All posts about
User experience

User experience is about how a person feels about using a product, system or service. (source: Wikipedia)

Lean Strategy for UX Design

Added on 16 October 2012 Peter Bogaards
The perfect mixology: strategy, lean, UX, and design.

“Lean strategy in UX design means getting to a simple, actionable statement about what problem we are going to solve for the user as soon as possible, so that the design process can proceed. In fact, lean strategy often happens in concert with design, enabling us to be more adaptive and to more easily apply our thinking to our designs. It’s about being less precious and profligate with our decks and deliverables, freeing us up to bring greater clarity and focus to our ideas. It’s strategy in motion, pressing us forward rather than holding us back until everything has been figured out and proven with mathematical certainty.”

(David Gillis a.k.a. @davegillis ~ UX Magazine)

The Age of User Experience Design: Infographic

Added on 16 October 2012 Peter Bogaards
The numbers – if true – are amazing.

“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.”

(Martin Treder a.k.a. @marcintreder ~ UXPin)

Design thinking isn’t about thinking. It is about doing.

Added on 11 October 2012 Peter Bogaards
Multi-disciplinary teams rulez.

“Products are developed by large multi-disciplinary teams. The teams deal with many topics requiring the expertise of several specialists simultaneously. They have to decide together if something is a problem; propose multi-disciplinary solutions; and align their activities into a seamless whole. Stated differently: team members have to think collectively, which is named team cognition. In September 2012, Guido Stompff received his PhD at Technical University of Delft, faculty of Industrial Design Engineering. The topic was team cognition in high tech development teams, and how designers contribute to it. This website are bits and pieces of his observations and findings, combined with reflections on trending topics.”

(Guido Stompff a.k.a. @guidostompff ~ Team Cognition)

Content and the journey: Building a good user experience for news sites

Added on 11 October 2012 Peter Bogaards
Finally, content as main driver of the user experience.

“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 I 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.”

(Rachel McAthy ~ Journalism.co.uk)

Top 10 things still to fix in experience design

Added on 10 October 2012 Peter Bogaards
Figure that!

“As user experience extends itself across devices and channels in the years ahead the biggest winners will be companies that take a holistic and planned view of how it all works for the customer. (…) If user experience people are to be successful in changing the hearts and minds of these groups, then we need to seek out opportunities to speak with them on their own ground and use a vocabulary that resonates with them: tying UX to social benefit, improved business performance and new marketing opportunities.”

(Ray McCune ~ Foolproof)

Demystifying UX Design: Common False Beliefs and Their Remedies: Part 1

Added on 9 October 2012 Peter Bogaards
Perceptions are all based upon belief systems.

“There are many common beliefs about UX design that are, unfortunately, based on casual and inaccurate observation. However, through systematically planned and conducted user research, we can see that some of these could not be further from the truth. In this series, I’d like to single out a few such design beliefs that meet two conditions: many product development professionals believe them and little user data supports them.”

(Frank Guo ~ UXmatters)

Fixing A Broken User Experience

Added on 4 October 2012 Peter Bogaards
Addressing design in the enterprise.

“Understanding an organization and its users and designing the right interaction and visual system take exceptional effort. You also need to communicate that system to teams that have already produced work that doesn’t align with it. This isn’t easy work. In this article, we’ll introduce you to a strategy for fixing the broken experience that starts with surface improvements, goes progressively deeper into structural issues and ends with a big organizational shift.”

(Stefan Klocek a.k.a. @klocekian ~ Smashing Magazine)

Designing a better experience for patients

Added on 20 September 2012 Peter Bogaards
Signs of growth: spin-offs of UX in tourism, banking, and health. Next-up: Edu.

“As the current system of delivering care for patients has proved not to be so effective and sustainable for the future, also because of the demographic change, the health sector is looking for different models of designing and delivering services, also learning at different disciplines to mutuate tools and approach.”

(Paola Pierri a.k.a. @paolapierri ~ MEDlove 2012)

You Don’t Need a Title to Be a UX Professional

Added on 17 September 2012 Peter Bogaards
Job titles are the starting points of the silo problem.

