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This brief is very, very brief.
“Today, UX has grown into an important design discipline that continues to grow and evolve. And while it’s fairly new, its multidisciplinary history can be traced all the way back to the Renaissance—if not earlier. To think about where the much debated-practice of user experience design will take us next, it’ll help to take a look back at some of the key events in its meandering evolution.”
(Ali Rushdan Tariq a.k.a. @alirtariq ~ FastCo Design) ★
Business and UX, from a strategic perspective (again).
“User experience in a company can be made superior by paying attention to various factors. Bringing good services and products to customers will directly have an impact on the business performance and results. There are various methodologies that one can use for monitoring the experience and bring about necessary changes to enhance it. Applications, software tracking systems and other useful tools and techniques can help in finding the right changes. To make sure your company offers the best to customers it is important to benchmark the user experience with these tools. Ultimately it involves delighting users so that they remain content and happy with the experience.”
(Rohan Salve ~ Techved Consulting) ★
I would go for magical guidelines. UX and Magic, brothers in arms.
“This article aims to present an overview of the mystical process of creation and principal of co-creation and to illustrate how it can guide bringing digital product ideas into reality–although it’s easy enough to see how this could translate to other products and services–in a way that ensures a great user experience, and makes our creative process more natural and outcomes more fruitful.”
(Tal Bloom a.k.a. @TalBloom ~ Boxes and Arrows) ★
When even the popular press gets into a DTDT conversation, we haven’t done a great job.
“The key can be found in ensuring that the UX is designed end-to-end from a core understanding of the user through to design and delivery, whereas the UI is the presentation designed to expose the power of that design process underpinning the UX for the user. Combined, UI and UX are the two different aspects that literally define the success of your product.”
(Sarah Deane a.k.a. @4HourUX ~ Huffington Post) ★
The growing theme of design for happiness.
“(…) we can structure our time and design our surroundings in such a way that we can quickly make a habit out of doing things that make us happy. These changes are small and incremental, but this is precisely why he thinks they work so well. “People think that we need big solutions to do the issue of happiness justice,” Paul Dolan says. “There’s this belief that anything worth having has to be effortful, but really the opposite it true. Just make happiness as easy as possible.”
(Elizabeth Segran a.k.a. @LizSegran ~ FastCo Design) ★
See, business is getting hold on design.
“The transaction funnel. The moment you hope a customer is sure enough of what they’re buying that they’ll go through all the necessary steps to complete the purchase. We work to reduce friction, hoping to improve the rate at which people starting down the funnel complete it. We’ve come a long way in understanding the science of the funnel and the factors that affect someone’s likelihood for completing the transaction.”
(Chris Risdon a.k.a. @chrisrisdon ~ Adaptive Path) ★
When you have three examples or more, you have a pattern.
“The growing impact of designers on companies’ business strategies seems to be inevitable and increasingly vast, enabling design studios to slowly but surely redefine large corporations’ mindsets.”
Frictions are the usability issues of UX.
“In user experience, friction is defined as interactions that inhibit people from intuitively and painlessly achieving their goals within a digital interface. Friction is a major problem because it leads to bouncing, reduces conversions, and frustrates would-be customers to the point of abandoning their tasks. Today, the most successful digital experiences have emerged out of focusing on reducing friction in the user journey (…)”
(Victoria Young a.k.a. @victoriahyoung ~ Betterment) ★
Quants for enterprise UX, the calculator.
“As we move forward with these concepts across our organization, we expect that our company’s products will advance in their UX maturity and, consequently, pay down their debt. The calculator is a great tool for modeling this CX/UX transition in a product and reinforcing a user- and data-centric product culture.”
(Kimberly Dunwoody and Susan Teague Rector ~ User Experience) ★
Dealing with complexity is the underlying message.
“Service design is just what it sounds like, the design of services. But this is a misnomer. If you look into the focus of modern service design across various industries, including my own, you see that it truly translates into “macro, end to end, surface to core experience design. This means it goes beyond the UX of specific touchpoints, and beyond just focusing on one channel or funnel. It truly stands for the macro view of the customer experience, and should be used strategically to design a more optimized and effective one, daresay delightful. Or, be used tactically to fix experiences that are falling short of their promise.”
(Erik Flowers a.k.a. @Erik_UX ~ HelloErik) ★
Breeding UX design talent might be the way to go for our field.
