June 2012

Walt Disney, the world's first user experience designer

Experience designer would be a better label.

"There's a lot of best practices that Walt did that we as user experience designers should embrace and do. Here's some of them (...)"

(Joseph Dickerson a.k.a. @josephdickerson)

Posted by PJB on June 29, 2012 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Agile is Wrong for UX

Can there be such a thing as software products?

"When something is wrong, it deviates from truth or fact. And I can say, with more confidence than ever, that traditional Agile software development methodologies (i.e. Scrum) are wrong for UX. In order to prove my case, I want to take you back to the inception of Agile (as I have read and experienced it) and its related software development methodologies. Along the way, we'll point out the reasons these methodologies are incompatible with the field of User Experience Design."

(Elisabeth Hubert a.k.a. @lishubert)

Posted by PJB on June 27, 2012 | Classification: Technology - User experience | Permalink

5 Tips for Effective UX Leadership

Speak up, we want heroes or champions more than (self-proclaimed) gurus.

"Your leadership superpowers will flourish as you stay engaged with the people influencing your product, become a confident voice for the user, and own the success and failure of your projects. The users of the world need UX practitioners to save them from noise, clutter, and wasted time. Producing work is not the same as providing leadership and strategic value. In the real world, people aren't born heroes; they're forged in moments of need. Rise up and defend your users. You are the expert, so lead and others will follow."

(Paul Holcomb a.k.a. @paulholcomb ~ UX Magazine)

Posted by PJB on June 27, 2012 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

From Islands To Ecosystem: Connecting Social, Digital + Mobile

Ecosystem thinking relates more to biology than design. Orchestrated growth.

"Today, the Web and the digital landscape looks dramatically different compared to the Internet's frontier years."

(David Armano)

Posted by PJB on June 26, 2012 | Classification: Social Web | Permalink

Taxonomy, Metadata, and Search

All the meta nodes in the conceptual layer explained.

Notes from Seth Earley's Confab Workshop ~ "(...) your table of contents, which somewhat expresses the hierarchy, order, and relationships within your information, helps the reader understand at a glance the whole of the information. Even if the user doesn't navigate his or her way through this sometimes maze-like TOC structure, not having the table of contents at all makes users uneasy. If you replace that table of contents with another sort of organization, something that doesn't express the semantic relationships of the information components, your users may feel lost."

(Tom Johnson ~ I'd Rather Be Writing)

Posted by PJB on June 26, 2012 | Classification: Information architecture - Metadata - Search | Permalink

Great Brands Are About Fusing Product And Service. How Do You Do It?

The next silver bullet for companies: appoint a CXO.

"Method's Reuben Steiger offers five ways for creating an ecosystem of products and services -- and thinking like a chief experience officer. (...) The days of perfect plans within a top-down hierarchy are over. Instead, we need to influence our companies to embrace shared values and product principles. Then, each of us can be a chief experience officer creating memorable experiences and a cohesive, engaging, and delightful brand."

(Reuben Steiger a.k.a. @method_inc ~ Fast Co.Design) ~ courtesy of nicoooooon

Posted by PJB on June 25, 2012 | Classification: Customer experience | Permalink

13 Tenets of User Experience

If academic is European, then economic is definitely American.

"User experience is the net sum of every interaction a person has with a company, be it marketing collateral, a customer service call, or the product or service itself. It is affected by the company's vision and the beliefs it holds and practices, as well as the service or product's purpose and the value it holds in that person's life."

(Robert Hoekman, Jr a.k.a. @rhjr ~ Sliced)

Posted by PJB on June 22, 2012 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Designing Services That Deliver

The founding article (1984) of Service Design and service blueprints.

"Faced with service problems, we tend to become somewhat paranoid. Customers are convinced that someone is treating them badly; managers think that recalcitrant individual employees are the source of the malfunction. Thinly veiled threats by customers and managers are often first attempts to remedy the problem; if they fail, confrontation may result."

