Web 2.0: Mistaking the Forest for the Trees?

Think of Web 2.0 as more of a concept than a person, place or thing and you'll find firmer ground. Even better, spend some quality time with O'Reilly's lengthy essay. Finally, keep in mind that the lion's share of Web 2.0 discussion is from a technological perspective; it hasn't yet filtered down to the information architecture, interaction design and similar discussion lists.

Rogers, Dave. GotoMedia (2006). Articles>Web Design>User Experience>Interaction Design

Turning on the Lights in Your Online Business

Ecommerce websites are typically set up as if they were just glorified catalogs: a list of products, some pictures, brief descriptions, and an order form. No human interaction at all.

Oxer, Jonathan. Internet Vision Technologies (2007). Articles>Web Design>User Experience>E Commerce

Personalizing the User Experience on ibm.com  

In this paper, we describe the results of an effort to first understand the value of personalising a website, as perceived by the visitors to the site as well as by the stakeholder organisation that owns it, and then to develop a strategy for introducing personalisation to the ibm.com website.

Karat, C.M., C. Brodie, J. Karat, J. Vergo and S.R. Alpert. IBM (2003). Articles>Web Design>User Experience>Personalization

When to Use Which User Experience Research Methods

Modern day user experience research methods can now answer a wide range of questions. Knowing when to use each method can be understood by mapping them in 3 key dimensions and across typical product development phases.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2008). Articles>User Experience>Usability>Methods

The Sacred Cow Blocking the Road

When product teams ask technical writers to document software products, writers usually start their projects by analyzing the tasks users will perform when working with them. A task analysis generates a list of procedures—plus the supporting information users need to follow them—and eventually results in a document in which sequentially numbered instructions are the dominant type of information—neatly organized under user-centered task headings and preceded by enabling knowledge. It sounds ideal, classical even. The problem? Users don’t read procedures.

Hughes, Michael A. UXmatters (2007). Articles>User Experience>Documentation>Technical Writing

The User Experience of Enterprise Software Matters

Over the past twenty years, the field of user experience has been fortunate. Software and hardware product organizations increasingly have adopted user-centered design methods such as contextual user research, usability testing, and iterative interaction design. In large part, this has occurred because the market has demanded it. More than ever, good interaction design and high usability are part of the price of entry to markets.

Sherman, Paul J. UXmatters (2008). Articles>User Experience>Software>Workplace

Communicating Customer and Business Value with a Value Matrix

What happens to the personas and scenarios once you’re ready to start requirements definition and design. Are you sure you’ve adequately communicated the type of system your users need to the Business Analyst and Interaction Designer on your team?

Cecil, Richard F. UXmatters (2008). Articles>Collaboration>User Experience>Assessment

Self-Education in UX and Working with User Research Data

How you can educate yourself in user experience. The best ways to capture and present user research data.

Six, Janet M. UXmatters (2008). Articles>Education>User Experience>Research

The UX Designer’s Place in the Ensemble: Directing the Vision

What does directing have to do with creating a user interface design? Well, we know a director is responsible for the strategic vision of creative work. That’s a given. But, did you know he is also responsible for ensuring a successful outcome that both meets his vision and is in line with the producer’s desires and budget? To make that happen, a director works with the cast, crew, costume and set designers, and everyone else who contributes to a successful theatrical production to pull together a cohesive product, without losing site of his vision. It’s a complicated job.

Lepore, Traci. UXmatters (2008). Articles>User Experience>Collaboration>Project Management

Create the World, The Interface Will Follow

In user experience design, there is a growing emphasis on starting projects by creating robust descriptions of the prospective users. Through contextual inquiry and persona development we gain insight into people’s needs; ascertain their desires; and illuminate their behavior, wishes, hopes and dreams. But in an attempt to create archetypal descriptions of people, the specificity of the environments people inhabit are often times diminished—research is conducted across broad cross-sections of markets to ensure that common experiences are identified and explored.

Wellings, Paula. Adaptive Path (2008). Articles>User Interface>User Experience>Contextual Inquiry

Learning From Museums: Kate Talks with the SFMOMA Interactive Educational Technologies Team

What can the User Experience field learn from the world of museums? Peter Samis and Tana Johnson of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) Interactive Technologies Team can help answer the question. The issues that they grapple with (and solve through inventive design) are firmly grounded in the goal of providing exceptional and inspiring museum experiences.

