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

Selling UX

At some point in your career, you’ll be called upon to sell UX to someone in your organization. You’ve probably already done it. Perhaps you’ll need to justify what you do in an organization or industry that’s just beginning to adopt UX methods or sell UX to secure your position within an organization or get future projects. So, what do you need to know to help you sell UX? What challenges might you face? This article examines what works and what does not work well when selling UX within an organization, identifies barriers you might encounter to the adoption of UX methods in your organization, and discusses how to package and present UX to stakeholders.

Szuc, Daniel, Paul J. Sherman and John S. Rhodes. UXmatters (2008). Articles>User Experience>Workplace

Evangelizing UX Across An Entire Organization

Executive buy-in is important, but communicating and selling the UX message across the organization, at all levels, is just as important. I would be most interested in learning more about the corporate cultures that embrace UX or customer-centered thinking and understanding more about why they have and what makes them ripe. What worked in the organizations you’ve worked for? What caused frustrations? It seems when everyone is trying to improve the user experience, it can help empower a usability / UX / design team to work on more strategic initiatives instead of facing roadblocks along the way.

Six, Janet M. UXmatters (2009). Articles>User Experience>Workplace

Patterns in UX Research

One of the key objectives of user research is to identify themes or threads that are common across participants. These patterns help us to turn our data into insights about the underlying forces at work, influencing user behavior. Patterns demonstrate a recurring theme, with data or objects appearing in a predictable manner. Seeing a visual representation of the data is usually enough for us to recognize a pattern. However, it is much harder to see patterns in raw data, so identifying patterns can be a daunting task when we face large volumes of research data. Patterns stand out above the typical noise we’re used to seeing in nature or in raw data.

Baty, Steve. UXmatters (2009). Articles>Research>User Experience

The Dynamic Discourse of Visual Literacy in Experience Design  

Educators should include new dimensions of visual literacy in academic curricula. Today’s students are actively involved in interactive experiences. They are contributing content to websites as well as designing websites and other types of online experiences for the public. Students need to understand the semiotics of interactive computing and how the integration of diverse sensory data with social interaction impacts the way we interpret online information.

Search, Patricia. TechTrends (2009). Articles>Education>Visual Rhetoric>User Experience

Accessibility to the Face

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

The User Experience of Enterprise Software Matters: Part 1

There’s one area that I believe user experience has lagged behind: the enterprise software space. 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>Content Management>User Experience

The User Experience of Enterprise Software Matters, Part 2: Strategic User Experience

In this column, I’ll provide a technology selection framework that can help enterprises better assess the usability and appropriateness of enterprise applications they’re considering purchasing, with the goal of ensuring their IT (Information Technology) investments deliver fully on their value propositions.

Sherman, Paul J. UXmatters (2009). Articles>Web Design>Content Management>User Experience

Including Recommendations in User Interfaces to Enhance Motivation

Motivation is an important factor in any kind of online interaction or transaction. People need a little encouragement when they’re not really convinced they should take any action or are uncertain about what action to take next. As users perform tasks online, they need to understand what’s happening and expect you to help them move forward. This article discusses the responsibility of a user interface to provide recommendations along a user’s path of interaction.

Kirmani, Afshan. UXmatters (2009). Articles>User Interface>Help>User Experience

Are URL Shorteners A Necessary Evil, Or Just Evil?

What started out as something people did via e-mail and bookmark-sharing services like Delicious, is now moving to Facebook, Twitter, and other social broadcasting services. It is just so much more efficient to share a link once with all your friends and followers than to send it to each one individually.

Schonfeld, Erick. TechCrunch (2009). Articles>Web Design>User Experience>Social Networking

Designing the Democratic

The role of the information architect (IA), interaction designer, or user experience (UX) designer is to help create architecture and interactions which will impact the user in constructive, meaningful ways. Sometimes the design choices are strategic and affect a broad interaction environment; other times they may be tactical and detailed, affecting few. But sometimes the design choices we make are not good enough for the users we’re trying to reach. Often a sense of democratic responsibility is missing in the artifacts and experiences which result from our designs and decisions.

Owen, Jamie. Boxes and Arrows (2009). Articles>Information Design>User Experience>Participatory Design

Using Web Software for Collaborative Work on Virtual UX Teams

Increasingly, virtual teamwork means UX professionals must get things done in an environment devoid of the physical presence of colleagues and lacking the relative ease of on-site collaboration. Effectively completing UX tasks while at a distance from our clients, stakeholders, and team members can be challenging, from both technical and process perspectives. How can we, as UX professionals, enable the close collaboration with others we need and manage the process of creating engaging digital experiences when we’re so far apart from each other physically?

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

Refactoring the User Experience

Though the relationship between software engineering and user experience is not always an easy one, software engineers and UX professionals share some common goals. Both have a vested interest in producing systems that are useful and usable. This column will explore how we can apply software engineering concepts and practices in the context of user experience design and, hopefully, build greater understanding between the two disciplines.

