http://tc.eserver.org/publisher/UXmatters A listing of works published by UXmatters in the field of technical communication. en-us Copyright (c) 2005-08 by the EServer. All rights reserved. tclib-editorial@eserver.org (TC Library Editorial Board) webmaster@eserver.org (Geoffrey Sauer) http://tc.eserver.org/images/newlogo.gif http://tc.eserver.org/dir/UXmatters http://tc.eserver.org/35643.html http://tc.eserver.org/35643.html 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? http://tc.eserver.org/35644.html http://tc.eserver.org/35644.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/35645.html http://tc.eserver.org/35645.html Many of us are more comfortable communicating in words than in pictures. For example, user assistance writers are by nature and training writers, so they understand words and are adept at using word processing and publishing tools. Writers use lexicentric tools not only for creating and delivering content, but also as cognitive tools—that is, tools that help them think more clearly and efficiently. Thus, a user assistance writer might create a user-task matrix or take advantage of a word processor’s outline view when creating or evaluating a document’s structure. http://tc.eserver.org/35646.html http://tc.eserver.org/35646.html In this Ask UXmatters column—which is the second in a three-part series of columns focusing on usability—our experts discuss how to conduct usability testing with limited funding. http://tc.eserver.org/35647.html http://tc.eserver.org/35647.html Governments and large organizations, with legal and administrative concerns like taxation and security typically address the practical aspects of identity we experience on a daily basis—issuing IDs and credentials and deciding the mechanisms for their verification. This division of responsibilities for defining and executing the construct of personal identity is nearly as old as the mind/body schism at the heart of Western culture. http://tc.eserver.org/35648.html http://tc.eserver.org/35648.html In this installment of Search Matters, we’ll continue our discussion of ads in search results. Understand what makes a good ad. Limit cannibalization. Provide ads for internal merchandise instead of third-party advertising. Pay special attention to ads on pages that appear if there are no search results. http://tc.eserver.org/35649.html http://tc.eserver.org/35649.html For the last 6 months, I have been using Microsoft Expression Blend as my primary design tool. Blend, shown in Figure 1, is quickly becoming a powerful product. Its new Sketchflow module had me at hello. http://tc.eserver.org/35650.html http://tc.eserver.org/35650.html The key to intranet success is to provide value to employees and give them a reason to visit the site repeatedly. One of the primary ways to achieve this is to connect employees with the people and groups with whom they need to collaborate. Workgroups, or communities of practice, provide the basis for a living, growing, vibrant space in which people can access the information they need, share best practices, and contribute to a shared knowledge base. This article discusses the role of communities of practice within organizations and provides a framework for planning research and design activities to maximize their effectiveness. http://tc.eserver.org/35651.html http://tc.eserver.org/35651.html In this Ask UXmatters column—which is the first in a series of three columns focusing on usability—our experts discuss the use of usability testing versus expert reviews. http://tc.eserver.org/35652.html http://tc.eserver.org/35652.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/35653.html http://tc.eserver.org/35653.html It is easy to get excited about eyetracking. Seeing where people look while using your Web site, Web application, or software product sounds like an opportunity to get amazing insights into their user experience. But eyetracking is expensive and requires extra effort and specialized knowledge. The heat maps and other visualizations certainly look impressive, but what can you really learn from them? After using eyetracking for the first time, many find that it is not easy to know how to analyze the visualizations and make conclusions from them. Does eyetracking really provide any additional insights you would not have discovered anyway through traditional usability testing? Does the value of eyetracking outweigh its limitations? This article will discuss and answer these questions. http://tc.eserver.org/35654.html http://tc.eserver.org/35654.html As a participant in the Content Strategy Consortium at the IA Summit 2009, I have enjoyed watching content strategy grow into a user experience discipline. The most recent and significant sign of content strategy’s rise is the release of Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halvorson. Kristina is a renowned content strategist, co-curator of the Content Strategy Consortium, and president of Brain Traffic. I was honored to chat recently with Kristina about her new book. http://tc.eserver.org/35655.html http://tc.eserver.org/35655.html The arrow and its brethren are everywhere on our computer screens. For example, a quick examination of the Firefox 3.0 browser, shown in Figure 1 in its standard configuration, yields eight examples of arrows—Forward, Back, and Reload buttons, scroll bar controls, and drop-down menus that reveal search engine, history, and bookmark choices. http://tc.eserver.org/35656.html http://tc.eserver.org/35656.html Not long after I went independent, a friend who works at a well-known global advertising agency asked if I would be interested in helping out on a high-profile Web site redesign project. I was pretty stoked. He suggested I come in to meet his team. After meeting with the lead developer and project manager, I was told they wanted to bring me on. All I had to do was to meet the creative director. “Can I see your portfolio?” I hadn’t brought one. “I can give you the URL,” I said. We weren’t near a computer. His glassy response: “I’m not sure what we have to discuss if I can’t see your work.” http://tc.eserver.org/35657.html http://tc.eserver.org/35657.html Conflicting demands make many UX professionals think of ads as a necessary evil. Customers frequently go out of their way to say they hate ads, while marketers always seem to try their hardest to stuff as many of them as they can on each search results page on your site. This leaves many UX design professionals caught in the middle, trying to balance the ad equation—and frequently failing to fully satisfy either customers or marketers. For this 2-part column, I’ve teamed up with advertisement and eyetracking research guru Frank Guo to present real-world strategies for successfully integrating ads into your search results. The goal is making money without unduly turning off your customers. http://tc.eserver.org/35658.html http://tc.eserver.org/35658.