(G. Lynn Shostack)

Posted by PJB on June 22, 2012 | Classification: Classics - Service design | Permalink

Just What is a UX Manager?

UX team lead or UX champion would be a better label.

"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. (...) 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 doesn't mean soft results like better user testing results, that means delivering the things businesses ultimately care about: adoption, growth, revenue, retention, and margins."

(Brandon Schauer a.k.a. @brandonschauer ~ Adaptive Path)

Posted by PJB on June 21, 2012 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Business Model Canvas for User Experience

Any tool extends the human body and mind.

"First nitpick, the customer should be the focus of the canvas. You're reading this sentence left to right, the canvas is the same. The Business Model Canvas is organized chronologically because it's made by business people, for business people, and it's based on a supply chain."

(Tristan Kromer a.k.a. @TriKro ~ Grasshopper Herder)

Posted by PJB on June 21, 2012 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

The definition of content strategy

Sounds simple: two thousand words of copy a month makes you a thought leader in the end.

"Through your content strategy you should describe your firm's expertise as clearly and openly as possible. You want to be generous with the knowledge you share through your site's content strategy. This idea makes many agencies feel uncomfortable (...)"

(Mark O'Brien a.k.a. @NewfangledMark ~ Newfangled)

Posted by PJB on June 20, 2012 | Classification: Content strategy | Permalink

Service Design: Beyond Customer Journey Mapping

Everything you can design, you can model and depict.

"Often, Service Design approaches can ask too much of an organization too soon. The difficulty is how to implement the opportunities uncovered from customer journey mapping. We recognize that companies work in silos and don't change quickly. We've come up with ways to guide organizations through prioritized decision-making that will result in a meaningful change to the customer experience. This webinar will focus on sharing consulting experiences and thoughts on how organizations can adopt Service Design in a manner that focuses effort and drives measurable business outcomes which work within existing organizational structures."

(User Centric)

Posted by PJB on June 20, 2012 | Classification: Service design | Permalink

The Past and Future of Experience Design: What a difference 10 years make

One tends to forget how long some of our histories are.

"(...) we need to better understand business language, issues, and concerns. To have the influence we think we should, we need to enlarge the solutions we create so that they can operate effectively in the economic and political systems of business. Experience isn't just something that gets imagined and designed. It gets funded, delivered, and managed."

(Nathan Shedroff a.k.a. @nathanshedroff ~ Boxes and Arrows) ~ courtesy of janjursa

Posted by PJB on June 18, 2012 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

UX Design Defined

This DTDT still forgets content. Wrapped box still remains empty.

"Unfortunately, in the field of user experience, people often confuse terms like information architecture, interaction design, visual design, usability engineering, and UX design. In some cases, people use these terms almost interchangeably. This article provides a lexicon of these terms and more clearly defines the role of the user experience designer."

(Ritch Macefield ~ UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on June 18, 2012 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

The Care and Feeding of a UX Services Team

Get to work with the smart, passioned and genius designer.

"Building a quality UX team in any setting is a tough challenge. Trying to build a quality UX team in a services organization presents unique challenges, because a ready pool of qualified applicants simply does not exist. Thankfully, our profession is in demand. The unfortunate side effect is that we can't easily find the right people to grow our team, even in this challenging economy."

(Baruch Sachs ~ UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on June 18, 2012 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Defining User Experience as Brand Experience

Brand experience: outside-in versus inside-out. It's just a matter of direction

"I have found that the best way to think of user experience is as the core of a brand: the reactor or the nucleus. Without good user experience your brand means nothing. But what is a brand? Its most basic definition is the sum of the experiences that a person has with a company or organization. You may be wondering what branding has to do with you the interface designer."

(Shawn Borsky a.k.a. @anthemcg ~ Spyre Studios)

Posted by PJB on June 18, 2012 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Illustrating the Big Picture: Journeys, Experiences and Interactions

The journey is the reward for experience designers.

"Journey models are emerging as a welcome and valuable refresh of some old and new tools in our UX arsenal. They are not just another deliverable for your checklist; they're a valuable method for digging deep into problems of long-term engagement, cultivating empathy, and establishing a problem space in which to generate and test ideas. Their output can serve as a backbone for strategic recommendations and more tactical initiatives. Form and function can vary widely depending on the project and stakeholder needs, but at their core, journey models are stories that focus on the meaningful relationships between individuals and organizations, and highlight opportunities to build a better future."

(Megan Grocki a.k.a. @megangrocki and Jamie Thomson a.k.a. @uxjam ~ UX Magazine)

Posted by PJB on June 14, 2012 | Classification: Service design - User experience | Permalink

Adaptive Content: Our primary platform is burning. Time to jump!

Lot's of jumping going on lately.

"I think the greatest insight I gained from Karen's adaptive content talk is the idea that historically, all content has been designed and created for a 'primary platform', whose format is well understood. After its initial publication, it must then be reformatted to meet the design realities of any other contexts in which it is to appear."

(R. Stephen Gracey a.k.a. @rsgracey ~ The Content Strategy Noob)

Posted by PJB on June 13, 2012 | Classification: Content strategy | Permalink

Service Design: Setting The Stage For The Consummate Experience

Service design, one of those fuzzy concepts with blurring borders.

"The field of service design is still young and evolving. And its interdisciplinary nature makes it difficult to define. (...) Regardless of the channel (social media, web, mobile, in-store, product experience) organizations that want to deliver great user experiences have to take time to educate their employees at all levels and at all touchpoints about what the company stands for, what it means to work there, and what kind of experiences they need to ensure for all users. Great service design means everyone involved is on board with creating the experience the audience wants. Take it from me, that can't happen without a common goal, proper communication, and lots of practice."

(Megan Grocki a.k.a. @megangrocki ~ UX magazine)

Posted by PJB on June 12, 2012 | Classification: Service design | Permalink

Socio-Technical System Design

Put your teeth into this monstrous 30,000 word chapter: the social and technology synergy.

"Some say the Internet is making us stupid but a mirror just reflects. Online media showing human brutality, corruption or stupidity just reveal what is. The Internet, as a microscope and telescope on humanity, is showing us to us. It isn't physical, but thoughts cause words and deeds as guns fire bullets. Humanity's thoughts are now online for us to choose. We, the human race, are choosing what we think and what we think is now online, with web-counters keeping the score. What the Internet electronic mirror shows isn't always pretty but it is real and to change oneself one must first see oneself. The evolution of computing is a part of human evolution, of a social experiment that has been ongoing for thousands of years. Only by personal evolution, by seeing beyond ourselves, do we help it succeed."

(Brian Whitworth and Adnan Ahmad ~ Interaction-Design.org)

Posted by PJB on June 08, 2012 | Classification: HCI | Permalink

Flow, Mastery and Ease-of-Use

Great to see a post by Christina on B&A again.

"Because this state is so desirable, both for productivity and for pleasure, many application (web and mobile) designers are starting to try to design for it as well. This is a daunting task. First, all humans are different. This means in identical situations I hit flow at a very different moment in the ease-to-difficulty continuum than you do. Secondly, flow is extremely easily to disrupt."

(Christina Wodtke a.k.a. @cwodtke ~ Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on June 08, 2012 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Content Modeling

Abstracting the content universals from their particulars.

"We're in the middle of a paradigm shift from unstructured content to structured content. It is unsustainable to continually unpick unstructured content, at the last mile, across our broadcast, print and digital channels. This shift is making us revisit the way we capture, structure and store content in fundamental ways. Content modeling is one of those. These pages outline the role of content modeling as a effective communication tool for structuring content."

(Cleve Gibbon a.k.a. @cleveg)

Posted by PJB on June 07, 2012 | Classification: Content strategy - Information architecture | Permalink

Basic Information Design Concepts

Great introduction set from Europe on Information Design, the relevant but forgotten design field.

"Information design has theoretical as well as practical components and information designers need to have theoretical knowledge as well as practical skills. In order to perform sound reflections and make a qualified reflection regarding theory and practice, we need concepts both to structure our thoughts, and to decribe them verbally."

