February 2011
1 post
3 tags
Funny but true: a quick illustration of how the...
Based on the neuroscience books I’ve read I’ve come up with a really easy way to explain to someone how the brain works. Below the illustration I explain the nature of the three components of the brain: You, the Nag and your Body.
You
Your consciousness and personality. The lump sum of your memory and experience that determines how you make decisions and who you are.
The Nag
...
6 tags
UX in the near and long-term future, 4 ideas to...
I’ve spent some time the last couple weeks trying to envision the near and long-term future of interfaces. I came away with the following useful nuggets.
1. Currently interfaces are moving out into the world where the people are
In my mind the biggest breakthrough with smart phones is that all that functionality that used to be on that computer in the corner is now traveling with me out...
January 2011
5 posts
3 tags
How I tie my UX work to sales and revenue
At my company everything the marketing team does falls under our sales funnel. This means that everything I do as the UX designer falls under one of the segments of this funnel. With this relationship, it’s easy for me to demonstrate how my UX work affects my company’s bottom line.
You’ve probably heard of the sales funnel before. Every company has their own version. ...
6 tags
9 Direct Marketing ideas to create UX that sells
In 2005 I had the privilege of attending a three day workshop by the D.M.A. (Direct Marketing Association). I recently dug up my notes for a project I’m working on and came across this great list I had put together based on that workshop. The list is still applicable today as I design UX that sells:
Multiple offers in one promotion equals lesser sales.
Direct marketing leads the customer...
4 tags
Will software engineering die some day?
In 2010 Wired magazine published an article about the death of the web. Basically it was pointing out the fact that the mobile market was the next big thing and people were moving away from the web. What I can’t wait for is the day when Wired announces the death of development. By that I mean the day when software development is so cheap and easy that most companies will finally put...
3 tags
4 UX Portfolio Tips
It’s that time of year again, when many designers take time to update their portfolios to keep them from getting stale. I spent most of my free design time in 2010 fine-tuning my own, here are some of my learnings.
1. The people looking at our portfolios know exactly what we do
I’ve heard many a hiring manager ask a designer, “What exactly did you do on this project?” ...
December 2010
4 posts
5 tags
What if we made software the same way they make...
Having studied film in college and having made a few short films, the thought has crossed my mind once or twice, what if development shops made software the same way they make movies? Imagine this scenario:
1. Assign a director, find the right writer
Today’s software has so many owners that the end result is often a muddled mess. A product owner is the closest thing the software industry...
4 tags
If you want to own a product, go into business,...
For the longest time I’ve been under the assumption that as the senior interaction designer I would eventually be able to define my company’s product. Come to find out, I’ll never be able to define the product because it’s not mine, it belongs to our marketing team and ultimately our C.E.O. The real problem is that there are things about the design of the product that the...
3 tags
Show the wrong design as early as possible
I’ve developed a design method I call showing the wrong thing as soon as possible. The idea is this: When I start a new project for a client, I have an initial meeting with them where I hear their idea. I then go off and design the first thing that comes to my mind that fits their need. It’s often not polished and not the right solution, but it represents a complete and concrete...
4 tags
My recent process for finding freelancers
Recently I was given a small budget to hire some freelancers to help with the large backlog of design tasks we have. Below are some of the steps I used to find the right people.
1. Posted on a design specific job board
I ignored the general job boards like workforce services, craigslist, hotjobs or monster. I went straight to authenticjobs.com, a very well known job board in the design...
November 2010
5 posts
9 tags
One challenge we are having with Agile, long term...
Agile at my company tends to be a very heads down speedy process in which design and development are always producing customer ready work. What Agile at my company doesn’t account for yet is any kind of long term planning. We desperately need a “planning” sprint where-in the design, dev and business teams purposefully spend time on foundational and long-term needs.
In UX...
6 tags
How I'm utilizing freelancers
A little over a month ago I had a budget to hire freelancers and after settling into a pattern with them, this is how I’m getting value from them. For this discussion there are essentially two phases to design, the critical thinking phase and the polish phase. The critical thinking phase deals with mocking and feedback loops until the key ideas are captured in rough drawings. The polish...
