“Quality assurance impacts the user experience: when things don’t work, users question their understanding and develop superstitions and inefficient workarounds.”
QA & UX
Lack of quality impacts all aspects of life.
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User experience
The past 100 years of the future: Human-computer interaction in science-fiction movies and television (.pdf)
HCI in films, TV shows and SciFi is really getting a genre.
“During the past hundred years, science-fiction (sci-fi) films and, later, videos, have, of necessity, had to depict detailed views of human-computer interaction (HCI) of the future, or alternate pasts/presents, in order to convey a compelling scene and, sometimes, in order move forward the plot. This publication explores some of the themes that emerge from examining this body of work. The basic premise is simple: HCI professionals can learn something from sci-fi media, and sci-fi media-producers can learn more from HCI professionals in order to show smarter views of the future.”
(Aaron Marcus a.k.a. @amandaberkeley ~ Amanda)
User experience in startups: Challenges and realities
Besides business, startups are the new hunting grounds for UX design.
“To understand how User Experience fits into a startup, it is critical that you understand the startup maturation cycle. While each startup has its own story, they all typically progress through the same stages. It is essential that you understand the personnel dynamics, the startup’s need for UX design, and its immediate business objectives and constraints at each stage.”
(Sasha Giacoppo a.k.a. @asgiacoppo ~ UXmatters)
Design dissonance: When form and function collide
Very happy Eric (finally) contributed to UXm.
“Dissonance is a musical term. It means things are not in harmony. Design dissonance occurs when a product or service sends out cognitive signals that run counter to the desired effect. In the strictest sense of the term, design dissonance often relates to usability – when a design somehow pushes a user in the wrong direction, in terms of both understanding and action. But in a broader sense, design dissonance can create disappointment, particularly when it occurs in relation to a service.”
(Eric Reiss a.k.a. @elreiss ~ UXmatters)
The intricate anatomy of UX design
Don’t get confused. It’s just a DTDT effort in Venn diagrams.
“This mega graphic attempts to tackle the relationship between UX and all other aspects of design.”
Looking beyond user-centered design
OK, time to move on.
“User-centered design has served the digital community well. So well, in fact, that I’m worried its dominance may actually be limiting our field.”
(Cennydd Bowles a.k.a. @Cennydd ~ A List Apart)
The four waves of user-centered design
Always loves categorizations of our history. Surfing the waves of Information Design.
“As practitioners, we must broaden our understanding of innovation from both business and user-experience perspectives. From a business perspective, we need to empathize with the impluse to reject the investment of resources innovation requires. Innovation is embraced only when the value gained is substantially greater than the investment costs: a marginal gain is rarely adequate. Our past practices have been confined almost exclusively to our existing, primary user market. It’s time to direct some of our attention to the fringe markets where disruptive technologies take hold.”
Effectively planning UX design projects
Project manager versus project leader: It is about leadership, not bean counting.
“Planning user experience projects is a balancing act of getting the right amount of user input within the constraints of your project. The trick is to work out the best use of your time. How can you get the most UX goodness for your client’s budget? This article explains how to choose the right mix of tools for the task at hand.”
(James Chudley a.k.a. @chudders ~ Smashing UX design)
The UX chakra model: Finding balance in your latest digital project
I’m afraid spirituality now also enters UX design. Help!
“To help reframe things, I’d like to propose a new way of modelling our design space: one that reflects both the core components of any good design effort and their overall alignment on an ongoing basis. The goal of the model is to improve learning and understanding throughout the journey. It’s not necessarily a replacement for contemporary methods, but simply a different way of looking at things.”
(Colin Eagan a.k.a @colineags ~ UX Booth)
Functional beauty and user experience
Pigs and lipsticks. Never thought pink was nice on an animal, except flamingos.
“Beauty is one of the oldest and most powerful concepts in human history—inspiring artists and lighting up cultural movements, philosophical debates, and, in modern times, curious scientific interest. Beauty is a desirable feature of the products we buy, with the power to shape consumer choices and preferences.”
(Catalina Butnaru a.k.a. @katchja ~ UX Magazine)
Are personas still relevant to UX strategy?
They will always be a great starting point for the unknowns of empathy and UCD.
“There have been some who have proclaimed the impending demise of personas as a UX design approach since shortly after their introduction. While the optimal approach to creating and employing personas is still evolving—thanks to more useful data becoming available to design teams and new project-management methods—their usefulness has not yet diminished. If anything, personas have become even more useful because they put a human face on aggregated data and foster a user-centered design approach even within the context of efficiency-driven development processes.”
(Paul Bryan a.k.a. @paulbryan ~ UXmatters)
What do you predict will be the future trend of user experience?
