Yancho

I posted some new thoughts on the Rain blog on the value of user experience testing: http://blog.mediarain.com/2011/09/usability-roi-and-the-art-of-communication/

I'm really glad I came across this tip. I didn't know it existed. It will be very helpful. It allows you to work with text in Photoshop as a paragraph, rather than a single line of text. http://methodandcraft.com/notes/switching-to-paragraph-text

Brewing the perfect brainstorm A little write-up I did for Rain based on a presentation I gave there and for the IxDA Utah group.

From an article in UX magazine : ... let’s take a quick look back to see how this new discipline fits into a simplified history of user experience: Human-computer interaction is about paying attention to people and their relationship with computing. Information architecture is about making things findable. Interaction design is about making things usable. Content strategy is about making things meaningful. Experience design is about making things seamless. Persuasive design is about making things influential. The trend goes towards deeper meanings and bigger impacts. As the design discipline gets better at the basics of understanding and enabling behavior, it moves towards creating meaningful impacts by influencing behavior. But this influence must be built on top of successes in the more basic elements of UX such as good research and seamless usability. This points to design as not merely being about aesthetics and veneer, but about designing with a purpose, an outco...

This article on password security is a good one. Article on password security

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 tha...

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 se...

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 ...

I'm really glad I finally spent some time reading the articles Dr. Gibbons suggested we read in relation to the Thanksgiving Point project. I think the most compelling thought I read was this: We argue that the right strategy cannot be known a priori. Instead of trying to define a service from the top down, we start with exploratory or immersive research to lead to opportunities for innovation in strategy. This, in turn, provides context (or the fill) from which the service can be created. But there are many great thoughts that help give picture to the concept of experience design: Great experiences are leading to a demand for even better experiences. As expectations for service experiences rise—are the people participating or cocreating those experiences becoming more skilled at leveraging the resources for their experience and designing their service? If so, then what are the implications for designing-for-service experiences? In designing-for-service experiences we must pr...

I've been doing a bit of reading about experience design. One thing that strikes me as interesting is the idea that sometimes in UX design we begin focusing on such minute things that it almost seems ridiculous. Like writing an entire article about whether or not you should write "submit" on your button or some other verbiage. Not that I don't think that is important in its own way. (I certainly agree with the sentiment.) I just feel like the more important broad principles of human engagement get ignored by a myopic view of the user experience. In " 10 Faces of Innovation ," by Tom Kelley, he tells how he will ignore cracks, dust, and peeling wallpaper in a hotel that has an exceptional bed because that's what is important to him when he is travelling. He comes in late and gets up early. The most important part of the hotel is the bed since a good night's rest makes a difference to his traveling experience. A vision of how you can make the user f...

Jakob Nielsen  suggests only testing 3-5 users because of the decreasing return on investment for more users. The graph from his post suggests that you find most of the errors in user interfaces with in the first few users. He suggests testing five users, then redesigning based on the feedback, then testing five more. It increases quality of data and results in a better product while keeping budget costs under control. It's a more efficient way to go. The exception is when you have distinct user groups, in which you test 3-4 users of each distinct user group in the same fashion as noted above.

Susan Weinschenk  wrote about the three loads of human factors in UX design, viz. cognitive, visual, and motor loads. She suggests the proper user experience design for any given program or site would be a balance of the three loads and would attend to the purpose of the site, whether to entertain, engage, or get things done.

My internship with Rain  this semester is a position in user experience design. I'm trying to hone up my skills and knowledge in the area.  One of my favorite quotes so far is the following from Whitney Hess'  article on the 10 Most Common Misconceptions about User Experience Design:  Josh Porter  ... says, “The biggest misconception is that [companies] have a choice to invest in their user’s experience. To survive, they don’t.” An interesting way of looking at user experience was diagrammed by Peter Morville showing the seven key elements of user oriented design. He calls it the user experience honeycomb. Any design should be aiming at these things: