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

What Can SEO Learn From UX?

Added on 22 August 2012 Peter Bogaards
Or what algorithms can learn from heuristics.

“User Experience plays an early, fundamental role in guiding basic decisions that shape websites and digital products, and is increasingly afforded a seat at the table, so to speak. The reason UX is such a juggernaut is because of the multiple disciplines it encompasses—design, information architecture, usability engineering, interface design, content strategy, and research. In spite of its relative youth, UX as a discipline has grown exponentially in stature over the last few years.”

(Jessica Greco a.k.a. @grecasaurus ~ iAcquire)

The Difference Between Information Architecture and UX Design

Added on 21 August 2012 Peter Bogaards
Sigh.

“Information Architects work to create usable content structures out of complex sets of information. They do this using plenty of user-centered design methods: usability tests, persona research and creation, and user flow diagrams (to name only a few). That said, it still seems that UX design is in vogue. (…) UX builds on the foundation that IA provides, aiming to take that experience to the next level, both creatively and emotionally. This is the outstanding difference that defines how the apps, sites, and products of today are designed as opposed to those of yesterday.”

(Darren Northcott a.k.a. @darrennorthcott ~ UX Booth)

Enterprise Content Strategy Comes Down To Governance and Workflow

Added on 21 August 2012 Peter Bogaards
Enterprises, the new hunting grounds for experience design.

“The problem today is that this bastion of the Industrial Revolution remains as businesses try to mobilize their human capital for the content demands of an always connected marketplace. Further complicating matters, workforce downsizing and the flattening of corporate hierarchies in the mid 1990’s continues to cripple many organizations in their ability to deliver the content needed to be successful in the Information Age.”

(Kris Mausser a.k.a. @krismausser ~ Follow the UX leader)

Designing Screens Using Cores and Paths: Designing from the inside out

Added on 21 August 2012 Peter Bogaards
Patterns are the designer’s best friend.

“Typically in web design, the opposite approach is the rule: designers begin with the homepage. They then work out a navigation scheme, which pages at the bottom of the site hierarchy automatically inherit whether it’s appropriate or not. The goal – or the primary content people are looking for or tasks they are trying to get done – turns out to be the last thing that gets attention in the design process.”

(James Kalbach a.k.a. @JamesKalbach ~ Boxes and Arrows)

The gadfly of information architecture

Added on 16 August 2012 Peter Bogaards
Always a delight to have him speak.

Q&A with Richard Saul Wurman ~ “At a sprightly 77 years, Mr Wurman is the author of scores of books on technology and design, and is credited with having coined the term “information architect”. During the interview, he was true to his eccentric, irascible self, which has inspried many to his causes. “We can’t make use of success or failure from one place or another because we have no common language,” he says metaphorically. “We also have no common language in medicine. We have very few common languages,” he says. “You need common filters. In all this big data, you need filters, because often innovation comes from this filter, because you can see a pattern. And I’m interested in those patterns.””

(The Economist)

Touch Targets for Application Design

Added on 16 August 2012 Peter Bogaards
Principles for touch-based user interfaces.

“(…) deeper dive into designing touch-based interactions. That is, how large we need to make our application controls and where should we place them on screen in order to optimize for touch. In addition to general guidelines, I also showcase a before and after design that converts a keyboard and mouse application to a touch-optimized interface by rethinking navigation, input controls, and more.”

(Luke Wroblewski a.k.a. @LukeW)

Design for a Thriving UX Ecosystem

Added on 15 August 2012 Peter Bogaards
Products and services morphing into digital ecologies, ecosystems and habitats. No more spaces?

“As social media technologies and computer-supported, collaborative activities become more ubiquitous in people’s work and everyday lives, UX professionals need to expand their skills and focus to take on broader experiences than just individual users engaged with single applications. It is crucial to understand people as social, cultural, and organizational components who are linked to other people, other technologies, and loads of information. The UX field is primed to step beyond just designing applications, and it’s time to start thinking about the UX ecosystems in which these users and applications exist. The best way to begin that transition is to think in terms of biology.”

(Dave Jones a.k.a. @Dave_L_Jones ~ UX Magazine)

User Experience Design and Information Architecture: Centered and Bounded Sets

Added on 14 August 2012 Peter Bogaards
Experiential to the max.

“The ease and fluency with which designers and clients alike can move into and around the centered set of practices and concepts of UXD brings with it a marvelous opportunity to re-define a bounded set for the remnant of cats for whom the bucket of design is interesting but not the central thing drawing one in, and for which the place of beginning isn’t end users and designing their experiences.”

(Dan Klyn a.k.a. @danklyn ~ Wildly Appropriate)

Tablet Versus PC: A Creative Decision

Added on 14 August 2012 Peter Bogaards
Computers with a different form factor, but a computer.

“Both tablets and traditional PCs have strengths in content creation, but they are strengths of different types. And their different strengths have more to do with the creative process than the content itself. This assessment of the nature of these differences that I’ve outlined here is an intuition that needs further validation through research.”

(Ryan Bell ~ UXmatters)

Why Top Execs are Starting to Care About UX Design

Added on 14 August 2012 Peter Bogaards
Crossing the border to CX.

“Garrett shares how research, psychology, behavior and design can open the doors to meaningful creativity for design and product experience strategies. But more importantly, he shares how executives across the organization can learn from the UX team to improve services, business models and overall customer relationships.”

(Brian Solis a.k.a. briansolis ~ Mashable)