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....
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