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/35225.html http://tc.eserver.org/35225.html Perhaps the true measure of a good idea is its persistence, even though folks are slow to pick up on it. SGML is a good example. It seemed like a great idea, but for a long time, had trouble getting traction in the general tool space. Then it started showing up at technical communication conferences wearing a name badge that said, “Hi, my name is DITA,” and suddenly, it’s a hit! http://tc.eserver.org/35096.html http://tc.eserver.org/35096.html Recently, Office Depot redesigned their search user interface, adding attribute-based filtering and creating a more dynamic, interactive user experience. Unfortunately, Office Depot’s interaction design misses some key points, making their new search user interface less usable and, therefore, less effective. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the Office Depot site presents us with an excellent case study for demonstrating some of the important best practices for designing filters for faceted search results. http://tc.eserver.org/35097.html http://tc.eserver.org/35097.html In this column, which is the second of two parts, we’ll continue discussing how companies can ensure the effectiveness of User Experience within their organizations and current product development processes. http://tc.eserver.org/35098.html http://tc.eserver.org/35098.html I believe designers gather data to understand the personas that represent the users for whom they are designing a user interface. This is quite similar to the way actors must develop an understanding of their characters. So, developing their character-building and storytelling skills can help designers—just as it does actors. http://tc.eserver.org/35099.html http://tc.eserver.org/35099.html As we explore what social technologies can offer and the boundaries they can cross—boundaries that had confined the traditional Web—UX professionals must now take up a new design challenge. We must address the changing needs for social media and facilitate users’ taking better advantage of everything social media has to offer. http://tc.eserver.org/35100.html http://tc.eserver.org/35100.html To foster discussion about the issues companies face in trying to effectively integrate user experience into their current organizations and processes, we surveyed our panel of Ask UXmatters experts, asking them to give us their thoughts on these important issues. http://tc.eserver.org/35101.html http://tc.eserver.org/35101.html While ubiquitous computing remains an unpleasant mouthful of techno-babble to most people who know the term, and everyware is still an essentially unknown idea, the visibility of augmented reality has surged in the last twelve months. http://tc.eserver.org/35102.html http://tc.eserver.org/35102.html In this article, I’ll discuss the cognitive elements at the intersection of advertising and human behavior. By taking an approach to advertising that looks at the impact psychological factors have on customer behavior, I’ve learned that customers respond directly to online advertisements, as we can see from their emotions, behavior, and interactions on the Web. http://tc.eserver.org/34866.html http://tc.eserver.org/34866.html Just as companies need to differentiate themselves by creating and promoting a clear value proposition, so do UX groups. What is our value proposition? What can UX teams do that other disciplines cannot? We think in terms of design. We communicate visually. Nobody else can do this as well as we can. Other disciplines may do a much better job of communicating numbers in spreadsheets or giving slick presentations highlighting features. What we, as UX professionals, can do is bring possibilities to life by visualizing solutions for stakeholders and enabling them to see those possibilities in tangible form. http://tc.eserver.org/34644.html http://tc.eserver.org/34644.html Innovation workshops can both help you come up with great ideas and align your multidisciplinary product team around them. Innovation workshops facilitate collaboration, foster trust, and promote free expression. They provide a venue for engaging a cross-functional team in brainstorming and creative ideation, filtering a large set of ideas, collaborating on design, rapidly gathering user feedback and iterating designs, and getting the consensus you need to drive an innovative product to market. http://tc.eserver.org/34645.html http://tc.eserver.org/34645.html As a rule of thumb, the earlier in the development process reuse can occur, the more efficient reuse becomes. Like software component reuse, the reuse of UX design elements can be a very efficient form of reuse—particularly because this form of reuse occurs very early in the product development cycle. The ability to reuse prior work effectively is one characteristic of a mature discipline. http://tc.eserver.org/34646.html http://tc.eserver.org/34646.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/34647.html http://tc.eserver.org/34647.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/34468.html http://tc.eserver.org/34468.html In this column, I’ll review what user assistance architects mean by reuse and what its benefits can be. I’ll then describe some different scenarios for reuse and offer guidelines that user assistance architects and information developers can follow. My examples show how DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) can be an effective reuse framework. But the principles I discuss go beyond DITA, and you can apply them to any structured information framework or toolset. http://tc.eserver.org/34469.html http://tc.eserver.org/34469.html Following a software design process can offer the same kinds of benefits you gain from following a recipe when cooking: getting reliable results. For example, if I have a recipe for gingerbread, but I don’t follow the recipe, should I still expect to get gingerbread? It depends, of course, on how much I choose to deviate from the recipe. http://tc.eserver.org/34406.html http://tc.eserver.org/34406.html In search results, the old adage a picture is worth a thousand words rings true. When it comes to making your search results more efficient to use, more relevant, and more attractive, images reign supreme. There is simply nothing else on your search results pages that can come close to offering the same potential as thumbnail images for dramatically increasing your conversion rates and revenues. http://tc.eserver.org/34407.html http://tc.eserver.org/34407.