paper & pencil

Account Sign-in: Many Mistakes to Learn From

2-part UIE article I've sent out to our teams:

• Account Sign-in: 8 Design Mistakes to Avoid
• 8 More Design Mistakes with Account Sign-in

One of my favorites is "Mistake #10: Requiring Stricter Password Requirements Than The NSA".

Feeding Frenzy for IxD'ers

Coroflot article attempts to define what interaction designers do in response to the "feeding frenzy going on".

The typical back-story for an Interaction Designer, as far as there appears to be one, features someone working in one of the above professions, finding certain aspects of a project falling through the cracks. Whether the project is a website being built or a laser printer being designed, it falls to someone to start making the calls about what it feels like to use it: whether the button layout makes sense, whether the next screen in a navigation structure follows logically, how you turn the thing on.

I certainly got into this profession by filling in gaps between what the project managers (myself included) and developers do.

Educating through the UI

Evolve Your User Interface To Educate Your Users provides numerous ideas for providing assistance to your users within the UI.

The help section of most applications, Web-based or otherwise, end up being used by the power users who are already trying to figure out every nook and cranny of the application. The proper way to help users understand how your application works is to bring the help section to them and in a format that can  easily be understood.

Some of the ways to do this are:

• Inline
• Examples of correct content/data
• Contextual tips
• Descriptive default data (ex. email@domain.com in an email address field)
• Real-time validation

A Design Continuum from Functional to Desirable

Interesting piece from Dave Shackleon, The Product Architect: A Design Continuum from Functional to Desirable - to show how better design can increase product adoptability.

This chart shows the adoptability of a product based on where it sits on a continuum from Functional to Usable to Desirable.  Rough descriptions of each are:

• Functional = A user can finish what someone could describe as a functional task but doesn't necessarily meet their needs or goals as a user.
• Usable = A user can meet needs and goals without frustration.
• Desirable = The satisfaction of needs and goals is done in such a way that a user builds a positive emotional association with the product (i.e. positive product equity).

Design Thinking v. Business Thinking

Luke W's notes from Roger Martin's talk - "Design Thinking: The Next Competitive Advantage"...

• This process can be thought of as a knowledge funnel. As we move down the knowledge funnel, we leave things out. When something is a mystery, we consider everything. When it is an algorithm, we need to consider less things to understand it. Finally, when a computer runs code it thinks about nothing. It just executes.
• As we move down funnel, we create more efficiency. But the drawback is we leave things out.

• Advice on how to work together. Designers working with business:
  • Take design-unfriendliness as a design challenge: this needs to be part of your job.
  • Empathize with the “design-unfriendly” elements. Find out what they are trying to produce.
  • Speak the language of reliability. Consistency, efficiency, etc. Need a shared language.
  • Use analogies & stories. This looks like something that has happened already. Substantiated by how analogous it is to something that happened in the past.
  • Bite off as little a piece as possible to generate proof. What’s the small piece that you can do to generate belief or proof.
• Advice on how to work together. Business working with designers:
  • Take inattention to reliability as a management challenge.
  • Empathize with the “reliability-unfriendly” elements. Trying to save you from downside of knowledge funnel: honing yourself to oblivion.
  • Speak the language of validity.
  • Share data & reasoning, not conclusions. Help designers link past to what they believe in the future.
  • Bite off as big a piece as possible to give innovation the biggest chance for succeeding.

Playgrounds for Data: Inspiration from NYTimes.com Interactives

Very inspiring article on UIE -Playgrounds for Data: Inspiration from NYTimes.com Interactives. Really great ideas for creating visualizations of data to tell a story.

The Emotion of Customer Experience

LukeW posted his notes from the talk The Emotion of Customer Experience at MIX07. Some of the bits I really liked:

Engineering Customer Experiences...

• Rigorous systems to develop and manage clues. Most companies spend their time learning how people feel about their brand instead of how their customers feel about themselves. You cannot NOT have an experience. The question is how well architected or designed is it? Does it have a set of random clues? Or do the clues create an emotional connection.

Managing Experiences...

• There is a hierarchy of customer behavior. At the top is ownership. We have many tools (blogs, social apps) to move people up levels.
• Language analysis. One study showed a 300% difference between a bank site’s language and their customer’s language. A 30% difference according to communications experts, is a barrier to marriage!
• You can’t get an entire organization to have intuitive skills.

Examples:

• Progressive insurance differentiation features: have adjusters show up at scene of accident with loss counseling and claim checks are written at the scene. Give competitor’s quote alongside their own.
• Howard Johnson restaurants: used to be all over highways. Got into cost cutting exercises: cost of napkins, dropping ice flavors for efficiency. All restaurants are now gone. Focused on extracting value from clients vs. creating value.

Design v. Usability

Nielsen warns Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous, which sparked an interesting and lengthy discussion on the IxDA list on definitions of design and usability. One interesting, although mistaken, argument is that designers are more enlightened about good design than usability practitioners.

One of Jared's responses:

Designers and usability practitioners have different roles in the design process and, when they work together well, they can produce amazing results. Of course, it takes little skill to do something poorly (damn, I really want to get that on a t-shirt) , so when they work together poorly, which takes virtually no skill or effort, then the results are likely to be less-than-desirable.