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User experience Expanded user journey maps: Combining several UX deliverables into one useful documentThe more data the document contains, the stronger the need for proper information design. "UX deliverables had a rocky year so far. I feel particularly bad for the humble wireframe, which took some serious knocks over the past few months. There's also a growing skepticism about the value of Personas. The Persona thing made me particularly uneasy because I've always been a huge fan, and we still start most of our projects with a workshop to define Personas and User Journeys." Posted on May 21, 2013 | Permalink The greatest secrets of UX revealedA list of so-called secrets, with a description phrase. We want narratives. "I know many UX designers present themselves as unquestionable experts on human beings; as seers whose edicts should be followed to the letter. Come on." (Joseph Dickerson a.k.a. @JosephDickerson ~ UX Magazine) Posted on May 15, 2013 | Permalink Service design for UX designersExplaining it to UX designers is one thing, to your mother is another. "If you are in an agency or consultancy environment, you might categorise service design as part of user experience and/or experience strategy. If you come from a product environment, service design might vibrate more to what you consider as product management and business design. In a nutshell, service design is delivering a designed experience onto different levels of actors with a more holistic approach in mind. Let me elaborate on that." (Patrick Neeman a.k.a. @usabilitycounts ~ Usability Counts) Posted on May 13, 2013 | Permalink User experience benchmarks for tablets and smartphonesGreat piece of content marketing. "User experience is arguably the most important aspect of a connected digital device such as a tablet or a smartphone." Posted on May 13, 2013 | Permalink Creating a successful information experience for your usersText and typography is the ultimate user interface and experience. "The good news is that most applications are already set up for integrating information. With planning and creativity, you can create a successful, positive information experience for your users." (Linda Newman Lior ~ UX Magazine) Posted on May 13, 2013 | Permalink What soccer teams and UX teams have in commonInterdisciplinary team work at its best. "Soccer teams, just like teams in any other sport, share a lot of difficulties and joys with UX teams. Think about how each player needs to have his or her role in the tactic scheme. Isn’t that the same as each creative having his or her own place on the UX team based on specific skills and abilities? Egos, collaboration, controversy, fast decisions, and especially the unpredictable moves are the beauty of being part of the game or the design project. Success in both cases is also closely related to teamwork, individual talents, and leadership." (David Sachs a.k.a. @sachs ~ UX Magazine) Posted on May 08, 2013 | Permalink UX design, role-playing and micromomentsThe theatre metaphor provides so much inspiration, insight and knowledge. "Good interaction design is about attending to every moment that passes between a person and the device (or system, or service) with which he or she is interacting. These moments can be explicit, as with gestures, taps, a button-click, or the completion of a form field. Or, these moments may be more elusive, such as a pause while you try and understand what is being asked of you or how to answer. It's these internal conversations that users have at any given moment that often get overlooked." Posted on May 08, 2013 | Permalink Position of navigation buttons affects the usability of apps for kidsDesign for the experiences of kids, the KX. "As technology becomes more advanced, interactive devices find their path into our everyday lives. Education is one of the most recent fields where new and interactive devices such as the iPad are being introduced. When interactive systems are used to teach children, it is essential to make sure that these systems are easy to learn and easy to use. They must not create a barrier between the child and the information to be accessed. On touch screen interfaces, interaction happens through direct contact between the hand and the interface. Especially for kids this offers great perspectives, as children naturally tend to touch things they want to interact with. However, due to the young age of interactive learning systems, little research has been done on how children interact with mobile devices." (Sabina Idler a.k.a. @SabinaIdler ~ UXkids) Posted on May 07, 2013 | Permalink Libraries: A canvas for creating meaningful user experienceLove the title of 'User Experience Librarian'. Information architecture meet UX for real. "UX in libraries needs to be a completely immersive experience. We make sure our shelves are full of items patrons want and need. The surroundings are designed to be home-like with fireplaces, couches, power outlets, lamps, and meeting rooms. Across the country, libraries are thus transforming themselves from book warehouses to places where people want to come and hang out." (Amanda L. Goodman a.k.a. @alagoodman ~ UX Magazine) Posted on May 07, 2013 | Permalink Feeling, thinking, doing Service DesignService design as the vehicle for adding corporate value: E2 ('Experience Engineering'). "I believe that the strategic process of experience engineering is why it is imperative that the benefits of Service Design are communicated to and supported by people working at the highest organisational business level." (Richard Arnott a.k.a. @servicejunkie ~ Curiosity Junkie) Posted on May 03, 2013 | Permalink 5 reasons why kids need special user researchIdentified a new type of experience: KX ('Kids Experience'). "Kids are special. There is no doubt about that. But it does not explain why they also need special attention when it comes to user research. Here are 5 reasons why we need to start doing user testing with kids and why it's very different than what we know from testing adults." (Sabina Idler a.k.a. @SabinaIdler ~ UXkids) Posted on April 19, 2013 | Permalink Selling user experienceSome would label this 'evidence-based'. "If our community is going to actively sell the concept of user experience, we need hard data. Yet at every conference I attend, I hear about new tools, new techniques, new processes - but almost never about unassailable scientific results that demonstrate replicability. Sadly, most of the case stories I hear are merely glorified advertising. Moreover, like touching the hot iron as a child, learning about what doesn't work is also important." (Eric Reiss a.k.a. @elreiss ~ FatDUX) Posted on April 15, 2013 | Permalink Strength of user research evidenceResearch precedes design, and the other way around. "Usability findings derived from a broad base of diverse studies have higher credibility than those based on many users with a single stimulus." Posted on April 15, 2013 | Permalink To Dwell Is To Garden: An empathic approach to employee experience designCX being driven by the EX. "The methods of experience design uniquely situate experience designers to address employee disengagement in textured ways. By uncovering the root behavioral causes and co-producing solutions with employees, experience designers can create the right kind of resources, which empower organizations to own their desired change over time. As employee experience design is not a tidy activity, this article will focus less on concrete deliverables or step-by-step how-to-recommendations. Instead, a working framework is presented to assist experience designers in thinking through their own process-centric approaches and solutions." (Liana Dragoman a.k.a. @ldragoman ~ UX Magazine) Posted on April 15, 2013 | Permalink Hire a UX manager: 10 reasons why you should do soUX management, another emerging discipline, practice and community. "It is difficult for those not in Research & Development, Quality Assurance, Marketing or other non-customer related departments to immediately see the reasoning behind the need to hire a UX Manager. This is understandable. Those in more financial or executive positions have their own sophisticated sciences and logistics with which to be concerned and are forced, often against their desires, to leave the 'creative' sciences to those who specialize in them. With that in mind, this article will list ten reasons why all enterprise level businesses need a UX manager. Before continuing to read, please note that some of these aspects come as a result of the user experience development phase, rather than being components directly thereof. All people in leadership naturally understand that one ripple in a pool affects all the others, making resultant factors just as vital as direct ones." (Danielle Arad a.k.a. @UXMotel ~ UsabilityGeek) Posted on April 09, 2013 | Permalink Why brand-centric UK firms now need to be UX-centric tooAnd of course, also outside the UK. "So why are relatively few companies turning to UX professionals or implementing in-house practices? The answer, somewhat predictably, is often cost or lack of human resources. But Is it worth it? Here we take a look at the issues, trends and health of the UX industry. (...) A UX or interaction designer (PJB: sic!) must think about how to conceive and design complex sequences of loosely choreographed interactions and rise to the specific challenges imposed by multi-channel and multi-platform services, managing their constant evolution. It's hard to deny that the rise of a UX design community has done wonders to improve the perceived quality of many recent products and services. In the future, business is likely to call on them even more." (Adriana Hamacher ~ Open Innovation) Posted on April 08, 2013 | Permalink New frontiers: The UX professional as business consultantBusiness, the new hunting ground for UX professionals. "We talk a lot about cross-channel experiences and how to address these new challenges as designers, but what about using our design skills, our hard won knowledge and empathy for customers to help companies decide what products and services will help grow their business? While companies are coming round to the value of customer experience, they're struggling to acquire the skills needed for creating and managing touch points as well as understanding and prioritizing needs. And when we're talking multi-channel ecosystems, who's better equipped to address this complexity than those who have the skill set to not only understand it, but to design it and guide how it's built. From optimizing the cross-channel customer experience, to creating new product and service extensions, we're heading into a prime moment for bringing our toolkit into the business arena. This talk is meant to be both a thought starter as well as a lively group discussion around how UX can begin to play a substantive role in a company's digital strategy. Using examples from my own experiences and input from a variety of seasoned practitioners, we'll examine the challenges and map the opportunities across our own journey as UX professionals who are starting to think about what's next." (Cindy Chastain a.k.a. @cchastain ~ Interaction 13) Posted on April 06, 2013 | Permalink What UI really is (and how UX confuses matters)DTDT: UX is everything not-UI. "People mix the terms UI and UX together. UX is tricky because it doesn't refer to any one thing. Interface design, visual styling, code performance, uptime, and feature set all contribute to the user's 'experience'. Books on UX further complicate matters by including research methods and development methodologies. All of this makes the field confusing for people who want to understand the fundamentals." (Ryan Singer) courtesy of thomasmarzano Posted on March 31, 2013 | Permalink User experience shape: Designing for engagementConnecting the shape of UX with stories, personas and dialogues. "Why do we even need web navigation at all? Well, for one, navigation provides access to the content of a site. But more important, it's the way that it provides access that makes navigation necessary. After all, site search also provides access to content. Why not just have site search and be done with the problem of designing and maintaining a complex navigation system?" (James Kalbach a.k.a. @JimKalbach ~ Experiencing Information) Posted on March 27, 2013 | Permalink A matter of character: Knowing your users and their storiesThe journey is the story, actually. With users (a.k.a. people) as the personae. "I'm fascinated with the concept of applying storytelling principles to the processes of product development to create great user experiences. Of recent interest is the similarity between making a film and creating a digital product or service." (Sarah Doody a.k.a. @sarahdoody ~ UX magazine) Posted on March 25, 2013 | Permalink The next wave in branding: Merging experiences across marketsBrand experience, user experience or customer experience. Sum of all interactions? Don't think so. "The design community has done its fair share to shape a UX-centric product-development culture, and in the last ten years, the practice of UX design - also often labeled with the same "UX" acronym - has arisen in parallel with the market relevance of UX itself. Even though the term "experience" and the expression "user experience" have both been abused to the point of sounding like yesterday's tired buzzwords, it is hard to deny that the rise of a UX design community has done wonders to improve the perceived quality of many recent products and services." (Fabio Sergio a.k.a. @freegorifero ~ FastCo.Design) Posted on March 25, 2013 | Permalink Why user experience cannot be designedYou cannot design any experience, but that doesn't mean you can't design the experiential context. "A lot of designers seem to be talking about user experience these days. We're supposed to delight our users, even provide them with magic, so that they love our websites, apps and start-ups. User experience is a very blurry concept. Consequently, many people use the term incorrectly. Furthermore, many designers seem to have a firm (and often unrealistic) belief in how they can craft the user experience of their product. However, UX depends not only on how something is designed, but also other aspects. In this article, I will try to clarify why UX cannot be designed." (Helge Fredheim a.k.a. @helgefredheim ~ Smashing Magazine) Posted on March 22, 2013 | Permalink Emerging technologies are creating new ethical challenges for UX designersKind of challenges, we must be aware of. And what are our responses, Toynbee would ask. "New technologies have always produced unintended consequences. But user experience designers and engineers face a number of new ethical challenges today with the rise of technology and our interaction and dependence on it. UX designers' primary job is to improve usability and extend productivity. But they also have a responsibility to address the unintended consequences of new technologies, some of them with a clear ethical dimension. Following is a look at some of the principle ethical quandaries that UX designers will run up against and must deal with responsibly." Posted on March 19, 2013 | Permalink Bridging the CEO credibility gapSo, grow-up you UX community. "Unfortunately, boardroom UX literacy does not develop by itself. It is the role of UX leaders to create an environment in which it can develop within their companies’ leadership teams and to provide meaningful data to which it can be applied. (...) I would suggest that the root cause leading to CEOs remaining underserved by the typical usability data available to them is a continued lack of business leadership focus and practice understanding among the UX community." (Daniel Rosenberg ~ Interactions March-April 2013) Posted on March 14, 2013 | Permalink The new experience economy: Activity as currencyTechnology entering into the veins of society and culture. "But the great equalizer to make this experience economy a true, two-way economy may be the simple sensor embedded in my clothing, car, or public space. Digital value exchanges are beginning to extend far beyond the screen of my phone or laptop. Embedded sensors will allow me to increasingly exchange my activity for currency." (Graeme Waitzkin and Laura Richardson ~ designmind) Posted on March 12, 2013 | Permalink The third user: Why Apple keeps doing foolish thingsUX and HCI facing the business community. Always interesting. "Apple keeps doing things in the Mac OS that leave the user experience community scratching its collective head, things like hiding the scroll bars and placing invisible controls inside the content region of windows on computers. Apple's mobile devices are even worse: It can take users upwards of five seconds to accurately drop the text pointer where they need it, but Apple refuses to add the arrow keys that have belonged on the keyboard from day-one." (Bruce Tognazinni) ~ courtesy of freegorifero Posted on March 12, 2013 | Permalink Jack of all trades, master of none: Danger for interaction designWondering why it's 'User Experience' but Interaction Design. "Interaction design is a young field. At least, that's what we as interaction designers keep telling ourselves. And of course, in comparison to many other fields we are respectfully young. But I get the feeling that we use it more as an excuse to permit ourselves to have an unclear definition of who we are - and who we aren't." Posted on February 26, 2013 | Permalink When to apply UX effort in agileLikes to write agile in lower case as well. "(...) when a UX designer is integrated into an agile team and helps model the business processes, interaction channels, and user behaviours at the start of a project, it gives everyone a clear, common vision of what they're working with, and it provides a foundation to build upon going forward. When a UX designer asks the right questions during evaluation, the models evolve, the requirements become clearer, and 'bad ideas' are caught before it's too late. And, when a UX designer facilitates group thinking and collaboration on a daily basis, design decisions get made faster and team members have a stronger sense of ownership of the final product." (Andrew Wright ~ nForm) Posted on February 22, 2013 | Permalink UCD Toolbox: Find, learn and apply methods for user-centered designA great initiative. Now, keep it up-and-running. And fresh! "We believe that creating objects that people love requires the right tools and methods. In fact, using the wrong method can lead to bad design decisions. But with over 200 methods and tools available, which ones could you use in your situation? That's why we give you access to a large chunk of the worlds' created methods, tools, techniques and resources for User Centered Design. We are making all of them searchable and executable. You can even publish your own method." Posted on February 22, 2013 | Permalink QA & UXLack of quality impacts all aspects of life. "Quality assurance impacts the user experience: when things don't work, users question their understanding and develop superstitions and inefficient workarounds." Posted on February 19, 2013 | Permalink The past 100 years of the future: Human-computer interaction in science-fiction movies and television (.pdf)HCI in films, TV shows and SciFi is really getting a genre. "During the past hundred years, science-fiction (sci-fi) films and, later, videos, have, of necessity, had to depict detailed views of human-computer interaction (HCI) of the future, or alternate pasts/presents, in order to convey a compelling scene and, sometimes, in order move forward the plot. This publication explores some of the themes that emerge from examining this body of work. The basic premise is simple: HCI professionals can learn something from sci-fi media, and sci-fi media-producers can learn more from HCI professionals in order to show smarter views of the future." (Aaron Marcus a.k.a. @amandaberkeley ~ Amanda) Posted on February 05, 2013 | Permalink User experience in startups: Challenges and realitiesBesides business, startups are the new hunting grounds for UX design. "To understand how User Experience fits into a startup, it is critical that you understand the startup maturation cycle. While each startup has its own story, they all typically progress through the same stages. It is essential that you understand the personnel dynamics, the startup's need for UX design, and its immediate business objectives and constraints at each stage." (Sasha Giacoppo a.k.a. @asgiacoppo ~ UXmatters) Posted on February 04, 2013 | Permalink Design dissonance: When form and function collideVery happy Eric (finally) contributed to UXm. "Dissonance is a musical term. It means things are not in harmony. Design dissonance occurs when a product or service sends out cognitive signals that run counter to the desired effect. In the strictest sense of the term, design dissonance often relates to usability - when a design somehow pushes a user in the wrong direction, in terms of both understanding and action. But in a broader sense, design dissonance can create disappointment, particularly when it occurs in relation to a service." (Eric Reiss a.k.a. @elreiss ~ UXmatters) Posted on February 04, 2013 | Permalink The intricate anatomy of UX designDon't get confused. It's just a DTDT effort in Venn diagrams. "This mega graphic attempts to tackle the relationship between UX and all other aspects of design." Posted on February 03, 2013 | Permalink Looking beyond user-centered designOK, time to move on. "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." (Cennydd Bowles a.k.a. @Cennydd ~ A List Apart) Posted on February 01, 2013 | Permalink The four waves of user-centered designAlways loves categorizations of our history. Surfing the waves of Information Design. "As practitioners, we must broaden our understanding of innovation from both business and user-experience perspectives. From a business perspective, we need to empathize with the impluse to reject the investment of resources innovation requires. Innovation is embraced only when the value gained is substantially greater than the investment costs: a marginal gain is rarely adequate. Our past practices have been confined almost exclusively to our existing, primary user market. It's time to direct some of our attention to the fringe markets where disruptive technologies take hold." (William Gribbons ~ UX Magazine) Posted on January 30, 2013 | Permalink Effectively planning UX design projectsProject manager versus project leader: It is about leadership, not bean counting. "Planning user experience projects is a balancing act of getting the right amount of user input within the constraints of your project. The trick is to work out the best use of your time. How can you get the most UX goodness for your client's budget? This article explains how to choose the right mix of tools for the task at hand." (James Chudley a.k.a. @chudders ~ Smashing UX design) Posted on January 25, 2013 | Permalink The UX chakra model: Finding balance in your latest digital projectI'm afraid spirituality now also enters UX design. Help! "To help reframe things, I'd like to propose a new way of modelling our design space: one that reflects both the core components of any good design effort and their overall alignment on an ongoing basis. The goal of the model is to improve learning and understanding throughout the journey. It's not necessarily a replacement for contemporary methods, but simply a different way of looking at things." (Colin Eagan a.k.a @colineags ~ UX Booth) Posted on January 23, 2013 | Permalink Functional beauty and user experiencePigs and lipsticks. Never thought pink was nice on an animal, except flamingos. "Beauty is one of the oldest and most powerful concepts in human history—inspiring artists and lighting up cultural movements, philosophical debates, and, in modern times, curious scientific interest. Beauty is a desirable feature of the products we buy, with the power to shape consumer choices and preferences." (Catalina Butnaru a.k.a. @katchja ~ UX Magazine) Posted on January 21, 2013 | Permalink Are personas still relevant to UX strategy?They will always be a great starting point for the unknowns of empathy and UCD. "There have been some who have proclaimed the impending demise of personas as a UX design approach since shortly after their introduction. While the optimal approach to creating and employing personas is still evolving—thanks to more useful data becoming available to design teams and new project-management methods—their usefulness has not yet diminished. If anything, personas have become even more useful because they put a human face on aggregated data and foster a user-centered design approach even within the context of efficiency-driven development processes." (Paul Bryan a.k.a. @paulbryan ~ UXmatters) Posted on January 21, 2013 | Permalink What do you predict will be the future trend of user experience?Being recognized, valued and appreciated by business is important in a society in which everything is seen as a market and a transaction. "I think user experience will continue to become more strategically important instead of just service-oriented. What I'm seeing right now is user experience company-wide goals and metrics that are driven by the highest management level. This is starting to happen more in the technology world, but might spread to other types of products. UX roles might become a lot more specialized; however, what companies will look for is people that have cross-functional skills and can work in a variety of settings. You will start seeing compartments in the field as companies try to find out the best user experience strategy. You will also see the new grads with lots of different skills in their education and a background in design combined with other types of fields that previously might not be associated." (Danielle Arad a.k.a. @uxmotel ~ UX Motel) Posted on January 17, 2013 | Permalink How strategic is your kitchen?Gastronomy as a metaphor for UX is (still) my thing. "A good kitchen-content strategy can turn your kitchen into a place that other people can use, too. This means you have to organize your kitchen in such a way that people can just walk in and find exactly the spoon or other object they need, quickly and without asking. Your personal guidance should become unnecessary, because the kitchen would be intuitively and universally organized. No one will ever open the wrong drawer or door or canister again. Everyone's unique kitchen style will now make perfect and immediate sense to everyone." (Seth Maislin a.k.a. @SethMaislin ~ Earley and Associates) Posted on January 15, 2013 | Permalink Stop designing for 'users'A provocative idea, but on the mark. "Most products support activities underpinned by collaboration and sharing. Designing for individuals may actually be harmful because these activities reflect ongoing transformations of artifacts, individuals, and social interactions. Focusing on individuals might improve things for one person at the cost of others." (Mike Long a.k.a. @mblongii ~ ThoughtWorks Studios) Posted on January 11, 2013 | Permalink Re-Introducing page description diagramsContent models, schemas and DTDs. Good old skool abstracting stuff. But... what's a page anyway? "Recently, we discovered the page description diagram, a method for documenting components without specifying layout. At first, it seemed limited, even simplistic, relative to our needs. But with some consideration, we began to understand the value. We started looking at whether or not PDDs could help us improve our process." (Colin Butler a.k.a. @cbutlerUX and Andrew Wirtanen a.k.a. @awirtanen ~ UX Magazine) Posted on January 10, 2013 | Permalink User experience, incorporatedThe delicate position of UX between all the powers that be in business. "It is easy to see that there are a few common ingredients across these different strategies, such as executive commitment, access to customers, new technical prototyping skills, and small, interdisciplinary teams. All of these ingredients are critical not only to UX, but also to developing the sort of bottom-up, risk-taking culture that is central to succeeding in the 21st century market. These skills are standard in the startup market where UX is increasingly appreciated as a key to success and value creation. The startup market is creating a new breed of business executives, like Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Square, who are impatient with requirements-driven waterfall product development processes. They think 'UX-first'. The big challenge now is to drive these same skills into the more traditional, top-down management culture at big companies. The companies that get it right will be either be at the forefront of disrupting business or much more likely to thrive in the era of disruption." (Robert Fabricant a.k.a. @fabtweet ~ DesignMind frog) Posted on January 08, 2013 | Permalink The service design global conference and redefining service designMore DTDT necessary for Service Design? "In this column, I'd like to briefly recap some highlights of the conference as a foundation for sharing the service design community’s upcoming task of redefining service design." Posted on January 07, 2013 | Permalink Stop explaining UX and start doing UXThe end of DTDT seems near. "The external validation model ensures that we're always arguing from a position of weakness—begging for resources before our managers or clients have seen what they're buying. We need to have the conversation about value after we’ve proven that the UX process works, not before. (...) Actions are stronger than words. We have the power to break the cycle of learned helplessness and earn the respect we crave—if we stop explaining UX and start doing UX." (Kim Bieler a.k.a. @feadog ~ UX Magazine) Posted on January 05, 2013 | Permalink There is no spoon: The construct of channelsChannel, device or touch point. Typical inside-out thinking. "Channels are completely fluid to the context of our needs. We can define them broadly: digital channel versus phone channel. Or we can zoom in and define them more narrowly: mobile channel versus desktop web channel. Or more narrowly still: native app versus mobile web. The purpose of defining channels largely depends on the context in which they are being discussed - at what detail do you need to define a particular channel to support the experience? You'll typically define them more broadly at the organizational level, and then more narrowly as you move down to the strategic and then tactical level." (Chris Risdon a.k.a. @ChrisRisdon ~ Adaptive Path) Posted on January 05, 2013 | Permalink A consistent experience is a better experience: Service designService design forces user experience design to sync with the new normal. "If there is one thing that has held the test of time, it's that history is bound to repeat itself. What was once old will most certainly become new again in the cycle of time because good ideas never go out of style. Service design is a shining example of this fact. In spite of the fact that the conception of service design is nearly 30 years old, it is an idea that is more relevant than ever today." (Mark Eberman ~ Digital Compass) Posted on January 03, 2013 | Permalink Five big UX topics in 2012More UX galore for the near future. Now we have to deliver the real goods. "For years, UX professionals have vigorously lobbied for a "seat at the table" when it comes to formative decisions about products and product development. Looking back at 2012, trends indicate that this wish is becoming reality. Many leading UX consultants reported that their clients are more open to research and design methods with a UX focus than they have been in the past. This elevated focus on UX ideas and concepts will require informed engagement with several high-level topics that emerged in 2012. This article discusses five of the themes that we expect will have relevance into 2013." (Catalyst Group ~ Boxes and Arrows) Posted on January 02, 2013 | Permalink Applying the Principles of Stage Magic to the User ExperienceAnd then... something magic happens here. "Stage magicians have been astonishing and delighting their audiences for years. But there is a surprising amount of repeatable principles behind the art of illusion. The bulk of the actual work in a practiced stage act is more about directing the audience's attention and expectations. Your application can also benefit from the principled application of practices such as direction/misdirection and not letting your users see your secret preparations and many others." (Danno Ferrin