Welcome to Project Soli. Why is there so many bad user interfaces in the world? Have you ever wondered why you encounter so many bad user interfaces everyday? The answer is not as straightforward as you might think. Subscribe to these quick tips using iTunes or RSS | Download Audio From unnecessary clicks in a mobile app to slow web pages, the world is full of substandard user interfaces. We all get frustrated by poor user interfaces. So why do they exist? If we all hate them wouldn’t we stop building them. It’s not like there are people who like the complex, time consuming and frustrating. We think we know the answer. There is no doubt that these are factors. A disconnect with the user I find it fascinating that a senior executive will moan about the usability of a website he is trying to use. This is because most executive teams don’t spend a lot of time with customers.
That is why I like to show management videos of users getting frustrated using their website. Broadcast marketing A similar problem exists in many marketing departments. But things are changing. Product Manager and UX Designer — What’s The Difference? — All Things Product Management. Winning products are created by visionary, multidisciplinary teams that are able to deliver a stunning experience. Those who have mastered the magic of crafting the user experience are able to smash their weaker competitors. Sounds pompous, but it’s widely recognized as the undeniable truth. When I was in Silicon Valley for the first time, showing people my idea for the company that will change the world (and it does!) — UXPin and I introduced myself as a UX Designer they said “UX Designer? Where have you been? The whole Valley is looking for people like you”.
User Experi-ence Designers were and still are employees in high demand for any tech company — no matter how big or how small. And yes, it’s just like fashion, but at the same time this is perfectly reasonable. This culture-creation task is usually handled either by a User Experience Designer or somebody who’s fulfilling the role of Product Manager (in small startups that’s often one of the founders). Engineer Thinking. I made a remark on Twitter the other day that gave rise to a discussion, and a few of the comments exemplified something I want to briefly talk about.
The actual topic of discussion isn’t particularly germane to my point, but suffice to say that it concerned a situation where Xcode (the development environment for Mac and iPhone/iPad programming) wasn’t doing anything to assist in a very common situation where you’d want to choose one of two possible courses of action, due to an underlying feature of the programming language used. In probably more than 80% of cases, one particular choice would be made.
My point, of course, is that Xcode ought to default to the most common choice, but transparently allow overriding that choice if the other option was needed. Many people readily agreed, but there were two other types of response which stood out. They were: Engineering in the real world has taught us (usually the hard way) about tolerances and precision. You can’t have it both ways. What Is ‘Follow Me Home’? Scott Cook, the founder of Intuit, started the Follow Me Home practice early in the company’s history. Basically, he would hang out at the local Staples store, wait for someone to buy Quicken, and then ask to follow the customer home to watch them install and use the product. This was one of the keys to Cook’s success as a budding entrepreneur, because it allowed him to build a product that truly made a difference in people’s financial lives. Over the years, Intuit has kept up the tradition of Follow Me Home.
I usually sponsor and attend at least 20 per year. During these site visits, I spend about an hour observing a customer working in QuickBooks. I also check out their facility and how work gets done in the office. By the end of my visits, I have a good sense of the challenges faced by a particular business — and what Intuit can do to improve QuickBooks. Laura Messerschmitt is a Senior Marketing Manager at Intuit. How To Interview Your Users And Get Useful Feedback.
1.1K Flares20018481161513--×1.1K Flares x Access to videos, talks, and worksheetsInvitation to private Google Plus CommunityJoin in on live Q&A webinars and fireside chats. A Path Back to Critique: What to do when the client sends you their own design instead of feedback on yours. | Discussing Design - Paying attention to the details of design critique.
Most of us have been in situations where, instead of getting what we’d consider to be useful feedback on our designs, we get a list of changes to make to it. And often this list doesn’t include a clear indication of why the changes should be made. Beyond that some of the changes might be things that are detrimental to the design and things we’d advise against. The most challenging of these kinds of situations is when it’s not actually a list we receive, but rather a new design that the client has put together on their own. We sit and stare at the screen with a million thoughts and questions running through our heads and often a building sense of frustration and insult. What do we do now? Step One: Breathe. Step back and force yourself to remember that most people are not diabolically evil, intentionally hurtful people.
Creating a design of their own is not necessarily an evil act. Hmm… “Show me. Step Two: Take note. Step Three: Critique their work. How does their design differ from yours? Lean UX Class, May 20-21 2013 | Crisp - Get agile with Crisp. The days of heavy specifications and documentation are numbered. The new currency of web and software development is shared understanding within nimble, small, dedicated teams.
In this workshop, Neo NYC founding partner, Jeff Gothelf, will teach you the collaborative, cross-functional ideals behind Lean Startup and Lean User Experience and demonstrate the power of highly cooperative teams. You’ll take away practical skills to encourage: Greater team collaborationDesign thinkingRapid design tacticsShorter feedback loopsIncreased product validity all while increasing team productivity, efficiency and camaraderie. The focus in this course is Lean User Experience, Design Frameworks and Design Thinking.
By design thinking we mean that a design process needs to focus on the goal of the project, and that you need to involve all diciplines as early as possible in cross functional teams. Jeff Gothelf’s latest book “Lean UX” will be published in may 2013 Who this course is for. 10 Principles of Lean User Experience. Sneak preview of the new Lean UX Book. Lean Startups require cross-functional teams working closely together. This is especially true when designing a great product. In this excerpt from the newest addition to the Lean Series, Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden discuss the idea of collaborative design -- an opening up of the product design process to all members of the team -- and why they feel this way of working produces not just better products but better teams as well. What follows is an excerpt from Chapter 4 (Collaborative Design) of Lean UX: Applying lean principles to improve user experience by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden The most effective way I’ve found to rally a team around a design direction is through collaboration.
