December 2011
3 posts
1 tag
What Does it Mean to be Simple?
All designers say simplicity is important, but what does it really mean to make something simple? Most of the time we think it means less, that by removing stuff we achieve simplicity. We think by keeping content above the fold we’re helping people focus, or by using bullets instead of paragraphs more people will read it, or by cutting text in half it becomes more clear. But simple...
1 tag
Is UX the Key to a Long-lasting Business?
“But what if the firm was driven, not by the goal of short-term profitability, but by the goal of continuous innovation in service of finding new ways of delighting customers? The new bottom line of this kind of organization becomes whether the customer is delighted. Conventional financial measures such as maximizing shareholder value are subordinated to the new bottom line. Profit is a...
4 tags
The Ghost of Decisions Past
Ghosts: invisible specters often thought to be trapped between worlds, left to torment the living or act as a messenger from the beyond. They invoke fear because we can’t touch them, can’t see them, and we don’t fully understand their existence—much like the mysterious design decisions that often haunt your product.
Constraints drive and shape the design of any product. They...
December 2010
1 post
1 tag
How to Identify the Best Design Problems
One of the core principles of UX is to solve existing problems, or problems that people are already struggling with. While this might not be as glamorous as inventing a brand new thing it is more practical: it makes identifying problems easier and people are much more receptive to your design. If you’re solving a known problem you don’t have to convince anybody that your design is...
November 2010
5 posts
1 tag
Why "Clean" Isn't Such a Dirty Word For Designers
You have probably heard someone say, “That design is so clean!”
Or perhaps you’ve scanned your RSS feed and seen titles like “1000 Clean and Minimalist Designs”, “Super-clean, Simple, Minimal Website Designs”, or “How to Design Clean, Typographic, Minimalist Sites.”
I normally throw up in my mouth a little when I encounter such phrases. But...
3 tags
Is Facebook Temporary?
Last week, the most prestigious investment bank in the world, Goldman Sachs, decided to invest almost 2 billion dollars in the social network Facebook (a mix of its own and its clients capital), which on paper made the six year old startup worth $50,000,000,000.
Yes, a social networking site is now worth $50 Billion Dollars. With a B.
The recent frenzy around the Goldman Sachs investment...
2 tags
Knowing Your Audience: Lessons from the Gaming...
This week’s guest author is Matt Ventre, a user experience designer at MessageFirst in Philadelphia, PA.
Now that we’re settling in to play our new, more-amazing-than-ever video games procured over the holidays, it makes sense to ask: “What can the UX folks learn from the wildly successful gaming world?”
In a word: audience. The video gaming marketplace’s vibrant success over the past...
2 tags
Building a Shared Understanding
This week’s guest author is Bill Scott, Director of E-commerce UI Engineering at Netflix and co-author of the fantastic book Designing Web Interfaces: Principles & Patterns for Rich Interactions.
Years ago I was in an off-site with the design team for a well known, successful web site. During the course of the day I heard designers complain that what went live was often embarrassingly...
2 tags
Usability Testing: Getting Design Teams Onboard
This week’s guest author is Christine Perfetti, CEO of Perfetti Media, a Boston-based user research consulting and training firm.
Many designers come to me for usability testing consulting services. One of the reasons they reach out is because they assume usability testing must be a complex, scientific process. As a result, they’d prefer to have an outside company conduct their...
October 2010
5 posts
4 tags
Words are the soul of UX
This week’s guest author is Relly Annett-Baker, who writes some of the best, most interesting web copy around for clients of all sizes. She resides in Wokingham, UK.
Words are the soul of user experience. More than any other design element, words communicate the bulk of the messages we communicate to others. Whether they are spoken or written, there’s a fine line between lazily...
1 tag
UX: The Enemy Within
This week’s guest author is Karen McGrane, an accomplished user experience and interaction design consultant, with 15 years of professional experience in customer research, information architecture, and content strategy.
I remember the first time I heard the phrase “information architecture.” It was in the technical communication program at RPI, in a conversation with the...
1 tag
The Long & Short of Writing for the Web
Recently I was reading a list of copywriting guidelines on how to make web pages attract and keep a reader’s attention. The list contained familiar items you’ve probably seen before: write a catchy headline, talk benefits vs features, and focus on a single message instead of many.
