototyping | Teamwork
Putting IA Theory into Practice
Published: January 21, 2013
In a previous column, “Creating a Web-Site Information Architecture in Six Steps,” I reviewed several categories of assumptions and tactics for creating a Web site’s information architecture. While that column focused on practice, it would also be useful for you to know how IA theory informed that column. Having a little theory in your back pocket is always useful.
Many practitioners of information architecture have come to understand the fundamentals of creating an information architecture through direct training, text books about practical methods, or real-world experience. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find documentation on the formal theory of information architecture.
So, I’d like to share several theoretical concepts from my research that I used as the foundation for my column “Creating a Web-Site Information Architecture in Six Steps.” I’ll condense these concepts into a simple and, hopefully, memorable diagram.
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Topic: Columns | Information Architecture
Idea Amplifiers, Activity Streams, and the Distributed Supercomputer: A Conversation Around Hypervoice
Published: January 7, 2013
Martin Geddes is one of the few people whose opinion I uniformly respect and consistently listen to. I don’t feel this way just from reading his newsletters, but because we worked together during an exciting time at Sprint, periodically coauthoring whitepapers and designing revolutionary mobile ecosystems that never quite came to pass. Martin has kept up this work, and I think of him as being somewhere between a quite successful strategic telecommunications (telecom) consultant and a radical futurist. He is perhaps the most well-informed person about telecommunications—as both technological and social phenomena—that I know of.
At Oracle Open World, in October 2012, Martin revealed a concept called hypervoice, which is a term he’s coined to describe a breakthrough innovation that HarQen has achieved, but were struggling to explain. He had heard the phrase links what you say to what you do during a meeting with them, and it immediately became clear that a new hypermedium had been invented. Best of all, hypervoice is not just a concept, but a working product.
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Topic: Columns | Interviews | Mobile UX Design
The Service Design Global Conference and Redefining Service Design
Published: January 7, 2013
The theme of the Service Design Network’s Global Conference in Paris, France, was Cultural Change by Design. I had the opportunity to copresent at the conference with my colleague Lisa Woodley. In this column, I’d like to briefly recap some highlights of the conference as a foundation for sharing the service design community’s upcoming task of redefining service design.
Companies and Change: Service Designer as Group Therapist
Lisa and I kicked off the two-day conference at the headquarters of La Poste, the French national postal service, with our topic “Companies and Change: Service Designer as Group Therapist.” Implementing a new or revised service in an organization is not as simple as creating a clear articulation of that service in a blueprint, then hoping that it suffices to bring that service to life. Rather, much of the work of service implementation is in understanding how employees need to change. Our topic concentrated on the idea that applying service design methods to the roles of employees within an organization can help uncover and address barriers to change that may be systemic within a culture. We believe the service designer’s role in a helping an organization to change is similar to the role that a group therapist plays when working with families who are trying to change their behaviors.
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Topic: Columns | Service Design
The Power of Faces in User Experience
Published: January 7, 2013
If you were to describe what a face is, what would you say? Would you talk about its features? Or would you talk about its function? We interpret the majority of the things a human face does unconsciously.
Faces Express Who People Are
I’m guessing that you probably said the main role of faces is to let us identify and recognize people, which is true. But faces do much more. People’s faces
- reveal their identity, age, and gender to others
- show their genetic inheritance
- portray a variety of emotions—for example, anger, disgust, happiness
- identify their ethnicity
- influence the behavior of others
Topic: Human Factors | User Experience (UX)
Publishing and Presenting, Part 3: Presenting
Published: January 7, 2013
If you’ve never presented at a user experience conference, the thought of doing so can seem daunting. As I mentioned in Part 1 of this series, the main reasons people don’t present at conferences are
- their inability to think of a topic
- lack of time
- doubt about being accepted
- the perceived difficulty of creating a proposal and presentation
- fear of public speaking
I also discussed the many rewarding benefits of presenting at a UX conference.
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Topic: Columns | Professional Development | UX Community
Lean UX and Rapid Innovation
Published: January 7, 2013
Earlier this year, I worked for a client, in a start-up environment, who needed extensive user research to validate their product concept and bring it to market. We conducted lean UX research continuously throughout the development process and quickly took the product to market. The results of our research were incredibly significant.
To get an innovative product to market quickly and efficiently, follow a lean UX process during each iterative development cycle. A lean UX process lets you validate business goals and identify market needs and affords opportunities for innovative change.
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Topic: Agile UCD | UX Strategy