5 tags
How I dealt with a difficult situation at work
I’m by no means an expert at this kind of thing, but I thought it’d be worth sharing the strategy I employed recently for dealing with a difficult situation at work.
The Problem
I want to do my best to avoid hurting anyone here, so I’ll be as vague as I can without losing the insights. Basically we have a large project going on for our flagship product. The project is in the...
5 tags
Why I don't work on a Mac, for now
The chart above shows the operating systems my customers used in 2010 to date. As an Interaction Designer it’s my job to get inside the heads of my customers as much as possible. One way I get inside their heads is by forcing myself to use the same operating system as they do. I believe it gives me some additional insight into my users when I too have to deal with that annoying UAC crap...
9 tags
6 Months later, why I still prefer Illustrator to...
At my job I have to be the web designer, the print designer and the flash animator. So it’s easier for me to stay in the one drawing tool that makes the transition between those tasks easiest.
That doesn’t mean I’m poo-poo-ing Fireworks, I’m not. Fireworks is freakin’ awesome. It’s just not the best tool for my specific role at my company. But rest...
October 2010
4 posts
6 tags
Cartooning prepared me for interaction design
After repeatedly and methodically constructing comic strips on a monthly then a weekly deadline for years, I started to get the hang of it. I learned to write out a bunch of ideas to discover the best one. Then I learned to rough sketch the panels until I found the mix of drawings that told the joke best. And finally I would put on the polish with detailed ink and shading.
Interaction Design...
7 tags
3 UX Take-aways from John Sculley's interview...
This week I read through the insightful John Sculley interview about Steve Jobs. I found the article very simple and yet very rich. Here are three things relating to designing products that I found most interesting.
1. Difference between Microsoft products and Apple products
Bill [Gates] was brillant too - but Bill was never interested in great taste. He was always interested in being able...
6 tags
Google.com needs the web equivalent of an AppStore...
In my mind there are essentially two things on the web, information and applications. Google does an amazing job of organizing information, but as far as organizing all the web applications out there Google falls short.
This difference really hit home to me as I was watching what all those amazing SEO gurus do what they do. They are basically filling the web with amazingly organized and robust...
4 tags
Beginnings of a UX handbook for my department
Last week I started a preliminary outline to answer to the question what is the UX department at my company responsible for. This is by no means comprehensive, it’s just a start.
1. Backlog grooming
Backlog grooming is just the Scrum way of saying make sure there is always a bunch of designs ready to go. My boss should never come to me and say he doesn’t know what to give the dev...
September 2010
4 posts
3 tags
Seriously Apple, why isn't my iPhone a watch yet?...
When Apple first announced those new Nano’s with the small square touch interface did anyone else think, my God that could easily be a watch?! I know it was just the Nano, but that could easily be the iPhone. I don’t know about you, but I get tired of having to pull my phone out of my pocket all the time. Wouldn’t it be so much nicer to just flick my wrist and see my latest...
4 tags
So is the web dead or what?
I recently read the Wired Magazine article The Web is Dead by Chris Anderson, and the counter post ‘New Twitter’ shows the Web isn’t dead by Pete Cashmore. In Anderson’s article he argues that people are trending away from the web and into whatever devices will give them what they want the fastest and easiest. Cashmore counters by saying that Twitter has seen the light...
5 tags
13 Important lessons I'd want to pass on to new...
Interaction design is about designing choose your own adventure stories. It’s simply a non-linear movie that allows your audience to choose their own path along the way.
Understand the difference between designing applications and games. They are the same thing, they are just on opposite sides of the “purpose” spectrum. Applications are for getting...
9 Useful Take-aways from the book Neuro Web Design
From the August UX book club reading, Neuro Web Design by Susan M. Weinschenk.
When recommendations were provided, an item sold 20% more volume
If a photo of the person accompanied a travel recommendation, the travel experience sales increased to 20%
Visitors in the reciprocity condition (given something first) were twice as likely to fill out the form than those who experienced the reward...
August 2010
5 posts
4 tags
One simple way to find your sales narrative
I’m in the middle of redesigning our homepage experience and thought I’d pass on this simple way to find your sales narrative. I asked my product manager to sit down with me for about 45 minutes and talk through his typical experience at trade shows. He’s been attending genealogy trade shows every couple of months for a number of years now. Out of anyone at the company...
