| Audience | Business | Culture | Design | Locations | Media | Methods | Services | Social Issues |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The growth of the User Experience Design field is breathtaking, but well deserved. Thanks to UX Designers all over the world, the quality of products has increased dramatically. Design really does matter now. It’s a user centric world in which there’s not only Apple on the scene anymore.
(via InfoDesign)
Designers, as makers of products and services, are key stewards of our planet because the products and services we design influence the ways in which people live, argues Kem Kramer in an article for Johnny Holland.
“What we design, how we design, the materials with which we design and for what purposes we design, set the pace for emerging cultural behaviours. We owe it to ourselves as stewards of our world, and as designers from all spectrum to consider the impact of each design that we create on the overall impact of not only our collective culture and cultural practices but also on the environment at large. Accordingly, for the fields of Design and User Experience to remain progressively relevant, we must begin to form a closer affinity to the Sustainability movement.”
Kramer is a UX practitioner at Research in Motion.
Discussions at recent news industry conferences have often referred to the importance of good user experience, particularly during discussions about how news outlets are reaching and interacting with their users on digital platforms.
References to user experience could cover a range of aspects, including the user’s journey through content, an app or a news website, the usability of those products and the experience of consuming a single piece of content.
For the purposes of this feature Rachel McAthy of journalism.co.uk asked managing editor of the Wall Street Journal’s digital network, Raju Narisetti, what user experience meant to him in the context of news and journalism.
(via InfoDesign)
Here’s the view of Ray McCune, managing partner at Flow, on some of the peaks we still have to climb if experience design is to become a mainstream business discipline.
It’s quite excellent.
1. Targets and incentives within businesses must be aligned with long-term value
As long as business managers are incentivised only to deliver against short-term goals in narrow areas of business performance, companies will struggle to make significant improvements in their relationships with customers.
2. We need to stop designing experiences based on company structure
We’re already seeing a rush by individual business units within large organisations to launch their own individual mobile offerings, often with little thought for the overall experience.
3. The User Experience community needs to get out more
We are talking to ourselves more than anyone else. [...] We need to seek out opportunities to speak with politicians, business owners, executives and managers on their own ground and use a vocabulary that resonates with them: tying UX to social benefit, improved business performance and new marketing opportunities.
4. Improve the user experience of boxed products
All too often the out-of-the-box experience offered by third-party products simply isn’t flexible enough to create a valuable, differentiated experience for customers.
5. Most digital agencies are charlatans
Ten years ago, few digital agencies had any user experience offering, so it should seem like progress that today the majority of agencies make the vocabulary of UX central to their pitch and their proposition. Or perhaps not.
6. Pitches are a uniquely bad way of finding a good design agency…
…but they remain a very good way of finding a bad design agency. The traditional pitch process is flawed because it requires agencies to begin the process of making decisions about creative ideas and complex interactions in the absence of insight and understanding.
7. NPS is a blunt tool
While Net Promotor Score (NPS) is good at telling a company what is happening, it’s less good at telling a company why. What influences advocacy is subtle, and NPS lacks the subtlety to help inform experimentation and optimisation of customer experience.
8. The cult of data
Even if data is infallible, the high priests interpreting the data are not. In almost every company we know, data analysts find patterns in the numbers and then guess at their meaning. That guesswork is passed up the line, sometimes to board level, but it masquerades as fact because its source is ‘the numbers’.
9. Still not enough investment in solving basic usability issues
While companies have increasingly employed usability testing to improve their sales and service processes there is still a clear tendency to act only on the issues which are easiest to fix.
10. Too much disrespect for customers
Henry Ford still gets quoted by people who want to marginalise the opinion of customers. There’s a lazy acceptance by many in business that user research is futile.
(via InfoDesign)
Tips on Prototyping for Usability Testing
By Jim Ross, Principal of Design Research at Electronic Ink, Philadelphia, PA, USA
Because user research studies peoples’ behavior, the most effective research techniques involve observing participants doing things and talking about what they’re doing. Research that focuses on opinions and discussions of behavior in the abstract isn’t as useful, because it’s difficult for people to talk about their behavior out of context or to evaluate a design without using it. Therefore, the best way to evaluate a new design is to create a prototype and give participants something concrete to interact with and react to. In this column, Jim Ross provides some tips that can make your usability studies more successful and help you to avoid problems when testing prototypes.
Are You Still Using Earlier-Generation Prototyping Tools?
By Ritch Macefield, Owner of Ax-Stream, London UK
Given that we can now choose from a variety of fourth-generation prototyping tools, why is it that so many organizations are still creating second- or third-generation prototypes?