a.k.a. @shemnon) Posted on December 20, 2012 | Permalink The Flaneur Approach to User Experience DesignThinking has always been a critical skill. Not mobile, content or user first, but think first! "As user experience designers, we must lead our processes and people with meaning, purpose, and intent. We must connect the dots forward from a problem to solution, not the other way around. This can only be done if we become more observant, aware, and empathetic." (Sarah Doody a.k.a. @sarahdoody ~ UX magazine) Posted on December 19, 2012 | Permalink Some thought on user experience in corporate researchThe relevance of user experience design in business contexts is mounting rapidly. "This presentation is divided into two parts. The first part is about setting the stage a bit, and in order to do so I will address the interrelations between some of the changes the telecom industry is facing, and how corporate research and innovation relate to these. In the second part I will illustrate how we at Ericsson Research recon that user experience plays a role in all of this." (Cristian Norlin a.k.a. @cristiannorlin ~ Ericsson UX blog) Posted on December 18, 2012 | Permalink Trends in User ExperienceThe hunting season for trends of 2013 has been opened. "(...) As user experience matures, it will become more closely aligned with business strategy—so the same priorities that drive the business will guide UX design. Instead of producing designs and deliverables to meet business requirements, UX professionals will collaborate with business strategists to co-create solutions that successfully engage customers and exceed competitive offerings. This expansion will require some learning on the part of UX professionals, who must gain literacy in the business drivers that cause their companies to succeed or fail in the marketplace." Posted on December 17, 2012 | Permalink UX is not UIFood is not gastronomy as well. "UI design is a huge part of UX. I would say that in a good majority of cases the UX designer does in fact design the interface as well. But UX is not UI. This is where the education of others comes in. Helping people understand just what UX is and the invaluable role it plays is illustrated beautifully with the UX Umbrella." (Erik Flowers a.k.a. @Erik_UX) ~ courtesy of thomasmarzano Posted on December 17, 2012 | Permalink Fitting Big-Picture UX Into Agile DevelopmentDesign spikes to protect our design core. "The rapid pace of UX design in the agile world can lead to shortsighted design decisions. Focusing on addressing the immediate needs of particular user stories within the limits of a sprint can lead to neglect of larger design questions, which can come back to haunt UX designers later." (Damon Dimmick a.k.a. @damondimmick ~ Smashing Magazine) ~ courtesy of willemijnprins Posted on December 14, 2012 | Permalink The Dark Side of User Experience DesignStanding in the mud is the real work. The rest is just words. "User experience design just stopped to be a niche and became a standard. (...) User Experience Design lies at the crossroads of art and science. It's a magical mixture of visual art, hard-boiled psychology and numbers. Non of these nobel ingredients can be omitted, as it may put your whole design endeavor at risk. (...) All my experience taught me that conversion optimization is not a weekend-long job - it's a way of developing your service. That's the tiresome reality. The true Dark Side." (Marcin Treder a.k.a. @marcintreder) ~ courtesy of thomasmarzano Posted on December 13, 2012 | Permalink The Evolution, Methods, Processes, and Distinct Value of Service DesignFrom application or site to service. Not really a giant leap. "The emerging focus on user experience will be the key to companies' success as we move from an industrial to a service-oriented society. Service Design focuses on the methods and processes of a service from the point of view of the user. The goal is to make sure that when a client or customer interacts with the service, from branding to customer service to any point of contact, there is room to make the service more useful, efficient, and effective." (AC4D) Posted on December 13, 2012 | Permalink Creating An Adaptive System To Enhance UXAdaptation is the best way to survive. "The abilities of today’s network information technologies to create rich, immersive personalized experiences to track interactions and aggregate and analyze them in real time, together with the data collected by the sensors we carry in our smart devices, provides us an opportunity like never before to design adaptivity in order to ultimately offer a better user experience that is both unobtrusive and transparent. This article will cover the fundamental concepts for utilizing smart device technologies and sensor data in order to understand context and introduce 'adaptive thinking' into the UX professional's toolset. I will demonstrate the importance of context when designing adaptive experiences, give ideas on how to design adaptive systems, and perhaps inspire designers to consider how smart devices and context aware applications can enhance the user experience with adaptivity." (Avi Itzkovitch a.k.a. @xgmedia ~ Smashing Magazine) ~ courtesy of fabiosergio Posted on December 12, 2012 | Permalink Building User Experiences: Synchronizing User Experience Design and the Supporting Metadata and Taxonomy InfrastructureTaxonomists focus on content organization. UX designers on content experience. "Despite their best intentions, user experience designers and taxonomy and metadata developers have often found that their work is not well connected, even though both are highly interrelated. For example, a design might be proposed that needs segmentation of content by user role, but there may not be metadata associated with content that captures the role, resulting in the need for detailed review of content and hand coding to create the experience. Taxonomists might build a taxonomy for roles without knowing which roles the design uses, leading to over- or under-specification of the taxonomy." (Carol A. Hert, Gary Carlson, and Bram Wessel ~ ASIS&T Bulletin, December 2012/January 2013) Posted on December 10, 2012 | Permalink Five UX Research PitfallsBe careful not to fall in any of them. Other mistakes still ahead. "More and more organizations view UX as a key contributor to successful products, connecting teams with end-users and guiding product innovation within the organization. Though it's fantastic to see this transition happen, there are growing pains associated with becoming a user-driven organization. These are the pitfalls that I see organizations grappling with most often." (Elaine Wherry a.k.a. @elainewherry) Posted on December 10, 2012 | Permalink 4 key ingredients for creating an exceptional patient experienceIt's the human touch in a 'moment-of-truth' that makes the difference. "While walking back to the infusion center from the hospital cafeteria, my mom briefly stopped and held the wall-railing to catch her breath. Enter a maintenance man 10 feet away who asked "Would you like a wheelchair?" My mom thanked him but graciously declined and we were on our way once again heading to the elevators. We were both moved by his kind and proactive attention. This man exceeded our expectations and two weeks later we're still talking about him. With four key ingredients, he transformed an ordinary moment into an extraordinary one for us and delivered an exceptional patient experience." (Doug Della Pietra a.k.a. @DougDellaPietra ~ Hospital Impact) Posted on December 07, 2012 | Permalink From User Experience To Customer ExperienceAs said before, an awesome wave of change (a.k.a. Alt-J) for UX designers is coming. Just surf on it. "(...) as we approach the end of 2012, the business discipline of customer experience, or CX, has gone mainstream. It's got its own professional organization, the CXPA. It's acknowledged as a key competitive differentiator, even by those who prefer spreadsheets to sticky notes. It's discussed in boardrooms and in media within the context of corporate earnings." (Kerry Bodine a.k.a. @kerrybodine ~ UX Magazine) Posted on December 06, 2012 | Permalink Translation is UXLost in... Get lost. "Today we can also say, translating is designing." (Antoine Lefeuvre a.k.a. @jiraisurfer ~ A List Apart) Posted on December 04, 2012 | Permalink The first rule of content strategy: Don't talk about content strategyCan be the first rule of almost all fields of practice. "(...) the most employable people are hybrids." Posted on November 27, 2012 | Permalink Defining Patient ExperienceDTDT for PX. "The sum of all interactions, shaped by an organization's culture, that influence patient perceptions across the continuum of care." Posted on November 26, 2012 | Permalink Should You Become A UX Generalist Or A UX Specialist?Generalist inside the UX comfort zone (think: coding, visual design or content creation), or outside (think: gastronomy, theatre or architecture). "If you doubt whether you're up to the task, you'll probably discover that you do indeed fall short. I'd encourage you to embrace those moments when you're outside of your comfort zone." (Matthew Magain a.k.a. @mattymcg ~ UX mastery) Posted on November 21, 2012 | Permalink Experience Design in the Agency Setting : Architecting cross-channel experiences to drive brand relationshipsExperience design: user, customer, patient, and student experiences. "As the user experience field has been maturing, certain unique disciplines have emerged, like user research, usability testing, content strategy, information architecture, and experience design. While different organizations may have UX departments named after any one of these disciplines, this article focuses not on taxonomy or the UX/XD service offering as a whole. Rather, it will examine the distinct "experience design" discipline itself and how this discipline can add value within the agency setting." Posted on November 19, 2012 | Permalink Accessibility is part of UX (it isn’t a swear word)Having access should be a hygiene factor, not a motivator. "People often go a bit wobbly when accessibility is mentioned. Visions of text only websites, monochrome designs and static content swirl in their heads. Teeth are gritted, excuses are prepared, and battle conditions ensue. The reality is that accessibility is simply a key part of UX. A truly outstanding digital experience is a fusion of accessibility, usability, creativity and technology. The trick is to weave those things together, and to do that successfully there needs to be a cross pollination of skills and expertise. The good news is that accessibility is usability under a magnifying glass. If you’re thinking about great usability, the chances are that you’re already thinking about great accessibility too." (Léonie Watson ~ humanising technology blog) ~ courtesy of ericscheid Posted on November 17, 2012 | Permalink The Music Outlives the BandLet's rock too. "User experience has momentum. Let it roll, and get back to work." (Robert Hoekman Jr. a.k.a. @rhjr ~ NEW Boxes and Arrows) Posted on November 17, 2012 | Permalink A Perfection of Means and a Confusion of AimsIs it what you are or what you do? Both." "My work involves helping people to understand how to best plan circumstances in which users are engaged and satisfied with their experience. Yet, I do not call myself a user experience designer." (Abby Covert a.k.a. @Abby_the_IA ~ NEW Boxes and Arrows) Posted on November 17, 2012 | Permalink What is User Experience?"I shall not today attempt further to define 'it'; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it." "I am one of these people. I design experiences. Or I design for experiences, if we must mince words. I don't do this because I was trained to do so. I do this because I must. I am a User Experience Designer. Or whatever they’re calling it these days." (Stephen Anderson a.k.a. @stephenanderson ~ NEW Boxes and Arrows) Posted on November 17, 2012 | Permalink Whither "User Experience Design"?Revitalized and DTDT (again). Just like love. "It makes no sense to ask what "user experience design" really means; it means whatever we use it to mean. We can ask what we need it to mean and how we already use it. I submit that we need a term for designing systems that include interaction design. And we already use "user experience design" to mean that now. If we could agree on that, I might stop feeling so bad about calling myself a "user experience designer"." (Jonathan Korman ~ NEW Boxes and Arrows) Posted on November 16, 2012 | Permalink Content, the once and future kingShaping compelling experiences with data, lots of them. "This is a new sandbox for technologists, data scientists, marketers, and experience designers. What are the corpora we have access to? What is lurking within our data smog? What are the new experiences we can create? No doubt we will continue to see art and humor, but let’s use those to inspire us as we imagine what else is possible. The biggest potential (and as always the hardest problem) is in the development of game-changing experiences. I look forward to seeing where this goes." (Steve Portugal a.k.a. @steveportigal ~ ACM Interactions November + December 2012) Posted on November 15, 2012 | Permalink What is User Experience Design?DTDTs are signs of community dynamics. More DTDTs, the better. "The translation of megabytes and code into a deliverable product that fulfills the needs of a user is done through User Experience Design." (Julie Celia ~ Cooper Journal) Posted on November 13, 2012 | Permalink The business of design: A series of interviewsBusiness will open up for UX, only when UX shows respect. "A lot of the problems with practitioners in our field arise because we are sometimes seen as almost anti-business. I've seen this attitude in the community, I've seen practitioners become zealots about the user, their feelings and their rights. They fight and resist decisions that are made for commercial benefit because they might impinge on the perfect user experience. This isn’t helped by an often evangelical, polemic and condescending attitude and language." Posted on November 13, 2012 | Permalink UX Strategy on the Job: An Interview with Three UX StrategistsFrom business, through digital to C/UX strategy. The plan to achieve the vision. "The statement that they agreed to participate is significant. Some of the people I asked to participate in this interview said their companies wouldn’t allow it. A couple of the UX Strategists who did participate said that they would have to send their responses all the way up the command chain for editing and approval. Why the secrecy? Why can’t UX Strategists share their craft openly like other UX professionals do when they discuss things like Photoshop filters or research methods or JavaScript tips? It's because a UX strategy is a valuable asset that companies want to protect: a battle plan for success in the digital realm." (Paul Bryan a.k.a. @paulbryan ~ UXmatters) Posted on November 12, 2012 | Permalink Dueling and Design : How fencing and UX are quite alikeSeeing parallels between UX and other fields of practice stimulates the creative flows. "Since most people are not very familiar with modern competition fencing, let’s start by taking a look at the sport. Modern fencing has its roots in swordplay, but the training and tactics employed are meant to win competitions, not duels. Bouts are fenced to a set number of points. Points are most often scored by making a valid touch on your opponent although points can also be awarded if a fencer retreats off the end of the strip or for certain rule violations. There is a director who judges the bout and enforces the rules." (Ben Self ~ UX magazine) Posted on November 09, 2012 | Permalink All Experience is OrganizedOrganized through orchestration, choreography, or direction. "Experience design claims to know better both a user experience as well as its design. The paradox therein being that no experience is designed. Experience is either in the Now, in which case it is event. Or it’s in the past, in which case it is reflected upon and then retold." (Adrian Chan a.k.a. @gravity7 ~ Johnny Holland Magazine) Posted on November 07, 2012 | Permalink The UX of publishing for tablets and smartphonesHow fast things are going is a matter of perspective. Even in the publishing industry. "You can debate all these things for as long as you want, but your audience has already chosen for you. They've already gone "mobile first". You probably need to start playing catch up." (Martin Belam ~ Emblem) Posted on November 05, 2012 | Permalink Hardware Specs vs. User ExperienceA kind of atoms versus bits, again. "Product quality has to be judged in the context of human tasks, and reviews should emphasize real use—not raw numbers." Posted on November 05, 2012 | Permalink Testing Positive for Healthcare UXExperience design for employees, customers, users, and (now) patients. "The healthcare experience is improving even though we've almost all had a less-than-pleasant memory of either waiting endlessly for an appointment, forgetting when and what dose of meds to take, crying over massive and unpredictable bills, or even just locating decent care in the first place. All of these mounting complaints and expenses have finally pushed healthcare to the tipping point. As a result, a patient-centered paradigm has emerged that is forcing organizations to more closely examine and improve the experiences they provide." (Maren Connary a.k.a. @MarenConnary ~ UX Week 2012 videos) Posted on November 02, 2012 | Permalink "Product designers" and design team evolutionThe new 'homo universalis' of experience design. "Product designers often work alone, and because they're expected to do so many things, end up working on projects of limited scope. (I think this contributes to the problem of managing complex user experiences). My supposition is that the small team of generalists can also out-produce an equal number of team-of-one product designers. You get higher quality, because folks who have a functional emphasis (such as visual design or interaction design) can deliver better than those whose priority is developing a broader set of tools. And you get greater output, because their mastery of those areas means they can deliver more quickly. What you give up are the transaction/overhead costs of teamwork, but I don't think those are as great as the gains." (Peter Merholz a.k.a. @peterme) Posted on November 01, 2012 | Permalink The Experience is the ProductProduct, service, platform, ecosystem, and experience. All the way. "(...) Service Design is about creating meaningful experiences and meaningful interactions - for and with the customers. It's not about the products itself anymore (their features can easily be replicated) it's about differentiating products by creating new ideas and emotional interconnections." (Pedro Custódio a.k.a. @pedrocustodio ~ NEXT Berlin) Posted on October 31, 2012 | Permalink It's all about the experience!Digital agencies (also) discover experience design. "The role of a business now is to orchestrate such experiences for its customers, in such a way that the memory itself becomes part of the product - the experience." Posted on October 30, 2012 | Permalink User Experience is Not Just Design, It's the Key to Innovation and GrowthIt's Garrett, not Garret. "It's not every day you have Jesse James Garrett stop by to talk about the state of user experience and its role in the future of business. But, we were fortunate to have him visit the set of Revolution to talk about the importance of people and experiences and how UX deserves the attention of the c-suite." Posted on October 26, 2012 | Permalink 10 Benchmarks for User Experience MetricsMetrics of Usability or CX, framed as UX benchmarks. "Quantifying the user experience is the first step to making measured improvements." (Jeff Sauro a.k.a. @MeasuringU ~ Measuring Usability) Posted on October 24, 2012 | Permalink UX design for startups: The age of user experience designStartups being the fertile ground for UX design. That's 'users' as in 'customers'. "Like many of my contemporary UX Design peers, I started my career as a so-called usability specialist. Fascinated by ergonomics and cognitive science, I was working to make sure users were able to actually use interfaces. Armed with user research, heuristics and a little bit of prototyping, I was trying to find my place in the 'developer-oriented' world. This wasn’t easy." (Marcin Treder a.k.a. @uxpin ~ NET Magazine) Posted on October 19, 2012 | Permalink User Experience v. Customer ExperienceHere we go again. DTDT, re-framed as "what came first". "Customer experience is always a little tricky to explain. It's just so darn big. What doesn't it cover (not much) and who is responsible (good question). Often, customer experience is translated into user experience - the front-end digital experience of users." Posted on October 17, 2012 | Permalink Lean Strategy for UX DesignThe perfect mixology: strategy, lean, UX, and design. "Lean strategy in UX design means getting to a simple, actionable statement about what problem we are going to solve for the user as soon as possible, so that the design process can proceed. In fact, lean strategy often happens in concert with design, enabling us to be more adaptive and to more easily apply our thinking to our designs. It's about being less precious and profligate with our decks and deliverables, freeing us up to bring greater clarity and focus to our ideas. It's strategy in motion, pressing us forward rather than holding us back until everything has been figured out and proven with mathematical certainty." (David Gillis a.k.a. @davegillis ~ UX Magazine) Posted on October 16, 2012 | Permalink The Age of User Experience Design: InfographicThe numbers - if true - are amazing. "The growth of the User Experience Design field is breathtaking, but well deserved. Thanks to UX Designers all over the world, the quality of products has increased dramatically. Design really does matter now. It’s a user centric world in which there’s not only Apple on the scene anymore." (Martin Treder a.k.a. @marcintreder ~ UXPin) Posted on October 16, 2012 | Permalink Design thinking isn't about thinking. It is about doing.Multi-disciplinary teams rulez. "Products are developed by large multi-disciplinary teams. The teams deal with many topics requiring the expertise of several specialists simultaneously. They have to decide together if something is a problem; propose multi-disciplinary solutions; and align their activities into a seamless whole. Stated differently: team members have to think collectively, which is named team cognition. In September 2012, Guido Stompff received his PhD at Technical University of Delft, faculty of Industrial Design Engineering. The topic was team cognition in high tech development teams, and how designers contribute to it. This website are bits and pieces of his observations and findings, combined with reflections on trending topics." (Guido Stompff a.k.a. @guidostompff ~ Team Cognition) Posted on October 11, 2012 | Permalink Content and the journey: Building a good user experience for news sitesFinally, content as main driver of the user experience. "Discussions at recent news industry conferences have often referred to the importance of good user experience, particularly during discussions about how news outlets are reaching and interacting with their users on digital platforms. References to user experience could cover a range of aspects, including the user's journey through content, an app or a news website, the usability of those products and the experience of consuming a single piece of content. For the purposes of this feature I asked managing editor of the Wall Street Journal's digital network, Raju Narisetti, what user experience meant to him in the context of news and journalism." (Rachel McAthy ~ Journalism.co.uk) Posted on October 11, 2012 | Permalink Top 10 things still to fix in experience designFigure that! "As user experience extends itself across devices and channels in the years ahead the biggest winners will be companies that take a holistic and planned view of how it all works for the customer. (...) If user experience people are to be successful in changing the hearts and minds of these groups, then we need to seek out opportunities to speak with them on their own ground and use a vocabulary that resonates with them: tying UX to social benefit, improved business performance and new marketing opportunities." (Ray McCune ~ Foolproof) Posted on October 10, 2012 | Permalink It's Time for the UX Community to Toughen UpScreaming and kicking into the new phase. "We, the UX crowd, are the new brand leads. We are the ones who will win battles and wars in customer perception and preference. Advertising leaves an impression, but digital interaction creates an immediate emotional state through functional creations." (Andrew Heaton ~ Johnny Holland Magazine) Posted on October 09, 2012 | Permalink Demystifying UX Design: Common False Beliefs and Their Remedies: Part 1Perceptions are all based upon belief systems. "There are many common beliefs about UX design that are, unfortunately, based on casual and inaccurate observation. However, through systematically planned and conducted user research, we can see that some of these could not be further from the truth. In this series, I'd like to single out a few such design beliefs that meet two conditions: many product development professionals believe them and little user data supports them." Posted on October 09, 2012 | Permalink Fixing A Broken User ExperienceAddressing design in the enterprise. "Understanding an organization and its users and designing the right interaction and visual system take exceptional effort. You also need to communicate that system to teams that have already produced work that doesn’t align with it. This isn’t easy work. In this article, we’ll introduce you to a strategy for fixing the broken experience that starts with surface improvements, goes progressively deeper into structural issues and ends with a big organizational shift." (Stefan Klocek a.k.a. @klocekian ~ Smashing Magazine) Posted on October 04, 2012 | Permalink Designing a better experience for patientsSigns of growth: spin-offs of UX in tourism, banking, and health. Next-up: Edu. "As the current system of delivering care for patients has proved not to be so effective and sustainable for the future, also because of the demographic change, the health sector is looking for different models of designing and delivering services, also learning at different disciplines to mutuate tools and approach." (Paola Pierri a.k.a. @paolapierri ~ MEDlove 2012) Posted on September 20, 2012 | Permalink 3 Keys to Aligning UX with Business StrategyWhatever strategy your business has, it must be a digital strategy. "This column focuses on three key aspects of aligning User Experience with a company's business functions and, thereby, breaking out of the mold of user interface design: understand the company, the competition and the customer." (Paul Bryan a.k.a. @paulbryan ~ UXmatters) Posted on September 17, 2012 | Permalink You Don't Need a Title to Be a UX ProfessionalJob titles are the starting points of the silo problem. "The reality is that you don't need to have the title of a UX professional or consultant to make a contribution in the field of user experience. If you are passionate about making a difference for the users who will eventually use the product you are working on and have the skills you need to do the work, that's really all you need to contribute to the product's user experience. Simply decide for yourself that this is what you want to do, no matter what title you happen to have in your organization. In this article, I'll give some advice to people who want to work as UX professionals. While most of these tips provide general guidance to anyone who wants to become a UX professional, some apply specifically to technical writers." (Delia Rusu ~ UXmatters) Posted on September 17, 2012 | Permalink How The Left/ Right Brain Theory Improves The User ExperienceIntegrative thinking leads to better designs for user experiences. "Let's take a quick look at the left brain-right brain theory to recap which part of our brain is responsible for what. Then, we'll shed some light on how you can consider different ways of thinking in your design in order to optimize the experience for your visitors." (Sabine Idler a.k.a. @SabinaIdler ~ Usabilia) Posted on September 14, 2012 | Permalink The Future of User Experience DesignNow that we have grown up, our future is to enter the big world of the marketplace for real. "Companies all over the world clearly need user experience designers, but even more, they need an excellent User Experience." (Marcin Treder a.k.a. @marcintreder ~ Designmodo) ~ courtesy of uxfactory Posted on September 13, 2012 | Permalink UX Strategy: The Heart of User-Centered DesignWithout a strategy, the HOW gets lost and the WHY remains static in the UX vision. "Today, organizations interact with their customers through multiple digital channels such as call centers, mobile devices, applications, and Web sites. It is not enough to create a strategy for these channels from business, technology, and marketing perspectives. Rather, it is essential that an organization’s UX strategy be at the core of user-centered design. A UX strategy establishes goals for a cohesive user experience across all channels and touchpoints." (April McGee ~ UXmatters) Posted on September 04, 2012 | Permalink (Why) Is UXD the Blocker in Your Agile UCD Environment?The leaner, the meaner. "Many organizations are moving from waterfall to agile software development methods. They often combine this shift with a move to user-centered design (UCD). This makes sense because, in addition to bringing great intrinsic benefits, UCD has a lot in common with agile. Both encourage a multidisciplinary approach, are iterative, encourage feedback, discourage bloated and overly rigid documentation, and value people over processes. However, the combination of agile and UCD all too often leads to UX design becoming the main blocker in the development process. Why is this?" Posted on September 04, 2012 | Permalink User experience trends and the problem with stealing bad ideasSomething with copy, steal and artists. "Startups really aren't thinking about what the user wants, and how to help them accomplish that goal. Focusing on that is the only thing that will actually make your users happy." (Harrison Weber a.k.a. @HarrisonWeber ~ The Next Web) Posted on September 03, 2012 | Permalink Beyond Wireframing: The Real-Life UX Design ProcessFollowing the UCD process in any form is no guarantee for success. No process is. "We all know basic tenets of user-centered design. We recognize different research methods, the prototyping stage, as well as the process of documenting techniques in our rich methodological environment. The question you probably often ask yourself, though, is how it all works in practice?" (Marcin Treder ~ Smashing Magazine) Posted on August 30, 2012 | Permalink The 6 Disciplines Behind Consistently Great Customer ExperiencesCongrats with the Forrester book on CX. "The practices in the design discipline help organizations envision and then implement customer interactions that meet or exceed customer needs. It spans the complex systems of people, products, interfaces, services, and spaces that your customers encounter in retail locations, over the phone, or through digital media like websites and mobile apps. Design weeds out bad ideas early and focuses your customer experience efforts on changes that really matter to customers. By leveraging expertise and ideas from customers, employees, and partners, it encourages creative solutions--and helps avoid missteps by grounding those solutions in reality. " (Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine ~ Fast.Co) Posted on August 28, 2012 | Permalink What is Digital Service Design?Think system, not discrete nodes a.k.a. site, app or shop. "Digital service design incorporates many existing disciplines – like web design, information architecture, user experience and content strategy. It is, if you like, an organising umbrella principle, in which all these disciplines can work together to build something that meets – and surpasses – user expectation. Perhaps most fundamentally, it's about letting go of the website as the core idea of digital development, and thinking about service as something that can be delivered through any number of channels – some of them digital. Instead of fretting over your mobile strategy, you figure out how to express your service principles