Wireframes are dead, long live rapid prototyping. Wireframes, your time is up. You’ve served your purpose. You’ve brought order where there was once chaos and provided gainful employment for thousands of UX designers, but I’m afraid now it’s time for you to go to the big recycling bin in the sky. You’re just no longer cut out for the cut and thrust of UX design and have been replaced by that young upstart called rapid prototyping.
In this article I argue why you too should ditch wireframes and embrace rapid prototyping. What are wireframes? In the same way that architectural drawings might outline what goes where for buildings, wireframes outline what goes where for a set of UI screens. An example wireframe with footnotes Wireframes are usually put together by a UX designer (or designers) prior to any visual design work and are typically constructed using diagramming tools such as Visio and Omnigraffle, or design and drawing tools such as InDesign and Fireworks. Why ditch wireframes? So what’s so wrong with wireframes? Lean ways to test your new business idea.
I’ll be honest, I’m a bit late to the party. I’ve only just completed Eric Ries book, ‘The Lean Startup’, that was published to much acclaim last year. I put off reading it, believing it would be another generic how-to-start-a-high-tech-business book. I already have a bookshelf full of these kinds of book, most of them unread beyond the initial chapter. But now I’ve read it I think that it should be obligatory reading for any UX person. What I like about the book is that it puts UX at the very heart of new product design — and does so in language that will make managers sit up and take notice. Here’s my version of the digested read. Designing new products or services is risky because there are so many uncertainties. Sound familiar? UX practitioners have a lot to contribute to this way of working but I wanted particularly to focus on the item I’ve numbered 4 in the list above: iterative design and testing. These techniques have three things in common. The three methods I want to discuss are:
Why most UX is shite. I was invited to speak at the event this week where getting a little sweary and ranty is kind of encouraged (it goes well with the craft beer consumption that is an integral part of the conference mix). This was my contribution. Slides: When I checked the agenda to see what I was supposed to be talking about at Monkigras, I saw that I was down to talk for 15 mins about ‘Crafting Good UX’.
Where to start. I suspect James expected me to come up with something like this post that ReadWriteWeb published the day before my talk: If you’re interested, the five signs (aside from simply *being* ), are: An elegant UIBeing AddictiveA Fast Startbeing Seamless, andIt Changes You I hate these kinds of lists. If only that were true, we’d be overwhelmed by UX amazingness. It’s not that simple right. Now, there are plenty of ways you can make a user’s experience of your product rubbish, but in my experience, there are a handful of serial offenders. 1.
So, this one I see ALL the time. Get a vision already. 6 Steps for Measuring Success on UX Projects | disciullodesign. – By MARK DISCIULLO The tepid economy is putting pressure on everyone from executives to User Experience (UX) teams to show direct, measurable results. So, I’m often surprised to hear of the many projects that include a UX component to them, yet there isn’t any true, quantifiable success criteria defined for UX.
Even more rare, are efforts to baseline the current design experience of an interface or product prior to a relaunch so any newly “defined” success criteria has some context. This is critical information to know so you can quantify whether or not your new designs have truly made improvements compared to past designs. Anything that is done as an organization should have justification – otherwise, why do it? UX is still being treated as though it’s a very subjective topic to measure. “This is not acceptable. Without credible UX success measurements, we all risk not being able to quantify our success. Why are we not measuring our UX efforts?
So how do we do this? Start measuring now! Source Order, Skip links and Structural labels. Presented at OZeWAI Conference, 9 December 2005 Summary Is page source order important to screen reader users? Recently, the idea of placing the informational content of a web page before the navigation has gained some currency. This paper reports on our research into the relevance and importance of page source order, skip links and structural labels for screen reader users.
Our results suggest that: Most screen reader users expect at least the main site navigation to be presented before the informational content of the page.The source order of a web page is likely to be of little relevance to the majority of screen reader users.About half of the screen reader users we either tested or surveyed found the use of skip links on the test sites helpful.All the participants indicated the inclusion of structural labels identifying the different levels of navigation on a web page was useful. Introduction For sighted users, developing this procedural model is usually relatively easy. Discussion. Usability Testing Is Qualitative Only If You Can’t Count. By Jon Innes Published: February 21, 2011 “Too many VP- and C-level folks still have no idea how to measure the value of usability or UX design initiatives.” I’ve recently found myself in a lot of discussions over the value of traditional user research methods.