The Many Hats of a Usability Professional
By Rebecca Albrand, Design Researcher at Electronic Ink, Philadelphia, PA, USA
Sometimes it seems as though usability professionals need to have superhuman multitasking abilities to conduct usability test sessions. As a usability professional, you have to wear the hats of a facilitator, a consultant, a conversationalist, a note-taker, a technologist, and a psychologist. In this article Rebecca Albrand describes some objectives for each of the roles you’ll need to take on, as well as provide some tips that you should remember to help you wear each hat successfully.
Demystifying UX Design: Common False Beliefs and Their Remedies: Part 1
By Frank Guo, Founder of UX Strategized, San Bruno, CA, USA
In debunking common UX design myths, Frank Guo shows that they’re just half truths that don’t fully account for the complexity of user experience and that there are better alternatives for achieving your design objectives.
Product Review: Mobile Prototyping and Testing with Justinmind
By Afshan Kirmani, Information Architect at Global Dawn, London UK
Justinmind Prototyper supports requirements gathering, wireframe creation, application simulation, and usability testing. You can use it to create interactive prototypes of both Web and mobile applications. As a bonus, Prototyper lets stakeholders and users provide feedback on your prototypes of mobile and Web applications. Thus, it incorporates all of the features that are necessary for a prototyping project.
The Web and Beyond is a bi-annual conference organized by Chi Nederland, focused on the practice and business of user experience.
On September 26, our 425 attendees saw a full-day, 3-track conference with keynotes and parallel sessions on user experience research, design, evaluation and management. The event featured both Dutch and English sessions by national and international presenters.
This year’s theme was “Momentum”, in recognition of the masses of people that are now convinced that user centered design is the best approach for designing successful interactive experiences, as well as the speed with which the field of user experience is developing.
Videos of the keynotes are now online.
Tablets and the age of comfortable computing (synopsis)
Rachel Hinman, senior research scientist, Nokia Research
Since their introduction in 2010, tablets have taken the mobile industry by storm, with sales expected to reach 120 million in 2012 alone. Whether novelty or need, tablets are clearly a big and growing part of the mobile device landscape that won’t be going away any time soon. Which begs the question: Now that these shiny new gadgets are finding their way into the world, how are people actually using them? In this talk, Rachel Hinman shared findings from her year-long study of tablet usage as well as provide design implications for designing tablet experiences. She covered:
Make It So: Apologizing for bad sci-fi UI (synopsis)
Chris Noessel, managing director, Cooper
Interfaces in sci-fi serve a primarily narrative purpose. They’re there to help tell the story of how a character disables the tractor beam, or hacks into the corporate database, or diagnoses the alien infection. But what would happen if we tried to build these same interfaces for the real world? Some would fare just fine. Most would need a little redesign. A few appear to be just plain stupid or broken. They couldn’t work the way they appear to. That is, until you use the technique of apologetics to discover that in fact far from being stupid, they’re brilliant.
Chris Noessel, co-author of the book Make It So: Interface Lessons from Sci-Fi (Rosenfeld Media, 2012) discussed this critical technique, showed how it works across several sci-fi interfaces, and challenged the audience to apologize for some “bad” sci-fi interfaces.
Get Lucky: How to put planned serendipity to work for you and your business (synopsis)
Lane Becker, author of Get Lucky
The world of work has changed. To keep pace with the rapidly shifting needs and expectations of the market – and stay relevant and competitive – we need to find ways to encourage and reward ongoing innovation inside our organizations. But embracing change as part of the regular process of doing business can be challenging for organizations that have learned to rely on routine and process to ensure consistent, reliable growth.
In their New York Times bestseller “Get Lucky,” authors and entrepreneurs Thor Muller and Lane Becker explore the qualities and business practices of Twitter, Instagram, Pixar, 3M, Google and other high-performing companies. In this keynote, Lane shared the secret formula behind the success of the world’s most successful organizations: “planned serendipity.”
(via InfoDesign)
In August, Cooper directors Chris Noessel and Stefan Klocek discussed implicit interactions at Device Design Day 2012, organised by Kicker Studio in San Francisco.
They also presented a new metaphor or mental model for thinking about emerging technology.
Check out the video of their talk.
The interplay between efficiency and quality in a service experience is often what separates a merely transactional interaction from a valuable and pleasurable one, writes Patrick Quattlebaum of Adaptive Path.
“The former gets the job done; the latter does so while creating a more human connection and an enduring relationship between service provider and customer. Unfortunately, in most cases efficiency wins out. Most organizations lean heavily on analytical methods to define rigid processes and procedures that are designed to reduce waste and increase predictability in service delivery. This approach views the organization as a machine to be fine-tuned and the customer as a rational actor who enters and exits processes like a rat in a well-designed maze.
Yet, customers are less rational than they would like to admit and more complicated (i.e., human) than process engineers would prefer. Much of this derives from how the unconscious mind affects behavior. [...] And, the unconscious mind is not only molded by individual experience, but by societal norms and rituals deeply embedded within a culture.”