through a mobile device." (Adam Tinworth a.k.a. @adders ~ Next Berlin) Posted on August 28, 2012 | Permalink UX amateurism and why I'm not a UX designer anymoreIn the end, honesty always prevails. "But somehow, it's not enough. Nor will it ever be. And where I'm aiming to go, unicorns and one-size-fits-all don’t seem to make sense. Maybe someday, I'll find something I can identify with. But for now, I don't think I can quite call myself a UX designer, because it's getting harder to identify what I do as wholly UX. For what it's worth, I am doing bits within UX – but I can't claim fame to all of it." (Boon Yew Chew a.k.a. @boonych ~ GlueThink) ~ courtesy if petermorville Posted on August 27, 2012 | Permalink The First Design Hardly Ever Wins: The Iterative Approach to UX DesignKeep making it better, all the time. "Since the rise of the Agile movement iteration became one of the hot words in the whole New Technologies industry. We're encouraged to iterate, we should close iterations of our work every week or two. Iterations are simply everywhere." (Marcin Treder a.k.a. @marcintreder ~ DesignModo) Posted on August 23, 2012 | Permalink What Can SEO Learn From UX?Or what algorithms can learn from heuristics. "User Experience plays an early, fundamental role in guiding basic decisions that shape websites and digital products, and is increasingly afforded a seat at the table, so to speak. The reason UX is such a juggernaut is because of the multiple disciplines it encompasses—design, information architecture, usability engineering, interface design, content strategy, and research. In spite of its relative youth, UX as a discipline has grown exponentially in stature over the last few years." (Jessica Greco a.k.a. @grecasaurus ~ iAcquire) Posted on August 22, 2012 | Permalink The Difference Between Information Architecture and UX DesignSigh. "Information Architects work to create usable content structures out of complex sets of information. They do this using plenty of user-centered design methods: usability tests, persona research and creation, and user flow diagrams (to name only a few). That said, it still seems that UX design is in vogue. (...) UX builds on the foundation that IA provides, aiming to take that experience to the next level, both creatively and emotionally. This is the outstanding difference that defines how the apps, sites, and products of today are designed as opposed to those of yesterday." (Darren Northcott a.k.a. @darrennorthcott ~ UX Booth) Posted on August 21, 2012 | Permalink Recent Research in User ExperienceResearch, the most important activity in user experience. "In this column, let's take a look at some recent technology developments that promise to change the landscape of user experience in the months and years to come (...)" Posted on August 20, 2012 | Permalink The State of Design PracticeFollow the Money, but money isn't following the Experience. "An overriding theme mentioned by many concerned the lack of understanding regarding the need for, execution of, and requisite resources required for User Experience Design. This resulted in insufficient importance given to design and inadequate resources being applied to it." Posted on August 20, 2012 | Permalink Design for a Thriving UX EcosystemProducts and services morphing into digital ecologies, ecosystems and habitats. No more spaces? "As social media technologies and computer-supported, collaborative activities become more ubiquitous in people's work and everyday lives, UX professionals need to expand their skills and focus to take on broader experiences than just individual users engaged with single applications. It is crucial to understand people as social, cultural, and organizational components who are linked to other people, other technologies, and loads of information. The UX field is primed to step beyond just designing applications, and it's time to start thinking about the UX ecosystems in which these users and applications exist. The best way to begin that transition is to think in terms of biology." (Dave Jones a.k.a. @Dave_L_Jones ~ UX Magazine) Posted on August 15, 2012 | Permalink User Experience Design and Information Architecture: Centered and Bounded SetsExperiential to the max. "The ease and fluency with which designers and clients alike can move into and around the centered set of practices and concepts of UXD brings with it a marvelous opportunity to re-define a bounded set for the remnant of cats for whom the bucket of design is interesting but not the central thing drawing one in, and for which the place of beginning isn't end users and designing their experiences." (Dan Klyn a.k.a. @danklyn ~ Wildly Appropriate) Posted on August 14, 2012 | Permalink Why Top Execs are Starting to Care About UX DesignCrossing the border to CX. "Garrett shares how research, psychology, behavior and design can open the doors to meaningful creativity for design and product experience strategies. But more importantly, he shares how executives across the organization can learn from the UX team to improve services, business models and overall customer relationships." (Brian Solis a.k.a. briansolis ~ Mashable) Posted on August 14, 2012 | Permalink UX for Learning: Design Guidelines for the Learner ExperienceStill convinced we can learn so much from the discipline of Instructional Design. "With educational applications for kids, corporate eLearning, and online degree programs, more and more UX designers face design briefs for creating digital experiences with an educational purpose. Other applications, whether they're new or launching new features, often present micro-learning experiences that gently teach users how to use the software." (Dorian Peters a.k.a. @dorian_peters ~ UXmatters) Posted on July 25, 2012 | Permalink Is UX Strategy Fundamentally Incompatible with Agile or Lean UX?As with all new things, it will take some time before UX Strategy establishes its position. "UX strategy is about building a rationale that guides UX design efforts for the foreseeable future. UX strategy can be effective in an agile environment if you can complete the strategy before agile development begins. Following a lean UX process, you can develop a UX strategy that is sufficient when time and money are very tight, and you need to complete a working product at the earliest possible date. However, lean UX does not serve UX strategy well in large companies that can afford the time and resources to collect and analyze the data they need to formulate a strategic UX roadmap that produces a sustainable competitive advantage." (Paul Bryan a.k.a. @paulbryan ~ UXmatters) Posted on July 25, 2012 | Permalink Making Sense of the Cross Channel ExperienceDesigning the white spaces, loud silences and waiting moments. "The intention of this article has been to highlight some of our thoughts on creating pervasive information architectures. Our goal has always been to try to develop a practical framework that can be used early on in a design process to help us visualise the information space that we are so commonly being asked to design for nowadays." (Jon Fisher a.k.a. @ergonjon ~ Humanizing Technology Blog) ~ courtesy of petermorville Posted on July 23, 2012 | Permalink Everything can be beautifulBeauty is a joy forever. "To make something beautiful is about deciding what to make, exposing people to it, and claiming with authority that it is beautiful." (Marc Hassenzahl ~ Interactions July + August 2012) Posted on July 16, 2012 | Permalink Using Neuroscience to Inform Your UX Strategy and DesignThe brain and strategy, an ideal combination. "Finally, the corporate world is catching up with UX fanatics. Companies are hiring UX designers and UX strategists like crazy. As these UX professionals complete projects, many organizations are happy with the new software they’ve created, but they haven’t necessarily learned why and how they can continue to implement better user experiences in the future." Posted on July 10, 2012 | Permalink Perspectives in Experience DesignWell done, Milan! "For me, the word Experience in the context of Design work refers to the way people experience the world, and making everything we produce fit into their lives. The word preceding Experience is about the perspective you use when talking about someone's experience, the roles and the scope you want to focus on. For an enterprise, this translates to the ways it chooses to appear in people's lives." (Milan Guenther a.k.a. @eda__c ~ Blurring Boundaries) Posted on July 06, 2012 | Permalink Why The User Experience Can Or Cannot Be DesignedDesigning the right circumstances so the proper experiences can emerge. "It seems an endless discussion whether the user experience can or cannot be designed. The difficulty of the discussion lies in the level of abstraction. I believe that is because everything is an experience and everyone is a user. There is no standard definition, nor consensus among the practitioners, of what experience design really is. In this article I hope to shed some light on the issue. I will share my thoughts about the difficulties to design the user experience and give some practical tips how to overcome this challenge." (Paul Olyslager a.k.a. @paulolyslager ~ Usabilia) Posted on July 04, 2012 | Permalink Walt Disney, the world's first user experience designerExperience 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 on June 29, 2012 | Permalink Agile is Wrong for UXCan 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 on June 27, 2012 | Permalink 5 Tips for Effective UX LeadershipSpeak 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 on June 27, 2012 | Permalink 13 Tenets of User ExperienceIf 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 on June 22, 2012 | 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 on June 21, 2012 | Permalink Business Model Canvas for User ExperienceAny 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 on June 21, 2012 | Permalink The Past and Future of Experience Design: What a difference 10 years makeOne 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 on June 18, 2012 | Permalink UX Design DefinedThis 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." Posted on June 18, 2012 | Permalink The Care and Feeding of a UX Services TeamGet 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." Posted on June 18, 2012 | Permalink Defining User Experience as Brand ExperienceBrand 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 on June 18, 2012 | Permalink Illustrating the Big Picture: Journeys, Experiences and InteractionsThe 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 on June 14, 2012 | Permalink Flow, Mastery and Ease-of-UseGreat 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 on June 08, 2012 | Permalink Designing the Spaces BetweenAs 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 on June 05, 2012 | Permalink Developing UX Agility: Letting Go of PerfectionNothing 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 on June 05, 2012 | Permalink Social Media Is A Part Of The User ExperienceSounds 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 on June 05, 2012 | 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 on June 04, 2012 | Permalink Theories Behind UX Research and How They are Used in PracticeIt'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." Posted on June 04, 2012 | Permalink Signs UX Research Is Making an ImpactLights at the end of the tunnel. "For a UX professional, one of the hardest things to measure is how much stakeholders and clients have bought into UX research. There is no clear, quantifiable answer to this question. Nevertheless, there are several signs that indicate stakeholder engagement, uptake, and buy-in. This article identifies some of these signs." (Tomer Sharon a.k.a. @tsharon ~ UXmatters) Posted on May 21, 2012 | Permalink There Is No Such Thing as UX StrategyNow UX Strategy is the subject for this DTDT format. "In the minds of many UX professionals - at the levels of both members of UX teams and UX executives - there is no such thing as UX strategy. But based on the scenarios that I've described in this column - all of which I've taken from real-life situations - the felt absence of UX strategy indicates that it urgently needs to become a reality." (Paul Bryan a.k.a. @paulbryan ~ UXmatters) Posted on May 21, 2012 | Permalink 5 Valuable Skills For UX ProfessionalsI can think of another 25 valuable skills. It takes at least 10.000 hours of work to become a real pro. "The background, education and skills of professionals in User Experience are diverse. Regardless of whether you're more on the research side or more on the design side of the User Experience, here are five skills that will make you more valuable and effective in your job." (Jeff Sauro a.k.a. @MsrUsability ~ Measuring Usability) Posted on May 10, 2012 | Permalink Expressing UX Concepts VisuallyOne image, a thousand words. One word, a piece of the jigsaw puzzle. "It is all too easy to create UX deliverables that are not visually pleasing. But UX expertise encompasses Web design, graphic design, and branding, so why should we be satisfied with mediocre design in our deliverables? When we present our personas, sitemaps, user flows, wireframes, and other design deliverables to our clients and stakeholders, it is our duty and responsibility to create well-designed deliverables." Posted on May 07, 2012 | Permalink A(nother) call to action regarding healthcareAgain a broken 20th century institution to refocus on experience: the PX "In my view, UX designers can do more. Learn about the problematic healthcare cultural characteristics that dominate and that need to change. Alter how you do design research. Don't limit yourself to incremental innovation and work that is narrowly focused on UIs. Question the advisability of doing projects that, in essence, only amount to putting lipstick on the very large healthcare pig. Escape your comfort zones in order to have the kind of impact on the world that you desire." (Richard Anderson a.k.a. @riander) Posted on May 04, 2012 | Permalink Customer experience: The natural ally for UX in businessOne of my rare original blogposts. Disclosure: I work at Informaat (The Netherlands) ~ "In this post, I would like to talk about what has been on my mind for the last year or two: the relationship between user experience and customer experience and how user experience designers can extend their influence in businesses." (Peter Bogaards a.k.a. @BogieZero ~ βiRDS on a W!RE) Posted on May 02, 2012 | Permalink Content strategy is not always uxThe DTDT thing disguised as an opinion. "The complex interplay between UX and content strategy allows for many different scenarios, but one thing is clear to us: Most of the time, content strategy efforts should not fall under UX. UX professionals are expert in creating intuitive, clear paths within websites for visitors to consume all your audience-targeted content. Content strategists are expert at creating content that meets audience needs." (Linda Leung ~ Tendo Communications) Posted on May 02, 2012 | Permalink How to Win the UX War Within Your OrganizationWar might not be the proper analogy. "When companies don't care about user experience, it is clearly reflected in the products they create. Although everyone can agree that software should be intuitive, user-friendly, and aesthetically pleasing, many managers aren't willing to invest the time and resources it takes to build something compelling. A large part of our job as UX advocates, then, is explaining design's impact on the company as a whole. Determining which battles to win and which battles to lose - even intentionally - can help you win the UX war." (Girish Gangadharan a.k.a. @appoosa ~ UX Booth) Posted on May 01, 2012 | Permalink True Death of UX? Being JadedUX moves up the ladder and more into business contexts to make a difference. "Being a services consultant in the field of user experience insulates you somewhat from the daily grind. But seeing the same problems, products, companies, and types of people can easily wear you down. However, despite the variety in UX work, a certain amount of routine and repetition can cause the exciting rituals of user experience to become habitual. When that happens, you can lose the excitement of the work, and jadedness can set it. It is vital that, as UX professionals, we re-examine not only what we are doing, but how we are doing it. Keeping our activities fresh is not only good for our professional aspirations, but in the end, serves the best interests of our customers." (Baruch Sachs a.k.a. @basachs ~ UXmatters) Posted on April 25, 2012 | Permalink Great User Experiences Require Great Front-End DevelopmentKnowing to code makes a better designer. "In this column, we'll discuss innovative approaches to application design that are based on our personal experience in the trenches." (Jim Nieters, Amit Pande, and Uday M. Shankar ~ UXmatters) Posted on April 25, 2012 | Permalink Agile UX versus Lean UXIt's one of those DTDT's again. "Bottom line: in everyday conversation, whether one uses the term Lean or Agile or What-not is probably not that important. What's more important, is an understanding of how Agile and Lean help make traditional UX a more whole practice." (Anders Ramsay a.k.a. @andersramsay) Posted on April 24, 2012 | Permalink Augmented PaperThere's some real magic in all these apps. "Design an experience. Make it as beautiful - and as emotionally resonant - as it can possibly be. Then adorn the core experience and content with only as much functionality as is absolutely necessary. Functionality - and software-based thinking in general - is like seasoning. A little is an enhancement; any more destroys the flavour, subsumes the artistry of the chef, and may well be bad for you. These new classes of devices, so immediately personal and portable and tactile, aren't desktop-era shrines demanding incantation and prostration. They're empowering extensions to our real, actual lives - and that's a profound thing. They take what was once prosaic or mundane, and give us just a taste of superpowers. They're augmentations, and they should be beautiful." (Matt Gemmell a.k.a. @mattgemmell) Posted on April 23, 2012 | Permalink User Experience Is The Heart Of Any Company. How Do You Make It Top Priority?Calling it 'Customer Experience' might help. "The closer you are to your customers, the more relevant your product will be and the more likely you make it for people to choose you. It may seem obvious, but the gap between those that do and those that talk is widening, despite the immediate bottom-line benefits. But more than this, companies that put usefulness at the heart of what they do become part of their customers' lives. Engaging with customers then becomes an ongoing conversation, rather than the stop-start involvement that characterized the 20th century. This makes it much easier for customers to come back, and keep coming back." (Mary Ellen Muckerman ~ FastCo) Posted on April 16, 2012 | Permalink UX Design as a Two-Way ConversationAssuming the computer talks to you. Computer says 'No'. "If you were talking to a person who did this you would assume they either weren't listening or were slightly unhinged. When a computer does it you're likely to assume that using the site isn't going to be a pleasant experience, or worse, you may leave." (Hana Schank a.k.a. @hanaschank ~ UX Magazine) Posted on April 05, 2012 | Permalink Extending the Experience Beyond the DeviceAnd beyond technology as well. All through design. "Over the last few years, the popularity of UX has grown by leaps and bounds. Companies have come to realize the importance of offering engaging experiences to their users, lest they risk losing them to competitors that have invested time and money into improving their product and service experiences. An interesting side effect of this enhanced focus on UX is that it has helped make users more sophisticated. This, however, can be a double-edged sword; as users become more sophisticated their expectations also increase, and UX professionals must find new ways to meet these elevated expectations. One way to achieve this is to extend the experience beyond the device." (Tim R. Todish a.k.a. @t3b ~ UX Magazine) Posted on March 30, 2012 | Permalink The De-Evolution of UX DesignReads like blowing the last post on UX design. Or is it IA? "It's been seven years since I took that first step into IA, and, sadly, it seems that the practice of understanding and prioritizing information before designing the interface has been abandoned. And because of that, we are facing a huge problem in the world of UX, which is, simply put, that we are devolving." (Lis Hubert a.k.a. @lishubert ~ UX Magazine) Posted on March 27, 2012 | Permalink Design Factory: Creative Design with Industrial ApproachDisclosure: I work at Informaat (The Netherlands). "Digital strategy touches every fiber of your operation. We firmly believe that it takes a systematic approach that's woven into your organizational fabric to deliver compelling customer experiences - an approach comprising a recurring cycle of ideation, design, development and evaluation (...) The Design Factory is a methodical, structured design capability that comprises people, processes and tools. It infuses your organization with the creativity, agility and efficiency to successfully execute your digital strategy - from conceiving innovative solutions through to using robust and scalable approaches for design and specification." (About Informaat, experience design) Posted on March 20, 2012 | Permalink Forrester Report: Digital Customer Experience Improvement Requires A Systematic ApproachDisclosure: I work at Informaat (The Netherlands). Industrialize Processes In Support Of A Digital Customer Experience Strategy - "To consistently meet or exceed customers' expectations, firms must take a systematic approach to digital customer experience management. In conducting in-depth interviews with 16 business professionals, Forrester found that several of these companies had adopted some best practices for digital design that delivered improvements in customer experience - leading to improved business results through increased revenues, improved loyalty, greater customer engagement, and reduced costs. However, no organization had a mature, systematic approach to consistently differentiate through superior digital customer experience. For firms to turn their digital customer experience into a sustainable source of competitive advantage, they must define a digital customer experience strategy and introduce robust tools and repeatable methodologies to support it." (About Informaat, experience design) Posted on March 20, 2012 | Permalink Talking Out Loud Is Not the Same as Thinking AloudOld wisdom: What people say is (often) not what they think. "(...) get your participants to think aloud, but encourage comments that illuminate the problem space - because that's what usability testing is all about." (Mike Hughes ~ UXmatters) Posted on March 20, 2012 | Permalink User Experience Cannot Be DesignedBesides DTDT and "There is no such thing as...", we also have "(...) can't be designed" as a recurring theme. "User experience has been getting a lot of attention these days, but many businesses are confused about the actual meaning of it. In my opinion, it can be defined as the summation of different considerations i.e. defining the information structure, enabling the users to manipulate the data/information, and communicate the different possibilities to the users." Posted on March 20, 2012 | Permalink Nine Misconceptions About Statistics And UsabilityMisconceptions are sometimes born out of plain ignorance. "There are many reasons why usability professionals don't use statistics and I've heard most of them. Many of the reasons are based on misconceptions about what you can and can't do with statistics and the advantage they provide in reducing uncertainly and clarifying our recommendations. Here are nine of the more common misconceptions." (Jeff Sauro a.k.a. @MsrUsability ~ Measuring Usability) Posted on March 13, 2012 | Permalink UX SIG on Experience-driven designExperience getting to the heart of innovation. "This is a User Experience Special Interest Group event by SIGCHI Finland, supported by UXUS research project by TEKES/FIMECC. We have a special guest speaker from Delft University of Technology, Rick Schifferstein, talking about taking an experience as a starting point of designing products. Finnish speakers will accompany Dr. Schifferstein with speeches on experience design." Posted on March 12, 2012 | Permalink Embedding User Experience Design in large organizations: Issues and recommendationsLarge organizations is a different playing field for many UX peeps. "The consequence of UX not being seen as an essential profitability lever is that it's rarely adequately represented in the upper echelons of large organizations. It's mostly seen as an auxiliary function down in the trenches as opposed to a core foundation of the business." (Rian van der Merwe a.k.a. @RianVDM) Posted on March 09, 2012 | Permalink Why User Experience Is Different From Consumer ExperienceCX or/versus/and UX? It's in the air. Consumer of customer, that's (still) the question. "Forrester recently released a report on the rise of the Chief Customer Officer. The emergence of a C-level role with authority over customers' interactions has caused much hand-wringing within the UX community. It's like the job (we think) we're made for has been stolen from us." (Greg Laugero a.k.a. @prodctstrategy ~ Johnny Holland Magazine) ~ courtesy of schilletje Posted on March 05, 2012 | Permalink How To Manufacture DesireAfter objects of desire, we get services of desire? "I created the desire engine in order to help others understand what is at the heart of habit-forming technology. It highlights common patterns I observed in my career in the video gaming and online advertising industries. While the desire engine is generic enough for a broad explanation of habit formation, I'll focus on applications in consumer Internet for this post." (Nir Eyal ~ TechCrunch) Posted on March 05, 2012 | Permalink Don Draper is the Antithesis of User ExperienceOh no! Not him again! "User Experience is about gaining insight on customers and prospects, and guiding the design of products and services based on direct input from those people on a regular basis. UX is NOT about getting people to do what companies just want them to do. UX is OPPOSITE of advertising. UX is about making things that people actually need, not trying to convince people that they should want them." (Whitney Hess ~ Pleasure & Pain) Posted on February 28, 2012 | Permalink 3 Myths of Customer ExperienceAnd these are just three of them. Many more to come "(...) sought to address some of the biggest red herrings in UX today. Ultimately, I want to turn 'myths' into 'truths' and introduce my definition of Experience Strategy as well as the critical notion of the 'Aspects of the Experience'." (Zachary Paradis a.k.a. @zacharyparadis) Posted on February 24, 2012 | Permalink What is User Experience Strategy, Anyway?Like all strategies, it's still a strategy. A plan to walk the talk. "User experience strategy builds upon an organization's business and product strategies through a shared vision for a product or service from the end user's perspective. UX strategy can also extend beyond a single product to create a vision for what a customer's interaction with your company will be like across multiple products and touch points over time." (Catriona Cornett a.k.a. @inspireUX ~ The Archer Group) Posted on February 23, 2012 | Permalink Tools supporting the design processCross-channel becomes touchpoint orchestration. Example: Touchpoint orchestration ~ "Consumers interact with companies in many different ways. They may receive corporate information through publicity in the media, they see brand advertisements on TV or in magazines, they interact with personnel during the buying process or at the customer service desk, they unwrap packaged goods, they sample products in stores, and so on. Ideally, the different design elements that consumers experience should work together like the instruments in an orchestra to create the overall experience. Just like the instruments in the orchestra each have a different character, the design elements do not need to be similar in order to work together in creating a great and engaging experience. Touchpoint orchestration makes sure that all different elements work together and in the right order, in order to create the desired user experience." (Experience Driven Innovation) Posted on February 22, 2012 | Permalink User Experience The Don Draper WayIs Don Draper (a.k.a. Mad Man) becoming the reference for all things and beyond? Used to be Peyton Place. "Like so many things related to technology and new media, champions tend to push a bottom-up strategy. But, my point for this series is to complement the current groundswell by convincing executives and decision makers to lead top-down strategies that covey a vision for what customer experiences should involve. Then, and only then, we can inspire incredible UX to in turn bring that experience to life. Everything starts with defining a vision that articulates the view of the customer journey not just as you see it, but what it is that customer would appreciate, relate to, and value." (Brian Solis a.k.a. @briansolis ~ Fast Company) Posted on February 22, 2012 | Permalink More Lessons in the Art of Empathetic Design and Spontaneity from DegasTheatre and art as sources of UX inspiration. Just like "Art as Experience" (John Dewey, 1932) "Degas may have said that he knew nothing of inspiration or spontaneity, but in reality, he knew their meaning better than most artists. More important, he understood the work that is necessary to make either happen. So, I continue to be fascinated by Degas, his process, and the beauty of his work. Therefore, I am choosing to get a little off topic to explore some important lessons from Degas and what I like to call his performance art." (Traci Lepore a.k.a. @TraciUXD ~ UXmatters) Posted on February 21, 2012 | Permalink The World of Services User ExperienceWe call this an ego-document in the positive sense of the word. "Practicing user experience as part of a larger services organization is hardly ever just about designing the user experience of a particular product. Any UX professional in a services role taps deeply into the human-relationship side of the discipline of user experience. The world of services user experience is challenging, fast paced, and, in some ways, different from a lot of other UX roles. I will be sharing this world with you in future columns." (Baruch Sachs a.k.a. @basachs ~ UXmatters) Posted on February 21, 2012 | Permalink Convenience: The third essential of a customer-centric businessNever seen 'convenience' as a quality attribute for user experience, like usable, useful or desirable. "Technology and innovative design have made many products and services more predictable and efficient, the two lower levels of Different's 7 Essentials of Customer Experience. Convenience, the next essential of customer experience, is a critical factor in determining how customers make decisions about what to buy, what services to use, where to go, and with whom to engage. Conventional wisdom says that convenience is a factor of time and effort. On the surface, that's true, but if you dig a little deeper to fully understand service convenience, you need to consider another factor: perception." (Ari Weissman a.k.a. @TravelingRE ~ UX Magazine) Posted on February 17, 2012 | Permalink Is this the beginning of the 'Success by UX' era?There are many ways to success. UX being one of them. More and more so in the Experience Economy. "While some people see differentiation via user experience as a bit of a copout, there's a lot of empirical evidence that suggests a product that solves a real problem with a simple, easy to use interface will succeed." (Andrew Cross a.k.a. @cross_andrew) Posted on February 16, 2012 | Permalink The De-Evolution of UX DesignInfoArch gets rehabilitated. "By bringing the IA phase back and by concentrating first on the information, several things will happen. First, your sketching and interface design becomes much, much better because you have prioritization and buy off on the content, context, and users you are designing for. This means that your wireframe/prototyping phase becomes a lot more about the interface and not what content should go in the interface and why. Second, you are showing your stakeholders that UX design truly isn't just form, but really is also about