Being recognized, valued and appreciated by business is important in a society in which everything is seen as a market and a transaction.
“I think user experience will continue to become more strategically important instead of just service-oriented. What I’m seeing right now is user experience company-wide goals and metrics that are driven by the highest management level. This is starting to happen more in the technology world, but might spread to other types of products. UX roles might become a lot more specialized; however, what companies will look for is people that have cross-functional skills and can work in a variety of settings. You will start seeing compartments in the field as companies try to find out the best user experience strategy. You will also see the new grads with lots of different skills in their education and a background in design combined with other types of fields that previously might not be associated.”
How strategic is your kitchen?
Gastronomy as a metaphor for UX is (still) my thing.
“A good kitchen-content strategy can turn your kitchen into a place that other people can use, too. This means you have to organize your kitchen in such a way that people can just walk in and find exactly the spoon or other object they need, quickly and without asking. Your personal guidance should become unnecessary, because the kitchen would be intuitively and universally organized. No one will ever open the wrong drawer or door or canister again. Everyone’s unique kitchen style will now make perfect and immediate sense to everyone.”
(Seth Maislin a.k.a. @SethMaislin ~ Earley and Associates)
Stop designing for ‘users’
A provocative idea, but on the mark.
“Most products support activities underpinned by collaboration and sharing. Designing for individuals may actually be harmful because these activities reflect ongoing transformations of artifacts, individuals, and social interactions. Focusing on individuals might improve things for one person at the cost of others.”
(Mike Long a.k.a. @mblongii ~ ThoughtWorks Studios)
Re-Introducing page description diagrams
Content models, schemas and DTDs. Good old skool abstracting stuff. But… what’s a page anyway?
“Recently, we discovered the page description diagram, a method for documenting components without specifying layout. At first, it seemed limited, even simplistic, relative to our needs. But with some consideration, we began to understand the value. We started looking at whether or not PDDs could help us improve our process.”
(Colin Butler a.k.a. @cbutlerUX and Andrew Wirtanen a.k.a. @awirtanen ~ UX Magazine)
User experience, incorporated
The delicate position of UX between all the powers that be in business.
“It is easy to see that there are a few common ingredients across these different strategies, such as executive commitment, access to customers, new technical prototyping skills, and small, interdisciplinary teams. All of these ingredients are critical not only to UX, but also to developing the sort of bottom-up, risk-taking culture that is central to succeeding in the 21st century market. These skills are standard in the startup market where UX is increasingly appreciated as a key to success and value creation. The startup market is creating a new breed of business executives, like Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Square, who are impatient with requirements-driven waterfall product development processes. They think ‘UX-first’. The big challenge now is to drive these same skills into the more traditional, top-down management culture at big companies. The companies that get it right will be either be at the forefront of disrupting business or much more likely to thrive in the era of disruption.”
(Robert Fabricant a.k.a. @fabtweet ~ DesignMind frog)
The service design global conference and redefining service design
More DTDT necessary for Service Design?
“In this column, I’d like to briefly recap some highlights of the conference as a foundation for sharing the service design community’s upcoming task of redefining service design.”
Stop explaining UX and start doing UX
The end of DTDT seems near.
“The external validation model ensures that we’re always arguing from a position of weakness—begging for resources before our managers or clients have seen what they’re buying. We need to have the conversation about value after we’ve proven that the UX process works, not before. (…) Actions are stronger than words. We have the power to break the cycle of learned helplessness and earn the respect we crave—if we stop explaining UX and start doing UX.”
(Kim Bieler a.k.a. @feadog ~ UX Magazine)
There is no spoon: The construct of channels
Channel, device or touch point. Typical inside-out thinking.
“Channels are completely fluid to the context of our needs. We can define them broadly: digital channel versus phone channel. Or we can zoom in and define them more narrowly: mobile channel versus desktop web channel. Or more narrowly still: native app versus mobile web. The purpose of defining channels largely depends on the context in which they are being discussed – at what detail do you need to define a particular channel to support the experience? You’ll typically define them more broadly at the organizational level, and then more narrowly as you move down to the strategic and then tactical level.”
(Chris Risdon a.k.a. @ChrisRisdon ~ Adaptive Path)
A consistent experience is a better experience: Service design
Service design forces user experience design to sync with the new normal.
“If there is one thing that has held the test of time, it’s that history is bound to repeat itself. What was once old will most certainly become new again in the cycle of time because good ideas never go out of style. Service design is a shining example of this fact. In spite of the fact that the conception of service design is nearly 30 years old, it is an idea that is more relevant than ever today.”
(Mark Eberman ~ Digital Compass)