The Anatomy of a Help File: An Iterative Approach

This article presents an approach to Help file design that focuses on creating a task-centered user experience and accommodates an iterative development strategy. This methodology allows the introduction of user assistance into early test phases--not only getting earlier validation for its accuracy, but also supporting quality assurance testing by serving as the test scripts for interactions with the user interface. This approach can also be a self-contained strategy--that is, one that allows an iterative approach to user assistance development even if the rest of product development operates on a waterfall model.

Hughes, Michael A. UXmatters (2007). Articles>Documentation>Methods>Help

Applied Empathy: A Design Framework for Meeting Human Needs and Desires

The design community keeps making a lot of noise about designing for people/users/customers. However, while this notion is well-intentioned and even conceptually correct, I find much of it boils down to empty rhetoric. What exactly are we doing? More user research? More usability testing? Certainly these are valid approaches to finding out about people's needs, but they're only a small part of an optimal solution. Are we using hollow tasks and tools like personas and scenarios? Those approaches typically take design farther away from the people for whom we are designing products rather than closer. How about focusing on usability and the user experience? That gets at only part of the issue and tends to come from the perspective of the product--as opposed to the more universal needs and desires of actual people.

Knemeyer, Dirk. UXmatters (2006). Articles>User Centered Design>Methods

Applying Color Theory to Digital Displays

For backgrounds behind text, use solid, contrasting colors, and avoid the use of textures and patterns, which can make letterforms difficult to distinguish or even illegible. Choose combinations of text color and background color with care. Value contrast between body text and its background color should be a minimum of about eighty percent.

Gabriel-Petit, Pabini. UXmatters (2007). Design>User Interface>Accessibility>Color

The Atmosphere at Interaction Frontiers 2006

Interaction Frontiers 2006 was a great experience, with some margin for improvement. I'm sure next year's Interaction Frontiers will be even bigger and better.

Bellocchio, Giovanni. UXmatters (2006). Articles>User Interface>User Experience

An Audience of One: Creating Products for Very Small Workgroups

As creators of digital user experiences, we must transform complex workflows and tasks into useful applications. Experts have written much about the UX design process as it applies to broad audiences, industry-specific vertical markets, and large corporate user groups. However, as our evolving information economy continues to encourage greater and greater specialization of job roles, there is an increased need for customized applications--digital systems that only a select few people will ever use.

Follett, Jonathan. UXmatters (2007). Design>User Interface>Collaboration

Audio and the User Experience

Audio signals also help us interact with our environment. Some of these signals are designed: We wake to the buzz of the alarm clock, answer the ringing telephone, and race to the kitchen when the shrill beep of the smoke alarm warns us that dinner is burning on the stove. Other audio signals are not deliberately designed, but help us nonetheless. For instance, we may know the proper sound of the central air conditioning starting, the gentle hum of the PC fan, or the noise of the refrigerator. So, when these systems go awry, we notice it immediately--something doesn't sound right. Likewise, an excellent mechanic might be able to tell what is wrong with a car engine just by listening to it run.

Follett, Jonathan. UXmatters (2007). Design>User Centered Design>User Experience>Audio

Bite-Sized UX Research

Regardless of the cause for your company’s resource crunch, focus on getting small wins as often as possible throughout your involvement in a project. This is a fairly common piece of advice that crops up time and time again, but it’s very much worth repeating. And it applies just as readily to both situations where time is short and those when there’s just not enough of you to go around.

Baty, Steve. UXmatters (2008). Articles>User Experience>Research>Methods

Brand Experience in User Experience Design

As user experience professionals, we have the opportunity to work more closely with brand and marketing specialists to clearly articulate the brand perception we want to elicit from our customers. Brand perception is, in part, an expectation on the part of a customer regarding future interactions with a company and its products and services. To achieve our desired brand perception, we must consistently represent and deliver the brand values we have led customers to expect.

Baty, Steve. UXmatters (2006). Design>Web Design>User Experience>Marketing

Breaking Down the Silos: Usability Practitioners Meet Marketing Researchers

I often find that client companies keep two disciplines locked up in separate silos—usability research within IT and marketing research within the Marketing Services department. This can have a serious impact on the sharing of information relating to customer experience.

Kozatch, David. UXmatters (2008). Articles>Usability>Marketing>Collaboration

Card Sorting: Mistakes Made and Lessons Learned

Card sorting is a simple and effective method with which most of us are familiar. There are already some excellent resources on how to run a card sort and why you should do card sorting. This article, on the other hand, is a frank discussion of the lessons I've learned from running numerous card sorts over the years. By sharing these lessons learned along the way, I hope to enable others to dodge similar potholes when they venture down the card sorting path.

Ng, Sam. UXmatters (2007). Articles>Usability>Methods>Card Sorting

Clash of the Titans: Agile and UCD

Agile software development has become fairly popular in the last few years, leaving many UX professionals wondering how user-centered design (UCD) can fit into an extremely fast-paced development process that uses little documentation. User-centered design can involve a variety of techniques that provide insights into users' wants, needs, and goals, including ethnography, contextual inquiry, contextual interviewing, usability testing, task analysis, and others. But all of these take time--time that an agile development process might not allow. There is hope, though. Agile and UCD methods are not completely at odds with each other--and in some cases, agile development can even enable a more user-centered approach. By taking the time to understand the differences and similarities between agile development and UCD, it's possible to devise a process that is both user-centered and agile.

Cecil, Richard F. UXmatters (2006). Articles>User Centered Design>Agile

Color Theory for Digital Displays: A Quick Reference: Part I

This article is Part I of a quick reference on color theory for digital displays. It is the first in a series of articles about the use of color in application program user interfaces and on Web sites.

