You will have noticed we missed another weekly blog post last week. Take it as a sign that we are really busy :)

UXurls

(contributed by Melissa)

You’ve seen popurls.com but now there’s UXurls.com. It’s an aggregation of everything UX from the last 24 hours, created by Harry Brignull, who says:

It’s a really simple popurls clone, intended for people who are too busy to set themselves up with their own RSS reader, or just fancy a quick glance at the sites I’m reading.

This blog is not one of the 130 sites Harry has included, so you’ll still need to come back and visit us :)

Rapid desirability testing

(contributed by Chris)

On UXmatters, Michael Hawley shares a case study where his team used the Product Reaction Cards developed by Microsoft Research to assess the “desirability” of design alternatives, from the user’s point of view:

To test which approach would best align with our intended goals, we conducted a desirability test using product reaction cards. Starting with the full Microsoft list of cards, we revised the list to include only the adjectives we felt were important for this brand, after assessing our early user research. We narrowed the final list to 60 adjectives, but kept the 60/40 split between positive and negative terms Benedek and Miner had suggested.

We’ve used this technique, or a very similar approach, on many occasions. The Product Reaction Cards are quite versatile and can be used in many other situations also. For example, for producing a view of the desired future state of a system, which can be very interesting in comparison/contrast with that group of people’s view of the current system.

In another recent project, users were asked to liken the website concepts to an image of a person. The images personified a variety of emotional responses, for instance a cool, young woman or an older, corporate gentleman. Overall, users felt one of the designs was quite young and feminine, which is what the project aimed to achieve.

Experience maps

(contributed by Angus)

We really like Gene Smith‘s experience maps, produced for a recent project:

[...] the research was much richer than anything we could capture in an alignment model. Hardcore gamers invest a lot of time–on forums, in stores, with friends–before buying a game. We wanted to show how these different experiences shaped their behaviour.

The solution we came up with was an experience map–a diagram that combines a persona with an abstracted story about the gamer’s journey from researching games to purchasing, playing to sharing experiences about that game. The story includes the details on the different channels where gamers get their information along with supporting quotes form our research.

They are great diagrams, I imagine most UX practitioners would be very envious of such high quality deliverables!

Researchers plan to automate web image description

(contributed by Pat)

In what might help to improve website accessibility, the E-Access Bulletin reports that a new UK academic research network aims to enable computers to describe visual content on web pages:

The network is aiming to develop a web browser plug-in which would be able to analyse an image and describe it to a visually impaired user. It is one of a number of projects exploring computer vision and computer language programming to be undertaken by the new V&L Net – the Vision and Language Network of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

Sadly, we skipped a week last week (did you miss us?). But now we’re back.

Domino’s Pizza: Be Inspired By Your Harshest Critics

(contributed by Angus)

Whitney Hess has a great post about a Domino’s video campaign promoting a new pizza they apparently created in response to user feedback. Includes video excerpts from the campaign. While it’s easy to be cynical I agree with her the customer reactions in the video seem authentic and demonstrate the benefits activities like design research and user testing can give an organisation if they take on board and act upon what is discovered.

While the cynic in me sees their Pizza Turnaround “documentary” for what it is — a marketing campaign — there are still many customer experience lessons to learn from their story.

Designing for experiences across channels

(contributed by Angus)

Brandon Schauer has created a single page diagram on designing multi-channel user experiences. Lot’s of new to me terminology which I think will prove useful.

Organizations are channel-bound. Customers aren’t.

This outlines components and practices necessary to deliver great customer experiences across more than a single channel.

Bringing User Centered Design to the Agile Environment

(contributed by Angus)

Anthony Colfelt on how User Centered Design and Agile processes can be reconciled. Good overview of the positives and negatives of the two processes and some advice on how to get the best qualities from both processes by adopting “Agile UCD”

Remember, Agile does not mandate how to define concepts or overall design direction, but it is a great way to execute on solid design research and well laid plans. UCD needs to be flexible enough to respond to the reality on the ground when the implementation team encounters issues that mandate a different design solution. Document only what is needed to get the message across and co-locate if at all possible, because cross-disciplinary collaboration and face to face communication are vital. Working a sprint ahead of the development team is helpful in allowing the design team enough time to test and iterate. If these rules of engagement are followed, the two approaches can work very well together.

Forgotten passwords an overlooked problem for subscription based revenue models?

(contributed by Angus)

In a long, colourful rant titled “Subscriptions are the New BLACK” about business models for startups, Dave McClure touches upon a user experience issue that apparently caused PayPal a lot of problems:

PayPal was one of the classic stories of viral growth, however in this instance we also experienced viral growth in customer service: at one point more than 2 in 3 employees worked in customer service. And i’m guessing somewhere between 10-20% of first-time customers never used the service again, primarily because they forgot their password.

He suggests that this misleadingly small problem will cause subscription/digital product based businesses problems & that the only way around it is to create services that people need/want to use frequently

… as we transition to a Startup Ecosystem driven by direct payment & subscription business models, I want to make it clear how IMPORTANT it is to make sure users don’t forget their passwords. If they forget their password, and/or can’t recover it, then guess what MoFo — YOU DON’T GET PAID.

Which means you don’t get Laid, you don’t get Acquired, and you sure as friggin’ hell don’t get to Go IPO.

So listen up & i’ll share a little secret with you — there is one very simple way to avoid forgotten passwords. Basically, it’s this:

Make a Frequent-Use Product.

But perhaps authentication services like Facebook Connect will help alleviate the problem this time round.