5 tags
UX for retention vs. UX for acquisition
Last week’s post really got the gears in my head moving. I’ve always thought of myself as a designer who gets business, but I really reached an epiphany this week on the topic. To put it bluntly, when it comes to sales the principles of good usability go out the window and are trumped by the principles of sales.
Where good usability principles do fit though, are after you’ve...
4 tags
Good UX isn't necessarily good selling
I was reminded this week that good UX doesn’t always equal good sales. Operating from the idea that good usability is usability that decreases the cognitive, visual and physical loads on the user, this test showed that decreased loads actually decreased sales.
Path 1 was our old control path in this test. Path 2 was a significantly decreased cognitive, visual and physical loads...
5 tags
Applying Dale Carnegie to UX (A Quick Idea)
This deserves a more robust and lengthy post at a future date, but it’s worth a quick mention here. When you boil it down UX is about simply about making computers talk to humans. And there is arguably no better manual for communicating with humans than Dale Carnegie’s timeless book How To Win Friends and Influence People.
So the trick as a UX Designer is to apply Carnegie’s...
5 tags
2 Great Design Quotes from the Latest Wired...
The August 2010 Wired magazine has an article entitled “The Master Planner” (Kelly 90). The article is basically a question and answer session with Fred Brooks, the author of The Mythical Man-Month which was published 35 years ago. In the article Brooks is discussing the ideas in his new book The Design of Design.
These are my two favorite quotes, I highly recommend the whole...
July 2010
4 posts
3 tags
Best unsubscribe page ever
If you haven’t already seen it or heard about it, go check it out right now. Here’s what’s going on. When you buy something from Groupon.com you start getting their daily emails. At the bottom of the those emails in super small print, just like every other spam out there, is an unsubscribe link. Once you click the link is when the fun begins.
Clicking the unsubscribe link...
3 tags
3 Tips for Using UserTesting.com
UserTesting.com is a fantastic site for getting quick usability feedback on your website. The best part was the speed, I had finished labs within two hours after submitting the test. Here are three things I’d wish I’d known first time around.
The core of the test is the user talking to you as they use the site. On the “TASKS” question of the order form, make sure you...
6 tags
Addiction design, not just delight
In the UX community we throw around terms like delight and desirability as our design goal after usability. I personally feel like those are just the tip of the iceberg of design potential. Truly great product design is one that is addictive. Something that users feel such a need for that the absence of the product creates a level of pain.
I’m definitely not advocating socially...
4 tags
Allowing myself to design pixel perfect again
I don’t know about your job, but at my company our product owners change their minds what seems like every week. And sometimes they change their mind twice a week. So my lead time to design is practically zilch depending on the project. I’ve adapted to this by working solely out of Illustrator. For me I can “sketch” faster in illustrator then on paper or any other...
June 2010
4 posts
The concept of loads and how to decide between...
Susan Weinschenk wrote a really great article on UX Magazine entitled Engagement, Entertainment, or Get The Task Done: Cognitive, visual, and motor loads in UX design. The article explains the concept of “load” when it comes to human factors.
There are three types of loads; cognitive loads (thinking, memory), visual loads (perceiving, noticing), and motor loads (keyboard, mouse,...
5 tags
Donald Norman explains the difference between...
The primary reason I became an interaction designer was because I wanted to make games. This is probably true of most of us.
I recently finished Donald Norman’s book “The Design of Everyday Things” and in the last chapter he talks about the difference between designing a game and designing an application (or device). Paraphrasing, he essentially says the goal of a tool is...
4 tags
3 Take Aways from Microsoft's Kinect
If you didn’t have a chance to see Microsoft’s E3 Press Conference, specifically the demos of Kinect, you owe it to yourself to watch it right now. The various Kinect demos start about 40 minutes in. I took away 3 main points from the demo.
1. Kinect is a milestone in UI design. Microsoft finally nailed the body as controller concept and now there will be a mad rush as standards...
5 tags
First Advantage I've Found for Adobe Fireworks
I was working on the fine details for my 2010 portfolio design when I decided I wanted to put in some perfect 1 pixel lines through out the design. I tried creating 1px rectangles in Illustrator but realized this level of pixel precision was very tedious and sloppy in Illustrator and would be so much easier to do in Fireworks.