Gabriel-Petit, Pabini. UXmatters (2006). Design>Web Design>Standards>Color

Color Theory for Digital Displays: A Quick Reference: Part II

This article is Part II of a quick reference on color theory for digital displays. It is the second in a series of articles about the use of color in application program user interfaces and on Web sites.

Gabriel-Petit, Pabini. UXmatters (2006). Design>Web Design>Standards>Color

Comparing UXD Business Models

Once we begin looking at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of various organizational models, we can almost immediately start brainstorming ways of mitigating the challenges and put policies into place that help improve the strategic impact of UX.

Nieters, Jim and Garett Dworman. UXmatters (2007). Design>User Experience>Management

The Complexity of Simplicity

Though many business strategies and publications continue to trumpet the power of simplicity in the design of digital products, for lots of companies and product teams, simplicity doesn't come easy.

Wroblewski, Luke. UXmatters (2006). Design>Usability>Methods>Minimalism

The Composite Intelligence of Virtual Assistants

Five levels of software intelligence can, in my opinion, make the dream of virtual assistants a reality. Collectively, they make up the concept of composite intelligence, which comprises various software components--each gifted with some moderate degree of intelligence.

Ostinelli, Roberto. UXmatters (2007). Articles>User Interface>User Experience>EPSS

Conducting Successful Interviews With Project Stakeholders

A simple, semi-structured, one-on-one interview can provide a very rich source of insights. Interviews work very well for gaining insights from both internal and external stakeholders, as well as from actual users of a system under consideration. Though, in this column, I'll focus on stakeholder interviews rather than user interviews.

Baty, Steve. UXmatters (2007). Articles>Collaboration>Interviewing

Connecting Cultures, Changing Organizations: The User Experience Practitioner As Change Agent

Every time we reach across discipline boundaries to keep a product team focused on users, drive changes to products or services based on user data we've collected, or design interactions with a clear focus on the target user, we are functioning as agents of change within our organizations.

Sherman, Paul J. UXmatters (2007). Articles>User Experience>Collaboration

Creating a Universal Usability Agenda

How do you keep usability, accessibility, and user experience requirements on track while developing standards? It is part of the very nature of standards to focus on details--and in the process, to sometimes lose sight of the real goals. This is especially true when a standards-making process goes on for a long time, a situation is highly political, or most people are focused on technology issues.

Quesenbery, Whitney. UXmatters (2006). Articles>Usability>Accessibility>Universal Usability

Review: Creating Conceptual Comics: Storytelling and Techniques

How often can you say you truly learned something completely new in a design workshop? For me, it had been a long time. But there I was, working hands-on with paper and pencil, dreaming up great ideas, and experimenting with visual communication in a medium I hadn't before seriously considered for the purpose. If you have a chance to attend this workshop, do it! If nothing else, it'll help you remember why you wanted to be a designer in the first place.

Hinton, Andrew. UXmatters (2006). Articles>Reviews>Technical Illustration

Customer Support on the Web: Don't Call Us, We'll Call You

Sometimes, when a customer looks for contact information for Customer Support, it is hidden from view or buried beneath layers of menus. Some companies even deliberately hide their contact information, because they simply don't want customers to contact them. So, what factors should you consider if your goal is providing more optimal customer support on the Web?

Szuc, Daniel. UXmatters (2007). Articles>Web Design>User Centered Design>Help

Data: The Essence of a Digital Lifestyle

I've been thinking a lot about metadata recently, but not from the standpoint of XML or programming or helping to organize and index data. My interest is in the future of content ownership, delivery, and value. I see a future for media that looks very different from the media of today. The germ of this idea actually came from my experiences with online movie rentals.

Knemeyer, Dirk. UXmatters (2005). Articles>User Experience>XML>Metadata

Deconstructing the Mobile Web

The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that the mobile Web is largely overplayed hype--the clumsy extrapolation of the behavior and use of a basic set of interfaces from one environment to another incompatible one. As a result of this broken mental model of mobile computing, we are not taking advantage of the real potential this technology offers.

Knemeyer, Dirk. UXmatters (2006). Articles>Web Design>Wireless Web

Designing Breakthrough Products: Going Where No User Has Gone Before

For UX designers, some of the most exciting projects to work on are new-to-the-world or breakthrough products that solve real problems people didn't even realize they had. Get them right and they may be hugely successful in the marketplace, but they're also the riskiest projects. While user-centered design (UCD) techniques can sometimes be valuable on new-product projects, more often, they don't seem to work particularly well when designing breakthrough products. Here are some lessons I've learned from my own work on new-product projects.

Olsen, George. UXmatters (2006). Design>User Interface

Designing Ethical Experiences: Social Media and the Conflicted Future

Questions of ethics and conflict can seem far removed from the daily work of user experience (UX) designers who are trying to develop insights into people's needs, understand their outlooks, and design with empathy for their concerns [2]. In fact, the converse is true: When conflicts between businesses and customers--or any groups of stakeholders--remain unresolved, UX practitioners frequently find themselves facing ethical dilemmas, searching for design compromises that satisfy competing camps. This dynamic is the essential pattern by which conflicts in goals and perspectives become ethical concerns for UX designers. Unchecked, it can lead to the creation of unethical experiences that are hostile to users--the very people most designers work hard to benefit--and damaging to the reputations and brand identities of the businesses responsible.

Lamantia, Joe. UXmatters (2008). Articles>User Experience>Community Building>Ethics