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/34408.html http://tc.eserver.org/34408.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/34325.html http://tc.eserver.org/34325.html This is not going to be an article about personas or even what distinguishes a good persona from a bad one. Instead, this article is about the ingredients we can draw on when creating audience models and some alternative ways of communicating the results of an audience analysis. First, however, let me briefly discuss what we generally mean when we talk about personas and the role they play in the design and development process. http://tc.eserver.org/34326.html http://tc.eserver.org/34326.html In this article, I will outline an approach to gleaning insights from primary qualitative research data. This article is not a how-to for creating the design tools that are often the outputs of primary qualitative user research—such as personas, mental models, or user scenarios. Instead, it identifies an approach to generating overarching insights, regardless of the design tool you want to create. http://tc.eserver.org/34327.html http://tc.eserver.org/34327.html 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? http://tc.eserver.org/34233.html http://tc.eserver.org/34233.html How do we know whether content is any good? This simple question does not have a simple answer. Yet, I think having a good answer would help us show our employers and clients why their content needs to improve and how their content compares to the competition’s. http://tc.eserver.org/34234.html http://tc.eserver.org/34234.html A common activity at the outset of many design projects is a competitive review. As a designer, when you encounter a design problem, it’s a natural instinct to try to understand what others are doing to solve the same or similar problems. However, like other design-related activities, if you start a competitive review without a clear purpose and strategy for the activity, doing the review may not be productive. http://tc.eserver.org/34235.html http://tc.eserver.org/34235.html Web site user assistance that consistently exceeds customer’s expectations can catapult your company to legendary status and create brand equity you can measure in billions of dollars. However, making Help a strategic asset for your company is an arduous task. To shed light on this important topic, I have teamed up with Tricia Clement, a renowned cognitive psychologist and Web site user assistance expert. In this month’s Search Matters column, we’ll deliver actionable insights about Web site user assistance. http://tc.eserver.org/34093.html http://tc.eserver.org/34093.html User assistance can add value to a product or Web service’s business model by influencing how deeply users adopt new features or services. As more products employ pay-as-you-go models like that of SaaS (Software as a Service), the contribution user assistance makes becomes increasingly more important. http://tc.eserver.org/34094.html http://tc.eserver.org/34094.html In this introductory column, I’ll discuss time management and some ways in which you can use quick-reference sheets and project-management tools to help you maintain some semblance of sanity in your busy life. http://tc.eserver.org/34095.html http://tc.eserver.org/34095.html 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? http://tc.eserver.org/34096.html http://tc.eserver.org/34096.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/34097.html http://tc.eserver.org/34097.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33949.html http://tc.eserver.org/33949.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33950.html http://tc.eserver.org/33950.html Page layout forms the foundation in presenting search results. Your layout decisions for search results pages will have tremendous impact on the user experience for your entire site. Choosing the right width for search results is important, and the optimal width for search results may be a great deal narrower than some people using big monitors would believe. http://tc.eserver.org/33951.html http://tc.eserver.org/33951.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33952.html http://tc.eserver.org/33952.html When it comes to modern theater, stage directions—the descriptive text that appears within brackets in a script—are an important piece of the puzzle. They speak for the playwright when he is not there. They provide details about how the playwright has imagined the environment and atmosphere. They describe critical physical aspects of the characters and settings. Stage directions can also be critical in dictating the intended tempo and rhythm of the piece. Whether they establish a production’s overall tone or elucidate particular actions of characters, stage directions help tell the complete story that is in the playwright’s mind. Stage directions accomplish all of this, using a simple convention that structurally separates them from the actual story. http://tc.eserver.org/33953.html http://tc.eserver.org/33953.html When people talk about both usability and accessibility, it is often to point out how they differ. Accessibility often gets pigeon-holed as simply making sure there are no barriers to access for screen readers or other assistive technology, without regard to usability, while usability usually targets everyone who uses a site or product, without considering people who have disabilities. In fact, the concept of usability often seems to exclude people with disabilities, as though just access is all they are entitled to. What about creating a good user experience for people with disabilities—going beyond making a Web site merely accessible to make it truly usable for them? http://tc.eserver.org/33954.html http://tc.eserver.org/33954.html While user interface (UI) reviews often occur at the end of the development cycle, I recommend that you get involved early in the process, preferably when the designers create the initial wireframes or paper prototypes. Why? Making changes early in the process reduces development costs. Plus, if you identify usability issues early, it’s much more likely the team can remedy them before launch, preventing bad reviews. http://tc.eserver.org/33955.html http://tc.eserver.org/33955.