So chalk one up for Fireworks. Illustrator was a great tool for...
2 tags
The kind of designers you want to hire
My boss has a favorite question he always asks potential designers he is hiring. The question usually starts with him showing the designer an existing page or design from our current website or product. He then asks how they would improve the design. If they immediately start into the colors, layout and aesthetics then he has his answer and he doesn’t hire them. He calls this kind of a...
May 2010
2 posts
2 tags
The jury is still out on using Fireworks over...
Since December of 2009 I’ve been forcing myself to use Adobe Fireworks CS4 to redesign my portfolio. I’m a die-hard Illustrator user when it comes to all my interaction design work. I am extremely fast in Illustrator and can crank out low to high fidelity work very quickly.
I’ve been hearing from a lot of other Interaction Designers that Fireworks is the way to go, over...
February 2010
1 post
2 tags
Couple Rules When Making Marketing Designs
At my job, because we are a very small company, I often have to shift between Interaction/UI designer and Graphic Designer for marketing materials.
When I am designing marketing materials they have completely different objectives from Interaction Design.
The marketing designs should:
Stand out
Be memorable
Memorability has a lot to do with emotion. Things are more easily remembered if they...
January 2010
7 posts
2 tags
Recent Books I've Read Cover to Cover
This list is currently a work in progress, I’m still working on adding all the books.
I don’t know about you, but I read a lot of books. Finishing books on the other hand doesn’t happen quite as often. These are the books I’ve actually read from cover to cover.
TwittFaced: Your Toolkit for Understanding and Maximizing Social Media ~ Jacob Morgan (Author), Josh S...
1 tag
Design isn't magic
Ok, so here’s a really deep one for you about design and the brain. Design is simply the process of expending psychic energy to pay conscious attention to details normal humans have let their brains bury into their long term memories. In other words, normal people simply aren’t paying attention to all the details that their senses are sensing. The details still affect the normal...
How to hire a visual designer
I’m new to the whole hiring and firing bit, but I’m starting to form a theory. When it comes to hiring a visual designer you hire for their style and their attention to detail. It’s very difficult for a designer, in my experience, to fake a style that is not their own. It is doable, and more so the longer you’ve been at it, but not when you’re still in the junior...
Know the API
I’m finding that what it really comes down to is knowing the API. When I don’t have the control to change the API to match the interaction, I have to go in and read the API so I know what I can ask the developers to do in the UI. Often times picking up on some alternate usage of a method that gives me the ability to present the UI in a better way.
Why do we need UXers who have visual design...
I’ve noticed a trend that in hiring interaction designers and ux designers the people hiring want someone who gets visual design. I realized the reason why is because bad visual design is so obviously bad, that it significantly hurts the brand and the customer experience. It affects the customer experience, and in affect the business, so much that it’s not worth having someone who...
We Interpret Computer into Human
I heard this concept before at a seminar by Tog (Bruce Tognazzini). Basically the job of the Interaction Designer is to interpret what the computer is doing into a language and a flow the user understands. But taking it even further, not just that the user understands it but that enables the user to get the result they want as fast as possible and make the user happy while doing it.
One problem we're having with Agile
One problem my company is having with Agile has to do with underestimating. Because the developers are just glancing at the design docs and not reading them through completely, they are giving rough guess estimates. Then their scrum gets loaded off those estimates and away they go. The challenge this creates is once they are into their scrum they take liberty with the design to fit it in their...
December 2009
1 post
4 tags
6 UX Rules I've Learned So Far
I’m currently interviewing candidates for a UI/Designer position at my company. Doing so caused me to think through what I’d want to tell the potential candidate first day on the job. It’s important to me to not introduce too many rules, but there are a few simple ones I’ve learned that I think are critical to pass on:
1. We write User Scripts, not Functional Specs
This...
November 2009
1 post
1 tag
Latest tweeks to our process
I’m always trying to refine and improve my design processes at work. Lately I’ve felt that design takes too long if I try to write all the stories and wireframes before handing anything off to development.
This is how I’ve modified my process:
Write out all the scenarios, one sentence each. These are one sentence titles in the typical format “User does this…”...