#33443
The Trouble With Personalization
Personalization has rarely been implemented well. Its failure is usually because of a lack of understanding of customer behavior.
McGovern, Gerry. New Thinking (2006). Articles>Web Design>Personalization>User Centered Design
#33463
Contingency Design: Maximizing Online Profitability By Helping People When Things Go Wrong
Contingency design is design for when things go wrong. It's the error messaging, graphic design, instructive text, information architecture, backend system, and customer service that helps visitors get back on track after a problem occurs.
37Signals (2007). Articles>Information Design>User Centered Design
#33475
Accessing Information: Not Everyone Does it the Same Way
As some in our profession have come to realize, social media and use of the Web in general have changed (and are still changing) the way in which people access and use information.
DMN Communications (2008). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>User Centered Design
#33581
Jared Spool on User Research Methods
Adaptive Path’s Peter Merholz recently talked to the founder of User Interface Engineering Jared Spool about user research.
Merholtz, Peter. Adaptive Path (2005). Articles>Research>Usability>User Centered Design
#33582
Everyone is mad for personas. They’ve permeated the highest and deepest levels of organizations, and have become a standard interaction design tool. Whole projects are now built around creating them, and there’s a feeling that once you get a half dozen or so, your design problems will be solved. Presumably, your personas solve them for you. The problem is, most teams build personas from the wrong kind of user information, or worse, base them on assumptions. It’s no surprise that a Web search for personas brings up an amazing variety of persona sets, and most of them are terrible.
Saffer, Dan. Adaptive Path (2005). Articles>Usability>User Centered Design>Personas
#33647
Who are your users? How do they work? How do your products fit into their routines? Filippo discusses audience analysis and developing user profiles to create effective user assistance.
Filippo, Elizabeth G. Intercom (2009). Articles>User Centered Design>Personas>Audience Analysis
#33665
A good starting point for planning the future of your website is to analyze what you already have. To some extent we are doing this all the time. That is how new projects happen. However, a more formal approach helps to better inform your decision-making throughout the web project. There are two ways to better understand your current website: qualitative and quantitative.
Boag, Paul. Digital Web Magazine (2008). Articles>Web Design>User Centered Design>Audience Analysis
#33793
XML and SOA (Service-Oriented Applications)
The realization of SOA through Web services is intrinsically driven by core XML technologies. The emergence of service-oriented design principles, however, is affecting how XML technologies are utilized and positioned within contemporary solutions.
Erl, Thomas. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>XML>User Centered Design
#33865
Why Bother With User Documentation in Recessionary Times?
In recessionary times, organisations should focus on getting sales from existing customers - so customer retention becomes ever more important.
Cherryleaf (2009). Articles>Documentation>Business Case>User Centered Design
#33894
Lessons Learned with Quick Reference Guides: Timing and Truth
I should never fully trust anyone on a project. I don’t mean this disrespectfully, because I work with competent, talented professionals. But no one has the full picture of how the application will truly work. The quality assurance (QA) engineer usually has the clearest picture. The program manager and project manager are often living in a slightly different world, full of a vision of how the product should work and how they expect users to interact with it, but sometimes they’re missing important nuances in the actual implementation. The interaction designer builds prototypes and assumes the developers will build them to spec, but since the prototypes are usually HTML-based, and not in Java or .NET, variances are inevitable.
Johnson, Tom H. I'd Rather Be Writing (2009). Articles>Documentation>User Centered Design>Emotions
#33934
Top Seven UX Design Definitions
Having determined to collect and share with you the top ten definitions of User Experience Design from the most credible sources, and so you to form your own, say, meta impression, I found the network falling just short. So, here are the top seven, with an invitation to you to contribute those definitions of user experience design (full three terms) that you find or know of. Inclusion is conditional, however, on a credibility standard that can only be defined as “secret sauce.”
Cummings, Michael. UX Design (2008). Articles>User Experience>User Centered Design
#33935
What Is User Experience Design
User experience design can sometimes be a slippery term. With all the other often used terms that float around in its realm in the technology and web space: interaction design, information architecture, human computer interaction, human factors engineering, usability, and user interface design. People often end up asking “what is the difference between all these fields and which one do I need?” This article examines the term and field of user experience to plainly extrapolate its meaning and connect the dots with these other fields.
Paluch, Kimmy. Montparnas (2006). Articles>User Experience>User Centered Design
#33936
User experience design is a subset of the field of experience design which pertains to the creation of the architecture and interaction models which impact a user's perception of a device or system. The scope of the field is directed at affecting "all aspects of the user’s interaction with the product: how it is perceived, learned, and used." User experience design, most often abbreviated UX, but sometimes UE, is a term used to describe the overarching experience a person has as a result of their interactions with a particular product or service, its delivery, and related artifacts, according to their design.