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33956.html http://tc.eserver.org/33956.html Search results pages are some of the most visited pages on typical e-commerce sites—to say nothing of a search engine like Google. Many articles appear each year about optimal search algorithms, database performance, and the like. In contrast, very few publications focus on improving the search experience from the customer’s perspective. http://tc.eserver.org/33719.html http://tc.eserver.org/33719.html The next wave in Web site design is persuasive design, designing for persuasion, emotion, and trust. While usability is still a fundamental requirement for effective Web site design, it is no longer enough to design sites that are simply easy to navigate and understand so users can complete transactions. As business mandates for Web site design have grown more strategic, complex, and demanding of accountability, good usability has become the price of competitive entry. So, while usability is important, it is no longer the key differentiator it once was. http://tc.eserver.org/33720.html http://tc.eserver.org/33720.html Using patterns has become a well-known design practice and is also considered best practice in the software development community. While UX teams can and should constantly promote best practice, we can also approach tackling poor design practice from the other side: antipatterns. Antipatterns are approaches to common problems that might appear obvious, but are less than optimal in practice. http://tc.eserver.org/33721.html http://tc.eserver.org/33721.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33722.html http://tc.eserver.org/33722.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33723.html http://tc.eserver.org/33723.html Before graphic user interfaces, text was the primary means of both input and output defining human-computer interactions. Even today, much of the information user interfaces present is textual. Therefore, we should not underestimate how the right text treatment can measurably improve user productivity and increase user satisfaction. As new technologies become available—for example, larger monitors with higher resolutions—a good foundation of knowledge about effective text treatment can help designers create usable user interfaces for them more quickly. http://tc.eserver.org/33690.html http://tc.eserver.org/33690.html Early in my technical communication management career—more than twenty years ago—I made this observation: “I can produce a manual that users won’t read for $50,000, or I can produce a manual that users won’t read for $5,000.” My point was that, until we started writing manuals users actually read, the $5,000 option was the better business strategy. But now, to heck with producing manuals users won’t read. This new world of post-2008 meltdown has changed the game. We must now write manuals users will read, and we must write them for $5,000. http://tc.eserver.org/33691.html http://tc.eserver.org/33691.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33657.html http://tc.eserver.org/33657.html 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? http://tc.eserver.org/33658.html http://tc.eserver.org/33658.html If you’re like me, you’ve always felt something was missing once you finished creating your personas and scenarios. They communicate the heart and goals of the user, but miss out on a lot of details. And while it’s the intent of both documents to do just that, neither personas nor scenarios succinctly communicates to your business what features a product or service should have and why it should have them. http://tc.eserver.org/33659.html http://tc.eserver.org/33659.html What are some good ways to educate myself in User Experience? http://tc.eserver.org/33476.html http://tc.eserver.org/33476.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33477.html http://tc.eserver.org/33477.html User assistance writers are often the Rodney Dangerfields of the UX world, bemoaning the fact that we don’t get any respect. I think the real problem is that user assistance folks are not particularly good at communicating the ways in which we add value to an enterprise. This column explores two models that show how user assistance adds value and how we can communicate that value to those who pay our salaries—something I would like to encourage other user assistance writers to do. http://tc.eserver.org/33478.html http://tc.eserver.org/33478.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33479.html http://tc.eserver.org/33479.html 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? http://tc.eserver.org/33480.html http://tc.eserver.org/33480.html How you can educate yourself in user experience. The best ways to capture and present user research data. http://tc.eserver.org/33481.html http://tc.eserver.org/33481.html In many of my columns, I have touted the importance of persuasive, or influential, content and shared relevant theories and arguments, sprinkling in some practical tips and examples along the way. This column brings together a collection of practical tips, or recipes, for persuasive content. http://tc.eserver.org/33482.html http://tc.eserver.org/33482.