“In a recent interview, Wydeven took the time to speak with me about her route to UX design, what it was like entering the UX field, what new designers should know, and how more experienced designers can help bring new designers into the fold.”
(Nick Lombardi a.k.a. @NickLombardi482 ~ O’Reilly Radar) ★
Business and design, the other way around.
“The field of UX is growing and changing. More corporations than ever are now seeing the importance of user experience and bringing User Experience in house. Some companies are accelerating their adoption of User Experience by acquiring some of the best UX design consultancies. How will this shift affect large and medium-sized UX design firms in the near future?”
(Janet M. Six ~ UXmatters) ★
Bravo! Such a nice initiative to bring the design challenge to our community. Great starting point for #WIAD15 and #ArchHappy.
“The world is complex. Information is subjective. Customer Experience is key. Globally there is a big community of courageous professionals for whom their daily work is about making sense of any mess. They are information architects, user experience designers, developers, social media experts, visual designers, innovators… sometimes working as specialists but in other roles too: as creative directors, entrepreneurs, managers or consultants. They are to be found in agencies, startups, big corporations or work as freelancers. They all have something in common: they are responsible for Designing, Developing, Building, Communicating webs, mobile apps or digital services and products that act as information spaces in ubiquitous ecologies (on any device, in any location, and in any format). The aim of this project is to stimulate discussion about how we Architect for Happiness.”
(Silvia Calvet a.k.a. @silviacalvet and Nicole Neuefeind a.k.a. @nicneuvision ~ About Architecting Happiness)
Know your professional history. Moving from HCI to UX into a steep valley or ravine.
“In this editorial, I advocate a new form of interactive community publication (…) to respond to new creative emphases within human-focused interaction design practices and research. I have called this CLUF (creatively led user foci), pronounced like the Northern English word clough, meaning a steep valley or ravine. The realities of reflective creative practices are that we can always probe further and explore more as we work down through layers of design practice. CLUF would support a much needed online community of practice around systematic rigorous exploration of creative UX.”
(Gilbert Cockton ~ Journal of Usability Studies Volume 10, Issue 1, November 2014)
Food experience without food is no food experience as well.
“User experience is a method of engineering and design that creates systems to work best for the intended user. In order to design in this way, users must be included in the design process through user research and usability testing. If user research and usability testing are not practiced, then UX is not being practiced.”
To lead the UX tribe, in theory and in practice.
“(…) we’ll discuss the need for great leaders in User Experience, describe some qualities that are characteristic of all great leaders, and consider some unique factors that make a UX leader great. Although UX leaders share many leadership traits with other disciplines – including business, product management, and engineering – leading UX research, strategy, and design requires particular strengths as a leader.”
(Jim Nieters and Pabini Gabriel-Petit ~ UXmatters)
The message is coming through. Slow, but consistently.
“(…) a clear link between a strategic approach to user experience and financial performance. Revenue growth, margins, valuations and share price performance were all higher for these companies relative to their respective peer group. These companies outperform because they provide consistently outstanding user experiences that help their customers succeed.”
(Gabriel Lowy ~ APM Digest)
Like the formats ‘What UX Design can lean from (…)’ or ‘The difference between UX Design and (…)’.
“User experience is an emergent property of an entire organization, not just one group. When user experience is so closely associated with design, it allows non-designers to feel like user experience isn’t their responsibility. This association also sets up designers to fail, because they are given a charter they cannot deliver on.”
(Peter Merholz a.k.a. @peterme)
UX4E on a collision course with CX?
“You’re hired to design a product that has a guaranteed audience of 50,000 users, right out of the gate. Your clients have a dedicated support staff with a completely predictable technology stack. Best of all, your work directly improves the quality of your users’ lives. That’s enterprise UX.”
(Jordan Koschei a.k.a. @jordankochei ~ A List Apart)
Learning from the essentials of Greek theatre allways helps any designer for experiences.
“The most successful UX professionals aren’t just good at the basic skills that their profession requires. They are well-rounded, self-aware, empathetic, problem-solving beings. Mastery of these soft skills sets a person apart and makes the difference between being employable and being exceptional. The thing is: many people haven’t really received training to master these skills. There aren’t that many classes that can teach you these skills. But any person who has trained in theater knows that everything you do in theater helps to foster the development of the whole person. And this is how theater has been the making of me as a UX Designer.”
(Traci Lepore a.k.a. @traciuxd ~ UXmatters)