In particular, the value of that staple of user research we know as the usability test and its relevance in today’s world of Google Analytics and A/B and multivariate testing. Business Leaders Don’t Understand the Value of Usability Testing Having spent the past several years consulting on both UX management and user-centered design best practices—and, for about eight years prior to that, working with senior executives as a UX leader on staff, I’ve come to realize that too many VP- and C-level folks still have no idea how to measure the value of usability or UX design initiatives.
Failing to Defend Small Sample Sizes “The use of the term quantitative research confuses many teams when researchers apply it to small-sample studies.” From Wireframes to Code, Part I. By Bill Schmidt Published: December 20, 2010 “Why not create a design artifact that is not disposable, but instead, one your team can convert to actual production code?” Within many companies, the use of wireframes in user experience design can be a contentious issue. People typically think of wireframes simply as artifacts designers create when generating design concepts, then later discard.
Why not create a design artifact that is not disposable, but instead, one your team can convert to actual production code? The Question “I was already aware of several software tools with which I could accomplish this goal and, in fact, had taken this approach on a recent project.” My exploration of this idea began when a software developer—who was in the audience during a recent presentation on wireframing and prototyping—asked me, “Why can’t you just use the code from your wireframes as the basis for the final code?”
But What Are Wireframes? Blueprints for Software Figure 2—A house Two Approaches. Subject-Matter Experts: Putting Users at the Center of the Design Process. By Demetrius Madrigal and Bryan McClain Published: February 7, 2011 “The insights we gain from interacting directly with users are invaluable.” This month we’ll discuss the process of putting users at the center of the design process and what that means in regard to both design and product strategy. We’ll also discuss some different approaches to a user-centered design process that we’ve come across and outline their positives and negatives. Finally, we’ll outline the steps necessary to make user-centered design a reality and how to get the most out of a user-centered design process when working on different types of products.
Why Users Matter “When we design a product to meet a market need, we’re addressing the problems, concerns, or desires of people who would use it on a regular basis.” Knowing our users is everything—without them, we’d have no one in mind to design for and few would purchase our products. User-Centered Research Strategies Working with Subject-Matter Experts Conclusion. Unmoderated, Remote Usability Testing: Good or Evil? By Kyle Soucy Published: January 18, 2010 “Recently, there has been a surge in the number of tools that are available for conducting unmoderated, remote usability testing—and this surge is changing the usability industry.” Conducting traditional synchronous, or moderated, usability testing requires a moderator to communicate with test participants and observe them during a study—either in person or remotely.
Unmoderated, automated, or asynchronous usability testing, as the name implies, occurs remotely, without a moderator. The use of a usability testing tool that automatically gathers the participants’ feedback and records their behavior makes this possible. Such tools typically let participants view a Web site they are testing in a browser, with test tasks and related questions in a separate panel on the screen. and clickdensity —or Web analytics tools that turn analytics data into videos of actual user sessions—such as Userfly, ClickTale, TeaLeaf, and Clixpy.
What You Can Learn Pricing: $$$$ Remote & Online Usability Testing Tool | Loop11. Protect Usability Tests from Yourself. Whether you’re testing an existing product, involved in a site redesign, or working on a completely new site, your biggest challenge is often yourself. Here are a few ways you might unintentionally cause problems: Your personal experience with a company, product, or application skews your interpretation. Think about an application you use daily. You know exactly where it frustrates you the most and maybe even how you’d fix it. Now imagine you were hired to make improvements to that app. You’d want to go straight to the source of your frustration. But if you limited your testing to just that area, you could miss a more global and crippling problem because of your tunnel vision.Years of experience using and working on the Web helps you to become an expert, but it also can create blind spots.