Over the long haul, collaboration yields bet- ter results than hero-based design (the practice of calling in a designer or design team to drop in, come up with something beautiful, and take off to rescue the next project). We had built a shared understanding through our collaborative design session. Looking Beyond User-Centered Design. User-centered design has served the digital community well. So well, in fact, that I’m worried its dominance may actually be limiting our field. The terms “user experience design” (UX) and “user-centered design” (UCD) are often used interchangeably.
But there’s an important distinction. UX design is the discipline: what we do. Precise definition is elusive, but most attempts focus on experience as an explicit design objective. User-centered design is a process: how we do it. Research. Other design processes#section1 UCD is the dominant design approach within UX, so pervasive that some UX designers behold it as the Platonic ideal of design. But other design processes are available. Self design, aka “scratching your own itch.” It seems arbitrary to regard these alternative design processes as inferior substitutes.
Weaknesses of UCD#section2 UCD’s ascendancy deserves historical context. Heaviness#section3 UCD simply takes longer than genius or self design. Negation of style#section4 What next? Scaling Your UX Strategy - Robert Fabricant. By Robert Fabricant | 10:00 AM January 7, 2013 In business today, “user experience” (or UX) has come to represent all of the qualities of a product or service that make it relevant or meaningful to an end-user — everything from its look and feel to how it responds when users interact with it, to the way it fits into people’s daily lives.
You even hear people talking about UX as the way in which a consumer connects to a business — all the touch-points from marketing to product development to distribution channels. It’s the “new black,” to borrow from a fashion phrase — as well as a reference to its influence on profitability. The value of UX as a corporate asset is no longer in question. Just look at the $1 billion price tag paid by Facebook for Instagram, whose primary asset is not technology, but the best photo sharing UX in the business (and some of the best UX talent as well). 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Eight UX Design Trends for 2013. One of the best things about user experience design is that the consumer products and services it helps to crystallize are always evolving. With that level of change comes all sorts of speculation about the future. Speculating is fun. Looking back on 2012 we saw a year brimming with innovations and ideas that set the stage for what we are likely to see in 2013.
With that, here are some trends and concepts that we see setting the stage for this year’s coming advancements in user experience. Downsampling The Onion hit it spot-on when they joked that 90% of our waking lives are spent staring at glowing rectangles. Little Printer skims headlines from your online feeds and spits them out as low-fi ticker tape for your bedside. Foodism Food has replaced art as high culture. This year, specialized products, processes, and mobile applications will catalyze new levels of culinary geekiness. Quantifed Ambition Augmented Dialogue Sensory Bandwidth Agile Economies Faceted Video Key indicators? Good Reasons to Create Great Personas. Over the years I have been asked to explain the value of personas. After all, they come in all shapes and sizes and can be expensive to create when you set out to do it right.
When I say right, I mean supported by contextual research into the circumstances of the target audience followed by a thorough analysis of that context, which results in great information design artifacts capturing the essence of the personas. This qualitative form of persona can also be enhanced by subsequent quantitative research, which may provide accurate insights into the relative size, value, and desires of personas, acting more as market segmentation and supporting business strategy. This balanced qualitative/quantitative approach can be very useful when integrating business and design teams to form a viable customer-focused strategy.
How personas are a driver of digital innovation, in no particular order… Please feel free to add to this growing list! 3 Challenges Implementing Lean UX in the Enterprise. Transitioning teams to be more “lean” in their product development is not easy. This is especially true in larger, more established organizations. Years of historical momentum coupled with siloed bureaucracy and overzealous legal departments have entrenched a serial, lengthy process in many banks, insurance companies and other enterprise level orgs. Add to this the relatively late addition of design and ux services and simply declaring, much less actually proving, product hypotheses becomes an organizational impossibility. Making a list of all of these challenges can be a lengthy endeavor. To spare you that list and to focus this article on challenges with actual solutions I’ve picked three. Again, this is far from a complete list and I encourage you to add your experiences to the discussion in the comments.
Failure is not an option For Lean UX and Lean Startup to take hold philosophically, your company culture must allow for some level of failure. 1. 2. Silos [Jeff] User Experience, Incorporated. By Robert Fabricant - January 7, 2013 In business today, “user experience” (or UX) has come to represent all of the qualities of a product or service that make it relevant or meaningful to an end-user -- everything from its look and feel design to how it responds when users interact with it, to the way it fits into people’s daily lives. You even people talking about UX as the way in which a consumer connects to a business -- all the touch-points from marketing to product development to distribution channels. It’s the “new black,” to borrow from a fashion phrase—as well as a reference to its influence on profitability. The value of UX as a corporate asset is no longer in question. Just look at the $1 billion price tag paid by Facebook for Instagram, whose primary asset is not technology, but the best photo sharing UX in the business (and some of the best UX talent as well).
Scalable Strategies for Managing UX 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. What Jerry Seinfeld can teach us about interaction design. Jerry Seinfeld may not be a designer, but we can learn a lot from his life of craftsmanship. The New York Times Magazine has a great piece on Jerry Seinfeld which illustrates what an amazing craftsman he is. In the accompanying video he explains how he writes a joke. The video is great because you see that Jerry is very much a writer…and if you’ve ever written anything yourself you’ll appreciate Jerry’s craftsmanship and how he pays attention to minute details to make something just right. Craftsmanship is knowing that the details matter and that getting them just right is the difference between good and great. But craftsmanship is craftsmanship, no matter what field you’re in. So as I was watching I kept noticing parallels with UI design…how Jerry works on a joke, refines it, and makes sure that it tests well before considering it done is a lot like the steps that UI designers go through.
Here are some similarities: Works in low fidelity. From Jerry Seinfeld Intends to Die Standing Up.