paper & pencil

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)

Demystifying Interaction Design

Joshua Porter expands on behavior is our medium - Robert Fabricant's keynote at Interaction 09.

We design to change, guide, support, elicit, constrict, and control behavior. The products and screens we create are about getting others to do something, using or buying or donating or otherwise taking some real-world action. Good design elicits the right behavior, poor design does not.

Robert Fabricant - Behavior is our Medium from Interaction Design Association on Vimeo.

An interesting discussion occurs in the comments about the words "elicit" and "behavior". There is a large focus on the moral implications of changing a person's behavior but that was not the point of saying behavior is our medium. It's also about changing the behavior of a system to match the user's goals, needs, wants, etc. to create successful interactions.

Surprisingly, Robert’s assertion was not as obvious to all those in attendance as he had hoped. He got pushback on the idea that designers traffic in behavior. In a follow-up post he writes:

“There is universal acceptance of a holistic approach to human centered design within this community – generally referred to as ‘experience design’ (not my preferred term). This approach considers all of the contexts surrounding use and then tries to build a unified interaction model to support user needs over time, across these contexts. It focuses not just on expressed needs but on those that are unexpressed: the emotions, motivations, and desires that shape user engagement over time. In fact, more and more of our clients are looking for our help in identifying these latent, unmet needs. So, it is interesting to find designers who are very comfortable, in fact insistent, on this holistic approach and yet spooked by the idea that we are in the ‘behavior business’.”

While I largely agree that I work with behavior, I don't feel this fully "demystifies" what I do as you could say the same about many professions - marketing and advertising come to mind immediately. But I do like using the word behavior in terms of what I'm shaping, more so than pixels, because it gets more to the heart of what an interaction designer does. And this is why I don't use the term "interface designer" as it puts too much emphasis on the screen and the visual and that's the easiest aspect to describe what I do.

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.

Best Careers 2009: UX, IxD and IA. Hooray!!

US. News & World Report named Usability Experience Specialist as one of the best careers for 2009. At the start of the article the author lists all the other job title variations this profession uses. I consider myself an Interaction Designer, but my official title is Information Architect. Dan Saffer created a good model of the wide range of UX disciplines.

Whatever you call them, their job is to help ensure that products, especially technical ones, are easy and pleasurable to use.

I am concerned though that the articles does focus much more on evaluation and research and completely skips over design.

You write a report summarizing what you've learned. Then, engineers develop a prototype of the product that comes closest to meeting both the company's and the surgeons' desires.

In between these two sentences is a HUGE step - the design phase where the research is analyzed and converted into solutions that the engineering team can then build. This is where the iPod comes from instead of just another MP3 player.

10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design

Whitney Hess describes the 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design on Mashable. Each misconception is expanded with thoughts from numerous UX luminaries.

User experience design is NOT...

1. ...user interface design
2. ...a step in the process
3. ...about technology
4. ...just about usability
5. ...just about the user
6. ...expensive
7. ...easy
8. ...the role of one person or department
9. ...a single discipline
10. ...a choice

In support of #2, Dan Brown says:

Most [clients] expect experience design to be a discrete activity, solving all their problems with a single functional specification or a single research study. It must be an ongoing effort, a process of continually learning about users, responding to their behaviors, and evolving the product or service.

running the company

Victor Lombardi created an excellent presentation, Can we run the company? (pdf), on the career paths available to designers. Lombardi establishes that our goal is to "empower people" and to do so we must have greater influence and that requires holding higher positions in organizations.

After interviewing several leaders Lombardi noticed that they all shared these 3 things:

Positive attitudes
Doing something they love
Willing to let go of old roles and grow into new ones

The presentation then goes on to outline three potential paths for designers: 1) Design Management, 2) General Management, and 3) Designing Organizations; with the most influence occurring in the third path. Lombardi then provides some insights into how to get to these higher positions and identifies some good books to read.

He also introduces the new term - Business Design:

Business Design is using the skills you have to “design” the business

“Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.”
- Herbert Simon

Throughout the presentation, Lombardi references Designers as Leaders, an essay by Richard Farson.

