Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications

If anything about current interaction design can be called 'glamorous,' it’s creating Web applications. After all, when was the last time you heard someone rave about the interaction design of a product that wasn’t on the Web? (Okay, besides the iPod.) All the cool, innovative new projects are online.

Garrett, Jesse James. Adaptive Path (2005). Design>Web Design>Server Side Includes>Ajax

The Business Value of Web Standards

Industry accolades aside, how important is standardization to an individual business like ours? Do Web standards give organizations a return on investment? Does the transition to XHTML and CSS make financial sense? The answer to those questions is yes.

Veen, Jeffrey. Adaptive Path (2003). Design>Web Design>Standards

Communicate the ROI (Return on Investment) for Design

In the late 1990s, companies spent exorbitant amounts of money developing web sites. A happy ancillary effect was the maturation of 'user experience design' as a practice -- an opportunity to gain experience and rapidly develop effective methods. Since the dot.bust and collapse of NASDAQ, companies have adopted a thriftier approach, requiring measured accountability for every expenditure, including design. Designers aren’t used to making fiscal arguments for their value. Isn’t it clear that a more useful/usable/desirable/pleasing product is of course a better product, which will sell more or be used more, thus earning more revenue? Unfortunately, this gut-level understanding isn’t necessarily shared by the world at large. Increasingly, designers are asking, 'How do we communicate our value to the business world?'

Merholz, Peter. Adaptive Path (2002). Design>Web Design

Conducting International Usability

As business on the Web matures, organizations increasingly pay attention to the first two Ws in WWW -- World Wide. Companies with international sales offices crave a distinct Web presence in each locale to demonstrate seriousness in that local market. Multi-national companies often use intranets to unify global teams. Maintaining global consistency requires centralizing these Web efforts (usually within corporate headquarters), yet this must accommodate distinct approaches to working which vary from region to region. User testing is a valuable tool in such situations, but how does one conduct user tests internationally? This essay draws from my experience leading an international user testing project, and I hope you can learn from my mistakes and successes.

Merholz, Peter. Adaptive Path (2002). Articles>Usability>International

Crafting a User Research Plan

Every piece of user research is part of an ongoing research program, even if that program is informal. However, making a program formal provides a number of advantages: It gives you a set of goals, a schedule that stretches limited user-research resources, and results when they're needed most. It also helps you avoid unnecessary, redundant, or hurried research.

Kuniavsky, Mike. Adaptive Path (2003). Articles>Project Management>Usability

Crafting a User Research Plan, Part II

The most difficult part of setting up a schedule for your user research plan is integrating it into the existing development system.

Kuniavsky, Mike. Adaptive Path (2003). Articles>Usability>Research

Doing a Content Inventory (Or, A Mind-Numbingly Detailed Odyssey Through Your Web Site)

I've spent the last year working with clients on a variety of information architecture and design problems. One of the most strikingly consistent issues, however, has been how many of these companies still haven't developed content management systems. I've spoken with enterprises in the Fortune 100 who find themselves sitting on top of 6 years' worth of Web content trapped in static HTML files. They know they need to get this stuff into database and redesign their site into a template-driven system. But their first question is inevitably, 'So, uh, where do we start?' If you're in a similar situation, your first step is to take stock of what you've got. This process, known as a content inventory, is a relatively straightforward process of clicking through your Web site and recording what you find. We've developed a simple Excel spreadsheet to help you structure your findings, and some tips on how to get through it. Start at your home page. Identify the major sections of your site. For example, at adaptivepath.com, we've divided our site into these sections: team, services, workshops, publications, and contact. If I were doing an inventory of this site, I'd start with one of those sections, click in, and see what's linked from it. For each page that I visit, I'd record the information specified in the columns of the spreadsheet. I'd follow every link and navigate as far as I could through the site, making sure to gather data about every possible page on the site.

Veen, Jeffrey. Adaptive Path (2002). Design>Information Design>Web Design

Eight Quick Ways to Fix Your Search Engine

Almost every site's search engine could use improvement. Most organizations' Web teams couldn't really affect the quality of their search results--they were stuck tweaking search technologies that had already been purchased and installed. Often, the most dramatic change they could make was in the design of the search and results interfaces.

Veen, Jeffrey. Adaptive Path (2004). Design>Web Design>Search

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

Face to Face With Your Users: Running a Nondirected Interview

An interview is a funny situation. It's like a friendly conversation between strangers, but unlike the kind you may have on the bus. When chatting on the bus, people try very hard to agree with each other and to quickly communicate interesting information. Each person wants to be liked and adjusts the way they speak and what they say so as not to offend. This type of exchange is perfectly fine for maintaining civil society -- deeper exchanges can always happen as an acquaintance deepens -- but shallow banter isn't appropriate for an interview. You need to find out what someone is experiencing, what they're thinking, or what their real opinions are.

Kuniavsky, Mike. Adaptive Path (2003). Articles>User Centered Design>Interviewing>Usability

Faucet Facets: Few Best Practices for Designing Multifaceted Navigation Systems

So often we assume that Web sites should be hierarchically organized. We talk about a 'home page' that offers 'top-level navigation' so that users can 'drill down' to the content. It's as if we're programmed to think top down. But what about information that isn't as easily structured this way? Sometimes, content has many attributes that have different importance to different users. A hierarchy assumes everyone approaches these attributes the same way, but that's often not the case.

Veen, Jeffrey. Adaptive Path (2002). Design>Web Design>User Interface

Fifteen Tips for Remote Collaboration

It will always be easier to rally a group of people who work in the same building, but you can accomplish just as much (or more) with a motivated remote team. Getting team members motivated in the first place and holding their interest are your goals. Here are fifteen quick and useful tips to get you started.