#33938
Ten Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design
The term “user experience” or UX has been getting a lot of play, but many businesses are confused about what it actually is and how crucial it is to their success. I asked some of the most influential and widely respected practitioners in UX what they consider to be the biggest misperceptions of what we do. The result is a top 10 list to debunk the myths.
Hess, Whitney. Mashable (2009). Articles>User Experience>User Centered Design
#33942
The Elements of Social Architecture
While your designs can never control people, they can encourage good behavior and discourage bad behavior. The psychologist Kurt Lewin developed an equation that explains why people do the crazy things they do. Lewin asserts that behavior is a function of a person and his environment: Bf(P,E). You can’t change a person’s nature, but you can design the environment he moves around in. Let’s explore some of Alexander’s patterns I’ve observed in my work and the design work of my fellow practitioners.
Wodtke, Christina. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>User Centered Design
#33944
Despite the ubiquity of reading on the web, readers remain a neglected audience. Much of our talk about web design revolves around a sense of movement: users are thought to be finding, searching, skimming, looking. We measure how frequently they click but not how long they stay on the page. We concern ourselves with their travel and participation—how they move from page to page, who they talk to when they get there—but forget the needs of those whose purpose is to be still. Readers flourish when they have space—some distance from the hubbub of the crowds—and as web designers, there is yet much we can do to help them carve out that space.
Brown, Mandy. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>User Centered Design
#33947
The words we use when we search are not always the words we like to read when we arrive at a website. Over the years, I have discovered that the way we think and the words we use when we search give strong clues as to what we want, but only clues. The words that will help us complete the task we came to the website to complete can be subtly-and sometimes substantially different-to the words we used when searching for it.
McGovern, Gerry. CMSwire (2009). Articles>Web Design>Search>User Centered Design
#33948
Social Media is Here to Stay... Now What?
For users, Web 2.0 was all about reorganizing web-based practices around Friends. For many users, direct communication tools like email and IM were used to communicate with one's closest and dearest while online communities were tools for connecting with strangers around shared interests. Web 2.0 reworked all of that by allowing users to connect in new ways. While many of the tools may have been designed to help people find others, what Web 2.0 showed was that people really wanted a way to connect with those that they already knew in new ways. Even tools like MySpace and Facebook which are typically labeled social networkING sites were never really about networking for most users. They were about socializing inside of pre-existing networks.
Boyd, Danah. Microsoft (2009). Articles>Web Design>User Centered Design>Social Networking
#34049
Empathy is what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. We have an ability to imagine things the way that others see them and how it makes them feel. We don’t even have to have a disability ourselves. Accessibility is NOT a checklist. Accessibility is about usability. Accessibility is a paradigm shift. Accessibility is a personal issue.
Foster, Rob. northtemple (2009). Articles>Accessibility>User Centered Design>User Experience
#34065
Putting the Wrecking Ball to the User Interface (UI)
Does a truly intuitive user interface exist? The author of this blog post doesn't think so. To create one, designers and developers really need to put the wrecking ball to the UI as it is now.
Nesbitt, Scott. DMN Communications (2009). Articles>User Interface>TC>User Centered Design
#34093
User assistance can add value to a product or Web service’s business model by influencing how deeply users adopt new features or services. As more products employ pay-as-you-go models like that of SaaS (Software as a Service), the contribution user assistance makes becomes increasingly more important.
Hughes, Michael A. UXmatters (2009). Articles>Documentation>User Centered Design>Help
#34100
Fluid layouts are an undervalued commodity in web design. They put control of our designs firmly in the hands of our users and their browsing habits. They’ve also utterly failed to seize the imagination of web designers.
Marcotte, Ethan. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>Document Design>User Centered Design
#34105
The parallels between the theories of technical communications and those of web design are very similar, the key aim is to keep the audience in mind at all times. The way you structure and present the information is also important, as is a sense of usability of the content itself.
McLean, Gordon. One Man Writes (2009). Articles>Web Design>Technical Writing>User Centered Design
#34118
Should You Cater to Younger Workers?
If you cater to the younger group, you risk alienating your most senior people (talented, expensive, hard-to-replace experts; people you don't want to lose to the competition; people with great political capital in the organization, who can perhaps defeat an IT initiative by pushing back hard). On the other hand, if you cater to the older group, you risk alienating the younger workers; and you risk keeping obsolete systems in place far longer than you should, making future replacement that much more difficult while also impeding business objectives, etc.
assertTrue (2009). Articles>Content Management>User Centered Design>Workplace
#34121
What is an End-User Software Engineer? 
To address the challenge of developing a shared understanding of the users that participate in each scenario we have developed a set of personas that describe the work styles, characteristics and motivations that are common to particular groups of people using our products. The personas help us communicate these characteristics by humanizing them, increasing the empathy that team members have for these fictional users.
Clarke, Steven. Microsoft (2008). Articles>Usability>User Centered Design>Personas