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33154.html http://tc.eserver.org/33154.html Let me describe a familiar user assistance experience. A user installs a new application, and when the user wants Help, the application directs her to the user documentation on a Web site or CD-ROM. What the user finds there is a PDF file containing the manual—or a collection of PDF files, representing a library of manuals, including a user guide, configuration guide, troubleshooting guide, and various references. And the layout of each of these PDF manuals is exactly the same as if it were a printed book. This raises an interesting question: If we’re giving manuals to users to read online, why do we design and write them for paper? http://tc.eserver.org/32776.html http://tc.eserver.org/32776.html User assistance writers are often the Rodney Dangerfields of the UX world, bemoaning the fact that we don’t get any respect. I think the real problem is that user assistance folks are not particularly good at communicating the ways in which we add value to an enterprise. This column explores two models that show how user assistance adds value and how we can communicate that value to those who pay our salaries—something I would like to encourage other user assistance writers to do. http://tc.eserver.org/32779.html http://tc.eserver.org/32779.html this column will take the form of a journey through a wide range of topics at the intersection of user experience design and everyware. http://tc.eserver.org/32780.html http://tc.eserver.org/32780.html Though visual designers might face different hurdles in particular product domains and at different points in their careers, there are three common misconceptions that surface quite frequently. http://tc.eserver.org/32781.html http://tc.eserver.org/32781.html My key point in this column is that we need to support, defend, and promote our artisans, or artists, and we need to eliminate the assholes from our organizations. In practice, I see a lot of managers who do not support their artisans—their greatest performers—but hold onto and even reward their assholes. In the end, an organization that rewards the wrong people can destroy its effectiveness and drive the most talented people out. http://tc.eserver.org/32675.html http://tc.eserver.org/32675.html Metaphor teaches. Metaphor influences. Are you drawing on its power? Perhaps not, because many major works on writing for interactive products make little mention of it. To help encourage better use of metaphor, this column describes both the usefulness of shallow metaphors and the potential of deep metaphors, while offering tips and examples. http://tc.eserver.org/32676.html http://tc.eserver.org/32676.html As UX professionals, we often take for granted the fact that our users will be dealing with a keyboard, mouse or track pad, and monitor. We think about users’ physical relationship with their digital devices very selectively, if at all. But, as we explore new human interface devices and incorporate new interactions into our designs, we have the opportunity to create deep connections between users and their technology. http://tc.eserver.org/32677.html http://tc.eserver.org/32677.html 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. In this article, we’ll try to avoid just being prescriptive. Rather, we’ll pose questions along the way, regarding what has worked well for you. http://tc.eserver.org/32678.html http://tc.eserver.org/32678.html Although our UX management peers have shared many tactics with us that have made their groups more strategically relevant, we’re presenting just a few here. We’ll highlight what we feel are the most salient factors in getting you to the strategy table. http://tc.eserver.org/32586.html http://tc.eserver.org/32586.html What does it mean to be strategically relevant? It means executives consider you a trusted advisor. It also means other disciplines—such as Engineering, Product Management, Business Development, and so on—consider you a partner and want you to participate in strategic decision making, even if they are not required to do so. http://tc.eserver.org/32587.html http://tc.eserver.org/32587.html Card sorting offers a systematic and statistically significant process for answering questions about hierarchy design. However, those of us who have run card sorts know there is an art to conducting successful card sort studies, and there are many variables that can affect the usefulness of results. In this column, I’ll discuss the challenges and limitations of card sorting and review alternative and complementary techniques that designers can leverage when developing an information hierarchy for a large-scale Web site. http://tc.eserver.org/32588.html http://tc.eserver.org/32588.html As designers, to be truly innovative, we must open ourselves up to new ideas, surround ourselves with diverse inputs, and be willing to embark on a new journey—regardless of whether we know the destination. Actors and others who create theater would tell you this kind of mindset is part their everyday work culture. So, what can we learn from the way actors and other theatrical artists work that will help us be more innovative, too? http://tc.eserver.org/32589.html http://tc.eserver.org/32589.html When you hear the term voice user interface (VUI), what comes to mind? Most likely, memories of an interactive voice response system (IVR) for customer service arise. IVRs are certainly not going away. For many companies, they remain the foremost contact point with customers. But voice user interfaces are more than just IVRs. In fact, VUIs have tremendous potential for enhancing the experience of any mobile phone user. As the use of mobile devices and applications proliferates internationally, understanding how to integrate, or mash up, graphic user interfaces (GUI) and VUIs is becoming critically important. http://tc.eserver.org/32590.html http://tc.eserver.org/32590.html It’s hard to find anyone who disparages use cases, but those who use them are still a minority. In a previous life as a UX designer, I used use cases and developed a great respect for them. But it wasn’t until recently that I began using them to design user assistance. Why did it take me so long to get back to these reliable work horses of user-centered design? http://tc.eserver.org/32591.html http://tc.eserver.org/32591.html In this column, I’ll explore the user experience of malicious software, or malware. My position is that, like many qualitative attributes, malware is in the eye of the beholder. And, I’ll suggest a method that product or service developers can use to assess the risk that their users, the media, or the market at large might perceive their offerings as malware. http://tc.eserver.org/32592.html http://tc.eserver.org/32592.html Usability testing makes use of a lot of role-playing scenarios like this one, and many findings and design recommendations result from participants’ responses to these scenarios. But an over-reliance on role playing when testing a product and making design recommendations can have