All posts about
User experience

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

True Death of UX? Being Jaded

Added on 25 April 2012 Peter Bogaards
UX moves up the ladder and more into business contexts to make a difference.

“Being a services consultant in the field of user experience insulates you somewhat from the daily grind. But seeing the same problems, products, companies, and types of people can easily wear you down. However, despite the variety in UX work, a certain amount of routine and repetition can cause the exciting rituals of user experience to become habitual. When that happens, you can lose the excitement of the work, and jadedness can set it. It is vital that, as UX professionals, we re-examine not only what we are doing, but how we are doing it. Keeping our activities fresh is not only good for our professional aspirations, but in the end, serves the best interests of our customers.”

(Baruch Sachs a.k.a. @basachs ~ UXmatters)

Augmented Paper

Added on 23 April 2012 Peter Bogaards
There’s some real magic in all these apps.

“Design an experience. Make it as beautiful – and as emotionally resonant – as it can possibly be. Then adorn the core experience and content with only as much functionality as is absolutely necessary. Functionality – and software-based thinking in general – is like seasoning. A little is an enhancement; any more destroys the flavour, subsumes the artistry of the chef, and may well be bad for you. These new classes of devices, so immediately personal and portable and tactile, aren’t desktop-era shrines demanding incantation and prostration. They’re empowering extensions to our real, actual lives – and that’s a profound thing. They take what was once prosaic or mundane, and give us just a taste of superpowers. They’re augmentations, and they should be beautiful.”

(Matt Gemmell a.k.a. @mattgemmell)

User Experience Is The Heart Of Any Company. How Do You Make It Top Priority?

Added on 16 April 2012 Peter Bogaards
Calling it ‘Customer Experience’ might help.

“The closer you are to your customers, the more relevant your product will be and the more likely you make it for people to choose you. It may seem obvious, but the gap between those that do and those that talk is widening, despite the immediate bottom-line benefits. But more than this, companies that put usefulness at the heart of what they do become part of their customers’ lives. Engaging with customers then becomes an ongoing conversation, rather than the stop-start involvement that characterized the 20th century. This makes it much easier for customers to come back, and keep coming back.”

(Mary Ellen Muckerman ~ FastCo)

Extending the Experience Beyond the Device

Added on 30 March 2012 Peter Bogaards
And beyond technology as well. All through design.

“Over the last few years, the popularity of UX has grown by leaps and bounds. Companies have come to realize the importance of offering engaging experiences to their users, lest they risk losing them to competitors that have invested time and money into improving their product and service experiences. An interesting side effect of this enhanced focus on UX is that it has helped make users more sophisticated. This, however, can be a double-edged sword; as users become more sophisticated their expectations also increase, and UX professionals must find new ways to meet these elevated expectations. One way to achieve this is to extend the experience beyond the device.”

(Tim R. Todish a.k.a. @t3b ~ UX Magazine)

The De-Evolution of UX Design

Added on 27 March 2012 Peter Bogaards
Reads like blowing the last post on UX design. Or is it IA?

“It’s been seven years since I took that first step into IA, and, sadly, it seems that the practice of understanding and prioritizing information before designing the interface has been abandoned. And because of that, we are facing a huge problem in the world of UX, which is, simply put, that we are devolving.”

(Lis Hubert a.k.a. @lishubert ~ UX Magazine)

Design Factory: Creative Design with Industrial Approach

Added on 20 March 2012 Peter Bogaards
Disclosure: I work at Informaat (The Netherlands).

“Digital strategy touches every fiber of your operation. We firmly believe that it takes a systematic approach that’s woven into your organizational fabric to deliver compelling customer experiences – an approach comprising a recurring cycle of ideation, design, development and evaluation (…) The Design Factory is a methodical, structured design capability that comprises people, processes and tools. It infuses your organization with the creativity, agility and efficiency to successfully execute your digital strategy – from conceiving innovative solutions through to using robust and scalable approaches for design and specification.”

(About Informaat, experience design)

Forrester Report: Digital Customer Experience Improvement Requires A Systematic Approach

Added on 20 March 2012 Peter Bogaards
Disclosure: I work at Informaat (The Netherlands).