Rutter, Kate. Adaptive Path (2008). Articles>Interviewing>User Experience>Interaction Design

Nondirected Interviews: How to Get More Out of Your Research Questions

As user experience designers, a key component to nearly all the techniques we use in our practice is the one-on-one interview. It’s the basis of requirements gathering, usability testing, and task analysis. In order to remove our personal biases, expectations and opinions from the questions asked, I practice a kind of questioning technique called the nondirected interview.

Kuniavsky, Mike. Adaptive Path (2002). Articles>Interviewing>User Experience>Research

Experience Attributes: Crucial DNA of Web 2.0

The industry has spent a lot of time defining Web 2.0 and mapping its DNA. But as we attempt to emulate the fast-growth success of the Web 2.0 darlings, we need to zero in on the parts of the DNA that actually create this noteworthy new value.

Schauer, Brandon. Adaptive Path (2005). Articles>Web Design>User Experience>Social Networking

Usability in Practice: The Human Face Of Software

Welcome to Usability In Practice. This is the first in a series of columns that will focus on the design of the user experience (UX). In the past, user experience was not a high priority for most development projects, but that's changed. Today, end users have a lot of experience with the Web and with software. They want design that's easy to learn and use and that fits their workflow. This column will show you how to deliver such designs.

Kreitzberg, Charles B. and Ambrose Little. Microsoft (2008). Articles>Usability>User Interface>User Experience

The User Experience of Enterprise Software Matters

I can’t tell you how many frustratingly unusable enterprise Web applications I’ve encountered during my 12 plus years in corporate America. As important as the user experience of enterprise software is to a business’s success, why isn’t its assessment usually a factor in technology selection?

Sherman, Paul J. UXmatters (2008). Articles>Web Design>User Experience>Assessment

Self-Education in UX and Working with User Research Data

What are some good ways to educate myself in User Experience?

Six, Janet M. UXmatters (2008). Articles>Education>User Experience>Audience Analysis

Conversing Well Across Channels

Whether you call it cross-channel experience or multichannel experience, the reality is that customers interact with companies through more than one channel, so it’s important for us to understand cross-channel customer behavior.

Jones, Colleen. UXmatters (2009). Articles>Communication>Collaboration>User Experience

Design Research Methods for Experience Design

There is a trend among some in the UX community to take the U out of UX and refer to our discipline simply as experience design. One reason for this change in terminology is that it lets us talk about a specific target audience in terms that resonate with business stakeholders more than the generic term user—for example, customer experience, patient experience, or member experience. The other reason for using the term experience design rather than user experience design is that it recognizes the fact that most customer interactions are multifaceted and complex and include all aspects of a customer’s interaction with a company or other organizational entity, including its people, services, and products.

Hawley, Michael. UXmatters (2009). Articles>User Experience>Research>Methods

The UX Customer Experience: Communicating Effectively with Stakeholders and Clients

Effective communication with stakeholders and clients is critical to the design process itself, but this is not a topic we often address, because, at first glance, it doesn’t appear to contribute directly to our primary goals, which are to create, build, and ship digital products. Certainly, as an industry, we are attuned to client service in a general sense, but there’s no doubt that methods of UX customer communication, education, and collaboration are sometimes overlooked and underutilized aspects of the design process. We can and should treat the elements of stakeholder and client communication as a kind of user experience. And we should design this experience for our UX customers so far as it’s possible to do so.

Follett, Jonathan. UXmatters (2009). Articles>User Experience>Collaboration

Improving Customer's SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) Experience with DITA

The quality of product information for customers is often an afterthought, yet the importance of any post-sales customer-facing information shouldn't be trivialized. While businesses invest heavily in customer service training and customer relationship management systems to improve customer satisfaction, they often overlook the experience that customers have with product documentation.

Silver, Jerry. SOA World Magazine (2007). Articles>Documentation>User Experience

Embedded Help System: The Emerging Help Technology

Embedded user assistance is a cutting-edge approach towards delivering online help that provides dynamic, context-sensitive, task-based information. Such a help system is very different from other types of online help in the sense that it requires very short and focused topics. This article examines embedded help system as an emerging help presentation that offers the potential for users to access information when and where they need it while using a software program. It also evaluates the ability of embedded help systems to overcome usability issues that are inherent in traditional online help systems.

Biswas, Debarshi Gupta. Indus (2007). Articles>User Experience

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

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

User Experience Design

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.

Wikipedia. Articles>User Experience>User Centered Design

Usability and the User Experience

What’s the difference between usability and user experience? For me, user experience is the experience someone has when using a design. Usability is the extent to which the design provides a good user experience. Usability is often misunderstood to mean ‘ease of use’. It’s much more than this though.

Hamill, David. Good Usability (2009). Articles>Usability>User Experience