major downsides and risks http://tc.eserver.org/32593.html http://tc.eserver.org/32593.html Psychologists and ethics researchers say we can take simple steps to align our Want and Should Selves over the three phases of decision making and help keep the Imp of the Perverse in check. http://tc.eserver.org/32029.html http://tc.eserver.org/32029.html The common wisdom is that we now live in the age of information; the freedom and access we have to data is unprecedented in history; and the efficiency and convenience of online commerce, research, and communication has already transformed our lives for the better. While this is true, of course, our excitement should be tempered by a few realizations. http://tc.eserver.org/32030.html http://tc.eserver.org/32030.html The number one enemy of any strategy is poor execution. All across the business landscape, the ability of an organization to execute its strategy is one of the most critical elements of success. And for an effective UX strategy, the broad range of elements requiring alignment and implementation make its successful execution all the more difficult. http://tc.eserver.org/31918.html http://tc.eserver.org/31918.html With companies moving business online, the Internet has become a source of profit for them. We all know how this works. You establish an online presence, sell your brand well—and you make money. Let’s rewind. We are selling our brands online, but doing it well is the challenge. To do it well, keep the following in mind: customer research is an important factor in generating business revenues, so it must be done right—that is, at the right place and at the right time; the online medium should not be the only way of gathering customer information; recognizing emerging trends—behavioral, demographic and emotional—helps companies move forward strategically. http://tc.eserver.org/31917.html http://tc.eserver.org/31917.html User interface designers have more interactive options than ever for presenting content. So, we can make meaningful strides toward offering users the right content in the right place, at the right time, in the right amount. However, these rich options for interactively presenting content also come with a challenge. http://tc.eserver.org/31877.html http://tc.eserver.org/31877.html A common frustration among UX professionals who are employed in the software development industry is the perception that executive-level management gives lip service to user experience rather than supporting specific UX activities by allocating sufficient resources for them. http://tc.eserver.org/31874.html http://tc.eserver.org/31874.html The 2008 IA Summit was held April 10–14, at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Miami, Florida, shown in Figure 1. It had the highest attendance in the conference’s nine-year history: Over 600 people signed up for the conference run by ASIS&T (American Society for Information Science and Technology). All the signs are that information architecture (IA) is a community and a practice that is growing, and that its sister disciplines—interaction design (IxD) and experience design—are well-represented at the conference—not just in terms of attendees, but also speakers. http://tc.eserver.org/31871.html http://tc.eserver.org/31871.html Most of us who are working as part of a design team in a services company, a product company, or even a design boutique have to live with a generic intranet. In this article, I’ll describe how to leverage your company’s intranet and how to build a community around an intranet for a UX team. http://tc.eserver.org/31876.html http://tc.eserver.org/31876.html Designers rationalize their choices just as much as everyone else. But we also play a unique role in shaping the human world by creating the expressive and functional tools many people use in their daily lives. Our decisions about what is and is not ethical directly impact the lives of a tremendous number of people we will never know. Better understanding of the choices we make as designers can help us create more ethical user experiences for ourselves and for everyone. http://tc.eserver.org/31870.html http://tc.eserver.org/31870.html One of my earlier careers was in manufacturing management, and it grounded me in the principles of project planning and management. When I moved into technical communication, I brought my project management disciplines with me, and I embraced the prevailing tools of my new profession. I dutifully produced documentation plans in Microsoft Word and supported them with detailed project plans in Microsoft Project. However, the problem is that—like bad relationships—these artifacts never gave back results that were sufficient to reward the effort I put into creating them. http://tc.eserver.org/31872.html http://tc.eserver.org/31872.html In my last column, I suggested that being a manager of UX is no better—and no worse—than being a great designer or user researcher, but the roles are very different. In fact, as the book The First 90 Days [1] points out, the skills that make you successful as an individual contributor are not the same skills you need as a leader. http://tc.eserver.org/31878.html http://tc.eserver.org/31878.html As enablers of online conversations between businesses and customers, Web forms are often responsible for gathering critical information—email addresses for continued communications, mailing addresses for product shipments, and billing information for payment processing to name just a few. So it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that one of the most common questions I get asked about Web form design is: “How do I deal with international addresses?” http://tc.eserver.org/31873.html http://tc.eserver.org/31873.html Interviewing is an artful skill that is at the core of a wide variety of research methods in user-centered design, including stakeholder interviews, contextual inquiry, usability testing, and focus groups. Consequently, a researcher’s skill in conducting interviews has a direct impact on the quality and accuracy of research findings and subsequent decisions about design. Skilled interviewers can conduct interviews that uncover the most important elements of a participant’s perspective on a task or a product in a manner that does not introduce interviewer bias. Companies hire user researchers and user-centered designers because they possess this very ability. http://tc.eserver.org/31875.html http://tc.eserver.org/31875.html Over the past three decades of computer/human interaction, we’ve seen digital technology evolve from a curiosity to a convenience to an integral part of our everyday lives. For UX professionals, the demand for our skill sets and the opportunities to practice seem only to grow, whether we be designers or developers, usability specialists or information architects, working in fields as diverse as Web, mobile, desktop, and embedded software systems. The UX professions are at a stage that could very well be a tipping point—where the rapid rise of digital devices, services, and connectivity converge to create a massive need for UX professionals. The mobile space alone could generate demand that we can only begin to imagine. http://tc.eserver.org/31600.html http://tc.eserver.org/31600.