Experience Themes

When a screenwriter can summarize a story in one sentence, he has a compass that can guide him throughout the writing process. Cindy Chastain chronicles how we can translate this approach to help us remember the quality and value of the experience we intend to deliver.

Chastain, Cindy. Boxes and Arrows (2009). Articles>Web Design>User Experience>Collaboration

Integrating Prototyping Into Your Design Process

Prototyping is a big deal right now. We get wrapped up in mailing list threads, new tools are released at an astonishing pace, books are being published, and articles show up on Boxes & Arrows. Clients are even asking for prototypes. But here’s the thing… prototyping is not a silver bullet. There is no one right way to do it. However, prototyping is a high silver content bullet. When aimed well, a prototype can answer design questions and communicate design ideas. In this article, I talk about the dimensions of prototype fidelity and how you can use them to choose the most effective prototyping method for the questions you need answered.

Beecher, Frederick. Boxes and Arrows (2009). Articles>User Experience>Prototyping>Methods

Non-UX Designers Can Pay Attention to User Experience Too!

Concepts, principals, and parts of User Experience Design can often times be difficult to approach—and this tends to create barriers with new bloggers. This begs the question: Do ordinary bloggers have to worry about UX Design?

Leggett, David. Fuel Your Blogging (2009). Articles>Web Design>User Experience>Blogging

Overload, Shmoverload

We don't really know what attention is, despite all the mumbo-jumbo spouted by Nobel laureates. My guess: most of what people say about attention is hogwash: mere anecdotes, or flimsy cultural norms offered up in a 'be productive, be happy' wrapper. Whenever business thinkers seek to apply an economic metaphor to human cognition, it is a mess: remember "knowledge management"?

Boyd, Stowe. SlideShare (2007). Articles>User Centered Design>User Experience>Emotions

Designing for B2B and Enterprise Applications

It's not uncommon to hear people complaining about the poor user experience of some B2B and enterprise applications. Read through these top tips to help you design enterprise applications that offer a better user experience and increase productivity.

Baxevanis, Alexander. Webcredible (2009). Articles>Human Computer Interaction>User Centered Design>User Experience

Can You Say That in English? Explaining UX Research to Clients

It's hard for clients to understand the true value of user experience research. As much as you'd like to tell your clients to go read The Elements of User Experience and call you back when they’re done, that won’t cut it in a professional services environment. David Sherwin creates a cheat sheet to help you pitch UX research using plain, client-friendly language that focuses on the business value of each exercise.

Sherwin, David. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Consulting>User Experience>Research

Cr@p Error Messages

When writing software, *please* don't give error messages that are only meaningful to developers of the software. Microsoft used to be awful for this: "System fault at DEAD:BEEF, please contact your system administrator". Which would've been cool, except that I *was* the system administrator.

Bailey, Jeff. LiveJournal (2009). Articles>Human Computer Interaction>User Centered Design>User Experience

The Future of Interface Design

The future of how we interact with computers is exciting to say the least. What once seemed like nonsense outside of Hollywood and Science Fiction is now starting to find it’s way into reality, and some of the technology is a bit overwhelming. Have a taste of what the future of interface design has to offer:

Leggett, David. UX Booth (2009). Articles>Human Computer Interaction>User Experience

Leah Buley on How to Get a Good Design Faster

Leah Buley is an experience designer for Adaptive Path, and she will be running a Bootcamp at Web 2.0 Expo New York to teach others how they can more productively and efficiently work together to create great designs and better user experiences. Leah recently spoke to us about her approach and how designers can apply it to their own situations.

Pike, Kaitlin and Leah Buley. Web 2.0 Expo (2009). Articles>Interviews>User Experience

Why Technical Communicators Should Help with Product Text

A huge problem for projects is the lack of a common language between the developers and the users. When my colleague and I were preparing a presentation for an internal conference on this subject, he said something that has stuck with me. He said, “The goal of the project is to make the user successful.” I added to that: It’s not to write code or validate code. It’s not even to ship a product or make money (of course, this last one is especially true in a non-profit organization). At least, it shouldn’t be these things.

Minson, Benjamin. Gryphon Mountain (2009). Articles>TC>Technical Writing>User Experience

Connecting the Dots of User Experience    

The article presents a point of view about analyzing and designing the user experience within pervasive networks made of distributed services and applications, where the user is the primary actor who freely and opportunistically connects and activates the system components following an activity-driven process. A digital content case study is used to outline the main characteristics of this scenario and to introduce a tool for user experience modelling and designing. From the application of this model are proposed some considerations about how the design process could change to support this vision.

Brugnoli, Gianluca. Journal of Information Architecture (2009). Articles>Information Design>User Experience>Case Studies

Preferences Considered Harmful

Every programmer and user interface designer eventually comes to this point: You can’t decide how a specific part of your user interface should behave. It’s easy, of course. Just make it a preference, and everyone will be happy.

Mathis, Lukas. ignore the code (2008). Articles>User Interface>Usability>User Experience

Design Partners: Passing on the Knowledge of UX

The two main drivers for a successful relationship were to respect each other’s opinion and to use active listening to understand what the other was saying.

Richkus, Rebecca. Designing the User Experience at Autodesk (2009). Articles>Knowledge Management>User Experience>Collaboration

The Problem with Problems

User Experience and usability practitioners are on a continuous hunt for problems that plague our users. This seems straightforward – find problems from testing, user forums, observation, and other methods, prioritize the problems, and generate solutions that eliminate the complaint. However, some events that we call problems in one context may not be problems in another.

