All the World’s a Game, and Business Is a Player. Reframing “UX Design” : peterme.com. I was asked to speak at UX Week 2012, and figured I’d turn my blog post “User experience is strategy, not design” into a talk, but a funny thing happened along the way. I realized that, yes, UX is design, but not design as we’ve been thinking of it. And by reframing “UX design” as a profession, we can set it up to uniquely address increasingly prevalent business needs. Before tackling the profession, we need to agree on just what “UX design” is. I have not come across a better definition than Jesse’s, which he originally shared in 2009: Experience design is the design of anything, independent of medium, or across media, with human experience as an explicit outcome, and human engagement as an explicit goal. Jesse went on to define human engagement across four factors — perception, action, cognition, and emotion, and then showed how design contributes to this engagement: Similarly, Dan Saffer attempted to diagram the scope of user experience design: These both present very broad mandates.
Why Responsive Design is Not Built for the User. Jeff Hasen is CMO of Hipcricket, a mobile marketing and advertising company. Marketers and designers have been told repeatedly of the benefits of responsive design. I, however, believe these benefits are mostly myths, since the theory hasn’t lived up to all that it’s promised. Some claim that responsive design automatically fits all devices: It is a simple design build that extends across many browsers and devices. In actuality, if a site is not designed for mobile first, users will encounter problems fast. Designers are mistaken in assuming responsive design is one-size-fits-all, because desktop-specific images on a website are larger in file size than those used on a mobile site and can, therefore, jam users’ precious bandwidth and patience. Even if responsive design promises one build to start, a designer still must test it on each device and on every generation.
Image via Shutterstock. Digital Scarcity | Tuhin Kumar. "2 Billion Likes per day on Facebook. 400 Million Tweets per day on Twitter. 50 Million likes per day on Instagram. " We live, for most part, a life that is eerily being encroached by the digital. Every day we find a part of the analog being replaced by the digital. An app to replace a board game, a website to answer a question instead of asking a friend, an app to know what's happening instead of looking around and talking.
As time goes by, digital, which is even today seen as a secondary dimension, will replace physical as the primary dimension in which we spend our time. I am not suggesting it as necessarily negative, merely pointing it out. Pointing it out, because as we start to put more of our time into it, we need to find a better way to tell others what is worth their time. Make it not just easier to recommend but also valuable and meaningful. You might answer back, one can like something or fav it or share it and that is an intent of telling others, this is GOOD.
See. Discuss: Principles of User Interface Design. Clarity is job #1 Clarity is the first and most important job of any interface. To be effective using an interface you've designed, people must be able to recognize what it is, care about why they would use it, understand what the interface is helping them interact with, predict what will happen when they use it, and then successfully interact with it.
While there is room for mystery and delayed gratification in interfaces, there is no room for confusion. Clarity inspires confidence and leads to further use. One hundred clear screens is preferable to a single cluttered one. Interfaces exist to enable interaction Interfaces exist to enable interaction between humans and our world. They can help clarify, illuminate, enable, show relationships, bring us together, pull us apart, manage our expectations, and give us access to services.
The act of designing interfaces is not Art. John Underkoffler points to the future of UI. Why Your Links Should Never Say “Click Here” By anthony on 06/20/12 at 10:39 pm Have you ever wanted your users to click your links, but didn’t know how to get them to act? When some designers run into this problem they’re tempted to use the words “click here” on their links. Before you give in to the temptation, you should know that using these words on a link can affect how users experience your interface.
“Click” Puts Too Much Focus on Mouse Mechanics Using the word “click” on your links takes the user’s attention away from your interface and on to their mouse. Users know what a link is and how to use a mouse. “view” relates to the users task, while “click” puts the focus on mouse mechanics Instead of using the word “click”, look for a different verb you can use that relates to the user’s task. “Here” Conceals What Users are Clicking Some links don’t use the word “click”, but instead they use the word “here”.
When your link doesn’t just say “here”, users can skip the verbose text and go right to the link Phrasing Links the Right Way. Just What is a UX Manager? Earlier this week, I wrote quick blog post, calling out seven lessons for UX managers from this year’s MX conference. Then on Twitter, Livia Labate, who leads the experience design practice for Marriott International asked, “Dear @AdaptivePath, what is a UX Manager?” Here’s my not-so-twitter-length response: UX managers come with all sorts of fancy-pants titles. This isn't about titles. This is about responsibilities. The core difference between a UX manager and the staff of a UX team is the responsibilities she holds.
(And, as an aside, I'm using 'she' because frankly it appears to me that the majority of UX managers are women.) Someone who manages user experience has stuck their neck out and said they'll deliver business outcomes through improving the experience that customers have with a product or service. That means you believe UX is a force that can not only improve people's experiences but that it can also drive business. Why I <3 UX Managers Okay, let it be said that I'm biased. The Rise of Cross-Channel UX Design. By Tyler Tate Published: October 17, 2011 “The message is now abstracted from the medium, and the book is a channel-independent experience—whether held in its physical form, heard as the spoken word, or read on an eReader, mobile phone, or desktop computer.”
A few Saturdays ago, I was walking around Greenwich in southeast London when I decided to peruse the local bookshop. Drawn to a display titled “Utopias and Dystopias,” I noticed the book A Brave New World sitting beside George Orwell’s 1984, which I had read and remembered enjoying. Curious about the association between the two, I picked up A Brave New World and glanced over the back cover. I then pulled out my phone and searched Google to see what others were saying about the book and noted that it is often considered one of the top-100 novels of all time. Figure 1—Amazon Kindle eReader and Kindle applications Books, newspapers, and magazines have not only gone digital, they’ve gone ubiquitous, contextual, and formless.
Retail Travel.