Paul Taylor of the Financial Times thinks wearable technology lives up to its promise at last.
“For years, engineers have envisaged technology so personal that “body area networks” would have wide applications in clothing and other worn items such as earrings. So far, the reality has fallen short of this sci-fi vision, although notable tech togs have included Spytech’s ties with a built-in video camera, which are still available.”
The author thinks this is now changing. He reviews Fleece 7.0 by Scottevest, the Nike+ Sportband, and the Blacksocks Smarter Socks.
Leanne Byrom, a freelance UX practitioner and UX lead for Phosphor Digital, writes about the importance of mental models in UX design:
Designing something right requires that you completely understand what a person wants to get done. You need to understand how a person uses something if you’re going to get the design right for them. You also need to know the person’s goals and the procedures she/he follows to accomplish those goals.
Mental models give you a deep understanding of people’s motivations and thought processes along with the emotional and philosophical landscape in which they are operating.
In this new RSA Animate, Dan Ariely, bestselling author and professor of psychology and behavioural economics at Duke University, explores the circumstances under which someone would lie and what effect deception has on society at large.
The RSA Animate was taken from a July 2012 lecture given by Dan Ariely as part of the RSA’s free public events programme.
Enjoy.
Observing the User Experience
A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research
by
Elizabeth Goodman, PhD candidate, University of California, Berkeley’s School of Information, National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow, and Intel PhD Fellow
Mike Kuniavsky, Founder, ThingM
Andrea Moed, Staff User Researcher at Inflection
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers
608 pages – September 21, 2012
(Amazon link)
The gap between who designers and developers imagine their users are, and who those users really are can be the biggest problem with product development. Observing the User Experience will help you bridge that gap to understand what your users want and need from your product, and whether they’ll be able to use what you’ve created.
Filled with real-world experience and a wealth of practical information, this book presents a complete toolbox of techniques to help designers and developers see through the eyes of their users. It provides in-depth coverage of 13 user experience research techniques that will provide a basis for developing better products, whether they’re Web, software or mobile based. In addition, it’s written with an understanding of how software is developed in the real world, taking tight budgets, short schedules, and existing processes into account.
> See also this article by UC Berkeley: “Elizabeth Goodman revises classic handbook of user experience research“.
John Wood, Emeritus Professor of Design at Goldsmiths, University of London, argues on Core77 that the user-centered mindset is based on a one-dimensional map in which only two places exist—master and servant. In the workplace, the designer is the servant and the client is the master. From a greater distance, the user is the master and the ‘client plus designer’ is the servant.
“The idea of user-centered design grew out of ‘humanism’, which can be traced to ancient Greece and the early Christians, who came to value the differences between individuals. However, while humanism has many admirable qualities, it is a dangerously incomplete basis from which understand things. [...]
We have designed ourselves into a bubble of self-satisfaction. ‘Solipsism’ is a good word for it. It reminds us of the old story of Narcissus, who was became obsessively absorbed by his own reflection in the lake and failed to notice that a beautiful girl was trying to get his attention.”
A few days ago SAP announced the opening of the new SAP Mobility Design Center to help customers meet the growing need for individualized mobile solutions.
Headquartered on the company’s campus in Palo Alto, Calif., the center is focused on enabling companies to keep up with the consumerization of IT trend by conceptualizing, designing and building mobile solutions to better connect with employees and consumers.
To achieve consumer-grade experiences, customers collaborate with a team of user experience (UX) designers, architects and developers. The team employs design thinking principles and validates mobile solutions with end users continually throughout the build process.
The SAP Mobility Design Center is a one-stop shop for designing, developing and validating customer-specific mobile enterprise solutions that are intuitive for users and leverage features such as touch, camera, GPS and other device functionality across a variety of device platforms.
Communicating the User Experience: A Practical Guide for Creating Useful UX Documentation
by Richard Caddick and Steve Cable
Wiley
2011, 352 pages
ISBN 978-1119971108
(Amazon | Scribd)
Abstract
As web sites and applications become richer and more complex, the user experience (UX) becomes critical to their success. This indispensible and full-color book provides practical guidance on this growing field and shares valuable UX advice that you can put into practice immediately on your own projects. The authors examine why UX is gaining so much interest from web designers, graduates, and career changers and looks at the new UX tools and ideas that can help you do your job better. In addition, you’ll benefit from the unique insight the authors provide from their experiences of working with some of the world’s best-known companies, learning how to take ideas from business requirements, user research, and documentation to create and develop your UX vision.
> Book review (UX magazine)
Today Albert Boswijk, founder and CEO of the European Centre for the Experience Economy, contacted us about his new book “Economy of Experiences”.
Boswijk co-founded the Centre, a structure affiliated with the University of Amsterdam, in 2000 with Joseph Pine, who was the first to launch the term in 1998 and then co-authored the seminal 1999 book with the same title.
