paper & pencil

The Marshmallow Challenge

Tom Wujec demonstrates the power of prototyping through the Marshmallow Challenge. Kindergartners fared better than recent business school graduates... which is funny & scary.

Good Reads Week of Oct 12

Fresh vs. Familiar: How Aggressively to Redesign
People don't like change so incremental changes to existing design are best. But sometimes a complete overhaul is warranted.

How To Persuade Your Users, Boss or Clients
Great tips for any profession.

Google's Marissa Mayer Assaults Designers With Data
Love Google but as a designer I would not want to work there. Lots of great designs were done without a ton of data to back them up.

The Six "Wow" Features of Windows 7
I'm glad to hear Microsoft is took more of a design approach but this Mac snob will not be silenced.

Good IXDers borrow, great ones steal...
Excellent summary of various disciplines that we should steal from.

The Manhattan Transcripts - from moma.org

Good Reads Week of Oct 5

The Future of Health Care Is Social
In this feature article, frog design uses its people-centered design discipline to show how elegant health and life science technology solutions will one day become a natural part of our behavior and lifestyle. What you see here is the result of frog's ongoing collaboration with health-care providers, insurers, employers, consumers, governments, and technology companies.

A shorthand for designing UI flows
Ryan of 37Signals describes a new shorthand for UI flow diagrams. Very simplified version that I think will come in handy at the start of a complex project.

Why Traffic Signs Don't Work (And What You Should Learn From It)
People respond more effectively to natural cues rather than artificial ones.

8 Ways Doing Less Can Transform Your Work & Life
Focus, quality over quantity, do better not more.

Facilitation: A Love Story
Facilitation is easily one of the top skills a UX professional should master.

Beyond Goals: Site Search Analytics from the Bottom Up
Overview of bottom-up analysis of site search stats and how it can complement a top-down approach.

7 Tips to Sell Your Ideas the Steve Jobs Way
Great tips for presentations and even for design sessions.

Good Reads Week of September 1

http://www.slideshare.net/billder/designing-humanity-into-your-products
Bill DeRouchey's presentation to relax and be human. (via David Kozatch, IxDA list)

http://www.agileexperiencedesign.org/profiles/blogs/story-mapping-with-jeff-patton
Video of story mapping with Jeff Patton and David Hussman at Agile 09. (via Anders Ramsay, agile-usability list)

http://unify.eightshapes.com/efficiency-tips/8-tips-for-organizing-project-files-folders/
Helpful summary of organizing files when multiple folks work on the same files.

The Secret to Writing Well
http://www.thinkingandmaking.com/view/the-secret-to
(More) Tips for Writing Well
http://www.thinkingandmaking.com/view/more-tips-for
Tips on writing and editing well from Austin Govella. (via Google Reader)

(un)Synchronizing UX & Development
http://www.thinkingandmaking.com/view/agile-ux-un
Working through how much UX should be handled in an Agile fashion. (via Google Reader)

35 Excellent Wireframing Resources
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/09/01/35-excellent-wireframing-resources/
Links to articles, tool lists and other resources for creating better wireframes. (via Google Reader)

4 Lessons that Helped Me Optimize My Workflow
http://freelanceswitch.com/productivity/4-lessons-that-helped-me-optimize-my-workflow/

Getting up earlier, scheduled breaks, strict interruption management, take advantage of spare moments. (via Freelance Switch)

Mommy, where do ideas come from?
http://www.cooper.com/journal/2009/08/mommy_where_do_ideas_come_from.html
Exploring ways in which ideas come to be.

Good Reads This Week

Interesting and insightful articles from this week... while most are the usual user experience related topics, there are some around freelancing as I begin my adventure in independent consulting.

