UX
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Cognition & The Intrinsic User Experience | UX Magazine
Over the past few years there's been a lot of discussion around whether an experience can be designed. But it seems like everyone's just getting hung up on semantics; an experience can be designed, but the user will always have the opportunity to experience it in a unique way. The reason every experience has the potential to be unique to the user is, in part, because cognition is unique to each user. Cognition is about knowledge and understanding, so there's a ton of psychological principles that fall under the umbrella of cognition. I'll focus on two principles that, once understood, will elevate a UX practitioner’s designs to a whole new level.The second speaker at this mornings An Event Apart in Boston is Whitney Hess . Here goes with the liveblogging… Whitney’s talk is about design principles. As a consultant, she spends a lot of time talking about UX and inevitably, the talk turns to deliverables and process but really we should be establishing a philosophy about how to treat people, in the same way that visual design is about establishing a philosophy about how make an impact.
Journal—Whitney Hess: Design Principles — The Philosophy of UX
In part one , Michael shared his first four lessons learned on navigating company politics to set up and prepare for great stakeholder interviews. Here, in part two, he covers his last five tips. “ Relatively few people have a complete A to Z view of who touches the user in sequence. If you are conducting stakeholder interviews and forming a strategy, this responsibility may fall to you. ” 5) Determine how each stakeholder influences the User Experience While strategies for new sites, features, content, and tools should bubble up from interview findings, outside research, server log analytics, and other information, you will probably begin work with a fairly clear sense of the problem space.
Setting Up Business Stakeholder Interviews Part 2 - Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design
Interviewing is an important technique for eliciting requirements from your stakeholders. When interviewing stakeholders you have several potential goals to accomplish: Interviewing is a skill that takes years to master, one that cannot possibly be taught in a few paragraphs. However, here are a few helpful pointers to help you to improve your interviewing skills: Tell the interviewee what the project is about and how they fit into the overall process. This lets them know that their input is important.
Interviewing Tips and Techniques for IT Professionals
How to Interview Stakeholders, Part 2 | Claxus
In the first part of this series I explored what makes a good stakeholder interview in general. In this article, I will write about how to use open questions, sketches and thinking out loud during stakeholder interviews. These techniques from the fields of usability and user experience can make interviews with project stakeholders more effective.
Conducting Successful Interviews With Project Stakeholders :: UXmatters
If you’ve read some of my previous columns on UXmatters , you could be forgiven for thinking my entire working life is spent largely surrounded in a sea of quantitative data. This is, rather surprisingly even to me, not nearly close to the truth. Looking back over recent months, by far the most common form of research I’ve carried out is that stalwart of qualitative studies—the interview. A simple, semi-structured, one-on-one interview can provide a very rich source of insights. Interviews work very well for gaining insights from both internal and external stakeholders, as well as from actual users of a system under consideration. Though, in this column, I’ll focus on stakeholder interviews rather than user interviews.“ Interviewing is both art and science, and it is something that any UE practitioner with a little additional time and moderation skills can employ to extract clear business requirements. ” For those who build websites and applications for a living, it is important to understand the realities of how clients work in order to guide effective strategy, IA, and user research aligned with business goals. Interviewing different people who deal with a company’s website will help you simplify complex strategic directions, create appropriate research plans, develop information architecture, and design interactions for great user experiences. Interviewing is both art and science, and it is something that any UE practitioner with a little additional time and moderation skills can employ to extract clear business requirements.
Setting Up Business Stakeholder Interviews, Part 1 - Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design
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How to create personas your design team will believe in
Assumption personas are fake personas It's easy to create a set of plausible statements about the primary users of a product or web site. We can make assumptions about their goals, their background and their behaviours, find a suitable bit of clip art and voila, we have a persona. It's much harder to create an accurate description of users that the design team will believe in and actually use to resolve design disputes. Is the number of personas small enough for the design team to remember the name of each one, with one of the personas identified as primary?20 things you can do this year to improve your user's experience
Run a usability test I put this one first for those people who don’t scroll — because it’s the single most powerful weapon in the user experience arsenal. Nothing beats watching a user struggle with your interface: it’s truly one of those scales-falling-from-the-eyes moments. The simple version: find your participant , give them a task with your system/product/web site, then shut up and watch. Overachievers might want to read the slightly more complicated version . Ask one of your non-designer friends what most irritates them about web sites and “not being able to find stuff” will be one of the first things they say.
accessibility
An Extensive Guide To Web Form Usability - Smashing UX Design
Contrary to what you may read, peppering your form with nice buttons, color and typography and plenty of jQuery plugins will not make it usable. Indeed, in doing so, you would be addressing (in an unstructured way) only one third of what constitutes form usability.The User Experience Wheel
I have used this model for some time now, time to reveal it to the critical eyes of fellow practitioners. It is a model that tries to explain “what is user experience?” The user experience is a series of phases, we have to focus on positivity in findability , accessibility , desirability , usability , credibility and usefulnessIt's been a long time since I've written about design here at Moz, but I spent my morning in a great meeting with Derric , and was inspired by a lot of his ideas and what we reviewed to revisit some of the emerging trends and outlier creatives that are opening our eyes to what's possible. Below, you'll find some truly exceptional, unique elements of creative layout and artistry, as well as simple tweaks to best practices that are pushing the field forward. Hopefully, a few will inspire your design directions, too! Not bad, right?
12 Creative Design Elements Inspiring the Next Generation of UX | SEOmoz
Experience Maps Identify Inefficiencies and Opportunities | UX Magazine
An experience map is a holistic view of all of the touchpoints or interactions people have with a brand. It enables you to determine a number of key factors: The map helps stakeholders empathize with their customers, putting them in their customers’ shoes.Tools
Contextual Enquiry – A Primer » SitePoint
Designers who don’t understand their users frequently develop products that are difficult to use and understand, do not meet real-world requirements, or provide irrelevant functionality. The best way to get to know users is to spend time with them, in their own environments, watching them do the things that your Website is going to support or enable. Of course, you can just go out and visit a few users informally, and that in itself will provide valuable information.Usability