function. We are moving away from the interface, which is how we started, and towards a real solution of which the interface is only a part. Third, we stop lying to ourselves, and we stop saying that the best UX solutions aren't just the coolest or the best aesthetically, but they are those that take content, context and users into consideration while creating an aesthetically appropriate interface. Most importantly, we stop UX's slide down the evolution scale back towards the time of print design and outputs, and instead continue our climb up the mountain towards being the user experience experts." (Elisabeth Hubert a.k.a. @likehow22) Posted on February 15, 2012 | Permalink Why User Experience Is Critical To Customer RelationshipsSee, UX gets picked up by the 'big guru guys'. Let's see what they do with it. "User experience is a priority that should, in some way, find a home within the design of any new-media strategy. (...) User experience is now becoming a critical point in customer engagement in order to compete for attention now and in the future. For without thoughtful UX, consumers meander without direction, reward, or utility. And their attention, and ultimately loyalty, follows." (Brian Solis a.k.a. @briansolis ~ Fast Company) Posted on February 14, 2012 | Permalink Disruptive InnovationOr how UX and CX can be disruptive. Love the comments. "A disruptive technology or disruptive innovation is an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network. The term is used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect. Although the term disruptive technology is widely used, disruptive innovation seems a more appropriate term in many contexts since few technologies are intrinsically disruptive; rather, it is the business model that the technology enables that creates the disruptive impact." (Clayton M. Christensen a.k.a. @claychristensen ~ Interaction-Design.org) Posted on February 14, 2012 | Permalink Dealing with Difficult People, Teams, and Organizations: A UX Research Maturity ModelThe baby, toddler, teenager, and adolescent phases of UX research. "An increasing number of organizations and individuals who develop software products, Web applications, Web sites, or other digital products are gaining a better understanding and appreciation for user experience and UX design and research. Subsequent to the introduction of some magnificent products and services that many executives now own or use-such as smartphones, tablets, Web applications, social media, and video games-they have gained a better understanding of what UX design and research can do to boost the success of a business offering." (Tomer Sharon a.k.a. @tsharon ~ UXmatters) Posted on February 06, 2012 | Permalink The User Experience Integration Matrix: Integrating UX into the Product BacklogAs long as we see UX projects as software engineering projects and not the other way around, the plus and minus sides of the magnet will not connect. "Teams moving to agile often struggle to integrate agile with best practices in user-centered design and user experience in general. Fortunately, using a UX Integration Matrix helps integrate UX and agile by including UX information and requirements right in the product backlog. While both agile and UX methods share some best practices-like iteration and defining requirements based on stories about users-agile and UX methods evolved for different purposes, supporting different values. Agile methods were developed without consideration for UX best practices. Early agile pioneers were working on in-house IT projects (custom software) or enterprise software." (Jon Innes ~ Boxes and Arrows) courtesy of janjursa Posted on February 03, 2012 | Permalink The top mistakes UX designers make: the writeupAs long as UX designers learn from their mistakes. "Rather than talk about tactical mistakes, such as in prototyping and running studies, I focused on the ones we overlook the most, about attitude and culture." (Scott Berkun a.k.a. @berkun) Posted on February 01, 2012 | Permalink UI: Getting the Details RightWhy 5 and not 7, 9 or 3? "User interface details matter to the overall user experience. Many users may not consciously notice these details on your site yet they do have an impact on the overall user experience. When everything feels just right the perception of your site and brand is improved. In this article, we'll look at 5 different types of UI details you should pay attention to." (Jamie Appleseed a.k.a. @jamieappleseed ~ Baymard Institute) Posted on January 27, 2012 | Permalink Defining an Interaction Model: The Cornerstone of Application DesignOr, on the value of working with models. Of any kind. "An interaction model is a design model that binds an application together in a way that supports the conceptual models of its target users. It is the glue that holds an application together. It defines how all of the objects and actions that are part of an application interrelate, in ways that mirror and support real-life user interactions. It ensures that users always stay oriented and understand how to move from place to place to find information or perform tasks. It provides a common vision for an application. It enables designers, developers, and stakeholders to understand and explain how users move from objects to actions within a system. It is like a cypher or secret decoder ring: Once you understand the interaction model, once you see the pattern, everything makes sense. Defining the right interaction model is a foundational requirement for any digital system and contributes to a cohesive, overall UX architecture." (Jim Nieters ~ UXmatters) Posted on January 23, 2012 | Permalink Global UX: A JourneyOld borders evaporate, new ones emerge. "In our increasingly connected world of 2012, we have more ways of continually learning to better understand, communicate, live, and work with each other, both locally and globally. The old boundaries, borders, and divisions are slowly disappearing, and established systems are starting to break down, making it challenging to learn what this new world means to all of us. When it is easy to become a friend of someone who does not live in our neighborhood or even our country, our assumptions about other people start to change. Similarly, the UX research and design professions are seeing a shift that edges us beyond the boundaries within which we live and work, forcing us to look outside our window when designing and improving the products and services we work on." (Whitney Quesenbery and Daniel Szuc ~ UXmatters) Posted on January 23, 2012 | Permalink The 9 Principles of Lean User ExperienceBut when does a startup become a non-startup? "These principles describe how best startup teams have always worked. By attempting to describe Lean UX, we hope the approach can be repeated, taught, and practiced deliberately to make startup teams more successful, more quickly." Posted on January 23, 2012 | Permalink Positive UX: Optimal user experience is more than the absence of usability issuesLess usability, more friction. "In this article I'll be applying a similar approach to introduce Positive UX; the idea that good UX isn't simply the absence of usability issues. I intend to draw parallels between the fields of well-being and UX in order to illustrate the factors that define and foster Positive UX and the implications this may have on measuring good experience with the web." (Rob Howells ~ Humanising Technology) Posted on January 18, 2012 | Permalink Affective Computing, Affective Interaction and Technology as ExperienceTechnology moving into the fibers of our emotions. "As Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Interaction Design moved from designing and evaluating work-oriented applications towards dealing with leisure-oriented applications, such as games, social computing, art, and tools for creativity, we have had to consider e.g. what constitutes an experience, how to deal with users' emotions, and understanding aesthetic practices and experiences. Here I will provide a short account of why in particular emotion became one such important strand of work in our field." (Kristina Höök a.k.a. @ProfessorHook ~ Interaction-Design.org) Posted on January 13, 2012 | Permalink How to Start a Career in UX DesignStart somewhere, then practice 10.000 hours. "Quite often, Web magazines, blogs, and other Web sites feature many interesting and informative articles about how to do UX design, graphic design, and Web design, but offer very little content about the fundamental steps that one must take to actually develop a career in one of these fields. So what should you do if you are just starting out as a UX designer, and what steps should you take to further your career?" (Chloe Lloyd ~ UXmatters) Posted on January 10, 2012 | Permalink Customer Experience versus User ExperienceOr in terms of scope, service design relates to customer experience; web and app design relates to user experience. And what about experience design a.k.a. cross-channel experience design? "In reading what they write about, it is disturbing how little reference Customer Experience people make to User Experience people. I've come across several references to human factors and usability, but you'll almost never find Customer Experience and User Experience in the same book, article, or room. This worries me. It worries me because I think that actually, this is possibly one of the best, strongest alliances that could exist in companies. It worries me because so much of what CX people do is what we need done so that the experiences we're designing have a real chance of being good. And it worries be because I think we as UXers could really benefit from understanding, in greater detail, a lot of the structure and discipline and business focus that CXers bring to our combined cause." (Leisa Reichelt a.k.a. @leisa ~ disambiguity) Posted on January 05, 2012 | Permalink A Consistent Experience is a Better Experience: Service DesignOne of the many intro's on Service Design, trying to answer the question of its value for commercial purposes. "If there is one thing that has held the test of time, it's that history is bound to repeat itself. What was once old will most certainly become new again in the cycle of time because good ideas never go out of style. Service design is a shining example of this fact. In spite of the fact that the conception of service design is nearly 30 years old, it is an idea that is more relevant than ever today. Service has become a serious topic of discussion in the design community these days and it's being recognized more and more as a key to business success in competitive markets. Good service design breeds satisfied, loyal customers. This post will walk you through the basics and how you can begin using it to your advantage to turn travelers into your very own brand ambassadors." (Mark Eberman a.k.a. @bikeboy389 ~ Digital Compass) Posted on December 20, 2011 | Permalink The Role of UX: Learning from SustainabilityUX designers express their identity crisis. Some deep mind work needed. "In recent times, it has become increasingly difficult to describe who UX professionals are and what they do. As a new entrant into this profession, defining who I am and presenting the skills I possess as something that is valuable to any organization has been an uphill task." (Antonia Anni a.k.a. @tonianni ~ UXmatters) Posted on December 20, 2011 | Permalink UX Dimensions of ConflictUX design remains a people business. "Even though there is no single answer to the question of how innovative or conventional a team should be and no clear gauge for how free or controlled a development process should be, you can make thoughtful decisions about what the right settings for those knobs are within your own organization. In doing so, make sure you take a value-neutral approach and understand your own biases going in. Then, choose the appropriate balance for your team, and select whatever tools and processes make the most sense for where you’ve set those knobs." (Mike Hughes ~ UXmatters) Posted on December 20, 2011 | Permalink Want to Improve Your Coordination? Attend to PatternsUsing patterns creates rhythm, confidence, and trust. "Like many of you, I'm passionate about crafting communication products that help others understand and act. I appreciate the work by writing practitioners who ask how sentence structure can support humans. I'm intrigued by the work of those of us who explore taxonomic relationships and ensure our tools bring consistency to thought. And recently I've become engaged by the thinking of information architects who attend to patterns and components." (Thom Haller a.k.a. @thomhaller ~ ASIS&T Bulletin Dec. 2011 - Jan. 2012) Posted on December 19, 2011 | Permalink Yes, Experience Can Be DesignedIn the DTDT or 'There is no such thing as...' category. And where does this debate lead us to? It depends. "As experience design has evolved from early ideas about human-computer interaction to our present understanding, we can see how the industry has shaped the tools for studying, influencing, mediating, and sometimes even controlling the way people experience the artifacts they interact with. But that raises a question: can experience really be designed? And it certainly triggers lively debate." (Sorin Pintilie a.k.a. @flyandcolors ~ UX Magazine) Posted on December 15, 2011 | Permalink For the love of experience: Changing the experience economy discourseReally hope her dissertation changes the discourse. "The attention for experiences as economic offerings has increased enormously in the last decade. However, the lack of a clear definition of experience and the bias towards the organization's perspective in the discourse cause much confusion. In this study experience is taken back to its basis: the encounter between an individual and his or her environment. Different concepts, effects and values of experience are defined to construct a more integrative discourse for the experience economy from the individual's perspective. To reap the benefits that the experience economy offers, the role of organizations has to change from a directing and controlling one to a more supporting and facilitating one. A true recognition of the co-creation that takes place in experiences shows how much latent potential for creating value there is yet to discover." Posted on December 14, 2011 | Permalink Towards an Ethics of PersuasionRight, always thought I was the center of the universe. "Here's my simple response: Don't take on projects that you wouldn't personally use yourself or recommend to your friends and family." (Stephen P. Anderson a.k.a. @stephenanderson ~ UXmag) Posted on December 14, 2011 | Permalink Can't get no satisfaction: Why service companies can't keep their promisesFor a lot of companies, it's just annoying that they have customers. "Service companies can't show customers a tangible product. Since services are intangible, the only way to sell them is by making a promise to perform. But most service companies fail to keep their promises, leaving customers frustrated, confused and abused. Why do so many service companies fail to keep their promises to customers?" (David Gray a.k.a. @davegray ~ Dachis Group) Posted on December 12, 2011 | Permalink Larry Constantine on Agile Experience DesignBoth fields seem to be at the wrong side of the magnet. "(...) when experience design is married with agile development, the results can be a crisis of faith on either or both sides." (Jean Claude Grosjean a.k.a. @jcQualitystreet ~ Agile UX) Posted on December 08, 2011 | Permalink Career Advice for User ResearchersLearning from the seniors. "The first thing you should decide is what you want to focus on. There is a great variety of roles in user experience. Some UX professionals are generalists who do everything from user research to UX design - and sometimes even software development. Others specialize on a particular aspect of user experience such as interaction design, visual design, content strategy, or ethnography. And many fall somewhere in between - for example, a UX Architect who conducts user research and is responsible for every aspect of UX design except visual design." (Jim Ross a.k.a. @anotheruxguy ~ UXmatters) Posted on December 05, 2011 | Permalink Planning User Research Throughout the Development CycleHow can you ever make something worthwhile if you haven't looked into it, a.k.a. research. "(...) we'll discuss how research planning can reduce costs and decrease the time it takes to perform user research. One of the biggest challenges in performing user research is determining which research approaches to apply and when to apply them. The research methods you choose are dependent upon a variety of factors, including budget, schedule, development phase, business goals, and research questions." (Demetrius Madrigal and Bryan McClain ~ UXmatters) Posted on December 05, 2011 | Permalink The difference between a UX Designer and UI DeveloperDTDT (again): Interface is part of the object and experience is part of the subject, be it for design or development purposes. "UX Designers focus on the structure and layout of content, navigation and how users interact with them. (...) UI Developers focus on the way the functionality is displayed and the fine detail of how users interact with the interface." (Ben Melbourne a.k.a. @benmelb ~ as in the city) Posted on December 02, 2011 | Permalink Is There Any Meat on This Lean UX Thing?What's the common denominator of structural programming, OVID, OOA/D, RUP, rapid/extreme programming and Agile? No design thinking regarding use involved. "There really is something here. Lean UX is an important new way to think about what we do, and I think there's real meat on it. Let me explain." (Jared Spool a.k.a. @jmspool ~ UIE) Posted on December 01, 2011 | Permalink The Anatomy of an Experience MapGreat and necessary piece of information visualization for understanding purposes. "Experience maps have become more prominent over the past few years, largely because companies are realizing the interconnectedness of the cross-channel experience. It's becoming increasingly useful to gain insight in order to orchestrate service touchpoints over time and space." (Chris Risdon a.k.a. @ChrisRisdon ~ Adaptive Path) Posted on December 01, 2011 | Permalink The upper bounds to qualityAAPL seems to falsify this. People willing to pay high prices for superb quality. "The digital age changes our notions of quality, and in particular, our notions of the limits to quality. Generally, there are two limits to quality: The first limit is your imagination. If you are innovative, you can increase quality in many creative ways. The second limit to quality is what the customer will pay for. If your product is priced too high, even if it is of super high quality, you won't be able to sell many." (Alan Cooper a.k.a. @MrAlanCooper ~ Cooper Journal) Posted on November 25, 2011 | Permalink Towards an Aesthetic of FrictionIt's academic, so it must be European. "Dr. Marc Hassenzahl is Professor for Experience Design at the Folkwang University of Arts in Essen, Germany, and research manager at MediaCity, Åbo Akademi University, Vaasa, Finland. He is interested in the emotional and motivational aspects of interactive, mostly tangible technologies, that is User Experience, Experience Design, the hedonic side of product use. Marc worked with companies, such as Samsung, Nokia, German Telekom, and lately BMW, on his vision of designing 'the experience before products', arguing for a postmaterialistic notion of designing things. He recently published Experience Design: Technology for all the right reasons with Morgan Claypool." (Marc Hassenzahl ~ TEDxHogeschoolUtrecht) Posted on November 23, 2011 | Permalink The Impact of PersuasionThe Don at TEDx (again), event organised by a Dutch 'university'. Understanding features in terms of complexity instead of functionality ~ "His studies and books on design theory coupled with his extensive academic and industry experience help companies produce enjoyable and effective products and services. Norman brings a systems approach to design, arguing that great design must touch every aspect of a company." (Donald A. Norman a.k.a. @jnd1er ~ TEDxHogeschoolUtrecht) Posted on November 23, 2011 | Permalink Complexity and User ExperienceGreat to see B&A revitalising. Understanding features in terms of complexity instead of functionality ~ "The best products don't focus on features, they focus on clarity. Problems should be fixed through simple solutions, something you don't have to configure, maintain, control. The perfect solution needs to be so simple and transparent you forget it's even there. However, elegantly minimal designs don’t happen by chance. They're the result of difficult decisions. Whether in the ideation, designing, or the testing phases of projects, UX practitioners have a critical role in restraining the feature sets within our designs to reduce the complexity on projects." (Jon Bolt a.k.a. @epic_bagel ~ Boxes and Arrows) Posted on November 23, 2011 | Permalink Everything is a serviceBut what if 'everything' is, then 'nothing' is. "The emerging service economy will require business and society to do some some fundamental restructuring. The organizations that got us to this point have been hyper-optimized into super-efficient production machines, capable of pushing out an abundance of material wealth. Unfortunately, there is no way to proceed without dismantling some of that precious infrastructure. The changes are already underway." (Dave Gray a.k.a. @davegray ~ Dachis Group) Posted on November 22, 2011 | Permalink When Is an Immersive Digital Experience Appropriate?Whatever you build, make sure it's usable and 'fun'. "So, when is an immersive digital experience appropriate? Although platforms should focus on getting users to their destination, the content users find there can be immersive. Programs should be immersive, but balance experiential design with usable design. Immersive experiences are notoriously difficult to document, from a UX perspective. The frameworks I've outlined are helpful in defining immersive experiences to a sufficient level of fidelity for a client to feel comfortable with the direction your solution is taking, but doesn't inordinately influence the creative team." (Jordan Julien a.k.a. @thejordanrules ~ UXmatters) Posted on November 21, 2011 | Permalink Out with the Old, In with the NewLots of food for thought in it. A Conversation with Don Norman and Jon Kolko on Trends in and the Relationships between Art, Business, and Design ~ "The ~2-hour exchange with and between Don and Jon and the audience was particularly engaging, thoughtful, rich, and delightful." (Richard Anderson a.k.a. @Riander) Posted on November 14, 2011 | Permalink A Brief Rant on The Future of Interaction DesignCouldn't deny the proper framing of 'Pictures Under Glass'. "As it happens, designing Future Interfaces For The Future used to be my line of work. I had the opportunity to design with real working prototypes, not green screens and After Effects, so there certainly are some interactions in the video which I'm a little skeptical of, given that I've actually tried them and the animators presumably haven't. But that's not my problem with the video. My problem is the opposite, really — this vision, from an interaction perspective, is not visionary. It's a timid increment from the status quo, and the status quo, from an interaction perspective, is actually rather terrible. This matters, because visions matter. Visions give people a direction and inspire people to act, and a group of inspired people is the most powerful force in the world. If you're a young person setting off to realize a vision, or an old person setting off to fund one, I really want it to be something worthwhile. Something that genuinely improves how we interact. This little rant isn't going to lay out any grand vision or anything. I just hope to suggest some places to look." (Bret Victor a.k.a. @worrydream ~ WorryDream) Posted on November 14, 2011 | Permalink The T-Model and Strategies for Hiring IA Practitioners: Part 2Or what the form of the character T can initiate. And what about the A, K, or X? "This second installment of my series on hiring IA practitioners, therefore, expounds on the Boersma T-model by presenting a grid that can help hiring managers make informed recruiting decisions by giving them a clear picture of the key verticals of UX practice, while taking into account three potential levels of an IA practitioner's professional experience." (Nathaniel Davis a.k.a. @iatheory ~ UXmatters) Posted on November 08, 2011 | Permalink Using Storyboards and Sentiment Charts to Quantify Customer ExperienceWhat would happen if we only talked about experience, human, user, or customer? "In the fields of user experience and service design, we use storyboards to illustrate our solutions, so clients can walk in the shoes of their customers, staff, or community and see our solutions as we see them. Storyboards are appealing at an aesthetic level, but are trickier to use in persuading clients who are more used to cold, hard numbers, charts, and tables. Offering more tangible measures of customer sentiment helps clients make connections between the experiences we depict and the sorts of technology, financial, and resource decisions that are necessary to make those experiences happen." (Ben Crothers a.k.a. @bencrothers ~ UXmatters) Posted on November 08, 2011 | Permalink Mobile UX Sharpens Usability GuidelinesUsabilty guidelines are just heuristics, for desktop, laptop and mobile. "Many guidelines are similar for mobile and desktop design, but their mobile interpretation is much more unforgiving." Posted on November 07, 2011 | Permalink How to Annoy a UX DesignerThe problem with most UX projects is that there are clients involved, not customers. "The relationship between client and designer does not always work out as smoothly as we would wish, despite the best efforts of all concerned. In this column, I'll take a look at some of the questions that can arise on a project team - and how they should and should not be answered. I hope these raise a smile - and possibly help you tackle the next awkward client conversation you encounter." Posted on November 01, 2011 | Permalink Five Ways to Be Persuasive in Your UX WorkConvincing is as hard as persuasion. "In your work as a UX professional, do you ever find that you need to convince people that the team should follow a user-centered design process? Do you need to convince stakeholders they should do user research? Do you try to get user experience thinking inserted earlier in the project lifecycle? Perhaps you need to sell yourself or your company? I certainly do. In fact, I find that there are many of these persuasive moments in the practice of user experience design. To be successful as a UX professional, you need to know how to be persuasive." Posted on November 01, 2011 | Permalink In Search of InnovationSimply following a set of UCD processes and creating the obvious UX deliverables doesn't lead anywhere. "(...) brands have to take the lead in innovation with a strong and consistent vision, and outlined several reasons why it's actually detrimental to listen to your users. I have to admit, their examples are compelling, but are they correct? How do we reconcile their claims with what we know about the value of design research and user-centered design? (...) I surmise that the pioneers of innovation really did have inspiration, intuition, hypotheses, hunches and non-linear thinking on their side. These are traits I would consider a part of a tinkerers' personality." (Peter Hui a.k.a. @hooooy ~ Teehan+Lax) Posted on October 31, 2011 | Permalink Designerly ways of working in UXAnd if the enterprise had a baby with the economy, they would call it the customer a.k.a. the human being. "If IBM and Apple had a baby today, it would be called UX. Not very likely, perhaps, but you see the point: UX has a mixed heritage, drawing from engineering traditions as well as big-D design traditions. I would like to characterize briefly what I have come across as typical values in professional UX practices. Then talk about what I see as 'designerly' ways of working within interaction design. And then finally put the two together in order to highlight some opportunities for designerly ways of working in UX." (Jonas Löwgren ~ Johnny Holland Magazine) Posted on October 28, 2011 | Permalink Anchoring Your Design Language in a Live Style GuideTalk about Design in a language each can understand. "Without a style guide, high-fidelity mockups are the best way to communicate a new feature to developers. Unfortunately, though, pixel-perfect mockups almost always result in duplicative and wrongly abstracted code. Why? First, fidelity alone (without good annotations) does not communicate the abstractions you intend. Without knowing how the designers conceive of the design language, developers may make different modeling choices and make the code difficult to maintain. Second, higher fidelity can unintentionally signal novelty. Developers may think that you mocked up something in higher fidelity because it is a new UI component, and thus fail to reuse existing code. This slows down development and results in bloated, less maintainable code." (Jim Lindstrom a.k.a. @jimlindstrom ~ UX magazine) Posted on October 27, 2011 | Permalink What I Bring to UX From... PsychologyImportant knowledge from inside the mind, brain and spirit. "How does one end up in UX after counseling delinquent girls and brain injured individuals? This question is one I am asked frequently once people find out the somewhat unorthodox route I took towards my career in UX. With some explanation, the connection between the two areas becomes much clearer and there is greater understanding for how my background in psychology has laid the groundwork for a career in UX." (Lori W. Cavallucci a.k.a. @lwcavallucci ~ Johnny Holland Magazine) Posted on October 21, 2011 | Permalink The Rise of Cross-Channel UX DesignInter touchpoint is cross-channel design; intra touchpoint refers to the design of the artifact. "Seamless, cross-channel experiences are the way of the future, as technology fades into the background and the personal, physical, and social context determine the methods we use to interact with information." (Tyler Tate a.k.a. @tylertate ~ UXmatters) Posted on October 18, 2011 | Permalink Seven Ingredients of a Successful UX StrategySeven is the magic number, for ux strategy as well. "UX strategy is about building a rationale that guides user experience design efforts for the foreseeable future. This article provides an overview of the ingredients I consider essential for developing a successful UX strategy. If you want to enter the growing field of UX strategy or learn more about it, this overview points you in the right direction." (Paul Bryan a.k.a. @paulbryan ~ UXmatters) Posted on October 18, 2011 | Permalink Storyboarding & UX: An introductionOne wonders why it takes so long finding valuable stuff from other fields. And btw, a customer journey depiction is not a storyboard! "The fields of user experience and service design typically use storyboarding to sell design solutions. They do this by casting personas in stories, showing the benefits of those solutions. They often look quite polished and professional, and can be daunting to some in these fields to pick up a pencil and try it for themselves. But not only can you draw these scenario storyboards yourself to sell your solutions, you can also use them as a powerful method for devising those solutions in the first place. Storyboards are part of the intriguing world of sequential art, where images are arrayed together to visualise anything from a film to a television commercial, from a video game to a new building. They're an effective communication device, bringing a vision to life in a way that anyone can grasp and engage with, before investing in producing the real thing." ~ UPDATE: Added part 2 and part 3 (Ben Crothers a.k.a. @bencrothers ~ Johnny Holland Magazine) Posted on October 14, 2011 | Permalink Thoughts on Lean UXLet's register, trademark or patent all 'new' ideas we have so we can stifle society. "Wasn't the Lean Start-up® simply a case of the Emperors New Clothes? A combination of User Experience Design and Agile development rebranded and repackaged for a new market. Also, what the hell was that ® about?" (Andy Budd a.k.a. @andybudd ~ Blogography) Posted on October 14, 2011 | Permalink UX For SuitsPaying attention to UX is just good business. "User experience is a catch-all term that we use in the software industry to describe the overall feeling