All posts about
User experience

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

Barriers to Holistic Design Solutions

Added on 17 January 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Face it, most UX design work consists of incremental improvements over the previous version of a product, and we rarely get to design holistic solutions that elegantly meet the needs of our target audience across systems, services, and devices—or wherever such needs crop up. Further, time-to-market pressures and narrow, predefined solution spaces usually constrain the occasional opportunities we may get to design a first-release product. This leaves so many UX professionals dissatisfied, because they know they could have done a better job or, worse, they may even have envisioned exactly how their design could have been better, only to find insurmountable barriers to their vision’s ever seeing the light of day.” (Christian Rohrer ~ UXmatters)

All about UX: Information for user experience professionals

Added on 13 January 2011 Peter Bogaards
“This is an independent site to share and, one day, also collect information about user experience. There has been an active group of researchers collecting user experience evaluation methods, frameworks, and definitions for several years now. We promised to bring the results back to the people who have helped us in this work. Finally, we are able to share the results! We are aware of the immaturity of this site on the day of its birth, but the site is supposed to grow as more information reaches the maturity level high enough for publishing. It is great to get the existing information online now.” (About AllAboutUX)

Why you need a user experience vision (and how to create and publicise it)

Added on 5 January 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Many design teams launch into development without a shared vision of the user experience. Without this shared vision, the team lacks direction, challenge and focus. This article describes how to use the ‘Design the Box’ activity to develop a user experience vision, and then describes three ways of publicising the vision: telling a short story; drawing a cartoon showing the experience; and creating a video to illustrate the future.” (David Travis ~ UserFocus)

The Relevance of User Experience: Using Every Opportunity to Impress Users

Added on 5 January 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Is it possible to calculate the ROI of great design? What about the cost-per-acquisition of a customer sold on User Experience? There are no second chances for first impressions, and even the smallest opportunity is a chance to ‘Wow’ users. What you do with that opportunity can spark a chain of events that can make or break your business.” (Nicolas Thomas ~ UX Booth)

An Interview with Jesse James Garrett

Added on 21 December 2010 Peter Bogaards
“I’m pretty excited that the new edition of Elements of User Experience is out – the first edition was one of the first books I really connected with, and it’s great to see a refresh. What are some of the highlights in this version? (…) There is so much evident care and craft in the Rosenfeld Media books – I think they now occupy the place O’Reilly books held 15 years ago as definitive works.” (Russ Unger ~ Peachpit)

The Importance of Designing an Experience Culture

Added on 21 December 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Attitudes and behaviors are constantly being shaped within organizations. It’s the reason there are performance reviews, processes and procedures, and role expectations. If business leaders want to foster a specific culture, then all opportunities, activities, and expectations of their staffs will be measured against the success of exemplifying that culture. To design is to plan something for a specific role, purpose, or effect – to work out its form. Company culture is designed in every conversation, and in every bit of feedback and evaluation criteria. It’s possible to control the corporate atmosphere by choosing which behaviors to support and encourage, and which to discourage. Cultures grow organically, but they are actively designed.” (Cynthia Thomas ~ UX Magazine)

UX Project Documentation: Answering What, Why, and How

Added on 14 December 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Many people don’t see the importance of gathering the necessary explanatory documents that define what you did all throughout your project development. Either that, or they treat the documentation process as a simple putting-together of all the sketches and wireframes generated. We should, nonetheless, give more relevance to this final, whole-project document.” (Pamela Rodríguez ~ UX Booth)

An interview with Mike Kuniavsky

Added on 7 December 2010 Peter Bogaards
“And we never fully understand our technology. We may understand the technical aspect of it, but we never fully understand the social implications of it. Lots of people point out that every technology is a double-edged sword; for every positive thing that it does, there’s a negative effect that it has. What we do is try to balance those. As designers, I think the role is to try to understand as much as possible about that, given the time, budget, and knowledge constraints that we have, in order to be able to make decisions to try to mitigate the negative aspects while amplifying the positive aspects of technology.” (David Bevans ~ Morgan Kaufmann Publishers)

The Holy Grail of Innovation: It Takes an Ensemble to Achieve Inspired Creativity

Added on 6 December 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Have you ever seen really good improv? Did you walk out of the experience willing to swear that the actors had rehearsed it ahead of time or it was some kind of magic? I’ll let you in on an actor’s secret: chances are the work was neither rehearsed nor magic! What’s more likely is that the group performing the improv was a true ensemble of actors who had trained and practiced the principles of improv and were accustomed to working together.” (Traci Lepore ~ UXmatters)

Content Strategy Will Make or Break Your Process

Added on 26 November 2010 Peter Bogaards
Karen McGrane and Jeff Eaton presentation ~ “User experience is key, and applying the basic principals we know about human-centric design can help give information and how it’s processed the place it deserves. By factoring this into pre-planning, task optimization, and above all communication, a beautiful site can have beautiful content without the last-minute chaos state.” (Duo Consulting)

Designing for Content Management Systems

Added on 22 November 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Designing and indeed front-end development for a website that will have content edited by non-technical users poses some problems over and above those you will encounter when developing a site where you have full control over the output mark-up. However, most clients these days want to be able to manage their own content, so most designers will find that some, if not all, of their designs end up as templates in some kind of CMS.” (Rachel Andrew ~ Smashing Magazine)

Applying Lessons from UML to UX

Added on 22 November 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Software Engineering is typically much more formal than User Experience in they way they model an application before development begins. After pseudo code, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) is probably the most widely used modeling language among software engineers. It has developed from other object‑based analysis and design languages over a period of many years and provides software engineers with a visual language that describes the design of a system at multiple levels.” (Peter Hornsby ~ UXmatters)