4 Tips for a Great First-Use Experience By Warren Croce Published: May 6, 2013 “It’s impossible to understate the importance of a great first-use experience of your product or service. ” It’s impossible to understate the importance of a great first-use experience of your product or service.
It doesn't matter if it's your first usability test or your hundredth; there are always things you can improve to make the most of the time with your users. Avoid using why in a direct, reflexive manner: We of course want to know why users do things on websites and in applications. But when we ask why directly, we risk putting the participant on the defensive.
PowWow is a free simple service for scheduling user research using your Google Calendar. The fine folks at Pointless Corp (aka Viget) created this as a side project for handling scheduling of user interviews and testing, but could be used for any kind of event. There are other apps like this that remove the fuss of coordinating schedules via email. PowWow does it simply, and provides a polished and pleasing experience.
SixUX. com is a collection of six second long Vine snippets of all sorts of transitions and animations (yup recorded by hand). Some inspiring short videos if you’re into moving pixel patterns. :) Overall I think transitions can be great if used wisely.
Most Web page layouts rely on design patterns created for laptop and desktop computers equipped with a mouse and keyboard. As the variety of devices being used to access the Web has grown, these patterns haven’t been keeping up. Designing for today’s Web means considering single-handed thumb use on smartphones, two handed touch interactions on tablets, mouse and keyboard input on traditional PCs, hybrid devices, and more.
UX deliverables had a rocky year so far. I feel particularly bad for the humble wireframe, which took some serious knocks over the past few months. There’s also a growing skepticism about the value of Personas. The Persona thing made me particularly uneasy because I’ve always been a huge fan, and we still start most of our projects with a workshop to define Personas and User Journeys.
There’s an untapped opportunity to design software environments that are beautiful, thoughtful, and humane. Here’s how one company is doing it. Over the last 10 years, great design has become an essential for consumer software success. If it’s not easy and enjoyable to use, forget about it.
In this week’s UIEtips, Stephen P. Anderson discusses micro-moments in design. Here’s an excerpt from the article: Good interaction design is about attending to every moment that passes between a person and the device (or system, or service) with which he or she is interacting. These moments can be explicit, as with gestures, taps, a button-click, or the completion of a form field.
This article is about design consultancy. It’s about wrangling that client who uses empty sentences like, “We want a snappy, simple experience,” or, “It should be on brand and should really pop. ” It’s about commanding the room and setting a vision before moving on to wireframes and pixels. While I’ll talk in terms of consultation, these ideas can be applied to the design phase of any new project.
“Is that really going to be enough people?” When the topic of user research comes up with a new client, they're often surprised by the small number of users we want to speak to. It’s important that designers and others involved in the design process understand research methodologies and can articulate the value we get from speaking to a small number of users.
For as long as user interfaces have had icons, there have been strong opinions about what makes an effective icon. From the business analyst to the CEO, we all like to tell the designer what's "intuitive" and what's "terrible. " Instead of making decisions based on the pay grade of the people in a meeting, consider using some data driven approaches to make better decisions.
Infinite scrolling promises a better experience for users. However, the good is often accompanied by the bad and the ugly. Once we understand the strengths and weaknesses of infinite scrolling, we can begin to use it to enhance our interfaces. Human nature demands hierarchy and structures that are easy to navigate.
[ Transcript Available ] This podcast is the recording of Jared’s keynote from UX Thursday Chicago. The world of web application design is expanding at a rapid rate. We’re now expected to design great experiences across a huge variety of platforms, from small screens to large displays. The flood of iPad applications and successful online businesses are showing our executives that design matters.
There are a lot of mistakes that can be made when conducting any type of research. But almost all research contains some mistakes in methodology, measurement or interpretation. Rarely do the mistakes render the research useless. To help make your next user research endeavor more useful, here are five common mistakes to avoid.
In this week’s UIEtips, I discuss the five most common pitfalls of prototyping. Here’s an excerpt from the article: Prototypes are a fabulous way to exploring ideas with a team. They shorten the time between “This is what we’re thinking…” and “Oh, I get it. ” In our work with design teams, we see a lot of teams using prototypes today.
I have a three-year-old daughter going through a struggle at the moment. It’s time for her to give up the teddy bear that follows her wherever she goes. But we’ll hear a little more about her later, including what she can teach us about providing a richer user experience. There is something comforting about knowing how to escape from a situation; knowing how to start again and knowing how to return home.
Have you heard that Google Glass will let you snap photos by winking? John Pavlus of the MIT Technology Review writes why that’s still going to feel weird.
This article continues where we left off in last week’s article. As we have seen so far, it is of no use paying for Google AdWords campaigns if users find it difficult to achieve their objectives once they land on your website. This article discusses usability guidelines that are specific for mobile websites, e-commerce websites [.
In a recent interview with Intercom, Joshua Porter expands on his “Wireframes are dead, dead, dead!” tweet from a while ago: I think you can capture almost everything you need to capture in a pretty detailed sketch. Not a high fidelity sketch by any means. Not the ones where you use five different kinds of markers and you shade everything or whatever.
Have you already been waiting for our list of recommended readings on UX? Just in time before the weekend, here are our 5 favorite articles of the month April. We hope you enjoy reading them as much as we did.
User research. Data is often misunderstood. It's more than just big numbers and math problems, it's a story told through feedback. But what is data anyways? If you think about it, it's really just a way to aggregate feedback. One way to get data is through design surveys.
User research. In this week’s UIEtips, we look back at a past article where I discuss several different user research strategies and the profound impact they can have on your products. Here’s an excerpt from the article: “Damn, I wish we’d done this a year ago. ” That’s what I hear right after I’ve started a team on their first user research project.
Usability testing. Will users get it?Marketing and design teams often want to know if users will understand a key concept on a website or design. For example, do users understand new terms and conditions, a privacy policy, different product models, prices or the service packages properly?When you want to know if users will understand something in a design, you can quickly see how asking "Did you understand the difference in our service plans?" isn't a good idea.
Usability testing. The core idea behind usability testing is having real people trying to accomplish real tasks on software, websites, cell phones or hardware. Identifying what users are trying to do is a key first step. Once you know what tasks you want to test, you'll want to create realistic task scenarios for participants to attempt. A task is made up of the steps a user has to perform to accomplish a goal.
Genius design. In this week’s UIEtips, I discuss the sophisticated approach of genius design. Here’s an excerpt from the article: A team that approaches genius design needs to focus on a specific problem that has a big enough market to provide a decent return on the investment. For example, an agency might decide they’ll become the industry experts in building web sites for small community hospitals.
Internationalisation. Our culture defines our values and our behaviour – not only in our everyday lives, but also on the Web. What catches our attention, what makes us trust a website, how we search for information, what we consider relevant, what triggers our actions, and how we perceive a website – at the end of the day, it all depends on our cultural background.
Books. Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights by Steve Portigal Rosenfeld Media To be published: early May 2013 Interviewing is a foundational user research tool that people assume they already possess. Everyone can ask questions, right? Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Interviewing Users provides invaluable interviewing techniques and tools that enable you to conduct informative interviews with anyone.
Persuasive Design. Jakub Linowski, creator of Wireframes Magazine just started writing a newsletter called Good UI on how to design sites that are easy to use and also yield high conversion rates. He's looking at how to employ practical ideas that satisfy the business side as well as the people using it, which I'm sure is something we all want to do on sites that sell a product or service. He plans to publish the newsletter monthly. Check it out.
Sketching. In this week’s UIEtips, I discuss how great designers use sketching for notetaking, to convey their ideas in meetings, to record their conversations with their co-workers, and to support their design research. Here’s an excerpt from the article: Words are powerful, but sometimes they don’t cut it. We can try to describe what we’re imagining, but a diagram often gets us to a common ground quicker.
Interface Design. Was the mouse “intuitive” before you learned to use it? Probably not. So intuition alone shouldn’t drive UI. We toss around the term “intuitive” a lot when it comes to user interface. We think of Apple products, and the way they redefined PCs and smartphones through systems that “just worked.