US universities reject ‘inaccessible’ Kindle e-Book

The E-Access Bulletin reports…

Two American universities have rejected the market-leading Kindle DX electronic book reader as a textbook replacement due to its inaccessibility for blind students. Both Syracuse University in New York State and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have chosen not to use the Kindle – manufactured by Amazon.com – as a teaching-aid, after their own trials found it was not fully accessible.

Interesting lessons for anyone else considering an e-reader device, and who wants to make it useful for as wide an audience as possible.
(forwarded by Pat)

Clients could make better use of research

Adweek recently published an article reporting…

Consumer research is ingrained in the cultures of many large corporations but relatively few are maximizing its use, according to a new study from The Boston Consulting Group [...] In fact, based on a four-stage scale of research development that BCG used to evaluate the 40 global companies it surveyed, nearly 90 percent were in the first or second stage, where research is generally tactical and applied in limited contexts.

This has generated quite a few comments, and criticism, although nobody seems to disagree with the basic sentiment of the report (that research could be more prevalent and better used). What do you think?
(forwarded by Pat)

Map of the design landscape

Over on DesignAday, Jack Moffett shares a timeline visualisation of the major—mostly US—design disciplines created by one of his graduate students.
(forwarded by Angus)

IA tools: storyboards

Matt Hodgson shares his thoughts on storyboards…

Storyboards are a great way to describe a user’s journey, their thoughts, feelings, attitudes, capabilities, behaviours and expectations, throughout a single scenario. They’re light-weight, easy to do, and as a visual tool can be used in workshops or just by a couple of members of the team. They also work perfectly on agile projects because they’re visual and, therefore, an instant placeholder for a conversation.

(forwarded by Angus)

So you wanna be a user experience designer

Whitney Hess shares her five guiding principles for working in UX…

I have collected a set of guiding principles for user experience designers, to encourage behaviors that I believe are necessary to being a successful practitioner, as well as a set of guiding principles for experience design — which I think anyone who touches a product used by humans should strive to follow.

(forwarded by Angus)

Getting to the customer – why everything you think about User Centred Design is wrong

On Black&White, Thomas Petersen discusses solving the right problem at the right time…

What you are solving in the wireframe phase is problems inherent in the wireframe phase, not problems with the product. What you are solving when testing the prototype is problems inherent in the prototype not in the final product. There is only one true test and that is the final product. Not until then will you start to receive valuable feedback in combination with quantitative feedback. You will get it where it matters.

This is something we’ve talked about in our team on a number of occasions. It’s an important aspect of the UX design process to get sorted out.
(forwarded by Angus)

Google tests streamlining search options feature

Over on Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan tells us how Google is tackling its “UI jazz problem”…

“I don’t like jazz, because you never know what’s going to happen next,” Mayer said, continuing on to apply the musical style to Google’s search results. “I’ve been calling this problem ‘user interface jazz.’ This result looks this way, and that result looks that way [something much different], and it really does slow you down.”

(forwarded by Angus)

Some design principles from the Global Agenda Council on Design

Tim Brown, of renowned design and innovation consulting firm, IDEO, shares with us seven principles as discussed at the recent World Economic Forum event in Dubai…

Design is an agent of change that enables us to understand complex changes and problems, and to turn them into something useful. Tackling today’s global challenges will require radical thinking, creative solutions and collaborative action. Here is a set of principles identified by the Global Agenda Council on Design that could help your Council to develop ideas and strategies to address the complex problems facing us all.

(forwarded by Angus)

Will Evans has written a piece entitled Shades of Gray: Wireframes as Thinking Device, on the role of wireframes in the UX design process (for an upcoming book on UX design by Russ Unger).

The whole post is interesting, but I like this bit in particular:

I think it is quite common for UX folks to view design as problem solving. For me, designing through the use of wireframes is a search in a problem space of alternatives; it’s a process of problem setting as much as it is a process of problem solving, which means that I always start with the context.

I like this; “problem setting” rather than “problem solving”.

The whole piece can be found on Will’s blog, along with wireframe examples he has created for the book.

(This may just prompt me to finish a long-running draft on “the truth about wireframes” which I have been working on for some time. I guess wireframes—or more accurately how they are abused—are a pet hate of mine :)

I’m excited about an initiative being developed by Steve Baty, to hold a regular book club focussed on books related to user experience. As Steve says:

Such a meeting would provide experienced folks with a chance to revisit some classics in a critical light; as well as getting an incentive to read some more current materials. And for less experienced folks it would provide them with a forum to ask those ‘I don’t get it’ questions that they might otherwise never understand.

This is a great idea, and I think this will prompt me to read more books, which can’t be a bad thing.

If you want more information on the Sydney UX book club, or any of the others that are springing up around the globe, check out uxbookclub.org which will act as a hub for all the different chapters (no pun intended).

Chris Rockwell as published his presentation entitled People Can’t Tell You What They Want (and nine other design research myths) to slideshare. Here are the ten myths he discusses:

1. Design Research constrains true innovative thinking.
2. People Can’t Tell You What They Want.
3. We’re inventing something never seen before so research isn’t applicable.
4. Qualitative and quantitative research are opposites.
5. Ethnography is the best research technique.
6. Participatory design research is superior to ethnography.
7. Focus groups aren’t useful.
8. The research team owns customer insights.
9. Designers can’t design until the research is complete.
10. When the research is done, you know everything you need.

I found this very interesting, not only to confirm my own views on some of these points, but also because each point is tackled with simplicity and style. I wish I had had this presentation on hand when talking to a few clients in the past :)

Thanks to Rob Tannen for the tip.