May 2010
10 posts
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
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...
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...
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...
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
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.
...
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
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,...
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...