an end-user gets when using a product. The UX is the attitude that is triggered when using (and subsequently thinking about) a company and their products and services. Since your user's attitude affects their future behavior toward your brand or product, a good user experience is vital to product adoption, engagement and loyalty." (Jurgen Altziebler a.k.a. ALT74 ~ Intridea) Posted on October 12, 2011 | Permalink Emotional Design for the World of ObjectsGreat set of interesting conference talks. "Welcome to the world of atoms. The human body is part of the physical world. It savors touch and feeling, movement and action. How else to explain the popularity of physical devices, of games that require gestures, and full-body movement? Want to develop for this new world? There are new rules for interacting with the world, new rules for the developers of systems." (Donald A. Norman ~ dConstruct 2011 videos) Posted on October 06, 2011 | Permalink Shoes, Cars, and Other Love Stories: Investigating The Experience of Love for ProductsWe not only love people, but products as well. And they don't talk back, sort of. "People often say they love a product. What do they really mean when they say this, and is this a phenomenon that is relevant to the field of design? Findings from a preliminary study in this thesis indicated that people describe their love as a rewarding, long-term, and dynamic experience that arises from a meaningful relationship built with products they own and use. Inspired by existing approaches to the experience of love from social psychology, research tools are developed for the closer study of person-product love. Using those tools the research in this thesis investigates how person-product interactions are linked to the experience of love and how these influence love over time. The findings reveal how the experience of love arises from person-product relationships, how love relationships develop over time, and which factors can provoke change in the love experience and love relationships over time. These findings present opportunities for design researchers and designers to foster rewarding experiences and long-lasting person-product relationships. Person-product love relationships can bring emotional rewards that benefit people's wellbeing and stimulate sustained efforts to keep loved products for longer." (Beatriz Russo ~ Technical University Delft) Posted on October 04, 2011 | Permalink The T-Model and Strategies for Hiring IA Practitioners: Part 1Or, what a simple diagram can bring. "What I also find disturbing is the lack of competency that some senior IA practitioners, with three to five years of experience, demonstrate when looking for employment. As a manager of an IA team, I have reviewed many resumes and portfolios of IA practitioners who don't meet the basic requirements; whose design artifacts don't reflect what I would expect of someone with senior-level experience. Does anyone know what junior or senior means? UX design managers, managers of information architecture, and IA practitioners should have a shared understanding of what makes a junior or senior IA practitioner a viable candidate." (Nathaniel Davis a.k.a. @iatheory ~ UXmatters) Posted on October 04, 2011 | Permalink The Ghost Hunter's Guide to User ResearchSome handy tips and tricks from the ghost hunter. "It was never my childhood dream to become a usability professional. In kindergarten, I didn't observe the other kids playing with their toys and think of ways to improve them. I didn't yearn to perform heuristic evaluations, usability tests, and contextual inquiries. Don Norman wasn't my Mister Rogers and Jakob Nielsen wasn't my Captain Kangaroo." (Jim Ross a.k.a. @anotheruxguy ~ UXmatters) Posted on October 04, 2011 | Permalink What I Bring to UX From... ArchitectureSounds more like information architecture, projects and clients to me. "To do well in either architecture or user experience design, the ability to communicate well is key, and the most important part of communicating is listening. As designers, we need to listen to our clients and their customers to understand their needs and requirements. We need to communicate our designs to both our clients and our development teams in a way that they will understand. Our ideas need to be translated into designs and made concrete, through user scenarios, workflow diagrams, mock-ups or wireframes so that they can be discussed, understood, tested and improved upon. Communication becomes even more important once those designs start being built. As I already stated, nothing ever gets built as planned. Therefore, communication is key in working with the development team to evolve and refine the design as it gets built, and to manage the expectations of the client throughout the development process as those changes are occurring. And, a lot of that communicating is listening." (Jennifer Fraser a.k.a. @jlfraser ~ Johnny Holland Magazine) Posted on September 30, 2011 | Permalink Truth and Dare: My response to Jason Mesut's EuroIA 2011 talkWell said: "I'm getting too old for this shit." "(...) ideally the phrase UX will disappear completely into a collective understanding and we will once again call ourselves by titles that better describe what we do all day." (Mike Atherton a.k.a. @MikeAtherton ~ Redux'd) Posted on September 30, 2011 | Permalink Demystifying Design'Then a magic occurs' is not enough anymore. "Designers are makers who craft solutions to problems that plague customers, clients, and at times, society as a whole. The specialized tools and jargon (leading? kerning? cognitive load?) often understood only by other practitioners are a designer's hallmarks. How we actually design and arrive at viable solutions is a mystery to most. Some believe this mystery helps us maintain the perceived value of design in our organizations. In today's world - a world craving more and better design - however, this mystery is actually holding us back as a profession." (Jeff Gothelf a.k.a. @jboogie ~ A List Apart Issue 335) Posted on September 20, 2011 | Permalink What I Bring to UX From... Market ResearchMarket research is rooted in demographics related to consumerism. Design research does the psychographics of me and my 'group'. "Research plays a vital role in UX, as we need to understand our users and their motivations in order to design products which meet their needs. Market research is all about finding out what people do and why. But how many companies have combined market research and UX teams? I'm going to outline what it's like to work in this kind of team and share how my background in market research led to a passion for UX." (Jessica Hall a.k.a. @mycatistheboss ~ Johnny Holland Magazine) Posted on September 16, 2011 | Permalink Seven Organizational Barriers to Designing Better ExperiencesReading this, I would almost give up on organizations. But I don't. "Over the last 6 years, I've been fascinated by watching how teams work together to create experiences. Much of these 6 years was spent with agile teams. Slowly, my personal practice as a user experience designer has evolved. Instead of focusing on what I can do to improve the experience, I've come to focus on what I can do to improve the organization." (Austin Govella a.k.a. @austingovella ~ Follow the UX Leader) Posted on September 16, 2011 | Permalink The S.M.A.R.T. User Experience StrategyOr how old skool insights can be revived. "(...) I (and many others) have been told to "create a good user experience." We've heard this in creative briefs, project kick-off meetings and critiques. It may have been a bullet point in a PowerPoint presentation or uttered by someone trying to sell a client or company on the value of their services. But there's a fundamental problem with stating that your goal is to "create a good user experience." It's not specific, directly measurable, actionable, relevant or trackable. Thus, it will create disagreement and disorganization, sending many projects into chaos. However, we can avoid this by using S.M.A.R.T. goal-setting criteria when defining user and business goals." (Dickson Fong a.k.a. @dicksonfong ~ Smashing Magazine) Posted on September 14, 2011 | Permalink Interaction Design Tactics For Visual DesignersIt keeps coming back to the idea of 'know the material you work with'. "Interaction design is a multi-faceted discipline that links static communications together to form an experience. Understanding the basic principles of this discipline is core to designing websites that are not only aesthetically pleasing but that actually solve business problems and bring delight to their users. This article just scratches the surface of interaction design. For Web designers of any kind, considering these fundamentals when designing any transaction or interaction is imperative." (Jeff Gothelf a.k.a. @jboogie ~ Smashing Magazine) Posted on September 12, 2011 | Permalink Framing the Practice of Information ArchitectureThe ship 'Titanic' sets course to a new UX iceberg. "Over the past two decades, the volatile evolution of Web applications and services has resulted in organizational uncertainty that has kept our understanding and framing of the information architect in constant flux. In the meantime, the reality of getting things done has resulted in a professional environment where the information architect is less important than the practitioner of information architecture." (Nathaniel Davis a.k.a. @iatheory ~ UXmatters) Posted on September 07, 2011 | Permalink Leveraging UX Insights to Influence Product StrategyHow UX influences product strategy and the other way around. "Many UX researchers and analysts aspire to influencing not only design implementation, but also product strategy. However, it is rather difficult to effect this kind of influence because user research insights tend to center on design and fail to speak to a company's overall strategy for a product. In this article, I'll describe how you can influence product strategy through a well-defined approach to user research and illustrate this approach by describing my first-hand experience with it. I'll also discuss how any UX professional intending to add business value can leverage this approach in influencing product strategy." Posted on September 07, 2011 | Permalink Great Customer Experiences Learn ContinuouslyHumans just have one mission in life and that's to learn. From the beginning 'til the end. From Apple's poster for its retail employees. - "All of these experiences have made us smarter. And at the very center of all we've accomplished, all we've learned over the past 10 years, are our people. People who understand how important art is to technology. People who match, and often exceed, the excitement of our customers on days we release new products. The more than 30,000 smart, dedicated employees who work so hard to create lasting relationships with the millions who walk through our doors. Whether the task at hand is fixing computers, teaching workshops, organizing inventory, designing iconic structures, inventing proprietary technology, negotiating deals, sweating the details of signage, or doing countless other things, we've learned to hire the best in every discipline." (Mike Wittenstein a.k.a. @mikewittenstein) Posted on August 30, 2011 | Permalink Transmedia Design for the 3 Screens (Make That 5)Increasingly 'computer' becomes a generic term; its instantiations matter. "Mobile use will rise, but desktop computers will remain important, forcing companies to design for multiple platforms, requiring continuity in visual design, features, user data, and tone of voice." (Jakob Nielsen a.k.a. @NNgroup ~ Alertbox) Posted on August 29, 2011 | Permalink What marketing executives should know about user experienceMarketing 2.0 has a change, and that's not marketing the social way. "Like it or not, the digital world has changed at a wicked pace, and more and more interactions between companies and their customers now happen via an interface. Software serves us everywhere, and the user experience now shapes these interactions every day. At the center of all this change sits the brand. TV and print advertising now regularly feature digital experiences from the likes of Apple, Google, Toyota, GE, and Amazon. The visual interface has become the new face of your brand. This means that the role of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) is now harder, and their influence must reach further into the organization than ever before." (Nick Myers a.k.a. @nickmyer5 ~ Cooper Journal) Posted on August 27, 2011 | Permalink Where Do Good UX Ideas Come From?I would say AAPL, but that's problably not a satisfying answer. "Many companies struggle with the question of whether to develop UX strategy, research, and design capabilities internally, or to engage external UX firms as-needed when projects arise. Companies must forecast their need for these services on a long-term basis, and weigh the comparative costs and benefits of each approach. But is it purely a question of economics? Does an external UX team offer value beyond the flexibility and overall cost savings of not maintaining an internal team? When asked only in the context of individual projects, the answer to this question is probably 'no'. For a single project, the rationale for engaging an external UX firm may remain purely financial. But it's crucial to ask a broader question: how effective will each approach be at fostering ongoing UX innovation, beyond the limits or needs of existing projects?" (Nick Gould a.k.a. @nickgould ~ UX Magazine) Posted on August 26, 2011 | Permalink What I Bring to UX From Computer ScienceAs a designer, you must know the materials you're working with: computational and connected data, information and content. "Human-Computer Interaction has strong roots in Computer Science, and user experience design is almost exclusively a technology-focused practice. How much does UX design share with its engineering-focused sibling? I'm going to share some thoughts about my experiences from making the transition from software engineering to UX, and how my past career has made an influence in my roles as a user experience designer today." (Boon Chew a.k.a. @boonych ~ Johnny Holland Magazine) Posted on August 26, 2011 | Permalink Desktop Summit: Claire Rowland on service designService design as holism applied to man-machine studies, HCI, UI and product design for Linux pros. "Like it or not, the vision of the interconnected future is coming, and our mundane devices and appliances are going that route as well. Making those things work well for users, while still allowing user freedom, is important, and it's something the free software community should be contemplating." (Jake Edge ~ LWN.net) Posted on August 25, 2011 | Permalink The Integration of User Experience into Software DevelopmentRecurring issue, especially now with all the buzz around Agile, Scrum, and 'what-have-you'. IBM called it OVID. "If the UX professional's job ends at the end of the design phase, something is wrong with the process." (Janet Six et al. ~ UXmatters) Posted on August 24, 2011 | Permalink The Difference Between UI and UXAs long as there is still confusion among few, these DTDT posts seem relevant. 'Filed in Graphics' (sic!) "In today's creative and technical environment, the terms UI ('User Interface') and UX ('User Experience') are being used more than ever. Overall, these terms are referring to specialties and ideas that have been around for years prior to the introduction of the abbreviated terminology. But the problem with these new abbreviations is more than just nomenclature. Unfortunately, the terms are quickly becoming dangerous buzzwords: using these terms imprecisely and in often completely inappropriate situations is a constant problem for a growing number of professionals, including: designers, job seekers, and product development specialists. Understanding the proper separation, relationship and usage of the terms is essential to both disciplines." (Shawn Borsky a.k.a. @anthemcg ~ Design Shack) Posted on August 23, 2011 | Permalink You can't save your way to innovation"Speed, cost or quality, just pick two." is 20th century thinking. "Creativity, productivity or freedom, just pick one." is 21th century. "What's wrong, you might argue, with keeping costs down? Quite a bit, it turns out. If your objective is to design a product people want to use, or to invent something brand new, you must embark on a journey of creativity and innovation. That might seem like normal, every day business, but don't make the mistake of trying to run your creative organization like a conventional one." (Alan Cooper a.k.a. @MrAlanCooper ~ Cooper Journal) Posted on August 23, 2011 | Permalink 5 Proven UX StrategiesSet expectations, and then exceed them. "Whether dealing with large corporations, game developers, small businesses or a sole proprietor, most business goals tend to amount to the same needs. User experience is an area that touches almost every single business problem. While every project comes with its own unique situations, there are a few tried-and-true user experience techniques that just work well and always produce results." (Shawn Borsky a.k.a. @anthemcg ~ DesignM.ag) Posted on August 22, 2011 | Permalink Why I'm not a UX Designer (and neither are you)Interesting observation by the Don: "When terms enter the vocabulary, they start to loose their special meaning." "I think it comes from a growing disregard for the systems nature of product design. What's taken hold is this notion that because a user's experience with a product is influenced by that product's design, the experience as a whole can therefore be designed." (Aaron Weyenberg a.k.a @aweyenberg) Posted on August 19, 2011 | Permalink UX Designers: Masters of Everything, Definers of NothingAs said, promising new initiative focusing on UX. "I'm a UX Designer, and with a strong understanding and working knowledge of interaction design, information architecture, information design, industrial design, visual interface design, user assistance design, and user-centered design, I'm able to research, design, and prototype new user experiences. While using a holistic multidisciplinary approach, I rapidly iterate on new ideas from concept to completion. Testing and designing not only the physical dimension of digital products, but using a powerful set of learned methods to design and perfect the emotional one." (Mike Stefanko a.k.a. @EssentialUX ~ Essential UX) Posted on August 17, 2011 | Permalink Requirements-Driven Software Development Must DieFunction follows feature follows user. "The process by which most enterprise software is developed is fatally flawed. There are flaws in any software development process, but in the past 13 years I've seen one approach produce more bad software and blow more budgets than any other: requirements-driven software development. Thankfully, I've also had the opportunity to see the success of an alternative type of process, a process in which user experience design drives what gets developed. This type of process helps teams deliver good software on time and within their budgets." (Fred Beecher a.k.a. @fred_beecher ~ Evantage Consulting) Posted on July 26, 2011 | Permalink The UX of LearningRemember the days of computer-based training, courseware and instructional systems design. "Learning is a complex process with distinct stages, each with corresponding tasks and emotions. Understanding how users learn can help us design experiences that support the user throughout the entire process. So let's learn a thing or two about learning itself. (...) Far from being monopolized by schools, learning is an essential human activity. Empathizing with and supporting users as they traverse the many stages of learning fosters happier users and a more profitable business." (Tyler Tate a.k.a. @tylertate ~ A List Apart) Posted on July 26, 2011 | Permalink A Service Design Approach Is Required To Deliver Great Customer ExperiencesFor commercial contexts, that's true. But there is so much more... "Internally focussed business tools, processes and systems are often thought about and designed in isolation from the design of the things customers interact with. Or to put this another way, projects that focus on improving the customer experience often don't fully consider the tools, processes and systems staff use in the delivery of the experience." (Iain Barker ~ @Iain_barker ~ Meld Studios) Posted on July 26, 2011 | Permalink What is Cross-channel?Or what a lot of reading, days of conversations and writing a book can do to your use of terms. "Cross-channel is not about technology, or marketing, nor it is limited to media-related experiences: it's a systemic change in the way we experience reality. The more the physical and the digital become intertwined, the more designing successful cross-channel user experiences becomes crucial." Posted on July 26, 2011 | Permalink Transforming User ExperienceRaising the bar. I might consider to change the goal of 'compelling user experiences' into 'transformative user experiences'. "Although the initial discussion of transformation focused on the changes planned for the museum, she also discussed the desired transformation that visitors to the museum would experience. She noted that individual transformation was unique to each person and the result of not only the experience offered by the museum, but by each person's frame of reference, personal interpretation of the information, and their culture and background." (Karen Bachmann a.k.a. @karenbachmann ~ Perficient) Posted on July 22, 2011 | Permalink The End of Client ServicesG+ is a great example of the importance of UX in social. "(...) a new economic paradigm in which the act of producing and consuming are one and the same, and he believes it's upon us right now. I subscribe to this theory, and I believe its most fascinating expression takes the form of social software, in which there is no consumption unless its users produce, and there is no production unless its users consume. The secret sauce that starts this virtuous cycle is not just technology, but also user experience design." (Khoi Vinh ~ Subtraction) Posted on July 21, 2011 | Permalink Visual Designers Are Just As Important As UX DesignersAlways thought perception was an integral part of feeding the experience. "Conceptually I believe you can break design into tangible and abstract activities. Tangible design typically draws on the artistic skills of the designer and results in some kind of visually pleasing artefact. This is what most people imagine when they think of design and it covers graphic design, typography and visual identity." (Andy Budd a.k.a. @andybudd ~ Blogography) Posted on July 19, 2011 | Permalink The UX of User Stories, Part 1Reminds me of scenario-based design of John Carroll. "If you are a UX designer who wants to quickly get up to speed with integrating Agile and UX, there are few better places to start than with User Stories. They are both a quintessential embodiment of Agile thinking (i.e. if you understand User Stories, you understand Agile thinking) and a potential power tool for a UX designer on an Agile team. But like any tool, they can be both highly useful and help your team be highly effective, or, if you have no idea how stories work, cause some serious damage, especially to the UX dimension of your product. So, if you're using User Stories or thinking about adopting them as a tool, here are ten tips to help UX designers understand User Stories (we'll just call them Stories from hereon) and wield them to both yours and the team's benefit." (Anders Ramsey a.k.a. @andersramsay) Posted on July 18, 2011 | Permalink The CSS of Design Storytelling: Context, Spine, and StructureAnd I thought CSS meant something else in Design. "(...) to be a really good storyteller, you need to understand three basic concepts: Context, Spine, and Structure (CSS). Each is critical and necessary, and all three need to work together." (Tracy Lepore a.k.a. @TraciUXD ~ UXmatters) Posted on July 18, 2011 | Permalink User experience research and practice: Two different planets?Keynote presentation by longtime reseacher of MUX ('Mobile UX'). Afterwards, the two planets (research and practice) kept their distance. "Good user experience is increasingly important for profitable business: once utility and usability are taken for granted, successful companies design for experiences. But how to manage the fuzzy thing called user experience in product development? Can UX research help UX work in practice? This talk discusses the impact of business goals on UX research and the transfer of UX research results into practice." (Virpi Roto ~ Chi Sparks 2011 videos) Posted on July 18, 2011 | Permalink The Difference (And Relationship) Between Usability And User ExperienceDTDT: One is a quality of an artifact in use; the other is an emerging phenomenon within the human, at the moment, during the episode, and in the long-term. "After web site accessibility, 'user experience' is probably the phrase that most people tend to confuse usability with. Whilst this topic has been discussed by various experts in the respective fields, I feel the need to write about it for two main reasons. The first reason is that several posts I have encountered emphasize the distinction between these two terms, yet they fail to highlight the relationship that exists between usability and user experience. The second reason is that whilst most of the posts are similar in nature, I have found some minor, albeit very valid points scattered in various posts I have read. Therefore, the objective of this post is to discuss these two terms, whilst highlighting their differences and more importantly the relationship that exists between them in a clear, concise way." (Justin Mifsud a.k.a. @justinmifsud ~ Usability Geek) Posted on July 15, 2011 | Permalink Business Analysis and User Experience"At UC Berkeley there has been an increasing awareness of the importance of business analysis (BA) and user experience (UX) in the software development lifecycle. In this article, we will discuss the advantages of involving BA and UX practitioners in your development process, when and how to involve them, and the similarities and differences between the two professions." (Allison Bloodworth, James Dudek, and Rachel Hollowgrass ~ Modern Analyst) Posted on July 13, 2011 | Permalink The User Experience of the BBC News"In a news environment, there is ultimately one asset that the web designer has to enhance and protect. Credibility. News is all about telling a believable version of real life. A brand as well established as the BBC's naturally goes a long way to distinguish its content from lesser-known, opinion-led publishers. But all brands are vulnerable to erosion if the presentation doesn't do them justice. The painstaking work that goes into the BBC's online output - the designer's understanding of what its content really is, who its readers are, what flavours of content to mix, and the mastery of formal methods of presentation - is all part of the never-ending preparation and re-preparation of an enticing Bento box." (Tammy Gur ~ Johnny Holland Magazine) Posted on July 11, 2011 | Permalink Let's Be Frank"Architect, designer, and living legend Ephraim Goldberg, better know as Frank Gehry, is one such individual. His explorations in light, sound, movement, and materials, as well as his innate ability to understand the psychology of human behavior, set him apart in the fields of architecture and design. To Gehry, the physical form of architecture isn't really about a physical structure at all, but rather the manifestation of all disciplines of art, design, and technology coming together to solve a problem." (Christian Saylor ~ UX Magazine) Posted on July 07, 2011 | Permalink What's in a name: The duality of user experience"As somebody who has publically stated that they "don't care about user experience" and is fed up of "defining the dammed thing" I find myself being drawn into discussions about the term far more often than I'd like." (Andy Budd a.k.a. @andybudd ~ Blogography) Posted on July 07, 2011 | Permalink Search Analytics for Your Site: Conversations With Your Customers"Any organization that has a searchable web site or intranet is sitting on top of hugely valuable and usually under-exploited data: logs that capture what users are searching for, how often each query was searched, and how many results each query retrieved. Search queries are gold: they are real data that show us exactly what users are searching for in their own words. This book shows you how to use search analytics to carry on a conversation with your customers: listen to and understand their needs, and improve your content, navigation and search performance to meet those needs." (Louis Rosenfeld a.k.a. @louisrosenfeld ~ Rosenfeld Media) Posted on July 06, 2011 | Permalink Building Trust on e-Commerce Home Pages"While the presence of many trust elements, aids, and cues throughout an ecommerce site contributes to customers' perception of its trustworthiness, as UX designers, we can build greater trust by including and appropriately placing these identified trust elements on a site's home page, as this article describes." (Shazeeye Kirmani a.k.a. @shazeeye ~ UXmatters) Posted on July 05, 2011 | Permalink How Cognitive Fluency Affects Decision Making"Every day, your users make judgments and decisions about the products and services you provide based on the way you present them. In this column, I'll talk about why seemingly insignificant aspects of information presentation can have surprising effects on people's perceptions and behavior." (Colleen Roller a.k.a. @DecisionUX ~ UXmatters) Posted on July 05, 2011 | Permalink Experience Design Models: Minding the Gap Between Ideas and Interfaces"So what can we do to better communicate experience design vision during that window of opportunity between raw ideas and design deliverables? How can we use our abilities to visualize for the greater good? Enter experience modeling." (Marc Sasinski a.k.a. @sashimijack ~ Johnny Holland Magazine) Posted on June 30, 2011 | Permalink Tales of Designer Initiation: The UX Design Boot Camp"Our objective during the UX Design Boot Camp was to design a user interface for a new product concept in only two weeks. Four new team members paired up to form two teams that would work on separate design projects. Deliberately vague, the description of the design problem for each pair comprised fewer than five sentences." (Lauren Shupp and Davis Neable ~ UXmatters) Posted on June 24, 2011 | Permalink The Future of UX"Are we going to evolve into tie-wearing consultants? Do UX pros matter at all a few years down the road? And how do Africa and refrigerators fit in? Together with the awesome folks at UXcamp Europe, we discussed the future of our profession." (UX Café) Posted on June 21, 2011 | Permalink Six Things User Experience Designers Forget When They Criticize Websites"It's easy to criticize the user experience of an application or website, because we're all end users. But sometimes we use it once, while many have to use it day after day as a part of their job. We talk about how we like using some sites, but there's always the 'I wish it was way.' Still, we are our own worst enemies. We constantly pick at sites and snipe on Twitter how certain missing features are UX 101, but we don't offer constructive feedback. We don't understand that some decisions are based on conscious business decisions. Worst of all, we don't get that company culture, most of all, plays a part in the final product. Not every company is Apple where design is king. Trade offs are made all the time, sometimes without any input from the user experience stakeholders. All good user experience designers make decisions regarding what they can live with and what they can't." (Patrick Neeman ~ usabilitycounts) Posted on June 20, 2011 | Permalink Developing a UX Practice of Practicing"Good practice focuses on the process, while work focuses on the outcome. When doctors, musicians, and pilots are practicing, they are not doing the entire job. They are looking at the process of the work, often repeating the same step multiple times." (Jared Spool a.k.a. @jmspool ~ User Interface Engineering) Posted on June 15, 2011 | Permalink CS is (Still) Not (Only) UX ... and Why It Matters"(...) I tend to think of UX design as a kind of design work associated with certain methods, processes, and values. It's not limited to the web, or even (theoretically, at least) to the digital world." (Erin Kissane a.k.a. @kissane ~ Brain Traffic) Posted on June 10, 2011 | Permalink I don't care about User Experience"These days we've stopped