Wilson, Chauncey E. Designing the User Experience at Autodesk (2009). Articles>User Experience>Usability

Values in Software Design Practice

Every user experience (UX) designer who practices in a corporate setting knows the breathless whirlwind that is modern business. We designers manage relationships with developers, business managers, and customers, and still have a full-time production role researching, designing and validating features and interactions. We rarely have enough time to do everything we should, and therefore have to carefully choose where to spend our time and resources.

Schrag, John. Designing the User Experience at Autodesk (2009). Articles>User Experience>Programming

The Foundation of a Great User Experience

I’m part of the AEC User Experience Team at Autodesk. Our goal is to design a great user experience for our customers, but just what does that mean? Our definition of user experience focuses on all the touchpoints that current or new users have with our product. For example, the downloading of software trials is often the beginning of one’s user experience with a product. If you have to fill out forms that ask for too much information, (should “cell phone number” be a required field on a trial download form?) or present you with too many obstacles, the likelihood of a positive user experience will be low. Your interactions with technical support, documentation, the product, and even other products that you use, are all aspects of the user experience.

Wilson, Chauncey E. Designing the User Experience at Autodesk (2009). Articles>User Experience>Usability>User Centered Design

Taking Aim: The Power of UX Goals

A user experience goal is a choice made by your product team about what kind of experience you want your users to have with your product or service. You use these choices to measure and direct the design of your product. Goals let us know when our tasks are complete, so that we can move on to something else. They stop us from obsessing over the wrong details and help us direct our energies to what is important. Goals tell us what to measure, and what can be ignored.

Schrag, John. Designing the User Experience at Autodesk (2008). Articles>User Experience

The Tangible View Cube

As interaction designers at Autodesk, we sometimes engage in design and thought investigations that are not directly related to the task at hand. These investigations are ways to frame problems by venturing into related design disciplines. For example, in order to understand what might be an appropriate transition when changing views in a 3d model, we try to understand how a video artist would create a transition between two scenes in a video. To understand how to improve the graphic quality of elements drawn in a building information model, we look at lots of pencil sketches drawn by architects. We think, what would happen if an on-screen element was made from physical material?

Nikolovska, Lira. Designing the User Experience at Autodesk (2009). Articles>User Experience>Graphic Design

First, Do No Harm 

In my column, On Good Behavior, I’ll explore the essentials of good interaction design. This first column provides a brief introduction to interaction design—defining the scope this column will cover—then explores some key design principles. What is interaction design?

Gabriel-Petit, Pabini. UXmatters (2009). Articles>User Experience>Interaction Design>Workflow

I Have an Idea! Forums for Design Conversations and Negotiations 

Working together in a group to produce a creative outcome is difficult—don’t let anyone tell you it’s not. A time or two, I’ve had that same feeling of being dumbstricken when participating in various forms of UX design brainstorming sessions.

Lepore, Traci. UXmatters (2009). Articles>User Experience>Collaboration

Testing the User Experience: Consumer Emotions and Brand Success 

The key to creating brand loyalty is developing a consistent and salient brand perception through the association of specific emotional experiences with a product or service. A classic example of this is the emotion of wonder and happiness people associate with The Walt Disney Company’s films and theme parks. By crafting amazing experiences for the people who enjoy their products, Disney has created such a favorable association, leading consumers to feel they can trust the brand and know what kind of experience to expect from a visit to a park, hotel, or movie theater. People can appreciate their intense focus on the user experience, whether watching Mary Poppins, meeting characters like Goofy and Minnie Mouse for the first time as a child, shown in Figure 1, or watching Toy Story characters leap to life in the amazing and spellbinding zoetrope at the California Adventure theme park.

Madrigal, Demetrius and Bryan McClain. UXmatters (2009). Articles>User Experience>Assessment>Emotions

Can UX Be Agile? 

Traditional, heavyweight development methodologies can be very effective at solving well‑defined problems, where the person solving the problem has a clear understanding of the initial and goal states, the available options, and the constraints on the problem. At the opposite end of the spectrum are ill‑defined, so-called wicked problems. When it’s necessary to balance numerous, often‑conflicting factors, traditional development methodologies are much less effective.

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

Agile User Experience Projects 

Agile projects aren't yet fully user-driven, but new research shows that developers are actually more bullish on key user experience issues than UX people themselves.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2009). Articles>Project Management>User Experience>Agile

Customer Service Experience Gone Bad 

Excellent customer service isn’t something we’re all born with. It’s learned. Yes, you’ll meet people who really stand out and make you feel great for having done business with them, but you’ll meet a lot more that just do their job and get by.

Men With Pens (2009). Articles>User Experience

Four Key Principles of Mobile User Experience Design 

As I transitioned from academia to industry, I discovered that while mobile UX was discussed, it wasn’t discussed from the same broad frame of reference that I was used to within the confines of a research-based institution. Although more recent mobile UX conversations I have found myself in have undoubtedly benefited from the ongoing smart phone revolution, overall I still find these conversations to be needlessly driven by tactical adoration and lacking a conscious consensus regarding the fundamental principles of the mobile-user experience.

Reese Brown, Dakota. Boxes and Arrows (2009). Articles>User Experience>Wireless Web