Marketing Isn't a Dirty Word

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.

Jones, Colleen. UXmatters (2007). Articles>User Experience>Marketing

More Alike Than We Think

Users were having trouble learning about the Open University's special form of distance education on the existing site. To solve this problem, we wanted to make recommendations for the style and format of the information as part of our design.

Quesenbery, Whitney. UXmatters (2006). Articles>Web Design>Usability

Motorcycle UX: Riding in the Fast Lane

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.

Sokohl, Joe. UXmatters (2008). Design>User Experience>User Interface

New Life for Product Documentation

Here are some 'truths' we've all heard: 'Documentation is just a band-aid for poor design.' 'Real users don't read manuals.' 'Super users never read anything.' 'Help doesn't.' But are they really true? I've seen some signs of life in the use of documentation for digital products recently.

Quesenbery, Whitney. UXmatters (2006). Articles>Documentation>User Interface>User Centered Design

Open Sesame! Selling UX Services

For some UX professionals, selling consulting services is as difficult as opening a magic door without a secret password. There is no simple password that can magically open prospective customers' minds so they can see what you can do for them. However, there are a few strategies you can use when opening a dialogue with new customers that will lead to your sales success.

Schreier-Fleming, Maura and Janet M. Six. UXmatters (2006). Careers>Consulting>User Experience

Review: Paper Prototyping

Carolyn Snyder's Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to Design and Refine User Interfaces provides the only complete guide to paper prototyping. It teaches you everything you need to know to successfully do paper prototyping and offers many practical tips. However, only about a third of the book is actually about doing paper prototyping. The majority of the book's content comprises a basic reference on usability testing. While some of the information on usability testing describes how to test paper prototypes, most of it is applicable to any type of usability testing. If you're already an expert in usability testing, you may not find this information as useful, but Snyder has honed her approach to usability testing over her many years of experience as a usability professional and provides a wealth of practical information.

Gabriel-Petit, Pabini. UXmatters (2006). Articles>Reviews>Information Design>Methods

The Perpetual Super-Novice

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.

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

Personas, Goals, and Emotional Design

When Don Norman's most recent book, Emotional Design, hit the shelves in early 2004, it sent a ripple through the user experience world. Norman introduced the idea that product design should address three different levels of cognitive and emotional processing: visceral, behavioral, and reflective. This idea seemed like old news to some and a revelation to others in the UX community. In either case, Norman's ideas, based on years of cognitive research, provide an articulated structure for modeling user responses to product and brand and a rational context for many intuitions long held by professional designers.

Reimann, Robert. UXmatters (2005). Articles>User Centered Design>Emotions>Personas

Pioneering a User Experience (UX) Process

Creating a User Experience (UX) process can be a very rewarding journey; it can also be a nightmare if approached from the wrong angle. Initiating a culture-shift, overhauling existing processes, evangelizing, strategizing, and educating is an enormous undertaking. Often it's a lonely path the UX advocate walks, especially if you are the only one who is driving that change from within the company. But that path is ripe with opportunities to improve your company's product creation process, as well as the product itself.

Hillman, Amy. UXmatters (2007). Design>User Experience>Project Management

Preparing for User Research Interviews: Seven Things to Remember

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.

Hawley, Michael. UXmatters (2008). Articles>Interviewing>Usability>User Centered Design

Recycle These Pixels: Sustainability and the User Experience

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.

Follett, Jonathan. UXmatters (2008). Articles>User Experience>Environmental

Rediscovering Communication

Today we have more ways of communicating than ever. The challenge? If businesses aren't careful, what they're trying to say--and what their customers are trying to say--can get lost in the complexity.

Jones, Colleen. UXmatters (2007). Articles>Business Communication>Communication

Refining Data Tables

Many articles have been written on what is probably the single most ubiquitous interface element within Web applications today: the form. Forms justifiably get a lot of attention because their design is critical to successfully gathering input from users. Registration forms are the gatekeepers to community membership. Checkout forms are how eCommerce vendors close deals. But what goes in must eventually come out, and the information users provide to Web applications often makes its way back to users in the form of tabular data.