selling UX and started simply doing it. (...) Sure, some agencies or individuals haven't quite reached that inflexion point yet, but I can tell you that it's on the way. Demand is far outstripping supply, so if you're not there yet, you soon will be. User Experience is no longer a point of difference, it's just the way all good websites are built these days." (Andy Budd a.k.a. @andybudd) Posted on June 01, 2011 | Permalink user-interface, user-experience & usability explained"So in short, when I'm 'interacting' with a website I'm using its user-interface design. How I 'feel' and my 'preferences' when using it is my user experience and how 'easy and intuitive' it is for me to perform the functions I came to do, is a measure of its usability. As you can see, it's really hard for someone to specialise in one of these areas without an understanding of the other two." (Bernhard Schokman a.k.a. @bernardschokman ~ myware) Posted on May 31, 2011 | Permalink ROI of UX"If we can measure the exact ROI of UX, we can demonstrate the value of the UX team, their work and also justify the need for research when it is necessary. Often the complaint around UX is speed. We can speed up the UX process by sketching, measuring features when they are live, and evolving our designs rather than working to create a final and highly polished version at launch. We can calculate the trade-off of using this faster deployment method rather than the more traditional process of doing lots of user testing up-front. There will be times where it isn't appropriate, and knowing the numbers allows us to justify this to the business. A caveat for the faster deployment method is that the UX team must be very senior and experienced." (Marie-Claire Jenkins a.k.a. @missmcj ~ i-thought) Posted on May 30, 2011 | Permalink The Expanding Role of User Experience Design"As UX designers, our role in our industry is more important today than ever. Our medium is maturing into a broad, multiple-platform, always on, multi-context, center-of-our-universe conduit for information. Our clients and customers are demanding more of us. We're not just designing web experiences anymore. Our designs have to adapt and respond to a variety of devices with different input methods that are used under very different circumstances where user goals and expectations change as well." (Aarron Walter a.k.a. @aarron ~ UX Magazine) Posted on May 25, 2011 | Permalink Capturing Meaningful and Significant User Experience Metrics"How many times have you wondered how you can collect meaningful and significant metrics to validate your research? Many researchers struggle with this same dilemma on a daily basis. For example, how can we know the magnitude of the issues we are detecting in a traditional usability lab study? Surprisingly, there are many ways to capture useful UX metrics if you have the knowledge of what solutions to use and how to use them." Posted on May 24, 2011 | Permalink Design + Lean Startup = Lean UX"Janice Frasier, talking about lean UX (...)" (Startup Lessons Learned's videos) Posted on May 24, 2011 | Permalink Service Design and User Experience: Same or Different?"One designs the interface of the experience and the other the service and organization behind it..." (Oliver King a.k.a. @ollyking ~ Engine service design) Posted on May 20, 2011 | Permalink Concept to Code: Code Literacy in UX"Code is the material that breathes life into a user experience, so we ought to get familiar with it." (Ryan Betts a.k.a. @hitsmachines ~ UX Magazine) courtesy of janjursa Posted on May 18, 2011 | Permalink Mobile & UX: A Perfect Storm"In his presentation at at Mobilism in Amsterdam, Netherlands Jared Spool outlined four major forces driving the value and visibility of design in Web-based applications. Here are my notes from his talk." (LukeW writings) Posted on May 17, 2011 | Permalink Gamification: Using Game Design Elements in Non-Gaming Contexts (.pdf)"Gamification is an informal umbrella term for the use of video game elements in non-gaming systems to improve user experience (UX) and user engagement. The recent introduction of 'gamified' applications to large audiences promises new additions to the existing rich and diverse research on the heuristics, design patterns and dynamics of games and the positive UX they provide. However, what is lacking for a next step forward is the integration of this precise diversity of research endeavors. Therefore, this workshop brings together practitioners and researchers to develop a shared understanding of existing approaches and findings around the gamification of information systems, and identify key synergies, opportunities, and questions for future research." (Sebastian Deterding ~ Gamification Research Network) Posted on May 16, 2011 | Permalink Cross-channel Experiences in Retail"83% of consumers prefer retailers offering a continuous and consistent shopping experience across the different channels: people would like to seamlessly interact with a company independently by the touchpoint, medium or place." (Pervasive Information Architecture blog) Posted on May 02, 2011 | Permalink Marketing: Don't be a Hater"Let's consider branding an essential part of service design solutions. How does branding help unify cross-channel experiences? How can it make services more enjoyable, memorable, and likely to be used again? Let's acknowledge the value that marketing brings to the UX conversation by including people from marketing departments in our client stakeholder interviews. Ultimately they will be telling the world about the products and services we create." (Kim Cullen ~ Adaptive Path) Posted on April 28, 2011 | Permalink The UX of this article"In many respects, when we talk about, evaluate, and revise products from a usability standpoint, we overlook the most important piece: content. Our tendency is to be concerned only with the wrapper or container, navigation through that container, and the interplay of the elements that make up the container. But what about the content which populates this otherwise dead space?" (Brett Sandusky ~ UX Magazine) Posted on April 27, 2011 | Permalink Ten Guidelines for Quantitative Measurement of UX"Most UX designers use qualitative research - typically in the form of usability tests - to guide their decision-making. However, using quantitative data to measure user experience can be a very different proposition. Over the last two years our UX team at Vanguard has developed some tools and techniques to help us use quantitative data effectively. We've had some successes, we've had some failures, we've laughed, we've cried, and we've developed ten key guidelines that you might find useful." (Richard Dalton ~ UX magazine) Posted on April 26, 2011 | Permalink Share The Sandbox: UX Can't Own Customer Experience"While CX is becoming a key competency for many companies, there isn't an agreed upon definition. I view it as an extension of UX, where non-digital experiences and services are just as important as screen interactions, and the full range of touchpoints with a brand across time has to be explicitly designed." (Samantha Starmer ~ UX Magazine) Posted on April 20, 2011 | Permalink Is Marketing The Evil Empire?"UX Magazine attended the 2011 IA Summit in Denver this year to interview conference speakers and attendees. In this video, interviewees respond to the question: Is Marketing the Evil Empire? We were expecting to get at least a couple of embittered responses, but instead found consistent opinions that marketing is misunderstood and should be treated as a partner rather than an adversary." (Jonathan Anderson ~ UX Magazine) Posted on April 20, 2011 | Permalink Integrating UX into Agile Development"Requirements definition is an integral part of an agile development process, and writing user stories is a fast, effective way of capturing requirements and estimating level of effort. UX professionals on agile teams sometimes add value by taking responsibility for writing user stories." (Janet Six ~ UXmatters) Posted on April 19, 2011 | Permalink Anticipating the Next Wave of Experience Design"We live in a world defined by increasing time pressure and more and more things competing for our attention. In such a frenetic world, it is understandable that we place more value on the quality of our experience. We want to make the most of the time we have. Experience design has emerged in part as a response to this growing need we all have. It is no longer enough to design products and services so that they have aesthetic appeal and perform well. We demand a more satisfying broader experience when interacting with these products and services so that we more effectively pull out the true potential of these products and services." (John Hagel) Posted on April 18, 2011 | Permalink The Elements Of Player Experience"Video games are breaking out of the roles they've traditionally occupied and are moving into spaces where they collide with UX design. There are games that serve as social glue between old friends, and games that bring strangers together to collaborate on solving problems. There are games that help people meet their life goals, and games that let people reward others for meeting theirs. There are games that facilitate creative self-expression, help people understand the news, train doctors to save lives, and advocate for human rights. As they expand into these realms, the lines separating game design from software UX design are growing fuzzier and less important." (John Ferrara ~ UX Magazine) Posted on April 08, 2011 | Permalink The Meaning of User Experience"Even though UX is also concerned with satisfaction, usability is seen only as a part of UX, in which the satisfaction can arise from some other source than product's good usability. Collectively, UX is about designing for pleasure rather than preventing usability problems." (User Intelligence) Posted on April 06, 2011 | Permalink The fall and rise of user experienceClosing plenary of the IA Summit 2011 ~ "Although there's still a substantial gap between aspiration and execution, business leaders are at least now talking about the right things: experience, prototyping, design strategy, and innovation. (...) User experience converts are typically drawn to the glamour of interaction design on shiny technology, and the amateur psychology that helps them sound authoritative about their approaches. Most lack knowledge of basic information architecture, design theory and elementary programming skills." (Cennydd Bowles) Posted on April 04, 2011 | Permalink Are you experienced? Business and the web user experience"(...) designing online user experiences is now an important process for any company that is serious about the web, from huge names such as Google and Facebook all the way down to small businesses. "User experience designers are the digital equivalent of architects," says Andy Budd." (Bobbie Johnson ~ BBC) Posted on April 01, 2011 | Permalink Use Gestalt Laws to improve your UX"An overall good user experience is an essential aspect for creating a successful website. The term user experience seems to be a popular trend recently, but how can we describe user experience and how can we make sure to offer enough of it on our websites? To keep it simple, user experience describes how users perceive a website, what kind of emotions they have when visiting a website, and whether or not they are motivated enough to return. This subjective experience is in a large part based on the visual appearance of a website." (Sabina Idler ~ DesignModo) Posted on March 31, 2011 | Permalink Assume an Amorphous User"Physicists often have to construct clean, clear-cut models to describe messy realities. They do this by cleaning up their concepts about reality, assuming things like frictionless surfaces, lossless mirrors, and yes, spherical objects. UX designers often do the same thing, assuming a spherical user (...) who knows what he wants to do and takes the logical path in achieving his goals. Our scenarios describe happy paths that lead to success for this user." (Mike Hughes ~ UXmatters) Posted on March 21, 2011 | Permalink Why UX Professionals Should Care About Service Design"I'm very excited to be kicking off my new UXmatters column, Service Design: Orchestrating Experiences in Context, with this discussion of the value of service design to UX professionals. In my column, I'll explore the concepts of service design and how to leverage its practices to optimize the user experiences our companies and clients look to us to create." (Laura Keller ~ UXmatters) Posted on March 21, 2011 | Permalink UX Zeitgeist"Use UX Zeitgeist as your library of UX books and articles. Add items, keep up with what others have added, learn which are rated best, and create and share your own public reading lists." (Rosenfeld Media) Posted on March 21, 2011 | Permalink The Materials of Digital Products"A perfect example is developing for the mobile platform. A native iOS app will allow for much greater refinement in performance, motion and visual treatment, but there will likely be greater build costs compared to an HTML5 mobile app. Conversely, HTML5 will allow much greater flexibility in deployment and distribution. Both technologies have their place in mobile, we just need to know when plastic is more appropriate than stainless steel." (P.J. Onori ~ Adaptive Path) Posted on March 17, 2011 | Permalink More, better, faster: UX design for startups"Startups don't have capital to burn or luxurious schedules for big-design-up-front. But unless your idea is by-and-for-engineers, design isn't something you want to skip on your way to market. For a startup, design may mean the difference between simply shipping, and taking the market by storm. But with tight budgets, and aggressive timelines, how to include design and get the best value for the investment?" (Stefan Klocek ~ Cooper Journal) Posted on March 16, 2011 | Permalink Why User Experience Cannot Be Designed"A lot of designers seem to be talking about user experience these days. We're supposed to delight our users, even provide them with magic, so that they love our websites, apps and start-ups. User experience is a very blurry concept. Consequently, many people use the term incorrectly. Furthermore, many designers seem to have a firm (and often unrealistic) belief in how they can craft the user experience of their product. However, UX depends not only on how something is designed, but also other aspects. In this article, I will try to clarify why UX cannot be designed." (Helge Fredheim ~ Smashing Magazine) Posted on March 15, 2011 | Permalink Innovation in Customer Experience"The experience delivered by a product or service can be a source of competitive advantage and business value through innovation. Experience designers – using the empathy they generate with customers during primary research, and the understanding of the customers’ broad context of use they gain – are well-placed to be the source of such innovation." (Steve Baty ~ Meld Studios) courtesy of jameskalbach Posted on March 15, 2011 | Permalink Where Innovation Belongs in User-Centered Design"While user-centered designers haven't always been the greatest advocates for innovation there is incredible potential for UX professionals to become the champions of innovation and the leaders of holistic design. User experience practitioners are in a unique position to reach out to users and across silos in pursuit of a beautiful user experience. Furthermore, while innovation can come from anywhere only user experience practitioners are equipped to evaluate whether a user population is willing to adopt an innovative idea. Innovation is inherently risky, and usability can mediate that risk through testing. Perhaps greater consideration needs to be given to how innovative ideas are evaluated in order to avoid focusing on the first use, but there is a place for User Experience in an world where innovation is king." (Jake Truemper ~ Johnny Holland Magazine) Posted on March 11, 2011 | Permalink UX is 90% Desirability"We are part of creating an experience. We are manufacturing something that wasn't there before. Sure usability is important. Yes, it needs to be designed well. Of course, it should function without a glitch. But, are those really what sell the experience? There's something more intangible that drives people to products: The desire to use it." (Francisco Inchauste ~ FINCH) Posted on March 11, 2011 | Permalink Lean UX: Getting Out Of The Deliverables Business"Lean UX is an evolution, not a revolution. UX designers need to evolve and stay relevant as the practice evolves. Lean UX gets designers out of the deliverables business and back into the experience design business. This is where we excel and do our best work. Let’s become experts at delivering great results through these experiences and forgo the hefty spec documents. It won’t be an easy road. Culture and tradition will push back, yet the ultimate return on this investment will be more rewarding work and more successful businesses." (Jeff Gothelf ~ Smashing Magazine) Posted on March 07, 2011 | Permalink UX Trends"Over the past few years, the term user experience has become better known in business, so selling user experience is no longer as hard as it used to be. It's becoming easier to tell the UX story, because through success stories like Apple, businesses are beginning to see the value of great design. However, there is still a gap between knowing how to make UX operational and how to source and invest in the right skill sets to make great design happen." (Daniel Szuc ~ UXmatters) Posted on March 07, 2011 | Permalink Research Methods for Understanding Consumer Decisions in a Social World"Ultimately, the goal is to understand the entirety of the consumer experience, so we can make the most informed decisions about online strategy, content, and positioning. In this column, I'll first summarize the findings from Edelman's article, then discuss how we can apply traditional user research methodology to supporting changes in marketing strategies." (Michael Hawley ~ UXmatters) Posted on March 07, 2011 | Permalink Approaches to User Research When Designing for Children"Children's exposure to computing devices depends on a great variety of factors—including cultural traditions, economic power, and family values. But there is no doubt that, in general, children's access to technological devices and interactive products has increased dramatically in recent years. We are now seeing even higher adoption of technology among children—thanks to the unpredictably intuitive interaction of youngsters with touchscreen technologies and mobile devices that they can carry everywhere and use at any time." (Catalina Naranjo-Bock ~ UXmatters) Posted on March 07, 2011 | Permalink Tough Sell: Selling User Experience"(...) this kind of a journey is a stretch for some UX professionals. It really does not suit all of us. In fact, you might be turned off by this kind of task, and that's OK. For those of you who try it, it can be rewarding and a great career expander. You will have added a new skill to your repertoire, and you will likely have professional connections with new parts of your business that you never knew existed." (Misha W. Vaughan ~ Journal of Usability Studies, Volume 6 Issue 2) Posted on March 06, 2011 | Permalink Measuring the User Experience on a Large Scale: User-Centered Metrics for Web Applications"More and more products and services are being deployed on the web, and this presents new challenges and opportunities for measurement of user experience on a large scale. There is a strong need for user-centered metrics for web applications, which can be used to measure progress towards key goals, and drive product decisions. In this note, we describe the HEART framework for user-centered metrics, as well as a process for mapping product goals to metrics. We include practical examples of how HEART metrics have helped product teams make decisions that are both data-driven and user-centered. The framework and process have generalized to enough of our company's own products that we are confident that teams in other organizations will be able to reuse or adapt them. We also hope to encourage more research into metrics based on large-scale behavioral data." (Kerry Rodden, Hilary Hutchinson, and Xin Fu ~ Google Research) Posted on February 22, 2011 | Permalink Prospecting in the 21st century"Service design is the natural progression from UX – taking interactions across platforms and concentrating on the invisible and tangible connections around customer or user interactions. Information architects should be at the heart of this design work and don’t be surprised to start to see IAs appear in companies that you didn’t even think of as 'digital'. (...) It is not just interface design. It is not just about making the world more usable and ethically correct. It’s all this and more. It is a force for changing business in its approach and to make it economically stable by providing for needs but also satisfying wants beyond the present day. This is the business value of UX. How you interpret the data you collect, and create something truly unique, relies on the teams skill set and experience." (James Kelway ~ user pathways) | courtesy of petermorville Posted on February 18, 2011 | Permalink Effective Design Documentation Without a FussAn Interview with Dan Brown - "Design documentation is shorthand for the collection of techniques to capture and communicate design ideas to other people on the design team. Those ideas may be half-baked or they may be well-cooked, and designers have various reasons for creating documentation." (Brad Nunnally ~ Johnny Holland Magazine) Posted on February 18, 2011 | Permalink Content Strategy and UX: A Modern Love Story"Why the gold rush? The answer is pretty simple: it's inherently impossible to design a great user experience for bad content. If you're passionate about creating better user experiences, you can't help but care about delivering useful, usable, engaging content." (Kristina Halvorson ~ UX magazine) Posted on February 17, 2011 | Permalink Content Strategy Is Not User Experience"(...) content people who come from or work in the UX world say content strategy and mean bits of all of the above, but with user-centered design at the core of the work. Product design becomes feature design; messaging and branding become content goals and style guides; data modeling becomes content templates and page tables." (Erin Kissane ~ Brain Traffic) Posted on February 11, 2011 | Permalink Persuasion in Design"Persuasion in design is often regarded as a subset of UX, but it goes beyond UX and the mechanics of traditional usability. It's about understanding the emotions that influence people’s behavior and decision-making, and then acting on that information to design compelling user interactions. Persuasive design applies psychological principles of influence, decision-making in a consumer context, engagement strategy, and social psychology to every stage of the design process, and it identifies potential barriers and emotional triggers to elicit the desired actions." (Elisa Del Galdo ~ UX magazine) Posted on February 09, 2011 | Permalink User Experience White Paper"(...) a result from a Dagstuhl seminar on Demarcating User Experience, where 30 experts from academia and industry worked together to bring some clarity to the concept of user experience. We see the white paper as an important step towards a common understanding on user experience." (AllAboutUX) ~ courtesy of jaspervankuijk Posted on February 07, 2011 | Permalink The Relationship Between User Experience And Customer Experience"Moving forward I will still use the term user experience to refer to that total library experience we want to design and deliver. In my presentations on UX I would be more likely to introduce the term 'customer experience' and point out how each term adds to our knowledge about and conversation on designing better libraries." (Steven Bell ~ Designing Better Libraries) Posted on February 07, 2011 | Permalink Business Objectives vs. User Experience"Here's a question for you: would you agree that creating a great user experience should be the primary aim of any Web designer? I know what your answer is and you're wrong! Okay, I admit that not all of you would have answered yes, but most probably did. Somehow, the majority of Web designers have come to believe that creating a great user experience is an end in itself. I think we are deceiving ourselves and doing a disservice to our clients at the same time. The truth is that business objectives should trump users' needs every time. Generating a return on investment is more important for a website than keeping users happy. Sounds horrendous, doesn't it?" (Paul Boag ~ Smashing Magazine) Posted on February 04, 2011 | Permalink UX Benefits to Building Mobile Web Apps"(...) there are many business benefits to building HTML5 mobile apps, but few, if any, user experience benefits." (LukeW) Posted on February 03, 2011 | Permalink Designing a Reason to Come Back"For most of us, launching and maintaining a Web site is enough of a chore. But what change is there to look forward to? Once a year, a number of sites participate in a CSS reboot, where all the styles are dropped. Some sites even commit to refresh their look on this day. This gives casual visitors - especially those who rarely visit a site, reason to come back - to see what's new. Department stores regularly have sales, seasonal offerings and other events, yet the only online equivalent seems to be cyber Monday." (Stephen Anderson ~ Johnny Holland Magazine) Posted on February 02, 2011 | Permalink User Experience and Experience Design"The notion of (User) Experience as stories told through products has a potential to change the way we think and design. At the moment, the majority of commercially available interactive devices is either too practical or too open-ended." (Marc Hassenzahl ~ Interaction-Design.org Encyclopedia) Posted on February 01, 2011 | Permalink A model for UX design reviews"Design reviews are so important for our work as user experience designers, but they too often fail us. Here is a model for design reviews that overcomes the problems of ego, emotion, and communication that so often get in the way of helpful feedback." (Davin Granroth) Posted on January 28, 2011 | Permalink Passive magic, design of delightful experience"It is noteworthy when the design of an experience is so compelling that you feel wonder and delight. When designed right it feels totally natural, some might even say it is truly 'intuitive'. No training is needed, no set-up, no break in flow, the tool fits seamlessly, improving without disrupting your experience; it's like a little bit of magic." (Stefan Klocek ~ Cooper Journal) Posted on January 26, 2011 | Permalink UX, It's Time to Grow Up"(...) one of the main issues that we see, but at times ignore, in this field is that most of us try to be jacks of all trades within UX." (Elisabeth Hubert) Posted on January 20, 2011 | Permalink Mobile UX Essentials"At the BAYCHI Interaction Design event tonight, Rachel Hinman (Nokia) talked about where and how to begin designing for mobile in her presentation. Here's my notes from her talk." (Luke Wroblewski) Posted on January 20, 2011 | Permalink UX, Design, and Food on the Table"In this case study, Laura Klein takes us inside the design process in a real live startup. (...) Interactive prototypes and iterative testing let you improve the design quickly before you ever get to the coding stage. Targeting only the confusing parts of the interface for redesign reduces the number of things you need to rebuild and helps make both design and development faster. Lean design is about improving the user experience iteratively! Fixing the biggest user problems first means getting an improved experience to users quickly and optimizing later based on feedback and metrics." (Eric Ries ~ Startup Lessons Learned) Posted on January 19, 2011 | Permalink Parallel & Iterative Design + Competitive Testing = High Usability"Three methods for increasing UX quality by exploring and testing diverse design ideas work even better when you use them together." (Jakob Nielsen ~ Alertbox) Posted on January 18, 2011 | Permalink Barriers to Holistic Design Solutions"Face it, most UX design work consists of incremental improvements over the previous version of a product, and we rarely get to design holistic solutions that elegantly meet the needs of our target audience across systems, services, and devices—or wherever such needs crop up. Further, time-to-market pressures and narrow, predefined solution spaces usually constrain the occasional opportunities we may get to design a first-release product. This leaves so many UX professionals dissatisfied, because they know they could have done a better job or, worse, they may even have envisioned exactly how their design could have been better, only to find insurmountable barriers to their vision’s ever seeing the light of day." (Christian Rohrer ~ UXmatters) Posted on January 17, 2011 | Permalink Ten tips for UX Freelancing"I offer no guarantees about any of these tips, all I can say is that they have worked for me and that they form the basis of my ongoing approach to UX Freelancing. Some of these I've known since the beginning, some I've learned, most often the hard way." (Leisa Reichelt) Posted on January 14, 2011 | Permalink Debunking User Experience"It dawned on me recently that, despite working in the industry since 1994, I don't really know what User Experience is." (Dean Schuster) courtesy of uxtweets Posted on January 14, 2011 | Permalink All about UX: Information for user experience professionals"This is an independent site to share and, one day, also collect information about user experience. There has been an active group of researchers collecting user experience evaluation methods, frameworks, and definitions for several years now. We promised to bring the results back to the people who have helped us in this work. Finally, we are able to share the results! We are aware of the immaturity of this site on the day of its birth, but the site is supposed to grow as more information reaches the maturity level high enough for publishing. It is great to get the existing information online now." (About AllAboutUX) Posted on January 13, 2011 | Permalink Power or Collaboration: What's Most Valuable to a UX Leader?"In this column, we'll explore these very questions: Do UX leaders need to acquire and wield power to ensure their organizations can produce game-changing design? If they don't already have executive support, can they can collaborate their way to success?" (Jim Nieters ~ UXmatters) Posted on January 05, 2011 | Permalink Why you need a user experience vision (and how to create and publicise it)"Many design teams launch into development without a shared vision of the user experience. Without this shared vision, the team lacks direction, challenge and focus. This article describes how to use the 'Design the Box' activity to develop a user experience vision, and then describes three ways of publicising the vision: telling a short story; drawing a cartoon showing the experience; and creating a video to illustrate the future." (David Travis ~ UserFocus) Posted on January 05, 2011 | Permalink The Relevance of User Experience: Using Every Opportunity to Impress Users"Is it possible to calculate the ROI of great design? What about the cost-per-acquisition of a customer sold on User Experience? There are no second chances for first impressions, and even the smallest opportunity is a chance to 'Wow' users. What you do with that opportunity can spark a chain of events that can make or break your business." (Nicolas Thomas ~ UX Booth) Posted on January 05, 2011 | Permalink Emergent Computing Paradigms"Curious if these three emergent paradigms make sense to you: organic material, infrastructure, and social currency." (Rachel Hinman ~ Rosenfeld Media) Posted on January 03, 2011 | Permalink UX Design and Agile: A Natural Fit?"Generally speaking, as an interaction designer you don't want to invest a lot of time programming something live, since what you really want is to keep iterating on the fundamentals of the design quickly. That's why working with paper prototypes is so commonplace and effective early in a project." (Communications of the ACM 54.1) Posted on December 27, 2010 | Permalink An Interview with Jesse James Garrett"I'm pretty excited that the new edition of Elements of User Experience is out - the first edition was one of the first books I really connected with, and it's great to see a refresh. What are some of the highlights in this version? (...) There