Nielsen is wrong on mobile

Jakob is wrong on everything, except usability.

“For all of Jakob Nielsen’s many great contributions to web usability over the years, his advice for mobile is just 180-degrees backward. His latest guidelines perpetuate several stubborn mobile myths that have led too many to create ‘lite’ mobile experiences that patronise users, undermine business goals, and soak up design and tech resources.”

(Josh Clark a.k.a. @globalmoxie ~ .net magazine) courtesy of lammertpostma

Designing for touch

Mobile Touch, the new design space with many new constraints, materials and possibilities.

“Great mobile designs do more than shoehorn themselves into tiny screens: they make way for fingers and thumbs, accommodating the wayward taps of our clumsy digits. The physicality of handheld interfaces take designers beyond the conventions of visual and information design‚ and into the territory of industrial design. With touchscreens there are real ergonomics at stake. It’s not just how your pixels look, but how they feel in the hand.”

(Josh Clark a.k.a. @globalmoxie ~ .net magazine) courtesy of puttingpeoplefirst

Personas: A Critical Investment For Content Strategy

Personas as the silver bullet to guarantee empathy?

“Content strategy isn’t really a discipline but a defined approach to handling an organization’s content consistently across departments and channels. It can only be effective if it becomes ubiquitous to the processes and procedures that already exist within business – communications, public relations, customer service, marketing, graphic design, IT, etc. While the defined strategy may be about content, the tactics by which we achieve our content goals are really about people. Who are we publishing content for? How will they interact with the content we present? How do they define relevancy? What is meaningful and engaging to them? Borrowing a tool that user experience and interaction designers have used for years, personas are a powerful way to not only create and implement a sound content strategy, but to facilitate its adoption by everyone in the organization.”

(Kristina Mausser a.k.a. @krismausser ~ Follow the UX Leader)

The UX Community Needs to Start Paying Attention to Android

Technology has always been a great driver of UX, closed or open.

“I’ve been doing a lot of research recently about mobile design patterns and UX best practices for smartphone and tablet devices for both iOS and Android platforms. One thing has stood out more than anything else during this process: no one is talking about Android.”

(Catriona Cornett a.k.a. @inspireUX ~ inspireUX)

Information Surfacing: Communicating through Design

Manipulate user engagement? Direct user behavior would be better.

“Information surfacing is to interaction designers what information hierarchy is to graphic designers. (…) Conceptual models are nothing new, but often become unintentionally obfuscated during the design processes. The design team, often dazed and confused, struggles to figure out why the product is now cluttered and unintuitive. A design thinking method I call ‘information surfacing’ helps to remedy this problem. Information surfacing involves the prioritization of UI elements with an intent to manipulate user engagement.”

(Ernest Volnyansky a.k.a. @ernestvo ~ UX Booth)

Capturing User Research

Anything you can capture from other people helps.

“It’s interesting to think of what the future might bring in information-capture technology for user research. In my dreams, an ideal tool would be on a tablet, reducing the massive amount of paper that I currently waste when capturing handwritten notes. It would allow me to view a discussion guide and add handwritten notes using a stylus. My notes would be synced with either an audio recording or a wireless video recording, which would make it easy to jump to any point in a recording that corresponds to particular notes. The application would then take my handwritten notes and automatically convert them to text that I could manipulate in a word processor. Do you know of any tools that would let me achieve this? If not, I can dream. In the meantime, I’ll be taking plenty of handwritten notes on paper and backing them up with audio or video recordings.”

(Jim Ross a.k.a. @anotheruxguy ~ UXmatters)

Extending the Experience Beyond the Device

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)

Mobile Is Not a Channel – It’s an Attitude

Channel, platform, or touchpoint? I’m getting all confused with the new cross-lingo.

“Mobile is not a channel because I don’t believe that consumers are making a distinction between their mobile and their fixed Internet experiences – from a consumer perspective, it’s the same Internet accessed through different devices. (…) Let’s stop talking about mobile as a separate channel and start designing digital experiences that incorporate mobile the way it obviously needs to be done.”

(Laurel Erickson a.k.a. @erxn ~ Enlighten)

The State of the Content Industry

Content (the stuff formerly known as information) has always been my reason to go to the WWW.

InfoDesign WebGem #6,400 – “At the forefront of this shift is the re-emergence of original, quality content and the surge in brands acting as publishers. Add to this changing landscape a redefining of journalism, shaped by social media, and the latest disruption in the broadcast industry, and media analysts see an industry that is both exciting and unsettling.”

(Patrick Burke ~ The Content Strategist a.k.a. @contently)

The De-Evolution of UX Design

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)

Is your organization design ready?

The idea remains: UX is an organizational challenge, not a design one.

“Let’s presume for the moment that interaction design can be perfected and delivered to your organization in a tidy, shiny bundle of brilliance. Have you now got a magic talisman that will protect you from competition and summon market share? Of course not. Design is just the beginning.”

(Chris Noessel a.k.a. @chrisnoessel ~ Cooper Journal) ~ courtesy of willemijnprins