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/31599.html http://tc.eserver.org/31599.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/31598.html http://tc.eserver.org/31598.html I’ve found that separating client requests into content units removes uncertainty and offers clearer direction, while helping your client recognize each individual request as a deliverable, requiring assignments and responsibilities. To do this, I follow a four-step process that helps delineate what content units each section of a Web site must cover—as opposed to content that acts as filler, or filler units. http://tc.eserver.org/31604.html http://tc.eserver.org/31604.html Whether we’re designing the user experience for a digital product or a physical one, as UX professionals, we are uniquely positioned to influence the behavior of other people, for good or ill. Our employers or clients charge us with responsibility for not only defining a design problem from multiple perspectives, but also finding solutions that are better than the ones that came before. Increased energy consumption, materials waste, and the resulting climate change are the chief difficulties our generation of designers and thinkers must address—or ignore at our own peril. But for most UX professionals, sustainability—unlike usability, technical feasibility, aesthetic appeal, and even business viability—is not yet a baseline factor that we take into account when designing a product or service. http://tc.eserver.org/31601.html http://tc.eserver.org/31601.html After working on five books as an editor or co-author, Lou Rosenfeld became disenchanted with the traditional book publishing model. So, in late 2005, he founded Rosenfeld Media, a new publishing house that develops short, practical, useful books on user experience design. Rosenfeld Media published their first book, Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior, in early 2008. I recently had the opportunity to interview Lou—along with Liz Danzico, Senior Development Editor at Rosenfeld Media—about starting a new publishing house and “eating their own dog food.” http://tc.eserver.org/31602.html http://tc.eserver.org/31602.html This article postulates that we cannot address the issue of simplification exclusively by analyzing the physical and computational parameters of technology. Instead, we must understand the goal of simplification in light of the knowledge, tasks, and processing-load demands on its users. We can approach simplicity as an engineering endeavor by controlling the impact on these three usage dimensions. http://tc.eserver.org/31603.html http://tc.eserver.org/31603.html Almost weekly, I talk with a UX designer or researcher who wants to become a manager of a UX team. For some people, this is a good choice. Both they and their teams thrive. But for many, it’s honestly not the right goal, and the end result is that neither they nor their teams are happy. The book Now, Discover Your Strengths [1] suggests that we tend to be good at the things we love doing, and we love activities at which we excel. I find that we do our best work when we’re in a playground. (I’ll explore this idea more in my next column.) Isn’t life too short to pursue a path we don’t enjoy? http://tc.eserver.org/31597.html http://tc.eserver.org/31597.html What we consider to be good technical writing often reflects an American cultural perspective. One facet of this cultural orientation is that technical writing tends to use a low-context style. Most notably, we tend to write user assistance as if users have never seen the user interface we are explaining. Secondly, we tend to write user assistance as if users have never even used software before. But users rarely go to Help before they have tried to accomplish a task on their own first, and most users today have extensive experience using software and are familiar with the standard ways of interacting with user interfaces. So a user interface is a high-context artifact—one a user has already seen before reading our documentation and that uses rules and conventions the user already knows. http://tc.eserver.org/31605.html http://tc.eserver.org/31605.html Elements of persuasion are important to creating winning content. To help safeguard content from becoming manipulation, we need to understand its distinction from persuasion. As a step toward that understanding, this article: provides basic definitions of persuasion and manipulation; explores the key differences between them; and describes some consequences for UX content. http://tc.eserver.org/30823.html http://tc.eserver.org/30823.