is so much evident care and craft in the Rosenfeld Media books - I think they now occupy the place O'Reilly books held 15 years ago as definitive works." (Russ Unger ~ Peachpit) Posted on December 21, 2010 | Permalink The Importance of Designing an Experience Culture"Attitudes and behaviors are constantly being shaped within organizations. It's the reason there are performance reviews, processes and procedures, and role expectations. If business leaders want to foster a specific culture, then all opportunities, activities, and expectations of their staffs will be measured against the success of exemplifying that culture. To design is to plan something for a specific role, purpose, or effect - to work out its form. Company culture is designed in every conversation, and in every bit of feedback and evaluation criteria. It's possible to control the corporate atmosphere by choosing which behaviors to support and encourage, and which to discourage. Cultures grow organically, but they are actively designed." (Cynthia Thomas ~ UX Magazine) Posted on December 21, 2010 | Permalink Essential and Desirable Skills for a UX Designer"UX Designers need to be excellent communicators and facilitators, as they often help bridge gaps in communication between other organizations." (Janet M. Six ~ UXmatters) Posted on December 20, 2010 | Permalink UX Project Documentation: Answering What, Why, and How"Many people don't see the importance of gathering the necessary explanatory documents that define what you did all throughout your project development. Either that, or they treat the documentation process as a simple putting-together of all the sketches and wireframes generated. We should, nonetheless, give more relevance to this final, whole-project document." (Pamela Rodríguez ~ UX Booth) Posted on December 14, 2010 | Permalink An interview with Mike Kuniavsky"And we never fully understand our technology. We may understand the technical aspect of it, but we never fully understand the social implications of it. Lots of people point out that every technology is a double-edged sword; for every positive thing that it does, there's a negative effect that it has. What we do is try to balance those. As designers, I think the role is to try to understand as much as possible about that, given the time, budget, and knowledge constraints that we have, in order to be able to make decisions to try to mitigate the negative aspects while amplifying the positive aspects of technology." (David Bevans ~ Morgan Kaufmann Publishers) Posted on December 07, 2010 | Permalink UX: The Enemy Within"The in-fighting has to stop. We must kill the enemy within. The real enemy is out there, in the vast realm of people who still don't get user experience." (Karen McGrane - 52 Weeks of UX) Posted on December 07, 2010 | Permalink The Holy Grail of Innovation: It Takes an Ensemble to Achieve Inspired Creativity"Have you ever seen really good improv? Did you walk out of the experience willing to swear that the actors had rehearsed it ahead of time or it was some kind of magic? I'll let you in on an actor’s secret: chances are the work was neither rehearsed nor magic! What's more likely is that the group performing the improv was a true ensemble of actors who had trained and practiced the principles of improv and were accustomed to working together." (Traci Lepore ~ UXmatters) Posted on December 06, 2010 | Permalink Content Strategy Will Make or Break Your ProcessKaren McGrane and Jeff Eaton presentation ~ "User experience is key, and applying the basic principals we know about human-centric design can help give information and how it’s processed the place it deserves. By factoring this into pre-planning, task optimization, and above all communication, a beautiful site can have beautiful content without the last-minute chaos state." (Duo Consulting) Posted on November 26, 2010 | Permalink Designing for Content Management Systems"Designing and indeed front-end development for a website that will have content edited by non-technical users poses some problems over and above those you will encounter when developing a site where you have full control over the output mark-up. However, most clients these days want to be able to manage their own content, so most designers will find that some, if not all, of their designs end up as templates in some kind of CMS." (Rachel Andrew ~ Smashing Magazine) Posted on November 22, 2010 | Permalink Applying Lessons from UML to UX"Software Engineering is typically much more formal than User Experience in they way they model an application before development begins. After pseudo code, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) is probably the most widely used modeling language among software engineers. It has developed from other object‑based analysis and design languages over a period of many years and provides software engineers with a visual language that describes the design of a system at multiple levels." (Peter Hornsby ~ UXmatters) Posted on November 22, 2010 | Permalink Winning in the Marketplace: How Much User Experience Effort Does It Take?"User experience encompasses all aspects of users’ interactions with a company, its services, and its products. Prioritizing user advocacy from the beginning of a product design process puts users at the center of the process and ensures their needs are foremost in all UX design decisions." (Sean Van Tyne ~ UXmatters) Posted on November 22, 2010 | Permalink On UX and advertising"Peter Merholz's rant The Pernicious Effects of Advertising and Marketing Agencies Trying To Deliver User Experience Design is bold, uncomfortable and dogmatic, as all rants should be." (Cennydd Bowles) Posted on November 21, 2010 | Permalink Pervasive Information Architecture: Designing Cross-Channel User Experiences"As physical and digital interactions intertwine, new challenges for digital product designers and developers, as well as, industrial designers and architects are materializing. While well versed in designing navigation, organization, and labelling of websites and software, professionals are faced the crucial challenge of how to apply these techniques to information systems that cross communication channels that link the digital world to the physical world." (Andrea Resmini and Luca Rosati ~ Pervasive IA) Posted on November 17, 2010 | Permalink IA Summit 2011, Denver CO"The IA Summit is the premier destination for those who practice, research and are interested in the structural design of shared information environments. Some call themselves information architects (and many don't) but all share a common desire to help people live better lives through meaningful experiences with information. (...) After 11 successful years bringing hundreds of practitioners together for five days of intense exchange of ideas and experiences, we pause to reflect on the state of information architecture and what is in store for this community of practice. As we continue to strive for more, we turn our focus to what can make us - as practitioners - and our practice, better." Posted on November 11, 2010 | Permalink UX Card Sort"If you are an Information Architect, User Experience Designer, Interaction Designer or similar and your job is designing digital interactive (web)sites, services or products then join in with the UX Card Sort! This card sort is a way of creating insight into what UX professionals have in common and what the differentiators are, based on your daily professional activities instead of discussing what a label such as IA/UXD/ID etc. should contain. The Card Sort does start though with the request to enter your job title as that might already identify existing clusters with a common label." (George Miles) Posted on November 03, 2010 | Permalink We're All Content Strategists Now (the video)"The "Best Careers 2009" issue of U.S. News and World Report gently mocked the user experience profession for its inability to agree on a name for itself. Indeed, many job titles seem like a mix-and-match game, mashing up words like "information" and "experience" and "architect" and "designer." And now "content strategy" comes around, looking for a seat at the UX table. Some say the profession fills a gap in our professional practices. Others argue that it's just a different name for the things that we already do. In this session, we'll discuss why UX needs content—and how UX practitioners of every flavor can put content strategy to work on their projects." (Karen McGrane ~ IDEA 2010) Posted on November 02, 2010 | Permalink Storytelling for UX: An Interview with Whitney Quesenbery and Kevin Brooks"This book looks across the full spectrum of user experience design to discover when and how to use stories to improve our products. Whether you are a researcher, designer, analyst, or manager, you will find ideas and techniques you can put to use in your practice." (Daniel Szuc ~ UXmatters) Posted on November 01, 2010 | Permalink The UX Design Education Scam"If you emerge from university today with a web design degree, chances are rather slim that you’re employable as a user experience or web designer. Maybe you learned a lot of stuff; it's just probably the wrong stuff. Congratulations, you've been defrauded. Hope it didn't cost you or your parents too much." (Andy Rutledge) Posted on October 26, 2010 | Permalink More on European UX Events"In Adaptive Path's newsletter of September 28, I shared my views on the European UX scene. In response, several people wrote to me with additions to the landscape. Below are the most interesting ones, followed by my impressions of 3 more European conferences: Euro IA, UX Russia and Design by Fire. And yes, I will count Russia as part of Europe in this respect." (Peter Boersma ~ Adaptive Path) Posted on October 19, 2010 | Permalink US UX versus EU UX – What’s the difference?"In response to questions from Amy Knox regarding US.UX and EU.UX, Søren Muus (creative director at FatDUX and co-initiator of ECUX) recently posted on the mail list of the Information Architecture Institute some interesting ideas in this matter. We are happy to republish his piece, because we find it food for debate." (European centre for user experience) Posted on October 11, 2010 | Permalink Information as a Material"This talk will discuss what it means to treat information as a material, the properties of information as a design material, the possibilities created by information as a design material, and approaches for designing with information. Information as a material enables The Internet of Things, object-oriented hardware, smart materials, ubiquitous computing, and intelligent environments." (Mike Kuniavsky ~ Kicker Studio D3) Posted on October 11, 2010 | Permalink Oliver Sacks on Empathy as a Path to Insight"Oliver Wolf Sacks is a British neurologist residing in New York City. He is a professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University, where he also holds the position of Columbia Artist. He previously spent many years on the clinical faculty of Yeshiva University's Albert Einstein College of Medicine." (HBR IdeaCast) Posted on October 08, 2010 | Permalink Making it suck"Making conventional interactions suck seems counter-intuitive and cruel. But there are plethora of products and services that aim to suck at common expectations for good reason. Among the many possibilities, things that suck can lead to strength, fun, good business and can introduce friction to prevent improper usage." (Cooper Journal) Posted on October 07, 2010 | Permalink Inspiration Beyond the Lab"Over the last ten years, both of us have read countless articles about innovation, entrepreneurship, and socially responsible ventures that change the world. The theme that appears to emerge time and time again is the importance of getting out of the office, visiting different cultures, looking outside the bubble we live in, and experiencing new adventures. But it wasn't until a recent vacation in Costa Rica, where Bryan had the opportunity to see rural farm workers using cell phones to talk with other farm workers—people who appeared to be very poor—that he fully realized the importance of understanding the world beyond that which we encounter on a daily basis." (Bryan McClain and Demetrius Madrigal ~ UXmatters) Posted on October 04, 2010 | Permalink Aligning UX Issues’ Levels of Severity with Business Objectives"Many of us in the field people now generally refer to as user experience have long used levels of severity as a means of indicating the criticality of a product’s or service’s usability issues to clients. Over the past several years, I’ve grown increasingly dissatisfied with the vague and somewhat solipsistic nature of the gradations UX professionals typically use to describe the severity of usability issues. High, medium, and low don't begin to sufficiently explain the potential brand and business impacts usability issues can have." (Paul J. Sherman ~ UXmatters) Posted on October 04, 2010 | Permalink Researcher-practitioner interaction update (UXRPI)"One thing that has been useful for me is the overall model of the problem space that emerged for me." (Keith Instone) - courtesy of resmini Posted on October 01, 2010 | Permalink UXpod: User Experience Podcast"The User Experience Podcast features a wide range of interviewees and commentary. Transcripts are available for some episodes, and more are being added." (Information & Design) Posted on September 30, 2010 | Permalink How to measure the effectiveness of web content?"(...) I can see two issues that make this a pretty difficult task, and it's the reason why the above three methods should not be used in isolation. In combination, they help tell the whole story. It is difficult to know what users really read on a page and it is difficult to isolate the effect of content changes from the other influencing factors on a page." (Rian van der Merwe ~ Elezea) Posted on September 27, 2010 | Permalink Gastronomy: A source of inspiration for user experience design"Today, I delivered my presentation at the EuroIA 2010 in Paris on the relation between my two passions: gastronomy and user experience design. Gastronomy: A source of inspiration for user experience design. "A crazy topic with a scary video clip of a positive eating experience", I said in my impersonation as Lars Von Trier!" (Composing Cook ~ FoodUX) Posted on September 26, 2010 | Permalink Global launch of Designing intranets: Creating sites that work"The definitive textbook for intranet teams on how to design intranets that work for staff. In 275 pages, this book walks through a practical user-centred approach to the design process, richly illustrating each step with full-colour screenshots from organisations across the globe." (James Robertson) Posted on September 21, 2010 | Permalink Leveraging User Data by Embedding UX Design Knowledge in Products"The role of data in a UX design process usually goes something like this: User researchers or UX designers gather data about users and their needs, using a variety of qualitative and quantitative approaches. They then analyze the data—often developing documentation that synthesizes the data, such as a task analysis or a set of personas. Finally, they use their analysis as a basis for making design decisions or influencing the strategy of the broader organization. Throughout this process, UX professionals mediate the relationships between the data that describes users and their requirements, design goals, and business objectives, seeking to align them as closely as possible. This article looks at how we can make this process of data analysis and design—or redesign—more effective by embedding UX design knowledge in computer systems." (Peter Hornsby ~ UXmatters) Posted on September 20, 2010 | Permalink Can Experience be Designed?"As in every other field there are con men that fool naive clients using experience design as a slogan. Some just make empty promises, some sell fluffy white papers, some use the slogan to hold pompous speeches, some just upsell naive clients with hot air. (...) Being an active facebook or Twitter user, a talented speaker, a winning sales man or a collector of UXD articles doesn’t make you an expert on user experience design." (Oliver Reichenstein ~ Information Architects) Posted on September 16, 2010 | Permalink Simplicity is Not Overrated, Just Misunderstood"Usability and user experience design is all about making things simple and easy to use. I never would've expected such a contradictory statement coming from some one who co-founded the Nielsen and Norman group, a firm that offers usability consulting, training seminars and research reports. This statement puts a dagger into the back of usability and user experience design." (UX Movement) Posted on September 13, 2010 | Permalink Design With Intent: How designers can influence behavior"The central idea behind UCD is that designers create experiences based on a rich and nuanced understanding of observed and implied user needs over time. UCD grew out of a functional, usability-oriented philosophy that began in the workplace, but it has since expanded beyond the purely functional to take into account many dimensions of the user’s experience, including emotional needs and motivations. Using the UCD approach, designers are one step removed from the action. We influence behavior and social practice from a distance through the products and services that we create based on our research and understanding of behavior. We place users at the center and develop products and services to support them. With UCD, designers are encouraged not to impose their own values on the experience." (Robert Fabricant ~ Design Observer) Posted on September 13, 2010 | Permalink Quality Assurance as Applied to User Experience Design"Of course verifying the integrity of the user experience is the role of the UX and design teams. While this may be true, many do not approach verifying all elements of a user experience with the same rigor as technical QA. This is in part because of easily made assumptions that once a design is near finalized or in development that it’s already been finalized from a UX standpoint. However, there are many elements of the user experience that need to be reviewed at this stage of the development process." (Catriona Cornett ~ inspireUX) Posted on September 08, 2010 | Permalink On defining UX"Information architects, interaction designers, researchers, academics. They are all UX professionals and not necessarily involved in the broad process, but are a cog in the machine. (...) Just like the debate about whether designers should be able to write HTML, this discussion is just not as black and white as every one is making out. There's a whole lot of grey in there." (Mark Boulton) Posted on September 07, 2010 | Permalink Why I think Ryan Carson doesn't believe in UX Professionals, and why I do"I think the reason Ryan thinks that 'UX professional' is a bullshit job title designed to 'over-charge naive clients' is because he's never actually been in the position to need one. If you look at Ryans' background, he worked for agencies in the late nineties and early noughties when the field of user experience was still in it's infancy. As such I suspect that he's never worked with a team of dedicated UX people." (Andy Budd) Posted on September 06, 2010 | Permalink Three Reasons Why Persuasive Design Isn’t Enough to Influence Change"To accomplish the good intentions of persuasive design, we need to do more than design to get people to act. We need to create content that influences people’s thinking in a positive way, motivates them to act, and makes acting easier. As the UX design industry pays more attention to content, we’ll be better prepared to influence what people do and think—and have a real chance at making the world a better place, online and off." (Coleen Jones ~ UXmatters) Posted on September 06, 2010 | Permalink Juicy Stories Sell Ideas"Stories are hot. And why not? We all know how to tell a story. Stories are a lot more interesting than most other ways of sharing information. And they work. Stories are a great way to introduce a concept in an imaginative way or sell an idea to your team or management." (Whitney Quesenbery and Kevin Brooks ~ UXmatters) Posted on September 06, 2010 | Permalink UX design framework: Interaction"Undoubtedly, interaction design is a design discipline that has become a defining element of UX. Though the preceding two quotes assert the alignment with a user's behaviour they do so here in relation to their interaction (the person and the artifact). In other words, it is the behaviour of the object in relation to the user. The following principles reassert this notion that many interaction design issues are born out of preconceptions of what a user expects to be able to do with the interface they are presented with." (User Pathways) Posted on September 05, 2010 | Permalink Designing Behavior in Interaction: Using Aesthetic Experience as a Mechanism for Design"As design moves into the realm of intelligent products and systems, interactive product behavior becomes an ever more prominent aspect of design, raising the question of how to design the aesthetics of such interactive behavior. To address this challenge, we developed a conception of aesthetics based on Pragmatist philosophy and translated it into a design approach. Our notion of Aesthetic Interaction consists of four principles: Aesthetic Interaction (1) has practical use next to intrinsic value, (2) has social and ethical dimensions, (3) has satisfying dynamic form, and (4) actively involves people's bodily, cognitive, emotional and social skills. Our design approach based on this notion is called 'designing for Aesthetic Interaction through Aesthetic Interaction', referring to the use of aesthetic experience as a design mechanism. We explore our design approach through a case study that involves the design of intelligent lamps and outlines the utilized design techniques. The paper concludes with a set of practical recommendations for designing the aesthetics of interactive product behavior." (Ross, P. R. & Wensveen, S. A. G. ~ International Journal of Design 4.2) Posted on August 31, 2010 | Permalink Don't Become A Digital Dinosaur: Design For The Space Between"As UX professionals, we need to extend our reach beyond just experiences for the Web and mobile applications. A website or mobile app might comprise just one interaction—one touchpoint—in the end-to-end experience that users have during their journey to complete their goals." (Samantha Starmer ~ UX magazine) Posted on August 30, 2010 | Permalink Why Great Ideas Can Fail"Designers are proud of their ability to innovate, to think outside the box, to develop creative, powerful ideas for their clients. Sometimes these ideas win design prizes. However, the rate at which these ideas achieve commercial success is low. Many of the ideas die within the companies, never becoming a product. Among those that become products, a good number never reach commercial success." (Donald A. Norman ~ Core77) Posted on August 26, 2010 | Permalink Jodi Forlizzi on Service Design"Interaction design encompasses human interaction with objects, people, environments and systems. It's not a widely held perspective outside of the Pittsburgh diaspora." (Jeff Howard ~ Design for Service) Posted on August 26, 2010 | Permalink Emotional Design with A.C.T.: Defining Emotion, Personality and Relationship (1/2)"In Part 1 of this two-part article, I'll be discussing how emotions command attention. Then, we'll dive deeper to explore how design elicits and communicates emotion and personality to users. Emotions result in the experience of pleasure or pain that commands attention. The different dimensions of emotion affect different aspects of behavior as well as communicating personality over time. In Part 2, I'll introduce a framework for describing the formation of relationships between people and the products they use." (Trevor van Gorp ~ Boxes and Arrows) Posted on August 24, 2010 | Permalink Personas: Explorations in Developing a Deep and Dimensioned Character"If we are going to begin to address these issues, we need to get at the root of the problem—our empathetic understanding of our users. Having empathy for users and understanding their needs doesn't come from reading words on a page. It doesn’t come from statistical analysis of demographics either. It comes from truly embodying and experiencing the character of a persona, so it becomes ingrained emotionally and physically in our memories. Actors understand this. From the time Stanislavski began teaching Method Acting - a process of transformation in which actors begin to take on the true nature of a character - actors have referred to this moment when they realize a character's emotional memory and have truly become the character as the moment of embodiment." (Traci Lepore ~ UXmatters) Posted on August 23, 2010 | Permalink The making of Undercover UX Design"Writing a book has been the most complex information architecture challenge of my life. The permutations in which you can sculpt, exclude, clarify and link information are staggering. No surprise then that we relied on our familiar design process, heading up the chain of goals, structure, content and surface. We appropriated the tools of our trade: personas, content analysis, user feedback and deep iteration—but it was trial and error that finally unearthed the process that worked for us." (Cennydd Bowles) Posted on August 19, 2010 | Permalink Supporting User Experience Throughout the Product Development Process"For most of us, the ideal when working on a product-development project would be to work with a group of like-minded professionals, each with their own areas of responsibility, but sharing the same overarching goal. Yet all too often in User Experience, we encounter unwarranted resistance to our ideas, making the product-development process much less efficient and adding to a project's costs. The apparent cost of involving User Experience early and throughout a product-development process becomes a series of hidden costs, resulting from project delays, incomplete requirements, and less than optimal products that result in higher error rates and reduced efficiency for users." (Peter Hornsby ~ UXmatters) Posted on July 19, 2010 | Permalink Design Is a Process, Not a Methodology"(..) I'll provide an overview of a product design process, then discuss some indispensable activities that are part of an effective design process, with a particular focus on those activities that are essential for good interaction design. Although this column focuses primarily on activities that are typically the responsibility of interaction designers, this discussion of the product design process applies to all aspects of UX design." (Pabini Gabriel-Petit ~ UXmatters) Posted on July 19, 2010 | Permalink How content strategy fits into the user experience"I just presented a talk to the Content Strategy Seattle group on how content strategy fits into the user experience. Here are my slides and a videocast for the talk." (Nick Finck) Posted on July 16, 2010 | Permalink The ROI of UX: Proving the Value of User Experience Design"I was recently asked to describe what a user experience designer does in less than 7 words. I could only narrow it down to 16: A UX Designer designs or enhances products, services and environments based on a holistic consideration of the user’s perspective. Pulling it all together, the tactics described in this presentation are intended to help you prove the ROI of UX. To me, that means: Proving to our clients and potential clients that designing their products or services with a holistic consideration of the user's perspective will reap larger returns than other potential business investments." (Erin Young) Posted on July 14, 2010 | Permalink What If Customer Experience Has No ROI?"Customer experience is not an altruistic endeavor; executive teams should focus on it because they believe that it will help their organization’s long-term business results. The bottom line: Improving customer experience is (often) good business." (Customer Experience Matters) Posted on July 14, 2010 | Permalink Where business analysis and user experience intersect: The benefits of collaboration"The real benefits of BA/UX collaboration is making a product users want to use! A product that rocks their world! A product that even makes your company money! A product that improves work processes, reduces errors, gets the information to the user the quickest, or whatever your goals are. It will achieve these objectives simply by focusing on the users’ needs and understanding how they relate to your business goals and needs. Oh, not to mention that it will also result in BAs and UX professionals with expanded skill sets and a new lense to look through!" (Evantage) Posted on July 13, 2010 | Permalink Six Questions from Kicker: Kim Goodwin"It wasn’t when I got my first job as a designer, I felt I had to achieve some degree of skill before I deserved the label. I'm not even sure where I had set that internal bar, but it took at least a couple of years. The beauty of interaction design being a relatively new profession is that it’s been easy for people to get into the field. The problem with interaction design being a relatively new profession is the same thing…there are lots of people with the job title who have great intentions and no idea what they're doing. This can affect perceptions of the profession as a whole, which is one of many reasons I think it's important to evangelize good techniques." (Kicker Studio) Posted on July 13, 2010 | Permalink Agile UX and The One Change That Changes Everything"(...) changing your attitude can be much easier if you have a clear and concrete goal you are working toward. And one of the most common challenges I come across when talking to UX designers transitioning to Agile is that they do not have a clear understanding of the journey. It is not clear what is different and what remains the same. It is not clear where to begin in making a change." (Anders Ramsay) Posted on July 09, 2010 | Permalink Needs, affect, and interactive products: Facets of user experience"Subsumed under the umbrella of User Experience, practitioners and academics of Human–Computer Interaction look for ways to broaden their understanding of what constitutes 'pleasurable experiences' with technology. The present study considered the fulfilment of universal psychological needs, such as competence, relatedness, popularity, stimulation, meaning, security, or autonomy, to be the major source of positive experience with interactive technologies." (Hassenzahl, M., Diefenbach, S., and Göritz, A. ~ Experience Design) Posted on July 07, 2010 | Permalink Maturing a Practice"The authors of this paper position pratice-led research (PLR) as an effective agent in the transformation of the seemingly inherent and natural acts found in casual practice into the formal arrangement of accepted truths and regulated practices of a discipline for user experience design (UXD) and information architecture (IA) communities of practice. The paper does not intend to exhaustively define discourse analysis, discipline practice or pratice-led research per se, but rather to introduce practitioners and the fields of UX and IA at large to the basic concepts of PLR so as to begin establishing discussion and awareness." (Hobbs, J., Fenn, T., & Resmini, A. ~ Journal of Information Architecture No. 3) Posted on July 01, 2010 | Permalink Twelve emerging best practices for adding UX work to Agile development"If the user experience practice in your company was weak before Agile, Agile development isn't going to help things. If your user experience practice was strong before Agile, it'll remain strong after Agile, and evolve to adapt." (Agile Product Design) Posted on June 29, 2010 | Permalink Anatomy of a Noob: Why your Mom Suck at Computers"The words metaphor and intuitive are often used in UX. They are the metrics that we use to judge the quality of a solution. But is this quality really as universal as we might like to believe? (...) Understanding something intuitively really means that you understand it holistically. If you understand it holistically you can fill in the gaps. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make your design intuitive or improve on it, not at all. Just understand that you are doing it for the natives not for the noobs." (Thomas Petersen ~ Black&White) Posted on June 23, 2010 | Permalink UX Myths: Debunking user experience misconceptions"(...) the most frequent user experience design misconceptions and explains why they don't hold true. And you don't have to take our word for it, we'll show you lots of researches and articles from design and usablity gurus." (Zoltán Gócza and Zoltán Kollin) Posted on June 23, 2010 | Permalink Agile+UX: Six strategies for more agile user experience"Six ways to be more agile and better integrate user experience and information architecture into agile development teams." (Austin Govella ~ Thinking and Making) Posted on June 23, 2010 | Permalink Zombie Personas"This is by far the nerdiest episode we ever did, so fasten your seat belts. In his session at UXcamp, Tom said: "Personas – love 'em or hate 'em – you can't not use 'em. Either you have zombies, or you have living ones." In this recording of his session he talks about different kinds of zombies like Mirror Personas, Undead Personas, Unicorn Personas or Stupid User Personas. He gives advice on how to avoid these fellas and how to make good use of living personas during a project. As a bonus, Tom explains why 37signals doesn't need personas at all." (UX Café) Posted on June 22, 2010 | Permalink The Importance of a Focused User Experience Strategy"An important aspect of user-centered design is identifying a strategy for how you will support an experience that addresses user needs and business goals. It is critical to remember that you need to focus your website’s strategy based on experiences that are relevant and valuable in context of the services your organization provides." (inspireUX) Posted on June 22, 2010 | Permalink User Experience Balance Scorecard"Customers have experiences with an organization’s products and services regardless of whether the organization is consciously managing them. A good user experience delights customers—increasing adoption, retention, loyalty, and, most important, revenue. And a poor user experience discourages customers from using a product or service and drives them to the competition—eventually, making a product offering unviable." (Sean Van Tyne ~ UXmatters) Posted on June 21, 2010 | Permalink Ethnography in UX"On my current project, I'm designing and implementing a framework for business that provides workflow management and supports information gathering and reporting. While there may be a software component further down the track, for now the technology is taking the form of procedures, reporting templates, and guidance material. This technology is both intellectual and social. Its goal is to support teams within the organization, and it requires people to work together. The biggest challenge with designing and implementing such technology is not creating code or a user interface, but ensuring its compatibility with team dynamics. This is where ethnography comes in." (Nathanael Boehm ~ UXmatters) Posted on June 21, 2010 | Permalink Favorite UX & Technology Blogs"When I presented this question to the Ask UXmatters panel of experts, I had expected to have much overlap among their responses. However, as you can see, our experts’ favorites include a great variety of blogs and other news sources." (UXmatters) Posted on June 21, 2010 | Permalink Architecture and User Experience: An Ecology of Use"Over the past several months I've proposed Architecture differs from design in its strategic and political positioning. In the last article, I suggested User Experience Architecture is at its best when it forces the business to question its assumptions about its market, its offerings, the technologies it depends on, and ultimately its vision. Do all businesses benefit equally from a User Experience Architecture? When is the time, effort and cost valuable, and when is it unnecessary? Hasn't business done just fine for the past several thousands of years without a need for a User Experience Architecture? Why now?" (CHIFOO) Posted on June 21, 2010 | Permalink Engagement, Entertainment, or Get The Task Done: Cognitive, Visual, and Motor Loads in UX Design"Before the days of websites and user experience, the interaction designer's job was focused. The term wasn't user experience, it was usability, and there was one goal: make it simpler and easier for users to get their tasks done. The design wasn't of websites, but software applications. 99% of the software applications were being used by people to get something done: write a report, analyze financial data, or sell an apartment building. There were lots of constraints on what the technology could do, and most of the technology was largely unusable for the everyday user who was not a computer expert. It took a lot of negotiation to make any interface changes, since programming was cumbersome and every change meant someone had to rewrite programming code." (Susan Weinschenk - UX Magazine) courtesy of janjursa Posted on June 18, 2010 | Permalink What every UX professional needs to know about statistics and usability tests"Do you like computers, but hate math? Would you love to work on creating cutting-edge technology, but don’t think you have the quantitative aptitude to be a programmer or electrical engineer? Then become a user experience professional! If you can count to 5 (the number of users in a usability test), then you already know all the math you'll need! Everything else is art! I bet you're good at art, aren't you?" (Stat 101) courtesy of usanews Posted on June 17, 2010 | Permalink Master user experience design"Craig Grannell talks to UX experts to demystify the process behind web design and development's fastest-growing and potentially most important industry." (.net magazine) Posted on June 17, 2010 | Permalink The Importance of Copywriting in Web Design"Designers often neglect to focus on both well-written copy and structuring a design so that it highlights the copy on the page. Today we'll discuss why copywriting is so important, who needs to learn it, and how to create content-centric designs." (Joshua Johnson) Posted on June 15, 2010 | Permalink The Problem with Great Ideas"Even great ideas have a limited shelf life. Bill Buxton has some stern words of advice for those looking to rest on their laurels." (Business Week) Posted on June 10, 2010 | Permalink Beyond design: Creating positive user experiences"Good user experience isn't just about good design. Learn how to create a positive user experience by being fast, open, engaged, surprising, polite, and, well... being yourself. Chock full of examples from the web and beyond, this talk is a practical introduction for developers who are passionate about user experience but may not have a background in design." (Google I/O 2010) Posted on June 09, 2010 | Permalink From Industrial Design to User Experience: The heritage and evolving role of experience-driven design"In this article, I want to share some thoughts about user experience design, UX practice today, and its parallels to industrial design practice. In efforts to continue the conversation about the true fit of UX as a growing specialization, I will attempt to position it within the landscape of established design disciplines. I will also to raise questions and considerations to entertain as UX emerges from its software-related origins and grows into strategic leadership across design disciplines. This is neither a manifesto nor a hard-lined stance on UX; rather just some ideas to help carry the collective discussion forward." (Mark Baskinger - UX Magazine) Posted on June 09, 2010 | Permalink (Digital) Experience"(...) if we start with the concept of experience as an event, the common historical lineage of these distinct understandings reveals itself. We are interested in this historical lineage, and would like to explain 'digital experience' as a historically developing category." (Ronald E. Day and Hamid R. Ekbia ~ First Monday Volume 15, Number 6) Posted on June 08, 2010 | Permalink Lou Rosenfeld Talks Past, Present And Future Of User Experience Design"I had the pleasure of interviewing Lou and, I have to admit, I was surprised by what I learned about my own role in the world of User Experience Design. We all contribute to the Big Tent of User Experience, and the future is very bright." (Anthony Viviano ~ Three Minds) Posted on June 04, 2010 | Permalink The How, What, and Why framework for Experience Design"Many companies have used the phrase "content is king" in recent years to talk about the importance of the material their sites ship. I heard this phrase first at Adobe Max a few years ago and have since noticed it in a number of places online. I think this is near to the mark but not quite there. In our framework here I've rephrased it as "The 'why' is king" because it puts the user at the center. Your content is pretty important to your site, but without users it's kind of worthless. The reason your users are coming to your site is of preeminent importance - that should drive your content. Then your content can drive your presentation, etc. etc." (R.J. Owen ~ Inside RIA) Posted on June 02, 2010 | Permalink Top 5 reasons why The Customer is Always Right is wrong"The fact is that some customers are just plain wrong, that businesses are better of without them, and that managers siding with unreasonable customers over employees is a very bad idea, that results in worse customer service." (Alexander Kjerulf ~ Chief Happiness Officer) Posted on May 27, 2010 | Permalink Usability Ain't Everything: A Response to Jakob Nielsen's iPad Usability Study"The conclusion of the Nielsen Norman Group's April 2010 study of iPad usability is that it has problems and more standards are the solution. Yes, the iPad is imperfect, but resorting to standards as the solution is an antiquated reaction that fails to consider how interactive systems have evolved. We're not usability engineers anymore (not most of us, anyway); we're user experience designers. Experience is more than just usability." (Fred Beecher ~ Johnny Holland) Posted on May 26, 2010 | Permalink Don Norman at IIT Design Research Conference 2010"There is a great gulf between the research community and practice. Moreover, there is often a great gull between what designers do and what industry needs. We believe we know how to do design, but this belief is based more on faith than on data, and this belief reinforces the gulf between the research community and practice. I find that the things we take most for granted are seldom examined or questioned. As a result, it is often our most fundamental beliefs that are apt to be wrong. In this talk, deliberately intended to be controversial, I examine some of our most cherished beliefs. Examples: design research helps create breakthrough products; complexity is bad and simplicity good; there is a natural chain from research to product." (Videos of the IIT Institute of Design) Posted on May 26, 2010 | Permalink The Elegant Architecture of the Customer Experience"People are the most vital asset when designing and crafting a unique customer experience. Disciplined execution requires a robust set of processes to ensure efficiency and uniformity and keep pace with the burgeoning scalability requirements of the enterprise. Automated systems are vital to augment productivity of operations and to fulfill accuracy, efficiency, effectiveness, reliability and scalability needs." (E-Commerce News) Posted on May 25, 2010 | Permalink Experience Design: Technology for all the right reasons"The book clarifies what experience is, and highlights five crucial aspects and their implications for the design of interactive products. It provides reasons why we should bother with an experiential approach, and presents a detailed working model of experience useful for practitioners and academics alike. It closes with the particular challenges of an experiential approach for design. The book presents its view as a comprehensive, yet entertaining blend of scientific findings, design examples, and personal anecdotes." (Marc Hassenzahl ~ Experience Design) Posted on May 18, 2010 | Permalink Special Issue: Experience Design – Applications and Reflections"Already last year, Mark Blythe, Effie Law and I edited a special issue on Experience Design in the New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia. It features a more designerly perspective on and some reflections about Experience Design itself and its relation to common approaches and views in Human-Computer Interaction and Design." (Marc Hassenzahl ~ Experience Design) Posted on May 18, 2010 | Permalink Designing User Experiences for Children"Creating a great experience for Web site users should always take the users’ perspectives into consideration. While a user's age can be a contributing factor in a design's success for a particular user, demographic information should not trump design conventions. Then, why do UX designers struggle when creating Web sites for children?" (Traci Lepore ~ UXmatters) Posted on May 17, 2010 | Permalink Playful User Experiences"As user experience designers, we tend to focus on getting users to the end of the journeys we've designed for them as quickly and effortlessly as possible. We try to take them from point A to point B in the shortest possible time. To me, it sometimes feels a little like we’re trying to get a child to quickly undergo a blood test before he notices that it hurts." (Shira Gutgold ~ UXmatters) Posted on May 17, 2010 | Permalink The Anatomy of a Website"Many people find it hard to picture a website as more than a bundle of content. This often makes explaining the mixture of languages used and the way everything comes together a difficult task. Because what makes up a website can be related and linked to the physiology of a human body, this article's comparison should help clients and beginners alike understand the complex nature of a site’s creation and components." (Alexander Dawson - Six Revisions) Posted on May 10, 2010 | Permalink Peter Merholz: The Want Interview"The founder and president of Adaptive Path explains why they're shifting away from 'user experience' and towards 'experience design'. He celebrates 360 design strategies through successful 'customer journeys' by Apple and Southwest Airlines and advocates for marketing and advertisement becoming the first touchpoint of such. He also outlines the history of personal computing in three 'waves' - and predicts the fourth." (Want Magazine) Posted on May 05, 2010 | Permalink Design Patterns for Mobile Faceted Search: Part II"This month's column covers strategies for making people more aware of the filtering options that are available to them, as well as methods of improving transitions between the various states a user encounters in a search user interface." (Greg Nudelman ~ UXmatters) Posted on May 03, 2010 | Permalink Achieving Design Focus: An Approach to Design Workshops"Stakeholders with business, design, and technology viewpoints can pull products in different design directions—sometimes without knowing how the design work fits into an overall strategy. This can leave stakeholders feeling lost and unhappy. Creating a focus around design goals and asking and answering the hard design questions as a team is an effective way of coalescing a team around one design direction. At the same time, it can create a more optimal and fun working environment. In this article, we'll describe a design workshop approach that can help you find that design focus." (Daniel Szuc and Josephine Wong - UXmatters) Posted on May 03, 2010 | Permalink Enhancing User Research with Emerging Technology"As technology evolves and new gadgets and electronics emerge in the marketplace, our options for the use of technology in conducting our user research continue to expand. The processes through which we have long gathered data—such as surveys and interviews—are no longer the only ways in which we can understand people and how they respond to our clients’ products and services. As professional user researchers, we have the opportunity to devise new and innovative ways of more accurately understanding user experience through the use of technology." (Bryan McClain and Demetrius Madrigal ~ UXmatters) Posted on May 03, 2010 | Permalink Developers, UX is not UI, learn that and stop trivializing!"And while this might be just my personal feeling, I am under impression that this kind of misunderstanding and trivialization of UX comes mostly from the developer-centric cultures like ones from Microsoft, Sun and IBM. Reason more for those companies to keep investing and educating all parties involved – you owe that to the customers and to the community of practice! Good things have been done so far – but obviously much more needs to be done." (UX Passion) Posted on April 29, 2010 | Permalink The Promise of Using UI Patterns for Large Software Packages Revisited"In this case study, we reflect on how a UI pattern-based design for building standard business software affects the user experience and the user-centered design process. We learned that pattern-based design does not optimize the user experience per se. Additional factors, such as user-centered design, prototyping tools, and management support determine the success or failure of the pattern-based approach. Interweaving the factors in the right way is a prerequisite for success." (Annette Stotz and Udo Arend - SAPDesignGuild) Posted on April 26, 2010 | Permalink Intentional Communication: Expanding our Definition of User Experience Design"Design and content. Content and design. It's impossible (and stupid) to argue over which one is more important than the other - which should come first, which is more difficult or 'strategic'. They need each other to provide context, meaning, information, and instruction in any user experience (UX)." (Kristina Halvorson - interactions XVII.3) Posted on April 26, 2010 | Permalink User Experience Metrics"These days many sophisticated metrics are built into web analytics packages, but few tools help us recognize which are really measuring that holy grail of UX: user engagement." (52 Weeks of UX) Posted on April 26, 2010 | Permalink UX Groundswell"Because I never stop thinking about wicked design problems or obsessing about user experiences, I decided to share my ideas here." (K. Bella Martin) Posted on April 22, 2010 | Permalink Want Magazine: Coming Soon"Want Magazine was born out of love for new understanding of man-made experiences (...) and our resulting motivation for contributing in return with enriching experiences of our own." (David Gómez-Rosado) Posted on April 20, 2010 | Permalink Industry trends in prototyping"Prototypes are meant to be a cost-effective way of experimenting with ideas. They are generally considered part of the pre-planning phase, rather than part of the construction or manufacturing process that results in the final product—although obviously the discoveries made during the process of prototyping should ultimately both inform and shape the construction process." (Dave Cronin ~ Cooper) Posted on April 20, 2010 | Permalink Ubiquitous Service Design"Decades later, these concepts remain relevant, and yet we must adapt for new contexts. As Glushko and Tabas explain, today's service systems may include interrelated sub-systems (e.g., person-to-person, self-service) across multiple locations, devices, and channels; and customer satisfaction is influenced by the extent of integration and consistency across those channels." (Peter Morville ~ Semantic Studios) Posted on April 19, 2010 | Permalink CHI 2010: Growing the UX Management Community"As User Experience matures as a discipline and grows in influence in the business community, UX leaders need to support one another by sharing their insights with their counterparts in other organizations, as well as with the educators molding the next generation of UX leaders at universities offering Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) programs. Indeed, the success of UX design and research initiatives within organizations depends significantly on how UX leaders position their teams and partner and build support with other senior leaders in their organizations." (Jim Nieters ~ UXmatters) Posted on April 19, 2010 | Permalink The Process Police"No process guarantees success. If there were a process that guaranteed happy users everyone would be using it. Nobody gets it right every time. Design doesn’t work like that. It’s iterative, responsive, ever-changing. You have to react as much as plan. You have to change your process on the fly to react to the marketplace. That's why we need to optimize for what's most important, a happy user, and do whatever it takes to make it happen, process be damned." (52 Weeks of UX) Posted on April 19, 2010 | Permalink IA Summit 10: Whitney Hess Keynote"In her keynote closing the 2010 IA Summit, Whitney asks if our work is just our job or our passion. To really make the difference we seek, our practice needs to be our calling. The UX community is united because of a common mission: We empower people to become self-reliant and more resourceful, organized, social, and relaxed. We don’t do it for them, they do it for themselves." (Jeff Parks - Boxes and Arrows) Posted on April 16, 2010 | Permalink The perils of persuasion"The success of UCD has sustained demand for user experience design skills, and the land rush has continued in 2010. UX is becoming a cookie cutter add-on for digital agencies and I rarely meet a web designer now who doesn’t claim UX proficiency, although not all can articulate what that means. And it’s not just the designers: I also see back-end developers, SEO professionals and marketers rapidly appending these two magical letters to their CVs." (Cennydd Bowles) Posted on April 16, 2010 | Permalink The riddle of experience vs. memory"Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our 'experiencing selves' and our 'remembering selves' perceive happiness differently. This new insight has profound implications for economics, public policy -- and our own self-awareness." (TED2010) Posted on April 14, 2010 | Permalink The Design Process and the Scientific Method"The design process is messy, difficult to explain and sell, and its results are not certain from the beginning. People want more predictability." (Dan Saffer - Kicker Studio) Posted on April 09, 2010 | Permalink Designing with Lenses"A design lens allows you to view your user experience design from the perspective of a single design principle. Lenses were originally created for game design but are just as powerful for user experience design." (Bill Scott and Theresa Neill) Posted on April 07, 2010 | Permalink Using a Collaborative Parallel Design Process"Genetic algorithms essentially mimic evolutionary biology to find optimal solutions. Initially, they select a population of solutions based on some evaluation criteria, then use some subset of that population—the fittest members—as breeding stock for the subsequent generation of solutions. This process continues for multiple generations, each getting closer to an optimal solution. This article describes my experience with parallel design and discusses how to make parallel design more collaborative." (Mike Myles - UXmatters) Posted on April 05, 2010 | Permalink Service design goes mainstream"Reading with interest an unfolding flameup at Design for Service caused by Jeff Howard's post entitled UX Rockstars need not apply. The gist of the conversation is a few folk getting all hot under the collar about disciplines and domains. Especially the emerging challenges in the US by this new fangled idea of Service Design and it seems to be freaking people out. Which is a good thing in my book. The argument was instigated by sweeping statement from an interview with Jesse James Garret of Adaptive Path, that went like this (...)" (Paul Sims - Made by Many) Posted on April 01, 2010 | Permalink Case study: Agile and UCD working together"Large scale websites require groups of specialists to design and develop a product that will be a commercial success. To develop a completely new site requires several teams to collaborate and this can be difficult. Particularly as different teams may be working with different methods. This case study shows how the ComputerWeekly user experience team integrated with an agile development group. It's important to note the methods we used do not guarantee getting the job done. People make or break any project. Finding and retaining good people is the most important ingredient for success." (James Kelway - Boxes and Arrows) Posted on March 31, 2010 | Permalink Fred Wilson’s 10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps"In February 2010 Fred Wilson, a New York based tech investor, spoke at the annual Future of Web Apps Miami conference. His talk, clocking in at just under 30 minutes, looks at his top 10 principles for creating a successful web app. A full transcript is available too." (Keir Whitaker - Think Vitamin) Posted on March 30, 2010 | Permalink Rock Stars Need Not Apply"The world needs talented, passionate service designers but it can do without rock stars. Service designers are humble. They embrace participatory values, particularly the idea that we should be designing with people rather than designing for them. The practical upshot is an evolutionary divergence in approach to research, sketching, design and prototyping." (Jeff Howard) Posted on March 29, 2010 | Permalink Leonard Cohen versus Jesse James Garrett"I think we should be called information architects and that it’s easier to talk about IA with people outside our field in terms of A than to talk with them about UXD in terms of X or D. Mr. Garrett thinks we are now and have always been user experience designers, that UXD is easier for muggles to understand, and that those of us who specialize in and choose the titles of IA or IxD are either fools or liars." (Dan Klyn - Wildly Appropriate) Posted on March 26, 2010 | Permalink Interaction10: How to Design an Experience for Experience Designers?"Collaborating with a large team of designers, who all worked as volunteers, we decided to approach the conference experience as designers creating a service, taking every aspect of the experience into account. We thought through the lifecycle of the event, in light of the needs and motivations of the 600+ participants at the event, in their various roles from attendees and speakers to sponsors, volunteers, and conference staff. We used our empathy as designers to imagine what was important to each user at each stage of the experience. And while not everything worked out exactly as we planned, based on feedback, I think conference was a success. Here are a few things we learned along the way." (Jennifer Bove - Fast Company) Posted on March 26, 2010 | Permalink UX at Year X"Adaptive Path co-founder and principal Jesse James Garrett's accolades range from creating seminal works on user experience to coining the term AJAX. Ahead of his UX London presentation, he talked to us about The Elements of User Experience a decade on, how service design relates to user experience, and his pick of future UX rock stars. (...) the phenomenal success Apple has had in the last ten years has been a double-edged sword for us." (Jeroen van Geel - Johnny Holland Magazine) Posted on March 24, 2010 | Permalink Taming Goliath: Selling UX to Large Companies 1/2"Large companies are the financial backbone of the web industry, but their size and complex organizational structure can make them challenging to work with. Having worked on both sides of the fence, I've seen great ideas become the casualties of this struggle between the proverbial David and Goliath, as agencies or freelancers meet face-to-face with Big Business to create web sites. Closing the door to large companies means missing out on important revenue, good work, and more people using our designs, so how can we make large companies work for us?" (Alan Colville - UX Booth) Posted on March 23, 2010 | Permalink UX Design versus UI Development"One of the more interesting tensions I have observed - since getting into user experience design about five years ago - is the almost sibling-rivalry tension between UX Designers and User Interface (UI) Developers. At the heart of the tension between them is the fact that most UI Developers consider themselves - and sometimes rightfully so - to be UI Designers. The coding part is like Picasso’s having to understand how to mix paint. It's not the value they add, just the mechanics of delivering the creative concepts." (Mike Hughes - UXmatters) Posted on March 22, 2010 | Permalink Sustainable User Research"Traditionally, user research involves directly observing and talking with people in the context of their work or play. Either researchers travel to observe participants in their natural environments or participants travel to a usability lab or focus-group facility. How better to understand how people use a product or technology than to observe them using it firsthand?" (Jim Ross - UXmatters) Posted on March 22, 2010 | Permalink There Is No Such Thing As Jesse James Garrett"The president of a firm that's synonymous with User Experience and who literally 'wrote the book' on the elements of User Experience making an impassioned call for everybody who’s called information architect or interaction designer to change their business cards to omit mention of these competing paradigms, and then insisting that the way your firm does its work is different than every other kind of design approach that’s come before it? It's a sell job, if not a sales pitch. I think he doth protest too much." (Dan Klyn - Wildly Appropriate) Posted on March 21, 2010 | Permalink How UX can get anything they want"When it comes to the world of UX, designers, usability engineers, and the rest, they tend to complain about how little power they have, but spend little time doing skill development in how to gain influence and power. The average designer or IA would be better served by going to a sales conference and learning sales and pitching skills, than going to yet another design event. They're already good at design, but they’re probably not very good at pitching design ideas to non-designers." (Scott Berkun) Posted on March 18, 2010 | Permalink Preso: User Experience Will Make or Break Social Business"User experience is the art and science of designing digital products that people want to use." (Karen McGrane - Bond Art+Science) Posted on March 17, 2010 | Permalink The (Near) Future of Managing Experiences"What's your plan for the near future? If you're like most in our field, the path forward is murky and no one at your office is handing out maps. We'll look at the trends and tactics that matter, so you can make your own map for moving ahead." (Brandon Schauer - MX Managing Experience 2010) Posted on March 16, 2010 | Permalink We learn from stories and experience"When it comes to learning and genuinely retaining something, nothing beats experiences. Formal educational or speaking settings don't always allow for actual hands-on experience with the content, but almost every learning situation — including presentation in various forms — does permit the use of stories." (Garr Reynolds - Presentation Zen) Posted on March 16, 2010 | Permalink SXSW Live: Beyond the Desktop"Some people think it's just the hardware, but it’s not. It's also about the software, the context, and the overall user experience." (Michael Leis) Posted on March 16, 2010 | Permalink The Virtues of a UX Professional"UX professionals can be an egotistical lot. We like to think that only certain people with certain qualities can do what we do. Not everybody has the right stuff to fly to the moon or storm the beaches at Normandy. And in a similar way (sort of) not everybody has what it takes to create great user experiences." (Colman Walsh - IQBlog) Posted on March 11, 2010 | Permalink User Experience Books Free to Read Online"The truly worldwide reach of the Web has brought with it a new realisation among computer scientists and industry professionals of the enormous importance of usability and user interface design. In the last ten years, much has become understood about what works in user interfaces from a usability perspective, and what does not." (Simon Whatley) Posted on March 11, 2010 | Permalink Can you mix Agile and UX?"Here's my open transparent written exploration of how I am navigating this concept. (...) I think the concept of Agile is fine, its the execution of it that I think is where the story kind of starts to fall a little to the way side, I think from a UX standpoint you really need to outline the features ahead but do so in a way that is suited to a ready, aim, fire model." (Scott Barnes) Posted on March 11, 2010 | Permalink The State Of Customer Experience 2010"Only 11% have a very disciplined approach to customer experience." (Bruce Temkin - Customer Experience Matters) Posted on February 26, 2010 | Permalink Surprise as a design strategy
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