20 Tools For The Freelance Designer On A Shoestring Budget
Links to free or cheap tools for image editors, feedback and usability testing, cross-browser testing, programming, and billing, invoicing and timetracking. (via FreelanceSwitch.com)

Convert Design Evolution
Fun video showing the design evolution of an iPhone app. (via Sporter)

Managing UI Complexity
Techniques for managing complexity in an interface. (via @Konigi)

Behind the Typedia Logo Design
Really great overview of designing the new logo for Typedia, which is a shared encyclopedia of typography. (via Twitter)

Your Future in 5 Easy Steps: Wired Guide to Personal Scenario Planning
Scenario planning is a great tool to work through an uncertain future. (via @MarkFrisk)

Design guidelines for e-commerce product pages with eyetracking data
10 guidelines for designing product pages such as clear calls to action, prioritizing important content, simple layout, quality images and helpful descriptions using bullet points. (via Core77)

Information Interplay: Visual Design, Information Architecture, and Content
Good designs and good design teams are strong in all three areas. (Via UIEtips)

Renting an Idiomatic Experience
Learning keyless ignition idiom. (via Alok Jain, IxDA list)

Are You a Visual Thinker?
Capturing key ideas in visual form engages people and they're most likely to read them. (via XPRESS)

3 design-based strategies for beating an economic downturn

Phil Barrett of Flow Interactive offers 3 design-based strategies for beating an economic downturn.

1. Innovate your way out

Innovation doesn't mean throwing money at blue sky projects and hoping for miracles. You can cut out masses of risk by using a structured design process:

• Contextual research. This isn't market research with surveys and focus groups. Contextual research is about observing and participating in people's lives to get the dirty truth about what they need, what they want and how they behave. The innovation often seems obvious when you've got the right information.
• Conceptual thinking. Get your team together. Have lots of ideas. Stay out of the details and explore the new and usual stuff - that's where inspiration comes from.
• Evaluation with target users. Make cheap prototypes any which way you can, and watch target customers try it out. Even if the feedback is not what you want to hear, it's better to face harsh reality in the R&D lab than out in the open market.
• Iteration. Your first attempt will be shaky. Keep testing and fixing your product's design until your customers tell you its ready.

2. Optimise, to squeeze more from what you have

Digital marketers make a lot of noise about acquiring new customers. That's certainly an essential element of a successful business. But keeping your customers happy when they get to you is worthy of at least as much attention. There's a rule of thumb: acquiring a new customer is 6-10 times more expensive than retaining an existing customer. So a solid strategy when times are hard is to plug the holes in your "leaky bucket," and stop website visitors from pouring out as fast as you can pour them in.

3. Cut costs by improving the customer experience

Organisations that work to improve the customer experience benefit from reduced costs. They can entice customers to the most cost-effective channels and they generate fewer negative customer experiences and fewer expensive service calls.

Evangelizing UX Across an Entire Organization

Several UX professionals offer their advice on Evangelizing UX Across an Entire Organization in the latest edition of Ask UX Matters.

Greg [Nudelman] shares this from his personal experience: “Not one company I have ever worked for was truly customer-centric. While some companies might say they are in their mission statement and even hire lots of designers and UX people, companies are only truly committed to one single thing: making money for their shareholders. However, the one clear finding that has come out of the entire UX movement is that focusing on your customers is the surest, most direct way for any company to make money.”

John Ferrara agrees, “The best way to get people invested in UX is to get them involved in it. Wireframe reviews are a great place to start. Since a wireframe is a fundamentally visual document, it serves as a great basis for generating group discussion.

Invite people from across the organization—engineering, editorial, marketing, legal—to meetings where you’ll walk them through an early wireframe page by page and solicit their feedback. You’ll find they can bring perspectives to the design that you hadn’t considered yourself.

“Usability testing is another great opportunity to get other departments involved. Before bringing in representative users, invite internal people in to participate in a dry run. This is a great opportunity to find flaws in the test script, while putting people from other disciplines, quite literally, in the user’s seat. As we all know, seeing the world through a user’s eyes can transform your thinking very suddenly. When full testing gets underway, invite them to observe and debrief with them afterward.”

Demonstrate the relationship between UX and making money. Use industry cases like Staples making 20 million a year by removing ads and extra links from their ZIP code page—example courtesy of HFI, Inc. This will introduce the topic of UX and its possibilities into the minds of decision makers.

Experience IS the Product... and the only thing users care about

Peter Merholz wonders why most businesses still don't get that the user experience is the product.

On its own, a simple camera is meaningless, because the entire photographic process (loading a camera, exposing the light-sensitive material, removing that material, processing the material, printing images from that material) could not get any simpler. Eastman's genius was in designing his system so customers could do what mattered most to them—capturing the image ("You press the button"). Eastman located other functions elsewhere in the system ("We do the rest"), allowing the Kodak camera to be remarkably straightforward to use.

George Eastman understood this and so does Steve Jobs.

A comment that sheds light on this comes from Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple:

When you start looking at a problem and it seems really simple, you don't really understand the complexity of the problem. Then you get into the problem, and you see that it's really complicated, and you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That's sort of the middle, and that's where most people stop....

But the really great person will keep on going and find the key, the underlying principle of the problem—and come up with an elegant, really beautiful solution that works.

That's what we wanted to do with Mac.
—from Insanely Great, written by Steven Levy

Until the last sentence, you might have thought he was taking about the iPod or even the iPhone. But the quote came from 1984, and demonstrates that transcendent product design is a matter of philosophy and approach. The reason product development has gone wrong is that people stop at the worst time—when the solutions are most convoluted.

What Eastman knew, what Jobs knows, is that you have to go beyond; you have to think about the experience people are having.

Google’s view on the future of business

Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, discusses the Internet, business, and innovation with The McKinsey Quarterly.

On the long tail...

And, in fact, it's probable that the Internet will lead to larger blockbusters and more concentration of brands. Which, again, doesn’t make sense to most people, because it’s a larger distribution medium. But when you get everybody together they still like to have one superstar. It's no longer a US superstar, it's a global superstar. So that means global brands, global businesses, global sports figures, global celebrities, global scandals, global politicians.

So, we love the long tail, but we make most of our revenue in the head, because of the math of the power law. And you need both, by the way. You need the head and the tail to make the model work.

On transparency and the wisdom of crowds...

But it has a lot of other implications for the way corporations operate. They can't be as controlling. They have to let information out. They have to listen to customers, because customers are talking to them. And if they don't, their competitor will. So there's a long list of reasons why a more transparent company is a better organization.

There are many business models predicated on control. My favorite example is movie distribution windows. As a consumer, I want to watch the movie whenever I want, and on whatever medium I want. But the whole economic structure of the movie business, up until recently, was organized around distribution in a certain format, at a certain price, and then wait a while. But in the new world people won’t wait. A good example was the delay of the Harry Potter movie. The fans were fanatical, writing letters and calling private cell phones to overturn the delay. The industry has a fan base that they need to spend time thinking about.

There's a lot of evidence that groups make better decisions than individuals. Especially when the groups are selected to be among the smartest and most interesting people. The wisdom of crowds argument is that you can operate a company by consensus, which is, indeed, how Google operates.

On what companies need...

You need two things. You have to have somebody who enforces a deadline. In a corporation the role of a leader is often not to force the outcome, but to force execution. Literally, by having a deadline. Either by having a real crisis or creating a crisis. And a good managerial strategy is “let's create a crisis this week to get everybody through this knot hole.”

And the second thing is that you have to have dissent. If you don't have dissent then you have a king. And the new model of governance is very much counter to that. What I try to do in meetings is to find the people who have not spoken, who often are the ones who are afraid to speak out, but have a dissenting opinion. I get them to say what they really think and that promotes discussion, and the right thing happens. So open models, beyond input from outside, also have to be inside the corporation.

Encouraging this is an art, not a science. Because in traditional companies, the big offices, the corner offices, the regal bathrooms, and everybody dressed up in suits cause people to be afraid to speak out. But the best ideas typically don't come from executives. And, unfortunately, the executives don't agree with me on that.

On innovation..

Innovation always has been driven by a person or a small team that has the luxury of thinking of a new idea and pursuing it. There are no counter examples. It was true 100 years ago and it'll be true for the next 100 years. Innovation is something that comes when you're not under the gun. So it's important that, even if you don't have balance in your life, you have some time for reflection. So that you could say, "Well, maybe I'm not working on the right thing." Or, "maybe I should have this new idea." The creative parts of one's mind are not on schedule.

Interaction Elasticity

Jakob Nielsen defines interaction elasticity:

Usability problems are like a barrier between you and your potential customers: the worse the design, the higher the barrier. Will users jump the hurdle? Some will, some won't. The lower your barrier and the more compelling your offer, the lower your interaction elasticity will be, and the more people will jump.

There are two strategies for increasing your website's business value: (1) do something that people really want and thus make demand less elastic, and (2) reduce interaction costs by increasing usability. I would do both.