Just took an interesting survey by Nielsen / Norman on my career in User Experience. Results will be used to help others entering the field know how to prepare and what to expect. Report will be free to all.
posted by
ted
on Monday, Apr 29, 2013
Free book download: Mindfire 1.1. Scott is an engaging and inventive speaker and writer. I haven’t read all of these essays, but those I have ring true regarding the creative process and innovation.
posted by
ted
on Wednesday, Mar 20, 2013
Sculpture at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Park in Seattle. Re-posted from last year, in honor of the holiday and the man.
When we lived in Seattle, we would usually go to this park on Martin Luther King Day to honor this great man and talk to our kids about what he stood for. I Have Dream must stand as one of the greatest and most inspiring speeches ever.
posted by
ted
on Monday, Jan 21, 2013
Connecting (Full Film) from Bassett & Partners on Vimeo.
The 18 minute “Connecting” documentary is an exploration of the future of Interaction Design and User Experience from some of the industry’s thought leaders. As the role of software is catapulting forward, Interaction Design is seen to be not only increasing in importance dramatically, but also expected to play a leading role in shaping the coming “Internet of things.” Ultimately, when the digital and physical worlds become one, humans along with technology are potentially on the path to becoming a “super organism” capable of influencing and enabling a broad spectrum of new behaviors in the world.
posted by
shane
on Monday, Jan 14, 2013
Tonight at midnight ends Optimal Workshop’s Designer’s Toolkit sale. We’ve used a number of these tools, and gotten good value out of them. For $1990, here’s what you get in the toolkit:
- OptimalSort for card sorting – 12 month subscription
- Treejack for tree testing – 12 month subscription
- Chalkmark for first click testing – 12 month subscription
- 4 books from Rosenfeld Media
- 3 remote user tests with UserTesting.com
- 6 webinars on the tools above
- UXPin Web Design Kit
- UXPin Wireframing App (first 20 purchasers)
- Moleskine Evernote Smart Notebook
- Stainless Steel Sharpie
- A stack of Optimal Workshop Post-it notes
posted by
ted
on Wednesday, Nov 28, 2012
Enjoyed this article by co-worker Tom Johnson on Writing in the Trenches. For many of the points, you could replace “Writing” with “Designing”; if you are not out there where your users are, how can you design successfully for them?
posted by
ted
on Monday, Oct 29, 2012
I enjoyed reading A Loose Heuristic for Mobile Design on UXBooth. The full article is worth the 5 minutes it will take to read, but here’s most of the heuristics in bullet form [with a few comments by me in brackets]:
- Simplicity is a requirement [not just a “good idea”]
- Balance brevity and comprehension [don’t throw the baby out with the bath water by stripping out necessary context]
- Understand, then optimize, your core value proposition [don’t try to do everything your desktop version does]
- “Where” is more important than “who” [understand physical context]
- Assume terrible dexterity [favorite quote: “give it to a young/drunk/old person and see how they do.”]
- The footer is a dead zone [don’t waste time on it!]
- Assume distracted, disrupted, and intermittent use
- Good experience is a subset of performance [it’s gotta be snappy]
- Provide access to the “desktop” version [like it or not, the “non-optimized” version will still work better for some people, depending on familiarity, performance, device, etc.]
- Test on as many devices as possible
posted by
ted
on Wednesday, Oct 24, 2012
“Putting the product in the customer’s hand. Demos. Knowledgeable staff that can compare across brands, give context on the product class, and show how the thing works. Why not a cooking demo, right there in the store? Not once a week: immediately, on the spot. Show customers why this is the best choice.”
Mark Hurst, in a great article on what brick-and-mortars must do to compete with online retailers like Amazon— not by trying to replicate Amazon in the store, but by providing what an online retailer CAN’T.
posted by
ted
on Wednesday, Oct 17, 2012
Great poster on why you fix bugs as soon as you find them. Many of the same cases could be made for usability issues (at least the medium to large sized ones). Here’s the short list (via uTest):
- Unfixed bugs camouflage other bugs. (So true for usability issues! This is why I love RITE testing and similar methods; you get those Big Rocks out of the way so you can discover others.)
- Unfixed bugs suggest quality isn’t important. (Amen, especially with regards to usability issues.)
- Discussing unfixed bugs is a waste of time.
- Unfixed bugs lead to duplicate effort.
- Unfixed bugs lead to unreliable metrics.
- Unfixed bugs distract the entire team.
- Unfixed bugs hinder short-notice releases.
- Unfixed bugs lead to inaccurate estimates.
- Fixing familiar code is easier than unfamiliar code.