Of course, having one’s way is hardly the ideal manner in which to conduct a professional relationship. Nevertheless, design judgment, even in matters of social responsibility such as health and safety, let alone matters of esthetics, efficiency, productivity and visual impact, is often subordinated to the client’s or employer’s wishes.

That is such an old story among designers that perhaps it is small wonder that designers tend not see themselves as leaders. If they have learned not to expect their professional judgements to sway clients or employers, how can they imagine leading corporations or communities, to say nothing of exercising leadership in the developing global arena? It is simply impossible for most designers to think of themselves as having a place in high councils of decision making.

But that is where designers are most needed—at the top. It is a travesty that the only professionals close to the CEO’s are lawyers and accountants. Designers have more to offer, because increasingly our organizations need to be design driven, not just market driven. To truly prosper, our global society must have its needs met, not just its wants.

Essentially, designers need to learn to see the world as the CEO does. Lombardi's presentation offers several books to help learn the language of business.

The presentation also pointed to an interview with Brad Nemer who oursued the dual degrees of Master of Design and Master of Business Administration.

"I chose the dual-degree path for two reasons. After working in several high-tech startups, where the product essentially is the company, it became clear that no matter how grand the vision, design is managed in the context of business." He said as he explained his choice of degrees, "So it is critical to understand the basic forces of accounting, marketing, and organizational management, because otherwise even the best designs in the world will go nowhere. The much-celebrated divide between "designers" and "suits" is not only counter-productive to success all around, it's inaccurate. Once you demystify business fundamentals, they become just like any other design constraint, and are no more insurmountable."

Farson again on designers as leaders:

Designers have even better preparation than most to assume leadership. They are especially qualified. Designers are already good at seeing things in context, already understand the sweep of history, already are conversant in the arts, sciences and humanities (as are the best leaders), already are good at working in ensembles, already are environmentally aware, already understand the limits of technology, its backfiring nature, already are capable of a high level of creative thinking, already can appreciate the esthetic dimensions of leadership. The first step, then, is for designers to begin to imagine themselves as leaders—of design firms, of communities, of cultural organizations, of corporations—and beyond.

The next 50 years will determine the survival of our civilization. We will succeed only if design becomes the organizing discipline of the future, and that will only happen when designers become leaders. The world needs what designers have to offer—not just on the drawing board, but on the board of directors.

organizing the ux field

david heller talks about the need for a common vocabulary in the UX field: Organizing the User Experience (UX) field!

For me the core of this problem is in the nomenclature and taxonomy that we use to represent the field of User Experience to the “outside” world. It is vital that we don’t give double meanings to words of the trade, that we substitute the politics that seem to be dividing us for the practicalities that we need to put forth. This needs to be done no matter how uncomfortable those most greatly effected get. There needs to be made room in people’s vocabulary to allow new terms to replace their old ones. Terms like “usability”, “HCI”, “UCD” which have been used almost as synonyms need to be made to be particular of each other and of other new words like “information architecture” and “interaction design”.

david goes on to provide his definition of terms and how they relate to each other:

There are those disciplines which are creative, solution oriented:

* Information Architecture - structure

* Visual & Information Design - presentation

* Interaction & User Interface Design - behavior

These disciplines have some level of cross over, but basically represent the disciplines used for bring a final product strategy to its tactical realization.

There are those disciplines that are informative:

* Usability Engineering - evaluative

* HCI - research

These disciplines bring guidance to the the first set. These help set up guidelines and best practices in different mediums changing random creativity towards a more successful overall solution. However, they do not form solutions, as they are not applications of guidelines, as they alone are not enough to move from evaluation to design.

Finally, there are those disciplines that are strategic which for the most part exist outside of the user experience sphere usually more connected to the business side of the equation than most practitioners of disciplines in User Experience get to go.

david has since developed a presentation (pdf) that defines UX and IxD and describes how IxD fits into UX.

UXnet

User Experience Network (UXnet) recently formed:

UXnet is dedicated to exploring opportunities for cooperation and collaboration among UX-related organizations and individuals.

yeah!!

mfa is the new mba

in harvard business review's breakthrough ideas for 2004 - idea #9 is that "The MFA Is the New MBA".

(via beth mazur)