Ideation. There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.
Designing for kids. I was recently fortunate to work on interactive storybooks for preschoolers and toddlers (ages 2–5) for the iPad and Android tablet platforms. Designing for young kids requires looking at things from a child's perspective. I learned some important lessons by observing kids and reviewing applications while working on these projects. Kids are curious and eager to explore.
Mobile design. A little while ago I had the pleasure of chatting with Anthony Kosner at Forbes about mobile product design. We discussed mobile advertising, focus, performance, content, and a lot more. You can read the whole thing over at Forbes or just enjoy the tasty tidbits I pulled out below. One thing I can tell you for sure is that everything you have is not going to be relevant for everybody.
Design process. It’s like one of those adventure movies where the hero, surrounded by their motley crew of misfit recruits, is looking across the valley at the approaching army, thinking, “What did we get ourselves into?” That’s the sense I get after talking with UX professionals about the challenges their organization faces as they move to Agile development processes. At first, Agile can feel like a battlefield.
Usability testing. It's often called web surfing or web browsing, but it probably should be called web doing. While there is still plenty of time to kill using the web, in large part, we're all trying to get things done. Purchasing, reserving, comparing and communicating—Internet behavior is largely a goal directed activity. If a website doesn't help users accomplish their goals then it's unlikely users will return and refer their friends.
Gamification. In 2009, interest in the capacity of games to solve real-world problems spontaneously began to erupt within general culture. This was an idea that a lot of people had been promoting for a some time through initiatives like Serious Games, Games for Health, and Games for Change, but their message had mostly flown under the public’s radar.
Terminology. A close friend asked me a few days ago – “You’ve covered decent ground on the science, dimensions, characteristics, design aspects, process and pervasiveness of usability considerations. How about doing a reverse bit? What usability is not about? Or the myths of usability?” I jumped at the chance.
Sketching. I want to take a moment to have a deeper, more reflective conversation about the role that sketching plays in my professional work, and how it has evolved it over time.
Design strategy. The cleverest trick that Apple has ever pulled isn’t convincing us to pay $500 for a phone or MP3 player, but rather convincing the world that if you want good design, then you have to follow Apple’s template of clean lines and stripped-down details. You can see how that happened: The company has become so synonymous with both good design and minimalism that most people assume those two things are one and the same.
Information Architecture. By Nathaniel DavisPublished: February 6, 2012 “The rapid rate at which people and organizations create and propagate information complicates our getting a grip on information overload…. ” The one thing we know about information overload on the Web is that we don’t know enough.
User research. By Jim Ross Published: February 6, 2012 “No one reads reports!” “PowerPoint must die!” “Conveying user research findings so people can understand them, believe them, and know how to act on your recommendations can be challenging.
Mobile design. New can be very scary. It’s easy to get comfortable with what we know, only to have everything turned topsy-turvy when we encounter major changes. The world of mobile design is new, and therefore, scary for many. The comforts of designing for the desktop disappear when we have to deal with these portable, tiny devices.
Forms. Despite being nearly ubiquitous online, username and password login screens are wrought with usability and security issues. Here's a small sample of how bad things are. The average person has between 7 and 25 accounts that they log into every day. (source)People report authenticating about 15 times in a typical work day on average.
Mobile design. The business practice of brainstorming has been around with us so long that it seems like unadorned common sense: If you want a rash of new ideas, you get a group of people in a room, have them shout things out, and make sure not to criticize, because that sort of self-censoring is sure to kill the flow of new thoughts. It wasn’t always so: This entire process was invented by Alex Osborn, one of the founders of BBDO, in the 1940's.
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Terminology. Jargon. It's an occupational hazard. Which is why we couldn't help but chuckle when we read this Harvard Business Review article on the subject. The article got us thinking, what are the buzzwords in our field that simply don't make much sense to us? The one term that kept coming to mind was "User Experience Design.
Methods. OK, we’re only at number 19 so far, there’s still a way to go. Still, what’s there so far suggests it’ll be an amazing series. As the site doesn’t make it easy to see all of the methods so far, here’s a list of what’s there to date: Concept Interviews: Users write down statement to do with the use of a product, and rank them.
Cases. Given that we love everything UX and design related, it must come as no surprise we are big fan of Smashing Magazine. Their choice of subjects is always spot on, and their articles show an impressive amount of attention to detail. They recently had their site redesigned, and the result is a beautiful, spacious site, designed from the typography out. I took a closer look at the new design and I’d like to discuss some of the findings with you.
Mobile design. When designers create applications for smartphones, they often hark back to principles inherited from desktop software. After all, they’re all computers, right? Android UX Design Chief Matias Duarte thinks it’s time to jettison that idea. The technology available in the average smartphone today is vastly more powerful than the desktop computer of 30 years ago, when those standards were first created.
User research. By Paul Bryan Published: January 23, 2012 In my new column, UX Strategy, I’ll explore the growing field of user experience strategy, which combines business strategy with user experience design to build a rationale and a road map for guiding an organization’s UX efforts.
E-commerce. We’ve all heard the gloomy prognostications: The Internet is rendering traditional retail obsolete. Thanks to increasingly sophisticated e-com, from price-slashing powerhouses like Amazon to startups that mimic the social aspects of shopping (Svpply, for one), consumers have little incentive to waltz into a brick-and-mortar store--and companies have little incentive to keep paying those astronomical rents.
Design strategy. By Jim Nieters Published: January 23, 2012 “An interaction model is a design model that binds an application together in a way that supports the conceptual models of its target users. ” In March of 2011, I joined HP to lead the User Experience and Front-End Development organization for Consumer Travel. My goal? To design products that transform the future of travel.
Wireframes. Had to whip up an OmniGraffle stencil for jQuery Mobile. I submitted it to Graffletopia, but it isn’t live yet. You can download it here in the meantime. Just put in the user name > Library > Application Support > OmniGraffle > Stencils folder and unzip.
Cases. Remember when you were five and you first learned how to make a shadow puppet of a dog by holding your palm in front of a flashlight and waggling your pinky finger? Making anything more complicated than that takes a lot of effort.
E-commerce. In our recent Retail multichannel customer experience report, we found that nearly all of the brands we researched performed poorly in their communications with the customer after a purchase has been made and the product has been delivered. It was the lowest scoring guideline in the report with an average of 1. 5 points out of 5.
Navigation. The benefit of using a faceted sidebar navigation on your website is that you aren’t vertically constrained by space. You can list as many links in the sidebar as you need. However, this known benefit also has an unknown downside. Listing too many links in your sidebar can lead to faceted overload.
Design strategy. Sometimes, it’s easy to brand what we do as the “science of the obvious. ” Here we are, doing all this research, and come up with something that is painfully obvious. The latest of the obviously obvious findings we’ve come up with? That teams who don’t have a shared understanding of their design rarely succeed at producing a great product. See? It’s obvious.
Interviews. Donald Norman is one of the world’s most influential designers and writers about design. We are big fans, and really proud that Anneke could talk to him about his books, the future of designing for the web, emotional design, the balance between design as an art-form and as a form of marketing, and much more. 'Emotional Design' by Donald Norman - a must read.