Wroblewski, Luke. UXmatters (2006). Design>Web Design>Forms>Databases

RIAs: The Technology Is Exciting, but They Really Do Help Users

Recently, there has been a lot of talk about Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), how they work, and how to choose the appropriate RIA technology. Unfortunately, so far, we've had few discussions about the value of RIAs to users and how RIA technologies let us create better, more usable Web applications.

Heller, David. UXmatters (2005). Design>Web Design>Interaction Design

The Role and Evolution of Design in Software Products

Design professionals often decry the lack of importance and investment their companies place on design. After all, most software projects revolve around a product's engineering, to the ongoing detriment of its design--not to mention the chagrin of so many designers, who wriggle uncomfortably toward the bottom of the food chain. But there is a good reason for this: products can be very profitable without investing a single penny in interface design--at least, beyond the user interfaces the engineers build. Indeed, at least in the early stages of a market or company, resources dedicated to intentional interface design are often a bonus rather than being viewed as a necessity.

Knemeyer, Dirk. UXmatters (2006). Design>User Interface>Programming

Rosenfeld Media: UX Publishing Startup: An Interview with Lou Rosenfeld and Liz Danzico

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.”

Kaufman, Joshua, Louis Rosenfeld and Liz Danzico. UXmatters (2008). Articles>Interviews>User Experience>Case Studies

Scalable Design

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.

Wroblewski, Luke. UXmatters (2007). Design>Web Design>User Experience

Seeing the World in Symbols: Icons and the Evolving Language of Digital Wayfinding

Of all the objects that occupy our digital spaces, there are none that capture the imagination so much as icons. As symbols, icons can communicate powerfully, be delightful, add to the aesthetic value of software, engage people's curiosity and playfulness, and encourage experimentation. These symbols are key components of a graphic user interface--mediators between our thoughts and actions, our intentions and accomplishments.

Follett, Jonathan. UXmatters (2006). Articles>Usability>User Interface>Graphic Design

Selection-Dependent Inputs

Successful Web applications tend to grow--both in terms of capability and complexity. And this increasing complexity is often passed on to and absorbed by a Web application's forms. In addition to needing more input fields, labels, and Help text, forms with a growing number of options may also require selection-dependent inputs.

Wroblewski, Luke. UXmatters (2007). Articles>Web Design>User Interface>Forms

Selling Your Brand by Using Your Web Site as a Customer Research Tool

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.

Kirmani, Afshan. UXmatters (2008). Articles>Web Design>Marketing>Audience Analysis

Sharing Ownership of UX

By working closely together in harmony, product management, UX, and engineering can achieve synergy, making the product user experience greater than the sum of their individual efforts.

Gabriel-Petit, Pabini. UXmatters (2007). Articles>User Experience>Collaboration

Simplicity in Your Mind

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.

Santos, Lucinio. UXmatters (2008). Articles>User Experience>Usability>Minimalism

Small Multiples Within a User Interface

Many software programs provide access to, and let users work with, large amounts of information. In addition to interactions that allow users to create, edit, and expand massive data sets, these information-rich applications must also support effective data interpretation. Data monitoring, reporting, and modeling applications require people to makes sense of large amounts of information quickly and easily. It should come as no surprise, then, that for such applications many interface design problems are actually information design problems. As a result, we can leverage information design solutions when tackling such problems. Using small multiples is one such solution.

Wroblewski, Luke. UXmatters (2005). Design>User Interface

So the Necessary May Speak

Though carefully structured organizational systems and well architected interactions are key components of effective interface designs, it is ultimately the presentation of an interface--layout, look and feel--that tells users what a product has to offer and how they can make use of it. As a result, creating usable and engaging interactive products is dependent on our ability, as designers, to communicate with our audience. The better at communicating we are, the easier it is for our audience to understand our messages and intentions and the easier it is for them to use and appreciate the products we design.

Wroblewski, Luke. UXmatters (2005). Articles>Web Design>Communication

So You Want to Be a UX Manager—Seriously?

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?

Nieters, Jim. UXmatters (2008). Careers>Management>User Experience