(Rune Petterson ~ IIID)

Posted by PJB on June 07, 2012 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

Design Patterns: When Breaking The Rules Is OK

First learn to obey the rules, then break them. Not the other way around.

"(...) we can neither follow nor ignore design patterns completely. Instead, we need a deep understanding of the rules of human-computer interaction, so that we know when breaking them is OK."

(Rian van der Merwe a.k.a. @rianvdm Smashing Magazine)

Posted by PJB on June 06, 2012 | Classification: Patterns | Permalink

Designing the Spaces Between

As music is the structured interruption of silence.

"We talk about good user experiences an awful lot these days, but when it comes to digital interactions, hardly anyone seems to know what that really means."

(Curt Collinsworth ~ UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on June 05, 2012 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Developing UX Agility: Letting Go of Perfection

Nothing is perfect.

"Although achieving Agile UX was a gradual process, we eventually made the shift. In this article, we'll share some insights we gained and barriers we had to overcome to develop successful approach to UX agility."

(Carissa Demetris, Chris Farnum, Joanna Markel, and Serena Rosenhan ~ UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on June 05, 2012 | Classification: UCD - User experience | Permalink

Social Media Is A Part Of The User Experience

Sounds like cross-channel design for UX.

"(...) social media is very much our concern. That is because social media is firmly a part of the user's experience, and we are user experience designers. The user experience does not occur within a single channel (such as a website or Facebook page). Users move between multiple channels and so all of these channels need to be designed as one consistent user experience."

(Paul Boag a.k.a. @boagworld ~ Smashing Magazine)

Posted by PJB on June 05, 2012 | Classification: Social Web - User experience | Permalink

UI versus UX: What's the difference?

First character the same, second not. Must be different then.

"UI is the saddle, the stirrups, and the reigns. UX is the feeling you get being able to ride the horse, and rope your cattle."

(Dain Miller a.k.a. @_dain ~ Webdesigner Depot)

Posted by PJB on June 04, 2012 | Classification: HCI - User experience | Permalink

Theories Behind UX Research and How They are Used in Practice

It's academic, so it must be (almost) European.

"This workshop aims to bring together researchers from academia and industry, as well as industry practitioners, who are conducting UX design and evaluation work and who either are applying theories, theoretical concepts and frameworks in their UX research or have concrete plans to do so."

(Workshop Blog)

Posted by PJB on June 04, 2012 | Classification: Design research - User experience | Permalink

How Many Test Users in a Usability Study?

Sounds like George A. Miller's 1956 Magical Number.

"The answer is 5, except when it's not. Most arguments for using more test participants are wrong, but some tests should be bigger and some smaller."

(Jakob Nielsen ~ Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on June 04, 2012 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

Interaction with Big Data Analytics

Big data needs big design for big experiences.

"Here we have described big data analytics as an emerging type of knowledge work, with plenty of opportunities for study and productivity improvements. However, even for those who are not interested in this form of knowledge work, big data analytics cannot be ignored: It's an important new avenue to learn about how people interact with computing."

(Danyel Fisher, Rob DeLine, Mary Czerwinski, Steven Drucker ~ ACM Interactions)

Posted by PJB on June 01, 2012 | Classification: Interaction design | Permalink

Interaction as Performance

Theatre, method acting and stage performance are great metaphors, inspirations and analogies for digital product experiences.

"Our overall goal is to lay the foundations for a 'dramaturgy of performance' by establishing a framework of concepts—a language, if you like—to help express the different ways in which computers can be embedded into performative experiences. We intend this framework to guide practitioners and researchers who are entering the field of artistic, performance, and cultural applications of computing. However, we also aim to stimulate wider thinking in HCI in general around the changing nature of the extended user experience and the new challenges this raises."

(Steve Benford and Gabriella Giannachi ~ ACM Interactions)

Posted by PJB on June 01, 2012 | Classification: Interaction design | Permalink