Hornsby, Peter. UXmatters (2009). Articles>User Experience>Usability

Using Verbs As Nouns in User Interfaces

To better manage interactions with such large datasets, we’ve incorporated the concept of views, in the same way that Microsoft Outlook and SQL Builder use them. However, my initial usability testing has found that the concept of views is escaping most people, and I think it often boils down to the term itself. Even if I show users what the software does—and they pretty much always like it when they see it—they still often cannot get over the initial hurdle of the naming convention.

Six, Janet M. UXmatters (2009). Articles>User Experience>Diction>User Interface

Out of Box Experience: Getting it Right First Time

The out of box experience (OOBE) describes the users first interaction with a product or service. In the technology sector this first experience invariably involves plugging stuff in, installing some software and crossing your fingers in the hope that the product will work. The problem is that, in far too many cases, it doesn’t.

Frontend Infocentre (2009). Articles>User Experience>User Centered Design>Usability

The Experience is Key

It is important to remember that the experience a person has using a product or service is every bit as important as that product or services usability.

Frontend Infocentre (2009). Articles>User Experience>Usability>Emotions

From Technical Writer to User Engagement Specialist?

Products and tools must evolve to ensure that user experience does not suffer as technical writers evolve their delivery to suit this modern age. If a user has a question, there should be only one place to search, and those results should contain relevant hits from all possible content sources.

LugIron Software Blog (2009). Articles>Writing>Technical Writing>User Experience

Growing Happy Users -- One Customer at a Time

Technical writing is a profession in transition. The way companies think of, use, and manage the people who help users make sense of and use products is absolutely changing. A lot of companies have started to use the term “information developer” to describe their technical writing positions. I don’t really care what label the profession chooses for itself, but I do know this: if technical writers don’t transition more than their job title then they will be missing out on a huge opportunity to move from the “gotta do it” category into the “can’t live without it” one.

Stern, Paula. LugIron Software Blog (2009). Articles>User Centered Design>User Experience>Technical Writing

Does Your Documentation Suck?

I’ve been browsing a lot of online documentation lately and in a past life I spent an enormous amount of time worrying about how my users were interacting with documentation. It never ceases to amaze me how bad most product documentation is, especially when the documentation is published in a half-measured attempt on the web. Do companies not realize the negative effect poor documentation, both content and presentation, have on their users?

LugIron Software Blog (2009). Articles>Documentation>Technical Writing>User Experience

Great Designs Should Be Experienced and Not Seen

When things are going well in a design, we don't pay attention to them. We only pay attention to things that bother us. The same is true with online designs. We attend to things that aren't working far more than we attend to things that are. When the online experience frustrates us, we pay attention to its details, often because we're trying to figure out some way to outsmart it.

Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2009). Articles>Web Design>User Experience>User Interface

Web Anatomy: Introducing Interaction Design Frameworks

If we simply look at what's already working well, and why, we can give ourselves two things we desperately need: a starting point for the design, and insight into to how to create better-stronger-faster interactions that are just as easy to use as the old classics.

Hoekman, Robert, Jr. User Interface Engineering (2009). Articles>User Experience>Interaction Design>Planning

Moving into User Research: Establishing Design Guidelines

The best technical writers do user research to understand the audience for their documentation, create user profiles or personas, perform task analyses, and do usability testing to ensure that their documentation meets users’ needs. All of these are activities in which a user researcher engages. Thus, as a technical writer, you can start amassing experience in user research and building a portfolio of user research documentation.

Six, Janet M. UXmatters (2009). Articles>User Experience>Research>Technical Writing

The Social Buzz: Designing User Experiences for Social Media

There is a lot of excitement about efforts that are currently underway to explore what social technologies can offer—the boundaries they can cross that the traditional Web could not. Similar to users’ need to cope with the problems of adapting to the ever-changing face of social media, addressing the needs of social media in design requires additional effort and interest on the part of UX designers, to keep track of the capabilities and limitations of emerging technologies.

Asad, Junaid. UXmatters (2009). Articles>User Experience>Social Networking

Visual Decision Making

User interface experts are often suspicious of the role of visual aesthetics in user interfaces—and of designers who insist that graphic emotive impact and careful attention to a site’s visual framework really contribute to measurable success. Underneath the arguments, I see a fundamental culture clash.

Lynch, Patrick. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>Visual Rhetoric>User Experience

Sheep, Chaos, and User Experience

The people who own the creation, collection, and distribution of content may not be the same people in the very near future. I also believe technical communication is part of information architecture and user experience design. While the technical communication community, specifically many STC members, also work in usability or information design, the culture of the user has changed faster than the culture within the tech comm community.

Anderson, M.K. MK Anderson (2009). Articles>TC>Information Design>User Experience