“The reality is that you don’t need to have the title of a UX professional or consultant to make a contribution in the field of user experience. If you are passionate about making a difference for the users who will eventually use the product you are working on and have the skills you need to do the work, that’s really all you need to contribute to the product’s user experience. Simply decide for yourself that this is what you want to do, no matter what title you happen to have in your organization. In this article, I’ll give some advice to people who want to work as UX professionals. While most of these tips provide general guidance to anyone who wants to become a UX professional, some apply specifically to technical writers.”

(Delia Rusu ~ UXmatters)

How The Left/ Right Brain Theory Improves The User Experience

Added on 14 September 2012 Peter Bogaards
Integrative thinking leads to better designs for user experiences.

“Let’s take a quick look at the left brain-right brain theory to recap which part of our brain is responsible for what. Then, we’ll shed some light on how you can consider different ways of thinking in your design in order to optimize the experience for your visitors.”

(Sabine Idler a.k.a. @SabinaIdler ~ Usabilia)

UX Strategy: The Heart of User-Centered Design

Added on 4 September 2012 Peter Bogaards
Without a strategy, the HOW gets lost and the WHY remains static in the UX vision.

“Today, organizations interact with their customers through multiple digital channels such as call centers, mobile devices, applications, and Web sites. It is not enough to create a strategy for these channels from business, technology, and marketing perspectives. Rather, it is essential that an organization’s UX strategy be at the core of user-centered design. A UX strategy establishes goals for a cohesive user experience across all channels and touchpoints.”

(April McGee ~ UXmatters)

(Why) Is UXD the Blocker in Your Agile UCD Environment?

Added on 4 September 2012 Peter Bogaards
The leaner, the meaner.

“Many organizations are moving from waterfall to agile software development methods. They often combine this shift with a move to user-centered design (UCD). This makes sense because, in addition to bringing great intrinsic benefits, UCD has a lot in common with agile. Both encourage a multidisciplinary approach, are iterative, encourage feedback, discourage bloated and overly rigid documentation, and value people over processes. However, the combination of agile and UCD all too often leads to UX design becoming the main blocker in the development process. Why is this?”

(Ritch Macefield ~ UXmatters)

Beyond Wireframing: The Real-Life UX Design Process

Added on 30 August 2012 Peter Bogaards
Following the UCD process in any form is no guarantee for success. No process is.

“We all know basic tenets of user-centered design. We recognize different research methods, the prototyping stage, as well as the process of documenting techniques in our rich methodological environment. The question you probably often ask yourself, though, is how it all works in practice?”

(Marcin Treder ~ Smashing Magazine)

The 6 Disciplines Behind Consistently Great Customer Experiences

Added on 28 August 2012 Peter Bogaards
Congrats with the Forrester book on CX.

“The practices in the design discipline help organizations envision and then implement customer interactions that meet or exceed customer needs. It spans the complex systems of people, products, interfaces, services, and spaces that your customers encounter in retail locations, over the phone, or through digital media like websites and mobile apps. Design weeds out bad ideas early and focuses your customer experience efforts on changes that really matter to customers. By leveraging expertise and ideas from customers, employees, and partners, it encourages creative solutions–and helps avoid missteps by grounding those solutions in reality. “

(Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine ~ Fast.Co)

What is Digital Service Design?

Added on 28 August 2012 Peter Bogaards
Think system, not discrete nodes a.k.a. site, app or shop.

“Digital service design incorporates many existing disciplines – like web design, information architecture, user experience and content strategy. It is, if you like, an organising umbrella principle, in which all these disciplines can work together to build something that meets – and surpasses – user expectation. Perhaps most fundamentally, it’s about letting go of the website as the core idea of digital development, and thinking about service as something that can be delivered through any number of channels – some of them digital. Instead of fretting over your mobile strategy, you figure out how to express your service principles through a mobile device.”

(Adam Tinworth a.k.a. @adders ~ Next Berlin)

UX amateurism and why I’m not a UX designer anymore

Added on 27 August 2012 Peter Bogaards
In the end, honesty always prevails.

“But somehow, it’s not enough. Nor will it ever be. And where I’m aiming to go, unicorns and one-size-fits-all don’t seem to make sense. Maybe someday, I’ll find something I can identify with. But for now, I don’t think I can quite call myself a UX designer, because it’s getting harder to identify what I do as wholly UX. For what it’s worth, I am doing bits within UX – but I can’t claim fame to all of it.”

(Boon Yew Chew a.k.a. @boonych ~ GlueThink) ~ courtesy if petermorville