Lean UX, Product Stewardship, and Integrated Teams Several emergent themes in software design and development are converging into a new way of working: Entrepreneurs understand the strategic value of user experience design in the guise of Steve Blank’s customer development and Eric Ries’ lean startupManagement are entrusting designers with product management responsibilities as frustrated designers are seeking them outAgile teams are coming to recognize the contribution of UX as designers learn to function in agile environments Each of these ideas have significant impact on the way user experience designers approach their work and how businesses structure their design and development efforts. Lean UX Traditional User Experience (UX) design techniques were developed in waterfall environments. Lean UX leverages the highly fluid nature of modern lean and agile development practices. Lean UX is not interaction design shoehorned into agile frameworks. Product Stewardship Product stewardship relieves pressure on the product owner bottleneck.
Do You Make These 10 Mistakes When You Blog? Assuming you want to increase your blog traffic, there are certain mistakes you must avoid to be successful. If you commit these mistakes, your traffic will never gain momentum. Worse, it may plateau or begin to decrease. Photo courtesy of ©iStockphoto.com/VisualField How do I know? Mistake #1: You don’t post enough. There are other mistakes, too; I doubt this list is exhaustive. Question: What other traffic-killers have you witnessed as a blogger? Designing better user interfaces The UX Designer’s Downward Dog: Designing in a Lean Environment « Second Thoughts Posted: May 29th, 2012 | Author: Lindsay | Filed under: mobile , Projects , side project , User Interface , volunteer | No Comments » Two weeks ago, I wanted to work on a mobile design for New York Cares’ volunteers as a way to brush up on Photoshop and tinker with Marshall Bock’s iPhone 4s Template . Background: New York Cares matches approximately 53,000 volunteers every year to projects around the 5 boroughs through partner organizations. On the NYCares website, volunteers can search projects using a variety of criteria. This functionality is available through the mobile web, but is not optimized for mobile use, nor does the organization have a mobile application. Research: I created an 8 question survey to understand how other volunteers find projects (search with specific criteria versus browse), what criteria they use to select a project (type, day, borough, etc.), and the ideal project date (within a week, within a month). Check out my Pinterest boards and please do connect.
Excellent Articles on Writing Title & Description Tags | Marketi Do you wonder what the big deal is about title and description META tags? Struggle with writing them? Think you can just shove a few keywords in and be good to go? How to Control Your Listing Text in Google’s Search Results By John Metzler The listing text in Google’s search results can easily be overlooked by some webmasters in their SEO efforts. All About Title Tags By Jill Whalen Fixing just the title tags of your pages can often generate quick and appreciable differences to your rankings. How to Create a META Description Tag – From 2004, but still amazingly relevant By Jill Whalen The keywords and phrases you use in your Meta description tag don’t affect your page’s ranking in the search engines (for the most part), but this tag can still come in handy in your overall SEO campaigns. Please share this post with your friends. 0inShare
Fact vs. Fiction: What Usability is Not A close friend asked me a few days ago – “You’ve covered decent ground on the science, dimensions, characteristics, design aspects, process and pervasiveness of usability considerations. How about doing a reverse bit? What usability is not about? Or the myths of usability?” In choosing to write this, I am simply reinforcing the simple concept that it is also necessary to talk about the “NOT” part in a subject as complex as usability. Usability is expensive It is known that Stanford University, Microsoft, IBM, and many others spend tons of resources (money and human) on usability research, which is quite expensive. I agree that it’s not a commodity – that there’s a price to pay. Usability is free At the opposite end of the first misconception, a large number of people believe that usability can be free. Usability is minimalism The concept of minimalism is usually a nice and welcome change in today’s noisy world. Going minimal is not alone going to get you usability. Usability is all art
Balanced Team Edit Central Contents Introduction: On Writing Style and Diction Tools Sponsored Links Reference Books Technical Notes Privacy Policy Contact Introduction: On Writing If you want to become a better writer, you need to do the following, in order of priority: (1) write a lot, and (2) seek ideas and inspiration, and (3) get the technical details right. This web site is mostly about the third and least important of these points. It should not be a surprise that to improve your writing you should write a lot. Inspiration does have a role to play, particularly if it can get you to write more. Lastly, there are the rules of grammar, punctuation, and spelling. Style & Diction This is an interactive section for checking a sample of writing. The Flesch reading ease score is based on a range of 0-100, with lower values for harder text and higher values for easier text; the other scores show the approximate (US) school grade of the text. Click the "Submit" button to look for possible problems in the text. Contact
Sensemaking in a changing world | Designing Change Andrew Chen (@andrewchen) Q10 Key features Full-screen. Focus on your work. Even if Mark Pilgrim doesn't like full-screen editors, some of us do. Live text statistics. Word, page and character counts are updated live as you type. Programmable page count formula. Specify what formula to use for page count calculation. Customizable look and paragraph format. Change the colors, line spacing, first line indent, paragraph spacing, font... Perfectly portable. A single self-contained executable file. Easy to use timer alarm. Perfect for timed writing sessions and word wars. Spell checker. You don't make mistakes. Notes. Any paragraph starting with ".." is considered a note. Target count. Displays completed percentage. Partial counts. Keep track of the extension of current chapter or see how much content you've produced in the current writing session. Autocorrections and quick text. Unlimited autocorrection entries to fix on the fly those persistent typing errors. Standard and clean text format. Encoding and line endings agnostic. Free.
Passive magic, design of delightful experience Why is Google Maps on a mobile device so amazing and delightful? Why does Word Lens feel so mind-blowing? Why does a Prius feel so good when you get in and go? Why does it feel satisfying to look down at the lighted keyboard on the Mac? It is noteworthy when the design of an experience is so compelling that you feel wonder and delight. So how to design the delightful, magical experience? In the digital world magic experiences are more likely to follow technology breakthroughs. I’m using passive to describe input which is largely listening and processing signal which is self-identified, as opposed to active input where signal is initiated by the user with specific intent. If you’e got a smart phone, a Mac, or a new car, chances are your experience is augmented with passive input magic. Fully passive input, quietly helping in the background Some sensors run in the background, quietly listening for the right signal which tells them to kick in and help.
Steve Blank