All posts from
May 2015

Heading towards UX excellence: Challenges from the UX Management Roundtable

Added on 27 May 2015 Peter Bogaards

Or how the middle management of Enterprise UX deals with the wicked problems of the experience landscape.

Disclosure: I work at Informaat experience design (The Netherlands) ~ “There is a growing need for UX managers in many organizations. Employees in this new role are facing big and complex challenges. Informaat organizes on a regular basis sessions of the UX Management Roundtable. In these meetings challenges are addressed and discussed UX managers are facing. Conversations of the roundtable from the past two years have now been documented in a free white paper.”

(Susanne van Mulken, Rob van der Haar, and Peter J. Bogaards ~ Informaat BiRDS on a W!RE) ★

The fox guarding the usability lab

Added on 26 May 2015 Peter Bogaards

Look-and-feel designers: “Look at how great our usability lab is. All our products and services have great usability.”

“In this editorial, I focus on the inherent conflict of interest that design agencies have when they are responsible for evaluating their own design work, what can be done to mitigate this problem, and the implications for the UX community. I define a design agency as a consulting firm that is hired to design (from a visual and interactive perspective) digital products.”

(Bill Albert ~ Journal of Usability Studies) ★

The wicked craft of enterprise UX

Added on 26 May 2015 Peter Bogaards

“While everyone seems to have different definitions of craft, there are some common threads that suggest a special quality of diligence, pride, and beauty, borne out of shaping some raw material with the utmost personal care - whether it’s your hands covered with flour and sugar while making a pie, or some industrial-machined aluminum grafted with a high-resolution pixel display powered by smart algorithms… to keep your family comfortable while enjoying that delicious pie.”

(Uday Gajendar a.k.a. @udanium ~ Medium) ★

Good design drives shareholder value: 2014 design value index results and commentary

Added on 22 May 2015 Peter Bogaards

2015 version coming soon, because ‘the results are in’.

“The 2014 Design Value Index shows us for a second year that corporations that put an emphasis on design as a strategic asset perform significantly better than those that do not. As corporate design capabilities mature, executives are able to direct this power towards their companies’ most challenging problems. This, in turn, allows design-driven companies to grow faster, and often with higher margins, due to the exceptional customer experiences they are uniquely positioned to create. Key trends identified through this work include the rise of user-experience (UX) design as a sub-discipline whose growth is expected to outpace all other design disciplines as the number of digital interfaces expand and the significant investment in internal design capabilities under way in many large U.S. companies today, as we see from DVI companies Intuit and IBM .”

(Jeneanne Rae a.k.a. @JeneanneMRae ~ Design Management Institute) ★

The psychology of UX

Added on 22 May 2015 Peter Bogaards

Old and still relevant. Human characteristics are of all times.

“When it comes to designing the UX, we need to take into consideration the necessity for a social outlet within our website or application. Allow for greater social interconnectedness in your designs so that people can go to each other for guidance and advice within your application, such as with ratings, reviews, news and forums. Allow users to forge helpful relationships, be it with similar users or with customer support. Give people an awareness of the size of the community they operate in to give them a sense of belonging as well as the choice of where they want to fit in within the community by establishing their profile.”

(Vanessa Carey ~ Methods & Tools) HT janjursa ★

Journey Maps: Not the end of the story

Added on 18 May 2015 Peter Bogaards

Have we found another silver bullet for UCD? And remember, the map is not the terrain.

“Journey maps have been around for the better part of a decade – some would argue longer – but it’s really only in the last three or four years that they’ve come into more common use, and more strategists are advocating their use as a framework for improving the customer experience. Without getting into the specifics of what a journey map is or isn’t in this column – there’s no shortage of material on the subject – suffice it to say that many in our field, including me, strongly believe in the potential of journey mapping for helping companies to achieve human-centric business transformations.”

(Ronnie Battista ~ UXmatters) ★

Your guide to online research and testing tools

Added on 12 May 2015 Peter Bogaards

A tool is just a tool, based upon a concept model which might not be true.

“The success of every business depends on how the business will meet their customers’ needs. To do that, it is important to optimize your offer, the website, and your selling methods so your customer is satisfied. The fields of online marketing, conversion rate optimization, and user experience design have a wide range of online tools that can guide you through this process smoothly. Many companies use only one or two tools that they are familiar with, but that might not be enough to gather important data necessary for improvement. To help you better understand when and which tool is valuable to use, I created a framework that can help in your assessment. Once you broaden your horizons, it will be easier to choose the set of tools aligned to your business’s needs.”

(Bartosz Mozyrko a.k.a. @UsabilityTools ~ Boxes and Arrows) ★

Information architecture’s role in UX design

Added on 11 May 2015 Peter Bogaards

Fortunately, no more discussions on information design versus information architecture. We’ve come from far away.

Jorge Arango discusses the state of IA and the importance of designers’ understanding of context and perspective – “Information architecture has always been an important part of user experience design, though not always acknowledged as such. With the emergence of social, IoT, and mobile, we have watched IA taking on a more dominant role in product development.”

(Mary Treseler a.k.a. @marytreseler ~ O’Reilly Radar) ★

What does it really mean to design in the browser?

Added on 11 May 2015 Peter Bogaards

Design with the digital material at hand. The browser interface being the canvas for it.

“Some insist designing in the browser is the only way to design a website. Some say designing in the browser limits creativity and these people don’t want to give up their graphic editors. What’s going on? Why the split? Why so many for and so many against designing in the browser? (…) I think the main reason for any pushback or misunderstanding is that detractors look at the phrase design in the browser literally and those in favor of it don’t.”

(Steven Bradley a.k.a. @vangogh ~ vanseo design) ★