Economy of Experiences
By Albert Boswijk, Ed Peelen and Steven Olthof
European Centre for the Experience Economy
2012 – 335 pages
ISBN: 978-0985593209
(Amazon link)
Abstract
Economy of Experiences sheds light on the fundamental process of change whereby society is currently searching for new forms of value creation. The ‘Experience Economy’ is the first symptom of this process. The Economy of Experiences is more than ‘feed me’ or ‘entertain me’. Businesses and organisations have a larger, more significant role to play in supporting individuals in their search to find their own way and a significant role for themselves. This book describes, step-by-step, the foundations of new forms of value creation and how businesses can avoid the downward escalation of price competition (commoditisation). It starts by placing individuals at the centre of their social context as well as events that are important to them in the world in which they live. In order to facilitate these, we present new business models in which co-creation plays an important role. Concrete design principles are given that can be used as a basis for creating meaningful experiences. Both theory and practice are discussed; numerous cases studies are dissected. The last three chapters focus on practical applications in health care, financial service innovation and developing creative cities. The book is backed by its own website: www.experience-economy.com.
UX Curve: A method for evaluating long-term user experience
Sari Kujala (a), Virpi Roto (b), Kaisa Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila (a), Evangelos Karapanos (c), Arto Sinnelä (a)
a) Tampere University of Technology, Finland
b) Nokia Research Center, Finland
c) Eindhoven University of Technology, Dept of Industrial Design, Netherlands
Article in Press – Elsevier – Interacting with Computers
—————
The goal of user experience design in industry is to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty through the utility, ease of use, and pleasure provided in the interaction with a product.
So far, user experience studies have mostly focused on short-term evaluations and consequently on aspects relating to the initial adoption of new product designs. Nevertheless, the relationship between the user and the product evolves over long periods of time and the relevance of prolonged use for market success has been recently highlighted.
In this paper, we argue for the cost-effective elicitation of longitudinal user experience data. We propose a method called the ‘‘UX Curve’’ which aims at assisting users in retrospectively reporting how and why their experience with a product has changed over time. The usefulness of the UX Curve method was assessed in a qualitative study with 20 mobile phone users. In particular, we investigated how users’ specific memories of their experiences with their mobile phones guide their behavior and their willingness to recommend the product to others.
The results suggest that the UX Curve method enables users and researchers to determine the quality of long-term user experience and the influences that improve user experience over time or cause it to deteriorate. The method provided rich qualitative data and we found that an improving trend of perceived attractiveness of mobile phones was related to user satisfaction and willingness to recommend their phone to friends. This highlights that sustaining perceived attractiveness can be a differentiating factor in the user acceptance of personal interactive products such as mobile phones.
The study suggests that the proposed method can be used as a straightforward tool for understanding the reasons why user experience improves or worsens in long-term product use and how these reasons relate to customer loyalty.
Jonathan Ross, business development director at FACT-Finder, discusses the steps luxury brands can take to ensure a more rewarding online retail experience for consumers.
“A recent study by McKinsey and Altagamma, the Italian association of luxury brands, appears to finally dispel the idea that online shopping is the preserve of discounted brands and shoppers looking to pick up a bargain. As far as the luxury category was concerned, there was a nagging suspicion that shoppers needed to experience a tactile relationship with their potential purchases in a way that could never be achieved online.
The McKinsey study surveyed more than 300 luxury brands, 700 websites and more than 2.5m online comments, including those on social media platforms. Digital sales are expected to reach about €15bn in the luxury market by 2016, but the survey also found that use of the internet by consumers for research and price comparison meant that about 15% of total sales in the luxury goods industry are directly generated by digital media. As much as a fifth of store sales (a market worth in the region of €34bn) is said to be directly influenced by the online experience.”
> Financial Times article about the Digital Luxury Experience report
In an article for GigaOM, Ellen Isaacs (personal site), a user experience designer and ethnographer for PARC, explains the benefits of using ethnography to develop better mobile products.
“Ethnographic studies likely save businesses far more time than they take. These observations and analysis can reveal insights that shift projects toward demonstrated problems. They also provide specific information about what features to include and how to design them to fit with people’s current practices. And perhaps most importantly, they can keep companies from developing a technology that solves the wrong problem or does it the wrong way. With benefits like this, it seems to me that companies don’t have time not to do ethnography.”
This article by my compatriot Koen AT Claes claims that our current notion of UX design mistakenly focuses on experience, and that we should go one step further and focus on the memory of an experience instead
“Studies of behavioral economics have changed my entire perspective on UX design, causing me to question basic tenets. This has led to ponderings like: “Is it possible that trying to create ‘great experiences’ is pointless?” Nobel Prize-winning research seems to hint that it is.”
Via concrete examples, additional research sources, and some initial how-to tips, the author aims to illustrate why and how we should recalibrate our UX design processes.