paper & pencil

UX Swimlanes

Luke Wroblewski posts his notes on UX Swimlanes presented at CanUX. This is an expanded and more visual version of traditional swimlane diagrams and I can imagine would really help to create shared understanding of key user scenarios.

Yvonne Shek of nForm provides some further information and a Visio template.

The strengths of the deliverable are:

1. Synthesis. It takes the UX, the business, the backend systems, and the story--and weaves each into a bird's eye view.
2. Simplicity. It makes the complex look simple, or simpler.
3. Improvement. It is a clear improvement over the traditional RUP business process modeling swimlanes, in terms of ease of use.
4. Communications. It helps the team talk about the "what" and "why." All the scenarios combined paint the entire story of the web app. The comics lane also help to communicate the "what" and "why" to management and business stakeholders (thanks to Kevin Cheng for the idea, and Kelly Mellings for the templates).
5. Facilitating the next step. I have already mentioned that Dennis was able to go directly into wireframing after this document was completed. The set of wireframes that Dennis produced out of these were much like the end product. He stared at the Swimlane doc for a few days, et voila: Iteration 1 of the wireframes!

The power of rich visual modeless feedback

Nick Meyers of Cooper, describes numerous examples of rich visual modeless feedback.

Alerting is another behavior in interface design where RVMF can be effectively used. Often, alerts such as errors may occur in other tabs, but can still be communicated to users where they are given the choice of breaking their workflow or ignoring the alert until later.

RVMF is most effective at presenting changes in status, progress, or displaying errors.

Use the same visual design principles when considering RVMF as with other forms of interface design:

• Use visual hierarchy to insure that the critical RVMF data stands out on the screen
• Use more than just color as a vector to represent RVMF
• Use color consistently and meaningfully to represent status and create a learnable color system (the Yahoo! Finance example utilizes commonly accepted color codes to represent direction)
• Use animation consciously and sparingly

RVMF is a great technique to be used in interface design, but it’s not generally appropriate for experiences that target beginners. Some standard design patterns, such as progress bars, are generally well-known and understood but custom controls always require some decoding by users at first.

IDEO’s Global Chain Reaction Experience

Eight worldwide IDEO offices created a way cool Rube Goldeberg Machine for an event called the Global Chain Reaction. Definitely watch the entire video, it's worth it.

Elmo in Palo Alto sends a print to Shanghai

Saving the World Through Design Thinking

During a recent World Economic Forum in Dubai, the Global Agenda Council/Design Group came up with a Design Manifesto to advocate for "what design thinking can do to help reshape the big issues of the day."

Learning – Design can help to rebuild the education system to ensure that it is fit for purpose in the 21st Century. Another challenge is to redefine or reorient the design education system at a time of unprecedented demand when thousands of new design schools are being built worldwide and design is increasingly being integrated into other curricula. Designers are also deploying their skill at communication and visualization to explain and interpret the overwhelming volume of extraordinary complex information.

Why Apple is great at interfaces when others are not

Nick Merritt opines on Tech Radar about the pleasure principle and how Apple understands that more than other companies do.

It is not just enough to make using something easy. Windows does that, more or less. When it comes to deciding what choices to make, it helps that a team has a supremely clear vision of the role the technology is going to play in the lives of its users, as the original Mac team did, as I suspect, the iPhone team does today, and to be fair to Microsoft, the Surface team has.

Fun matters because it creates a legion of advocates for a technology that slightly duller products do not.

Choosing the Language for a User Interface

Several prominent UX professionals tackle the topic Choosing the Language for a User Interface in the first UXMatters Q&A column.

Exclaiming “I bet everyone is unhappy!” Whitney [Quesenbery] describes three of the intermingled issues this reader faces. “First, the language in the interface is not separable from the user interface. People using your software don’t experience the visual style, interactions, and information in the interface separately. That’s why user experience is so difficult to get right—it’s inherently multidisciplinary, and takes expertise in many skills. You should be designing the language along with the rest of the interface.

“In an ideal world, where everyone on your team has great writing skills:

• the UX lead on a project should own all decisions regarding user interface text
• the product manager or marketing lead should own branding and marketing text
• the technical communicator should own Help text" 

- Pabini Gabriel-Petit

Another advocate for writer involvement in the ownership of text decisions, Colleen [Jones] says, “The writer and the user interface designer—closely consulting user feedback—need to make the final decisions. While the writer and user interface designer should listen to feedback from the other experts on the project team, their expertise needs to be respected. While we all may be familiar, we are not all experts. We do not all understand the nuances of tone, the impact of connotations, the subtleties of viewpoint, and so on. Trust the experts!”

Lessons for User Experience Consultants from Barack Obama

John Yesko blogs on the lessons UX professionals can learn from the Barack Obama campaign.

How can we emulate this approach? Remember that’s it’s all about people. Be sure to know your audience. It’s impossible to develop a good solution if you don’t know the motivations and context of your site’s users. But it also means that you should get to know your clients. Communication will be smoother and more productive if you understand each others’ perspectives.

Color Lab with Flickr

Thanks to the weekly signposts from Adaptive Path, I found this fun color tool from Idée Inc. They use an API from Flickr for all the photos.

Swurl is way cool

In the last couple of years we've all become more active online and we have a presence in many areas. Swurl provides a neat way to see all of your activity, as well as other people, in a really cool timeline.