One recommendation, however, rang false to me: keep your text short. The author recommends this because...
5 tags
Keeping Safe Those Things We Hold Precious; Our...
This weeks guest author is Alan Colville, a ux designer and founding member of Analog Coop. Learn more about him at http://alancolville.org.
Brooklyn Beta was a most memorable web conference. It can be relived through peoples’ stories, anecdotes, images and more, which are strewn far and wide across the web. Although not altogether typical, the quantity of data created around this event...
3 tags
Kill Your Darlings
There is nothing like the moment when you suddenly come upon the answer to a design problem. Whether it is a particular interaction or the perfect design element, it is a moment of pure elation. However, in that moment, there is a always a risk of an emotional attachment being formed. Essentially, we have the potential to surrender our ability to see beyond the “perfect solution” we...
September 2010
8 posts
2 tags
Keep On Learning
One of the greatest qualities in most creative problem solvers is a thirst for learning. Most designers and user experience professionals I know have some level of post-graduate education. But if you were to dig a little deeper, you would likely find that many have degrees in either partially or completely unrelated fields. The truth is the greatest thing you learn while getting a college...
1 tag
Groupon and the Value of Copywriting
Speak to any seasoned designer long enough and the topic of copywriting comes up. Any designer worth their salt knows the value of great copywriting and how it can transform a dull, routine web experience into a delightful one.
But what exactly does it mean to write great copy? How do we know when we’ve achieved it? Is this something that we can learn as part of the design process, or...
1 tag
What makes a good UX Designer?
At the recent Warm Gun conference in San Francisco I heard a similar refrain: we’re looking for a good UX designer and can’t find one. I heard this from both startups and huge companies. Representatives from both Google and Facebook complained they could not find enough good UX designers.
That’s actually amazing. The two most successful software companies on the planet are...
1 tag
Designers Lie. That's OK.
Our guest author this week is Cennydd Bowles, UX designer at Clearleft. His new book Undercover User Experience Design is out now and worth your time and attention.
And then, of course, you ask us how we work. We respond with confidence, bold Helvetica outlining our design process: research, ideas, prototyping, testing, iteration. We hope you approve of our rigor, and perhaps even believe it...
1 tag
Match the Tool to the Problem
Our guest author this week is Daniel Ritzenthaler. Dan is a web design consultant based in Boston. He makes videos about common questions he hears from clients on Design Thoughts, and can always be reached on Twitter @danritz. Learn more about him at http://wurkit.com/.
How long has it been since you’ve heard designers argue about which method is better: sketches, wireframes, mock-ups, or...
1 tag
Design Systems Need To Be Challenged
As designers, we all have processes, systems and tools that we use day in and day out. Each one employed to solve a specific problem in a specific way. As we attempt to automate our design process and optimize our methods we invariably realize that our answers are becoming more and more generic—formulaic, if you will.
As we utilize frameworks and design patterns to help us move faster, we are...
3 tags
How Constraints Drive Creativity
“Constraints drive creativity.”
You’ve probably heard this quote (or some variation of it) before. I see it all the time. But I always find myself asking: “What is it about constraints that make us more creative?”
Is it a mindset we get into, that forces us to think deeper about the underlying problem we’re trying to solve? Or is it that our back is...
2 tags
User Testing Can Save Your Life
Okay, so maybe it won’t save your life. But it certainly can keep you out of the ER due to the stress-induced heart attack you were about to have because you have no idea whether or not your customers can actually use the thing you just poured your life into building. Usability testing is one of the best things you can do to understand whether or not people can use the product as you...
August 2010
10 posts
1 tag
Customers as Guests
There are lots of ways to think about user experience, but one of the ways I like best is how Jeff Bezos describes how Amazon.com treats their customers:
“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”
Too often we fall into marketing-speak and...
2 tags
How To Change Things
Let’s face it, change is difficult. For most human beings, change evokes fear and stress. Familiarity, on the other hand, is comforting. It allows us to live and operate with a certain level of ease which doesn’t require active thought at all times. This applies to your product just as much as our daily lives.
Building successful products rarely happens by doing what everyone else...