Industrialize Processes In Support Of A Digital Customer Experience Strategy – “To consistently meet or exceed customers’ expectations, firms must take a systematic approach to digital customer experience management. In conducting in-depth interviews with 16 business professionals, Forrester found that several of these companies had adopted some best practices for digital design that delivered improvements in customer experience – leading to improved business results through increased revenues, improved loyalty, greater customer engagement, and reduced costs. However, no organization had a mature, systematic approach to consistently differentiate through superior digital customer experience. For firms to turn their digital customer experience into a sustainable source of competitive advantage, they must define a digital customer experience strategy and introduce robust tools and repeatable methodologies to support it.”

(About Informaat, experience design)

User Experience Cannot Be Designed

Added on 20 March 2012 Peter Bogaards
Besides DTDT and “There is no such thing as…”, we also have “(…) can’t be designed” as a recurring theme.

“User experience has been getting a lot of attention these days, but many businesses are confused about the actual meaning of it. In my opinion, it can be defined as the summation of different considerations i.e. defining the information structure, enabling the users to manipulate the data/information, and communicate the different possibilities to the users.”

(Cygnis Media)

Nine Misconceptions About Statistics And Usability

Added on 13 March 2012 Peter Bogaards
Misconceptions are sometimes born out of plain ignorance.

“There are many reasons why usability professionals don’t use statistics and I’ve heard most of them. Many of the reasons are based on misconceptions about what you can and can’t do with statistics and the advantage they provide in reducing uncertainly and clarifying our recommendations. Here are nine of the more common misconceptions.”

(Jeff Sauro a.k.a. @MsrUsability ~ Measuring Usability)

UX SIG on Experience-driven design

Added on 12 March 2012 Peter Bogaards
Experience getting to the heart of innovation.

“This is a User Experience Special Interest Group event by SIGCHI Finland, supported by UXUS research project by TEKES/FIMECC. We have a special guest speaker from Delft University of Technology, Rick Schifferstein, talking about taking an experience as a starting point of designing products. Finnish speakers will accompany Dr. Schifferstein with speeches on experience design.”

(SIGCHI Finland)

Embedding User Experience Design in large organizations: Issues and recommendations

Added on 9 March 2012 Peter Bogaards
Large organizations is a different playing field for many UX peeps.

“The consequence of UX not being seen as an essential profitability lever is that it’s rarely adequately represented in the upper echelons of large organizations. It’s mostly seen as an auxiliary function down in the trenches as opposed to a core foundation of the business.”

(Rian van der Merwe a.k.a. @RianVDM)

Why User Experience Is Different From Consumer Experience

Added on 5 March 2012 Peter Bogaards
CX or/versus/and UX? It’s in the air. Consumer of customer, that’s (still) the question.

“Forrester recently released a report on the rise of the Chief Customer Officer. The emergence of a C-level role with authority over customers’ interactions has caused much hand-wringing within the UX community. It’s like the job (we think) we’re made for has been stolen from us.”

(Greg Laugero a.k.a. @prodctstrategy ~ Johnny Holland Magazine) ~ courtesy of schilletje

How To Manufacture Desire

Added on 5 March 2012 Peter Bogaards
After objects of desire, we get services of desire?

“I created the desire engine in order to help others understand what is at the heart of habit-forming technology. It highlights common patterns I observed in my career in the video gaming and online advertising industries. While the desire engine is generic enough for a broad explanation of habit formation, I’ll focus on applications in consumer Internet for this post.”

(Nir Eyal ~ TechCrunch)

Don Draper is the Antithesis of User Experience

Added on 28 February 2012 Peter Bogaards
Oh no! Not him again!

“User Experience is about gaining insight on customers and prospects, and guiding the design of products and services based on direct input from those people on a regular basis. UX is NOT about getting people to do what companies just want them to do. UX is OPPOSITE of advertising. UX is about making things that people actually need, not trying to convince people that they should want them.”

(Whitney Hess ~ Pleasure & Pain)

What is User Experience Strategy, Anyway?

Added on 23 February 2012 Peter Bogaards
Like all strategies, it’s still a strategy. A plan to walk the talk.

“User experience strategy builds upon an organization’s business and product strategies through a shared vision for a product or service from the end user’s perspective. UX strategy can also extend beyond a single product to create a vision for what a customer’s interaction with your company will be like across multiple products and touch points over time.”

(Catriona Cornett a.k.a. @inspireUX ~ The Archer Group)