Young, Indi. Adaptive Path (2003). Careers>Collaboration>Online

Finding the Right Users

If you’re using the eenie meenie method to select users for your research, perhaps it’s time you tried something a little more scientific. There is no such thing as sound user research without an airtight user-selection process behind it. No matter how good the observation and analysis, it’s all for naught if you’ve studied the wrong people. Too much “user research” is conducted, analyzed, and applied without anyone ever having spoken to users. Researchers then offer guidelines based on the needs and preferences of people who would never use the product in question. Relevant user research results depend on two factors: First, obviously, you’ll need to find people who are likely to use the product. Second, you’ll need to interview enough of them so that trends emerge from their collective behavior. These trends will indicate your primary design targets.

Merholz, Peter. Adaptive Path (2003). Articles>User Centered Design>Usability

Get Out of Your Lab, and Into Their Lives

We need to practice research methods that accept the complexity of customers' technological world, and take it into account. Monolithic solutions are giving way to smaller point solutions, people are saving their information in a variety of places (personal computer, websites and hosted applications, handheld devices, print-outs), and reliance on stored passwords and favorites is deepening. And yet, in this climate, we still invite folks into a foreign lab, to use a computer that isn't theirs, to leave behind their files, papers, and Post-It Notes, and then ask them to engage in a scripted series of uninterrupted tasks.

Merholz, Peter. Adaptive Path (2006). Articles>Usability>Methods

How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Relinquish Control

How could there be a successful business model in actively sending people away from your site? Seven years and a $75 billion market capitalization later, that question has obviously been answered.

Merholz, Peter. Adaptive Path (2005). Articles>Web Design>User Centered Design

Keep Office Politics Out of Your Design

Everyone has an opinion about design. If your debate is based only on opinions, the person with the most power always wins. Almost always. The team that has rational support for its conclusion can trump power and opinion. User research can give you concrete proof that one direction is better than another.

Young, Indi. Adaptive Path (2003). Design>Web Design>Assessment

Making A Better CMS

Most open source content management software is useless. The only thing worse is every commercial CMS I've used. But it doesn't have to be that way.

Veen, Jeffrey. Adaptive Path (2004). Articles>Content Management

Metadata for the Masses

Many classification systems suffer from an inflexible top-down approach, forcing users to view the world in potentially unfamiliar ways.

Merholz, Peter. Adaptive Path (2004). Articles>Information Design>Metadata

The Nine Pillars of Successful Web Teams

Every Web team has its own take on dividing up roles and responsibilities and implementing processes for design and development. Formal titles, job descriptions, and reporting structures can vary widely. But the best teams I’ve encountered have one important thing in common: their team structure and processes cover a full range of distinct competencies necessary for success.

Garrett, Jesse James. Adaptive Path (2003). Design>Collaboration>Web Design

Ninety Percent of All Usability Testing is Useless

Ninety percent of all usability testing performed on Web sites is useless. This is not to say that it doesn’t have a significant role to play in user experience design. When done right, usability testing will improve your Web site and your development process, but the current culture surrounding Web site usability testing is such that it rarely benefits the design. Worse, this misapplication can undermine the acceptance of this important technique throughout an organization.

Becker, Lane. Adaptive Path (2004). Articles>Usability>Testing

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. The questions asked are at the heart of any interview. Following are a loose set of guidelines to help you frame questions in a way that elicits honest and accurate responses.

Kuniavsky, Mike. Adaptive Path (2002). Articles>User Centered Design>Interviewing>Usability

Organization in the Way: How Decentralization Hobbles the User Experience

Contrary to all the books, articles, Web sites, and workshops that suggest otherwise, the biggest problem in user experience design today is not one of practice. Any competent practitioner can dip into the current toolbox of methods and create a satisfactory product. Right now, the biggest obstacle to good design is poor organizational structure. The fundamental makeup of most organizations runs contrary to producing quality designs, and as organizations get larger, this becomes increasingly apparent.

Merholz, Peter. Adaptive Path (2004). Articles>Collaboration>Web Design

The Pendulum Returns, Part 1: Unifying the Online Presence of Decentralized Organizations

A number of smart businesses are realizing that the organizational characteristics that lead to their successes — such as agility, decentralized decision making, and fast growth — have made their Web sites unworkable through poor development processes and inconsistent user experiences. This frustrates any attempt by visitors to find meaningful information. The irony here is that for day-to-day business operations such decentralized companies have proven much more 'customer-centered' than their monolithic ancestors. By allowing departments to own the customer relationship, these companies rapidly accommodate their customers' particular needs. However, upon migrating their information and services to the Web, such companies typically offered a site organization that simply mimicked the company's structure, inevitably confusing the customer, who was not expecting to see labyrinthine departmental structures that they hadn't realized existed.

Merholz, Peter. Adaptive Path (2002). Design>Web Design>Information Design

The Pendulum Returns, Part 2

Last week I argued for the importance of decentralized organizations to unify their online presences. Now, achieving that is much easier said than done. Over the past few years, we’ve seen a handful of companies that have very successful web experiences despite strongly decentralized organizations. We set out to discover what makes these companies’ sites more effective, and found some consistent characteristics.

Merholz, Peter. Adaptive Path (2002). Design>Web Design>Information Design

Persona Non Grata

Personas are a documented set of archetypal users who are involved with a product, typically the product's users. Each persona has a name and a picture. They're supposed to give designers a sense that they are designing for specific people, not just generic, ill-defined users. Done well, this is exactly what personas do. The problem is, most teams build personas from the wrong kind of user information, or worse, base them on assumptions.

Saffer, Dan. Adaptive Path (2005). Articles>Usability>Methods>Personas