- Fixing a bug today costs less than tomorrow. (Very true.)
posted by
ted
on Wednesday, Sep 19, 2012
Wow—a free online course from Stanford on Human-Computer Interaction, taught by Scott Klemmer! Covers the basics of both design and evaluation. Might have to check that out… (Via Justin Hamilton, user research intern extraordinaire.)
posted by
ted
on Tuesday, Sep 18, 2012
Enjoyed this article by Chris Risdon on
Experience Maps. A great combination of vision, model of current experience, and design opportunities. I’ve done some things like this before and seen great value, but never as complete or compelling.
posted by
ted
on Wednesday, Aug 15, 2012
Good post from Jakob Nielsen on the relationship between SEO and usability, including ways in which they complement each other and the ways in which they conflict.
posted by
ted
on Monday, Aug 13, 2012
“The media has missed a much larger, much more important point: Steve Jobs was the first CEO to bet the company on the user experience. From the very beginning of Apple, and renewing his efforts when he returned as interim CEO, Jobs was constantly focused on building products that would deliver the best possible experience—rather than the most up-to-date chipset, or the best partner arrangements, or the most horrific monopolistic lock-in scheme.”
Mark Hurst, discussing an article focused on whether it works to “be mean” (like Jobs). Personal management style was much less important than a user-centered vision of the future; I agree.
posted by
ted
on Wednesday, Aug 08, 2012
“Although the page design was nice and worthy of silver, the overall UX doesn’t even place. In fact, the Olympics should be disqualified in the UX race for kicking the fans in the gut. Hijacking links is not sportsmanlike.”
Jakob Nielsen, opining about the official Olympics site’s inability to deliver on the overall user experience, despite doing OK on following specific design guidelines.
posted by
ted
on Monday, Jul 30, 2012
I’ve always loved the idea of collaborative design sessions, parallel design competitions, evolutionary brainstorming— or whatever label you’ve come up with for what Jared Spool calls design studio workshops.” So … why oh why have I never gotten to participate in one? Someone invite me please.
posted by
ted
on Wednesday, Jul 25, 2012
“Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy. The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways. One shortcut is to become reckless: to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to first think through the consequences. (Sure, tweet that photo! What could go wrong?) The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver: do nothing. Instead of agonizing over decisions, avoid any choice. Ducking a decision often creates bigger problems in the long run, but for the moment, it eases the mental strain.”
I read this article on “The New York Times” back in May. Since reading it I’ve found myself continuously thinking about it and I’ve referred to it in several conversations since. It’s one of those things that I’ve always subconsciously known was happening, but when once I read about it, it brought a certain type of life to it that it has fascinated me. Enjoy™
“Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?” By John Tierney and
Published: August 17, 2011
posted by
shane
on Friday, Jun 08, 2012
“The user doesn’t come out of nowhere. We don’t land on your page and then head happily to those social networks to promote you, just because you have a button on your site. We find content through Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest etc., not the other way around.
If you provide excellent content, social media users will take the time to read and talk about it in their networks. That’s what you really want. You don’t want a cheap thumbs up, you want your readers to talk about your content with their own voice.”
Saw this article through an email newsletter sent to me from the Twitter. I am one of those people who LOVE those social buttons, but since reading this post it has really got me rethinking it all, and paying more attention to my own personal behaviors as well as other humans. Enjoy™
“Sweep the Sleaze” by Oliver Reichenstein
posted by
shane
on Friday, Jun 08, 2012
“When you are designing, how much time do you spend in your own head, applying your own perspective, and how much time do you spend in someone else’s mindset? Next time you’re designing, try to spend more of the time outside of your own perspective. Make this into a practice.”
Jeff Moyes shared this post with the UX group at FamilySearch today and what Indie Young wrote at the end really helped refresh how we should approach user experience in our work. Enjoy™
Mental Models: How to Wield Empathy Posted by Indi Young on Rosenfeld.
posted by
shane
on Friday, Jun 08, 2012
At familysearch we’ve been working on a standard tool set for front-end developers to be amazingly productive/happy/awesome in. We settled on Node.js and have recently launched it in production. It is performing fantastically and we are falling in love.
If you’d like to work with Node.js and you’d like to do it at familysearch, give a holler to schlegel “at” familysearch dot org. Then we can tell you about all the other cool stuff we’re doing.
posted by
scott
on Saturday, May 19, 2012
An excellent article from Louis Rosenfeld: Stop Redesigning And Start Tuning Your Site Instead. You and your key stakeholders need to read this.
posted by
ted
on Friday, May 18, 2012