July 2010
6 posts
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
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...
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....
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...
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...
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...
June 2010
8 posts
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...
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. ...
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...
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...
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
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...
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...
2 tags
Teach Your Users Well
In the Usage Lifecycle, the transition between First Time Use and Ongoing/Passionate Use can often be narrowed down to one crucial element: education.
Here is a familiar scenario that all of us have experienced to some degree or another:
You sign up for the latest social network/web app/photo-sharing site and are thrown into yet another system, which may or may not include some copy about how...
3 tags
Cohort Analysis - Measuring Engagement over time
In a recent post I recommended watching the startups for insights into UX. One example of a useful UX technique that came out of the startup space is the cohort analysis.
A cohort analysis is a tool that helps measure user engagement over time. It helps UX designers know whether user engagement is actually getting better over time or is only appearing to improve because of growth.
A cohort...
1 tag
Is the term "UX" being marginalized?
The term “UX” is becoming like duct tape. People are sticking it everywhere. Take, for example, the UX-related jobs titles people are using these days, essentially a concatenation of UX on the front of an existing thing: UX designer (a term I’ve used), UX architect, UX consultant, UX researcher. The other day I even saw UX web developer. (I have no idea what this means).
But...
1 tag
Forgiveness
“To err is human; to forgive, divine” - Alexander Pope
Traditionally, as designers, we would interpret this to mean our users will always make mistakes and when we “forgive” them (help them get back on their way) we are exhibiting the divine. However, I would argue that we, the designers and developers, need to ask forgiveness from our users.
Humans are inherently...
3 tags
Control
A couple weeks ago I wrote about how creating something simple is not that simple at all. One of the things that makes this so difficult is the ever increasing demand to add more features, more settings, or more controls. While all these things are intended to make it easier on the user, it actually serves to create a state of discomfort and even momentary confusion and anxiety. The more things...
2 tags
Watch the Startups
If you want to find the most innovative UX practitioners, watch the startups. Startups are startup companies, newly-formed businesses made up of small teams moving extremely quickly to take advantage of an opportunity they see in the market.
Many of the innovative ways I’m seeing of gathering feedback, testing designs, rapidly evaluating customer satisfaction, and measuring customer...
2 tags
Experience Precedes Branding
Do we all love the Nike logo because it’s inherently a great logo or do we love it because we’ve had good experiences with Nike shoes? How about the FedEx logo? The Apple logo? Chanel No. 5?
Conventional wisdom, or a trip to Times Square, might convince us that logos and imagery change the way we think about companies. After all corporations spend billions of dollars a year sending messages our...
2 tags
Design Involves Compromise
“Design almost invariably involves compromise…. Rarely can the designer simply optimise one requirement without suffering losses elsewhere…. There are no established methods for deciding just how good or bad solutions are, and still the best test of most design is to wait and see how well it works in practice. Design solutions can never be perfect and are often more easily criticised than...
April 2010
8 posts
1 tag
Simplicity isn't that simple
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” —Leonardo Da Vinci
Simplicity, by definition, is freedom from complexity; the absence of luxury or pretentiousness. Sophistication, on the other hand, often implies a sense of style, cultivated beauty and refinement. So is Da Vinci contradicting himself here?
On the contrary. I believe the ultimate level of sophistication happens when...
2 tags
UX Engagement Metrics
Remember when hit counters were all the rage? I do. I remember putting them at the bottom of my web pages to see how many people were reading and then reloading them incessantly to watch the number go up. Time was when hits and page views were the king of web metrics. But now we have a new metric to focus our energy on: engagement. How engaged are our users, we ask? How often do they visit? Are...
1 tag
The Process Police
The other day our friend Whitney Hess innocently tweeted:
“I find mental models really trying. Does that make me a less skilled UXer?”
I know how she feels. I have dozens of books on my shelves describing different processes for doing design, from mental models to personas to content audits to user testing to you-name-it, and I follow almost none of them. I use bits and pieces,...
2 tags
Design for Delight
“Even if it is true that the average man seems most comfortable with the commonplace and familiar, it is equally true that catering to bad taste, which we so readily attribute to the average reader, merely perpetuates that mediocrity and denies the reader one of the most easily accessible means for aesthetic development and eventual enjoyment.” - Paul Rand
Delight. Surprise. Joy.
...
1 tag
The Experience belongs to the User
We all like to play God. We like to imagine that the design we create is ushered into the world and all those who use it have an epiphany…they do things exactly in the way we have prescribed. They approach, use, and experience our design in the manner we envisioned, resulting in an amazing user experience.
You might call this the God complex approach to UX. It is the ego-driven approach,...
2 tags
A picture is worth a 1000 words, except when it...
One of the primary jobs of any designer—regardless the medium—is to convey complex stories and ideas visually in such a way that the viewer can nearly instantly comprehend the information being presented. Human beings are highly visual creatures able to make connections and process visual information almost instantly. Your overall decision to engage, trust, believe, purchase or commit to an...
1 tag
UX Insights: an interview with Andy Budd
This weeks post is an interview with Andy Budd, a founding partner and Managing Director of Clearleft. He also goes by the title of User Experience Director depending what mood he’s in. Andy is the founder of the dConstruct and UX London conferences and has always had an interest in the way design affects human behavior.
52WeeksOfUX: You founded Clearleft five years ago with Jeremy Keith...
3 tags
Finding Flow
In his book Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes a state of optimal experience, where people are so engaged in the activity they’re doing that the rest of the world falls away. He defines this state as:
“the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of...
March 2010
8 posts
3 tags
Honest Interfaces
“To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful.”—Edward R. Murrow
Users approach most products with an expectation of honesty. Things should do what they say, behave in an expected manner and reinforce their decision to use this product/service/website. The interface is your opportunity to gain their trust and confidence while...