2 tags
Finding Your Way
Have you ever found yourself staring at something that is supposed to be helping you understand where you are and where you are going? Have you ever stood there long enough to finally realize that you won’t be able to decipher the unidentifiable cluster of lines, shapes and letters on the map without the aid of another human being. It’s frustrating, somewhat humiliating, and above...
2 tags
Software that Teaches
There is an old saying:
“Give a man a fish, and you’ve fed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed a man for a lifetime”
Too much of our software simply gives people a fish instead of teaching them how to fish. That is, most software acts as a dumb tool…can do a particular thing but doesn’t teach how to use it well.
But teaching is increasingly part of...
4 tags
Copycat Design
Many years ago I was working on a design project with an e-commerce company who was selling electronics on the Web. The design team was working on a large redesign of their web site in response to their latest thinking on what works best for selling their products. At one point I noticed they were making several changes to their web site that reminded me of something I had seen before. So I...
1 tag
UX Won't Save You
I have this sneaking suspicion that a fair number of people are under the impression that User Experience is the hot new “silver-bullet”. Sorry to burst any bubbles, but I am afraid that just isn’t the case. While there can be no doubt that UX plays an important role in shaping, defining and creating a successful product, it is important to understand that there are often other...
5 tags
Chart Junk isn't as bad as you think
This week’s esteemed guest author is Brian Suda, a master informatician residing in Reykjavik, Iceland whose wonderful new book is A Practical Guide to Designing with Data.
Every day we are bombarded with poorly designed graphics ranging from TV news reports to magazine info-graphics, horribly pedestrian Powerpoint and Excel charts to signage that is impossible to decipher. The...
3 tags
Information overload is not the problem
A good reminder from Edward Tufte:
“There is no such thing as information overload, just bad design. If something is cluttered and/or confusing, fix your design.”
This is a deceptively strong statement. It seems to merely be suggesting we don’t blame information overload for the pain it causes, and instead blame design.
On a more subtle level, however, Tufte is asking...
2 tags
Reward the Passionates
What’s the best way to bring in new customers? That question is posed by almost everyone at one point or another, no matter what product or service they’re offering. The common way to attack this problem is to go out and advertise…to redirect attention to your offering and convince people that yours is better than what else is out there.
But in an age of empowered consumers...
2 tags
Next-generation UX
We are in the midst of a dramatic shift in human-computer interaction. The inputs, devices and mental models we’ve had to adapt to in order to get this far are slowly becoming obsolete. Even an “average” computer user has already been re-wired and adapted to the hundreds of mental hurdles that a traditional computer interface throws in our way.
However, a new way of...
July 2010
8 posts
2 tags
StartUXs
Our guest author this week is Whitney Hess. Whitney is a user experience design consultant based in New York City. She writes about improving the human experience on her blog Pleasure and Pain, and can always be reached on Twitter @whitneyhess. Learn more about her work with startups at http://startUXs.com.
Startups start up with a single idea: a solution they believe the world has never seen....
3 tags
The Five W's of UX
Who, What, Where, When, Why (and How - it ends with a “w” cut me some slack). In school we were taught that these fundamental questions must be addressed in the process of creating a strong argument and delivering a legitimate story. In the world of User Experience, being able to accurately answer these 5 questions can be the difference between a product that instantly resonates with...
3 tags
Wireframing is not a religion
Ah, the wireframe. The bread-and-butter of the UX designer. The IA’s best friend. And possibly, the bane of your existence. It all depends on how you view them.
Wireframes are an indispensable tool for design thinking—a digital sketch pad—ready to be drawn and erased, scrapped or resurrected at any moment. A working documentation used to establish the language, content, and structure of...
3 tags
Time to Delight
There are a lot of metrics out there we can use to gauge how positive a user experience is. We can look at “time on site” to see how long someone uses a web site. We can look at “return visits” to see how many times someone returns to a web site.
Here’s a simpler but just as interesting metric you might try to measure:
How long does it take for a new...
3 tags
Timelessness
An excerpt from The Vignelli Canon:
“We are definitively against any fashion of design and any design fashion. We despise the culture of obsolescence, the culture of waste, the cult of the ephemeral. We detest the demand of temporary solutions, the waste of energies and capital for the sake of novelty.
We are for a Design that lasts, that responds to people’s needs and to people’s...
