All posts about
UCD

The perils of persuasion

Added on 16 April 2010 Peter Bogaards
“The success of UCD has sustained demand for user experience design skills, and the land rush has continued in 2010. UX is becoming a cookie cutter add-on for digital agencies and I rarely meet a web designer now who doesn’t claim UX proficiency, although not all can articulate what that means. And it’s not just the designers: I also see back-end developers, SEO professionals and marketers rapidly appending these two magical letters to their CVs.” (Cennydd Bowles)

I Am Not A User!

Added on 15 February 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Well, first of all let’s get rid off the word user and let’s talk about people. Because user implies something totally internal: I’m a user, I want to use this machine, so let’s use it. This is a utilitarian/task cognitive approach to interaction design, a rather medieval kind of approach. If you talk about people, what they are and what they do in their daily lives, there are so many opportunities to discover… so users will not evolve, they will die out, but people will remain and I would like to talk about their lives and conquests.” (I’m not a user)

Hierarchical Task Analysis

Added on 8 February 2010 Peter Bogaards
“As UX professionals, we have a great many analytical and descriptive tools available to us. In fact, there are so many that it can sometimes be difficult to decide which tool is most appropriate for a given task! Hierarchical task analysis (HTA) is an underused approach in user experience, but one you can easily apply when either modifying an existing design or creating a new design.” (Peter Hornsby – UXmatters)

Bringing User Centered Design to the Agile Environment

Added on 1 February 2010 Peter Bogaards
“I am not anti-Agile although I’ve been bitten a few times and feel trepidation when I hear someone singing its praises without having much experience with it. Over the last eight years, I’ve seen Agile badly implemented far more often than well (and yes, it can be done well, too). The result of this is mediocre product released in as much time as it would have taken a good team to release great product using a waterfall approach. In this article, I will describe Agile and attempt to illuminate a potential minefield for those who are swept up in the fervor of this development trend and want to jump in headlong. Then I will present how practices within User Centred Design (UCD) can mitigate the inherent risks of Agile and how these may be integrated within Agile development approaches.” (Anthony Colfelt – Boxes and Arrows)

How UCD and Agile can live together

Added on 14 December 2009 Peter Bogaards
“User-Centered Design is the methodology by which you design a holistic product while considering the needs of stakeholders and users. Agile Development is a programming methodology and philosophy intended to overcome the challenges of the waterfall development process and to deliver clean and functional code. How can these two methodologies come together?” (David Farkas – Johnny Holland Magazine)

Design Ethnography & Mood Maps

Added on 6 July 2009 Peter Bogaards
“The sole purpose of this exercise is to document and map the emotional states of a user so that it can guide the creation and communication of personas to stakeholders while also informing the design process itself. I’m not one for ux deliverables for their own sake, but this is one that carry’s a lot of weight and also goes a ways towards ‘traceability’ – that is, the ability to show all the real research that went into your personas.” (Will Evans) – courtesy of ppf

Follow the Recipe

Added on 26 May 2009 Peter Bogaards
“There are many good processes for software design. By process, I mean a prescribed way of performing software design. Every software company I’ve ever worked with has a design process they’ve adopted or created to meet their needs. However, after working on numerous software projects, I have come to realize how few projects actually follow their companies’ intended design processes. Why is it that so many companies don’t follow their existing processes for software design?” – (Ron Gagnier – UXmatters)

The poverty of user-centered design

Added on 6 May 2009 Peter Bogaards
“(…) the set of methods employed by most user-centered professionals fails to deliver truly user-centric insights. The so-called ‘science’ of usability which underlies user-centeredness leaves much to be desired. It rests too much on anecdote, assumed truths about human behavior and an emphasis on performance metrics that serve the perspective of people other than the user. – If we could de-couple user-centered design and usability then there might be some benefit but I don’t think this is as important as it might first appear. More important is the very conception we have of users and uses for which we wish to derive technologies and information resources. Designing for augmentation is a very real problem and a great challenge for our field theoretically and practically.” – (Andrew Dillon – InfoMatters)

Progressive User Adoption

Added on 24 March 2009 Peter Bogaards
“Users of technology products—from mobile phones to ecommerce Web sites—often stop learning and adopting features long before they’ve mastered those products’ full capabilities. A learning plateau usually occurs once a user has learned the features that meet his minimum product-adoption criteria, when the benefit of adopting more features doesn’t seem worth the extra effort or risk.” – (Mike Hughes – UXmatters)

Industry trends in prototyping

Added on 2 March 2009 Peter Bogaards
“In the world of designing interactive products and services, prototype is generally defined as some representation of a design idea. In the world of physical products, the term tends to connote something quite similar to the finished manufactured form. Indeed, industrial designers use the term model to describe what interaction designers think of as a prototype.” – (Dave Cronin – Adobe Dev Connection) courtesy of janjursa

Considering the User Perspective: Research into Usage and Communication of Digital Information

Added on 2 July 2008 Peter Bogaards
“In this article we present the methodology and initial results from qualitative research into the usage and communication of digital information. It considers the motivation for the research and the methodologies adopted, including Contextual Design and Cultural Probes. The article describes the preliminary studies conducted to test the approach, highlighting the strengths and limitations of the techniques applied. Finally, it outlines proposals for refinement in subsequent iterations and the future research activities planned.” (Kelly Snow et al. – D-Lib Magazine May/June 2008)

Top 100 User-Centered Blogs

Added on 16 October 2007 Peter Bogaards
“Web designers often concern themselves with optimizing sites for spiders from Google, Yahoo, and other search engines, but pay little attention to creating sites that real people can use. This problem has sparked a movement towards user-centered web design, a topic that covers accessibility, web standards, and interfacing. Check out these blogs for the latest and greatest in this people-centric field of design.” (Jessica Hupp – Virtual Hosting)
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CORE (Cognitive Organization for Requirements Elicitation)

Added on 24 September 2007 Peter Bogaards
“Using a case study drawn from the Orbitz.com information architecture environment, our 2007 IA Summit poster uses visuals and text to describe a rules-based soft systems methodology for collaborative decision-making. In this case study, the Orbitz information architect was faced with a need to rapidly develop specifications for new web application features. Produced in the absence of use cases, functional requirements, or business requirements, these new specifications had to be both culturally and technically acceptable, and meet changing business and user needs.” (Joanna Wiebe and Scott Confer)