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/30824.html http://tc.eserver.org/30824.html The problem of the perpetual super-novice is the tendency of people to stop learning about a digital product--whether it's an operating system, desktop application, Web site, or hardware device. http://tc.eserver.org/30822.html http://tc.eserver.org/30822.html Findable. Scannable. Readable. Concise. Layered. We know much these days about how to make Web content usable--thanks to experts such as Robert Horn, Jakob Nielsen, Ginny Redish, and Gerry McGovern. What we don't understand as well, however, is how to make content win users over to take the actions we want them to take or have the perceptions we want them to have. We don't understand how to make Web content both usable and persuasive. I, by no means, intend to imply that we should sacrifice the usability of content to make it more persuasive. Truly winning content must be both. http://tc.eserver.org/30820.html http://tc.eserver.org/30820.html These days, the idea of customer engagement is almost as hot as Web 2.0--and almost as controversial. As busy UX professionals, should we invest our time and energy in caring about engagement, or is it just another buzzword? I think we do need to understand customer engagement, so that, at a minimum, we can respond intelligently to questions about it from marketers or executives. We might even glean some useful insights from thinking about engagement. This column aims to cut through the hype and reveal the potential value of engagement. http://tc.eserver.org/30818.html http://tc.eserver.org/30818.html If you have all the resources you need, do the very best job you can in all respects. But if your resources are tight, ask yourself whether you are writing the essential stuff at a level of quality users will notice. Also, ask whether the value of the documentation you are producing aligns with the economic pressures on your company. http://tc.eserver.org/30819.html http://tc.eserver.org/30819.html The usability and user experience communities of practice are experiencing great growth and have emerged in countries throughout the world. These developing practices have brought about a huge economic boom in the UX market as both customers and clients are beginning to understand the business benefits they bring. In India, we have undoubtedly seen the growth of these practices. Indian UX companies are delivering designs that satisfy users' needs to their clients. http://tc.eserver.org/30682.html http://tc.eserver.org/30682.html These days, the idea of customer engagement is almost as hot as Web 2.0--and almost as controversial. As busy UX professionals, should we invest our time and energy in caring about engagement, or is it just another buzzword? I think we do need to understand customer engagement, so that, at a minimum, we can respond intelligently to questions about it from marketers or executives. We might even glean some useful insights from thinking about engagement. This column aims to cut through the hype and reveal the potential value of engagement. http://tc.eserver.org/30683.html http://tc.eserver.org/30683.html The design decisions that both industrial designers and interaction designers have made on the Breva provide an enhanced experience for the rider--that is, for me. http://tc.eserver.org/30636.html http://tc.eserver.org/30636.html Ajax and Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) have revolutionized the way users interact with Web sites. However, documenting the design of any page that uses Ajax is a challenge, because the page--and, more importantly, components on the page--can have different states, depending on how users interact with the page's components. http://tc.eserver.org/30635.html http://tc.eserver.org/30635.html With so many choices as to how we can spend our time in the digital age, attention is becoming the most important currency. In today's splintered media environment, new digital products and services must compete with everything under the sun, making differentiation key to developing an audience that cares, invests, and ultimately drives value. http://tc.eserver.org/30208.html http://tc.eserver.org/30208.html 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? http://tc.eserver.org/30209.html http://tc.eserver.org/30209.html This framework comprises the competencies a UX professional or team requires. The following sections describe these five competencies, outline some questions each competency must answer, and show the groundwork and deliverables for which each competency is responsible. http://tc.eserver.org/30186.html http://tc.eserver.org/30186.html Think you're not into marketing? Think again. As UX professionals, we share much in common with our close cousins, the marketers. We all seek to understand customers--needs, preferences, behaviors, attitudes, and more. We all seek to create positive touchpoints with customers and, in turn, a positive affiliation with our product or company brand. We all know the importance of communicating effectively with customers and evaluating the performance of our work. http://tc.eserver.org/30187.html http://tc.eserver.org/30187.html Experience designers need to transition from designing for a single, static space--the desktop--to imagining the broad possibilities of the geospatial Web. For digital products and services, the next dimension of user experience we should consider during design is location. http://tc.eserver.org/30025.html http://tc.eserver.org/30025.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/30024.html http://tc.eserver.org/30024.html Your seemingly elegant design begins to bloat with features, tear under the pressure of localization, and nearly keel over under the weight of new content that pushes it to its breaking point. Before long you give up. It's time to redesign--again. Could you have avoided this all too common cycle? Was there anything you might have done to anticipate these changes? One potential answer lies in scalable design considerations. Screen frameworks, user interface structures, and components that enable your product design to gracefully accommodate new features, new markets, and dynamic content--that can shrink or grow--are the cornerstones of a scalable design. http://tc.eserver.org/29928.html http://tc.eserver.org/29928.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/29927.html http://tc.eserver.org/29927.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/29926.html http://tc.eserver.org/29926.html Two questions any writer must deal with are: 'What do I write about?' and 'How much do I say about it?' Essentially, these questions deal with the scope and the depth of a document. Technical communicators have a tendency to want to document a topic as completely as possible, and we carry this instinct with us when we architect and write Help files. In this column, I challenge that prevalent instinct and offer an alternative way of thinking about the scope and depth requirements of Help systems. The benefits of this approach are, I hope, better Help for users and, for our clients and employers, a more efficient use of technical communicators' time. First, I'll discuss three principles that underpin my perspective, then I'll give some practical advice about writing Help that people will actually use.