Whether you’re conducting formal usability testing or just meeting with your team to discuss wireframes, your deeply held convictions can influence you anywhere! Avoid asking leading questions. "Strategic UX" by Leisa Reichelt at London IA. I was going to start this blog post off with a quote from Leisa Reichelt’s recent London IA talk, but she came out with so many pithy one liners that it was impossible to pick one. Leisa’s basic premise was that if you read some of the very best books about management strategy and techniques, they sound awfully familiar to anyone who has ever read a UX book. For example, they have a focus on businesses being successful by serving customer needs - a criteria for design success that we are all familiar with.
The problem, Leisa suggests, is that actually a lot of the managers you’ll come across during your career haven’t been to business school or read the very best text books about management strategy. Therefore, Leisa argued, we should be playing up our role as facilitators in a business, to help the rest of the company to come to the conclusion that a good business strategy usually requires there to be a good UX strategy. So, as Leisa put it: “Business needs to get more from their UX team. Well-designed error messages - Formulate Information Design.
Error messages are a necessary part of every form On electronic forms, error messages indicate when input is missing or invalid. Even if your form has been carefully designed with great user experience in mind, you'll still need error messages as form-fillers are…well…only human. We all make typographical mistakes, accidentally miss fields and make our own, sometimes unusual, interpretation of questions and field labels. Principles of good error message design There are plenty of solid articles on the web that enumerate the principles behind well-designed error messages, from Jakob Nielsen's advice in 2001 to the relevant section of the current Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines. All of these guidelines boil down to one small and straightforward set of principles that apply to each error: Underlying these principles is a more general one about forms: be respectful of the user. The missing example: error messaging done well The key features of this example are as follows:
Why Your Form Buttons Should Never Say Submit. By anthony on 01/05/11 at 10:27 pm When you see a Submit button on a form, what comes to your mind? One could easily reason that clicking the button submits the user’s information into the system for processing. A Submit button describes what the system does well, but it doesn’t describe what the user does at all. When users fill out a form, they are engaging in a task.
A form button that says Submit gives users the impression that the form isn’t focused on a specific task. Your form button should describe exactly what the user is doing in their task. Although Submit buttons aren’t as prevalent as they once were, they still exist on forms today. Top 10 Research-Based Usability Findings of 2010: Measuring Usability Blog. Asking Questions About Internet Behavior. By Caroline Jarrett Published: February 7, 2011 “Steve Krug’s newest book … inspired me to think again about my whole approach to usability testing.” Have you read Steve Krug’s newest book, Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems?
I was honored when Steve asked me to read it in manuscript form, but—just between you and me—I didn’t expect to learn all that much, because I’ve been practicing and teaching usability testing for more than 15 years. Well, I was completely wrong: the book inspired me to think again about my whole approach to usability testing. A few examples of what made me think: testing far more often—maybe monthly rather than twice a year testing with just three participants rather than my usual five to ten forgoing a written report in favor of a post-session debrief meeting Having said all of that, there was one point in the manuscript that I just couldn’t agree with.
We Rarely Know How Long We Spend on Habitual Behaviors. Encyclopedia of Usability, HCI, and more. I only have one big research question, but I attack it from a lot of different angles. The question is representation. How do people make, see and use things that carry meaning? The angles from which I attack my question include various ways in which representations are applied (including design processes, interacting with technology, computer programming, visualisation), various methods by which I collect research data (including controlled experiments, prototype construction, ethnographic observation), and the theoretical perspectives of various academic disciplines (including computer science, cognitive psychology, engineering, architecture, music, anthropology).
If you are based in Cambridge, you may like to attend the following talks on human-computer interaction. This page lists a few large research themes and major projects illustrating them. I only have one big research question, but I attack it from a lot of different angles. A Beginner’s Guide To A/B Testing: Exceptional Web Copy. Infinite Scrolling Best Practices. 25 great free UX tools « UX for the masses. Customer account experience - Neo Insight January 2011 newsletter. Killing the Cancel Button on Forms for Good. UX Project Documentation: Answering Why, What and How. Password Usability Perils to Avoid.