Yancho

I like Kristi Olsen's definition of UX: As UX researchers, our goal is to identify customer pain points and obstacles in a given workflow or process, then tell a compelling story about their risks and provide general recommendations for alleviating those risks. It's pretty succinct and clear. Methods vary, but the goal is the same. Mike Hughes on UX Matters  argues that we sometimes make a faulty assumption in our view of the "user". Users are  not  spherical. They are irregular, lumpy beings who introduce spin and resistance into your well-planned happy paths. Walk through a design, explicitly asking at each step:  What might a reasonable person do that could lead to failure?  Examine the consequences, then change your design to prevent, mitigate, or repair the damage that could result. If you need to convince others to implement your solution, either involve them directly in the walkthrough or document negative scenarios to the same level of detail that you

A thought from Colleen Jones, the author of Clout, in an interview on UXMatters.com marketing and media tend to focus on influencing  attitude , while usability and technical communication focus on supporting  action.  There’s a time and a place for content that influences attitude—and for content that guides action. More and more, a  complete  user experience must plan content that influences  both  attitude  and  action. That’s easier said than done This is an area that probably needs more attention -- the idea of melding attitude and action, somehow making instruction or experiences attend to both, because internal to a person attitude and action are reciprocal and will often spiral with each other.

From  David Brooks Over the past few decades, we have tended to define human capital in the narrow way, emphasizing I.Q., degrees, and professional skills. Those are all important, obviously, but this research illuminates a range of deeper talents, which span reason and emotion and make a hash of both categories: Attunement: the ability to enter other minds and learn what they have to offer. Equipoise: the ability to serenely monitor the movements of one’s own mind and correct for biases and shortcomings. Metis: the ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations. Sympathy: the ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and thrive in groups. Limerence: This isn’t a talent as much as a motivation. The conscious mind hungers for money and success, but the unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence when the skull line falls away and we are lost in love for another, the challenge of a task or the love of God. Some people seem t

I'm reading "Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems" right now. I really like Steve Krug 's authorial style. He suggests that: Even though terms like “user-centered design” and “user experience” are now in the vocabulary of most people working on Web sites, relatively few designers, developers, stakeholders, managers, and check-signers—who all have a hand in the design process—have actually spent any time watching how people use Web sites. As a result, we end up designing for our abstract idea of users, based for the most part on ourselves. It is interesting to note, though, that when you do spend some time and resources on exploring how users interact with your design you can have a tremendous amount of success. Jakob Nielson , who has been doing UX design and testing for many years, says that: According to our survey, spending 10% of your development budget on usability should improve your conversion rate by 8