2 tags
10 Principles of UX
1. The Experience Belongs to the User: Designers do not create experiences, they create artifacts to experience. This makes all the difference. Since experience is subjective it cannot be designed in quite the same way that a physical product can. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t design the framework within which people experience our product/service. If our framework is solid,...
2 tags
It's The Little Things
The restaurant is fairly full on this warm Sunday night at SXSW. The lights are low and the place has a back-woodsy charm about it. There is a small 4-piece band tucked away in the corner. The drummer keeps things swinging with just a snare and high-hat. There’s a man playing the upright bass and a guy on a semi-hollow body guitar with just the faintest crackle of distortion. And then...
1 tag
Why UX is really just good marketing
If you ask any User Experience Professional what the principles of their profession are, one of the first principles you’ll hear is “Know Your Users”. This makes sense: if we are to create great experiences for users then we must know something about them. You’ll also find this phrase if you stumble upon any sort of must-have usability checklist (long lists of Important...
3 tags
Visual Hierarchy
We have many words for the frustration we feel when an interface isn’t directing us to what we need to know. Loud, messy, cluttered, busy.
These words have been appropriated from other parts of life, of course, but we need them to express our feeling of being overwhelmed visually by content on a screen or page. We need them to express how unpleasant a user experience it is to not know...
1 tag
Visual Weight
Visual weight reinforces a page or screen’s visual hierarchy by contrasting the size, color and/or position of elements in the design. By adding visual weight to elements that are of primary importance and reducing the visual weight on elements of less importance you help guide the user and strengthen the overall design of the page or screen.
Just as you would consider each and every word...
1 tag
Changing Existing Situations
“Everyone designs who devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that produces material artifacts is no different fundamentally from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick patient or the one that devises a new sales plan for a company or a social welfare policy for a state. Design, so construed, is the core of all...
2 tags
Make Less More
“What if instead of adding new features, a company concentrated on making the service or product much easier to use? Or making it much easier to access the advanced features it already has, but that few can master? Maybe what they lose in market share in one area will be more than compensated for in another area. In a lot of markets, it’s gotten so bad out there that simply being...
February 2010
8 posts
1 tag
Good design is...
Good design is innovative.
Good design makes a product useful.
Good design is aesthetic.
Good design makes a product understandable.
Good design is unobtrusive.
Good design is honest.
Good design is long-lasting.
Good design is thorough down to the last detail.
Good design is environmentally friendly.
Good design is as little design as possible.
—Dieter Rams
1 tag
User Interface as Customer Service
Time was when we weren’t interrupted quite as much as we are these days. It’s hard to remember, but there was a day without mobile phones, Twitter, Facebook, email, or pop-up ads. We used to be able to take the time to learn something new.
Those days are over. It’s not that we don’t learn new things, but the time slots in which we can learn are much shorter. We...
1 tag
The Power of Frameworks
“The power of frameworks is yet to be uncovered as one of the greatest opportunities for designers.” - Liz Danzico
So if we are makers of frames, what sort of frameworks are we making?
Structural Frameworks: Affect the way we move through space. Creating spaces that people live in and use. Offline known as architecture. Online known as interaction design/information architecture....
1 tag
Makers of Frames
This week’s esteemed guest author is Liz Danzico
Look around you. There’s a field surrounded by trees, a curb along a street, a raised subway platform, a sign-in invitation, a checkout process with five steps—indications of boundaries, of edges. Of frames. The field, the city, the transport system, the website—none have inherent boundaries. Yet they take on different boundaries when...
2 tags
The Usage Lifecycle
As users interact with your product or service, they proceed through a series of steps called the usage lifecycle. The usage lifecyle is a mapping of the user’s experience with your design. Like other lifecycles, the usage lifecycle has a beginning, middle, and an end, each of which are characterized by different behaviors and goals. Though they be similar in every other way, people act...
3 tags
You are not your user
Socrates said, “Know thyself.”
I say, “Know thy users.”
And guess what? They don’t think like you do. You know your product inside and out. You knew it when it was just a few sketches on a napkin. You have been using it in every form and iteration it has been through in its entire life-cycle. Your actions, decisions and preferences have been imprinted into every...
1 tag
Utility vs. Beauty
A good designer always works to keep the form, function and the aesthetic quality of a design in balance throughout the life of a project. Just because something looks good doesn’t mean its useful. And just because something is useful does not make it beautiful.
More often than we want to admit, we use glitz and glam—or worse, the current popular design trend—to hide the areas where we...
1 tag
Dreamers of Day
Designers are an odd lot: creative, moody, pensive, thoughtful, weird. But the one characteristic that separates designers from others is action. They make stuff that didn’t exist before. They take the idea living deep inside their head and pull it out, realizing it in a drawing, prototype, or product. Unlike most people, they don’t just think about it. They don’t just...
January 2010
8 posts
1 tag
Apple's iPad: For what Audience?
After years of speculation, Apple finally released a tablet computer yesterday called the iPad. There was fanfare! There was rejoicing!
There was also much criticism: everything from it doesn’t have a camera or USB port to it doesn’t support Flash or HDMI out to it doesn’t let you multi-task. In 24 hours we have dozens of reasons why the iPad will fail in the marketplace.
But...
1 tag
Constraints Fuel Creativity
We are often led to believe that the more freedom we have the more creative we will be. Full creative license? Sweet. Unlimited budget? Awesome! No timetable? Even better.
Yeah, right.
I say embrace your constraints and draw out of them the very solution that sets you apart from the crowd.
The imposition of constraints can lead to great design decisions. Limitations often force you to view...