“(…) getting the technology to work is hard, but the really hard part is getting the human-system interaction right, making it easy for people to use the systems. Here are the issues. Touch and sensing technology is becoming more and more popular, whether it is on mobile telephones and tablets, navigation systems, or even cooking appliances. These give great opportunities, and of course, great opportunities also pose great challenges. Some are technical, but more and more they are interaction and design challenges – how to ensure that the capabilities of the technology are well matched to the needs and capabilities of the people who use them.”
A conversation with Dan Klyn: Richard Saul Wurman & IA for UXers
“Initially I went back to 1976. That’s a fairly well-known time when Wurman introduced the idea of the architecture of information at this conference that he was the chairman of in Philadelphia but then going further back from there the artifacts become increasingly more difficult to get your hands on and yet the payload for how it could influence how we do our work today gets richer and richer.”
(Patrick Quattlebaum a.k.a. @ptquattlebaum ~ Adaptive Path)
Softer side of change
“Businesses have always looked at ways to improve, to either save cost or improve operating performance. The drive for improvement is even greater today due to the current economic climate we find ourselves in. Traditional buzz words such as process re-engineering and process improvement are becoming part of every day language once again, as organisations try to become leaner. The challenge faced by organisations when applying these improvement techniques is that the world we find ourselves in today is very different to when these approaches were first defined. Organisations are no longer stand alone entities, most are now part of a large ecosystem with complex interdependencies, spread in some cases across the globe.”
(Mike Clark ~ Bridging the Gap)
Associating UX changes to the Net Promoter Score
“A bad experience will impact how likely users are to recommend a website or product to a friend. Fixing those bad experiences is critical to increasing positive word of mouth. Unfortunately, there are usually too many things to fix and just as many opinions on what should be fixed. Development teams need to prioritize.”
(Jeff Sauro a.k.a. @MeasuringU ~ Measuring Usability) ~ courtesy of barbarakoop
Interesting facts make web pages compelling
“Users hunt for facts online, so factually rich content will attract readers and keep their attention.”
Design in service: Crafting the citizen experience
“Many agree that a combination of factors – a demand for better user experience, the rise of ubiquitous technologies and more readily accessible datasets – present the conditions necessary for a more enjoyable life as a citizen of our country. But necessity is just the mother of invention; it takes hard work to get there. To narrow the gap between today’s promises and tomorrow’s opportunities, designers are increasingly intent on improving what’s known as the citizen experience.”
(Andrew Maier a.k.a. @andrewmaier ~ UX Booth)
Starving for understanding?
“Wurman is among a relatively small group of sensemaking oriented thinkers who figured out, early on that what is important is not the data but rather the understanding, the making sense of it. If you look at the present, relatively early cycle of the Big Data wave this realization regarding the importance of sensemaking is only just starting to emerge. At the moment in the Big Data phenomenon cycle tons of beauty-oriented graphics are being thrown up on the web everyday, a small fraction of which have anything to do with helping others reach understanding.”
The widening gulf of customer experience
“Without commitment, promising a focus on the customer widens the gap between expectations and delivery. This leads to disappointment for shareholders, who will not see the long-term financial returns expected, and for customers whose experience below expectations will be perceived as worse than if no promise was made in the first place. This may explain why some of the most successful, and most loved companies do not try to differentiate themselves with a promise of better customer experience. In fact they rarely even use the word. Instead, they focus on the actual delivery of it.”
(David Jacques a.k.a. @DavidJacques ~ Customer Input)
Designing the business around the experience
“When trying to start a business, you are probably going to focus on what your possible target market is first. You will then start to look at gaps in that market and what the various opportunities and outcomes are, which can be achieved based on this research.”
(Michael Clark ~ Bridging the gap)
Forget Google Glass. These are the interfaces of the future
“Future civilizations will know we were crazy when they see clips of us talking into our screens.”
(David Gelernter ~ WIRED)
Six ways ecosystems have changed our roles and the way we work
“Smart companies no longer just ‘sell product’ – they build ecosystems of genuine value, comprised of dynamic, interconnected touch points that stoke customer interests and support their needs. Customer experience becomes an essential business strategy. In the midst of this shift, where lagging businesses struggle to follow suit, our role as UX professionals is evolving and forcing us to work differently.”
(Cindy Chastain a.k.a. @cchastain ~ MX Conference 2013)
Crafting UX: Designing the user experience beyond the interface
“In large technologically-driven organizations with a broad and complex product range, establishing a user-centric approach to product design can be very challenging. The shift towards designing products and services for compelling experiences for users requires (among other things) changes in planning, resources and processes.”
Three reasons we’ve outgrown mobile context
“It seems like it’s taken forever, but everyone is finally taking designing experiences for smaller screens seriously – whether they’re doing responsive design or designing stand-alone mobile Web sites.”
(SuAnne Hall ~ UXmatters)
Sense-making in cross-channel design
“Successful cross-channel user experiences rely upon a strong informational layer that creates understanding amongst users of a service. This pervasive information layer helps users form conceptual models about how the overall experience works (irrespective of the channel in which they reside). This paper explores the early development of a practical framework for the creation of meaningful cross-channel information architectures or ‘architectures of meaning’. We explore the strategic roles that individual channels can play as well as the different factors that can degrade a user’ s understanding within a cross-channel user experience.”
(Jon Fisher, Simon Norris, and Elizabeth Buie ~ Journal of Information Architecture Fall 2012)
Visualizing service design
“When we speak about a service or a system, an ecosystem or concept, they are a lot of times abstract things. Visualization representation is a way to make them more tangible.”
(Elizabeth Wood ~ frog design mind)
Improving UX with customer journey maps
“The necessity of providing user satisfaction on every key touchpoint in your business is critical to your success. The issue, however, is identifying those crucial touchpoints. Customer journey maps could be an incredibly helpful solution in this area.”
(Jacek Samsel ~ Six Revisions) ~ courtesy of thomasmarzano
Design in teams: What designers contribute to multidisciplinary teams
“Products are developed by large multidisciplinary 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.”
(Guido Stompff a.k.a. @guidostompff ~ About DiT)
Findability is a content problem, not a search problem
“Findability is a constant theme in content strategy and technical communications, yet it seems to me that people often treat findability as a problem existing outside the content. Findability is addressed using SEO tactics and by devising sophisticated top-down navigational aids, such as taxonomies and faceted navigation, but it is seldom seen as issue to be addressed in the content itself. I believe this focus on top-down findability is wrong. Top-down finding aids have their place, but the majority of the focus should be bottom up, and it should start with the content itself.”
Making better customer journey maps
“You might know that a customer journey map is a visualisation of interactions between a customer and your organisation. But what are the things that could make your next customer journey map even better?”
(Marc Fonteijn a.k.a. @marcfonteijn ~ 31Volts)
Exploring and enhancing the UX for television: A debrief
“At the BBC R&D, we have been working on how to exploit the interactive functionality now available through connected televisions through a number of projects under themes such as companion screens, authentication, Internet of Things, recommendation services, accessibility and so on. They are all exciting topics to explore and we were interested in finding out what the research community had to say on the subject.”