4 tags
Emotion and Data
Steve Jobs, in Friday’s iPhone 4 press conference, in which Apple tried to downplay the attenuation problem some people are experiencing with the phone, talks about both the emotional and data-driven nature of providing a great experience.
“We care about every user and we are not going to stop till every customer is happy. When you love your customers, nothing is off the table....
1 tag
The Distance between Maker and User
Recently I was part of a user testing study in which I observed someone using the software I had designed. At one point the user did something he wasn’t supposed to do (in theory) and in an instant I saw the problem. The descriptive text I had written was on the wrong screen…instead of the previous screen it should have been on this screen. The problem had existed for a while in the...
2 tags
Turn Your HiPPO Into A UX Hero
An interesting story plays out in the lives of User Experience professionals working in large corporations across the globe each day. Just like in nature, where the king of the jungle rules by fear, respect, and sheer exertion of power, the business realm is often ruled by a similar creature—the HiPPO (“Highest Paid Person’s Opinion”).
The HiPPO is a force to be reckoned...
June 2010
8 posts
3 tags
Understanding The Journey
How you arrive somewhere is almost as important as where you were going in the first place. It doesn’t matter if it is a website, a boutique clothing store or a diner somewhere in middle America—humans are strongly affected by our surroundings and, for better or for worse, create an emotional connection to the destination based on the journey which brought them there in the first place. ...
3 tags
Email, the Glue of UX
With the rise of social networking, email has taken a back seat to tweets and wall posts as the hip message format. But email is still a huge channel for messaging, and serious business messaging has not yet mingled much with pokes, favorites, or other social message types.
There are many places in the UX Lifecycle where email has a place. Of course, each of these things can be done directly...
2 tags
Gall's Law
“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.” - John Gall
Such a simple statement, such profound implications for almost everything we do: design, teach, govern, communicate. The simple idea that, despite our most intricate and thorough planning, we cannot create complexity at the beginning but must instead start with something...
2 tags
Critique me, Please!
“Your design isn’t a work of art. It’s a business solution. Practice being critiqued.” — Matthew Smith (Squared Eye)
Who in their right mind wants to practice being critiqued? Encouraging others to critically examine the work we produce (and in some ways, us as designers or as people even) is not something that comes naturally to most human beings. There is an emotional...
1 tag
The Fundamental Attribution Error
In his now-famous book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell convincingly characterizes influential people as one of three types: connectors, mavens, and salesmen. He describes how each of these types of people have rare gifts that make them unlike regular people, they can either connect others amazingly well, be valuable sources of information, or have a knack for convincing others of something....
4 tags
Innovation-The Next Great Buzzword
In recent years, the notion of design as a strategic advantage has gained a lot of traction amongst business leaders. This is a good thing. More and more designers (UX and otherwise) are having a greater voice in the direction of the company and/or product. However, the new and emerging trend seems to be “innovation.” It is the missing ingredient, the key to success, or better yet,...
1 tag
The Local Maximum
Do you ever feel that your design has become stale and that despite your making lots of little changes to it over time without any big overhaul there is just no way to drastically improve it?
If so you’ve probably hit what Andrew Chen calls the “Local Maximum”. The local maximum is a point in which you’ve hit the limit of the current design…it is as effective as...
1 tag
There's no right answer
This weeks guest author is Donna Spencer. Donna is a freelance information architect, interaction designer and writer who just published A Practical Guide To Information Architecture.
When we are working on a hard design problem (or even on a fairly easy one), we often realise there are many ways we could go – lots of options and lots of potential solutions. It can be frustrating to figure out...
May 2010
10 posts
1 tag
Commander's Intent
There is a wonderful section in the book “Made to Stick” that applies 100% to interaction design. It is the section on what is called “Commander’s Intent”.
The book describes Commander’s Intent as a tactic the U.S Army uses to prioritize decision making. As you might imagine, it’s impossible to devise and communicate a strategy at the start of a...
1 tag
Never Stop Looking Ahead
“Ultimately, my job as a designer is to look into the future. Its not to use any frame of reference that exists, really. My job is about what is going to happen, not what has happened.” - Marc Newson For most of us, the majority of our work involves refining, updating and improving existing systems. However, we must never forget that our job is fundamentally about shaping and...
