User Interface Engineering

In the corporate boardroom, Innovation has moved beyond the fad stage and has now become an enterprise mandate. Problem is, ordering your institution to innovate is akin to a gym teacher ordering the class to meditate. (“OK CLASS, TODAY WE’RE GOING TO MEDITATE. BEGIN. ONE. TWO. MEDITATE. THREE. FOUR. MEDITATE. SPOOL! YOU’RE NOT MEDITATING!” Is my high school phys ed experience showing?)

In the June 2008 issue of the Harvard Business Review, there is a super article by IDEO’s Tim Brown on what it takes to bring innovation down to the execution. Tim’s solution: Design Thinking.

Tim tells us that Design Thinking is:

a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.

Anyone who is immersed in UX design will find familiar comfort in Tim’s descriptions of how this works. There’s nothing new is how he goes about it. It’s just that he’s done a great job of explaining what we do in business terms that executives can understand.

For example, the Tim explains why prototypes are important to an organization’s understanding of the problems they are trying to solve through design:

Prototypes should command only as much time, effort, and investment as are needed to generate useful feedback and evolve an idea. The more “finished” a prototype seems, the less likely its creators will be to pay attention to and profit from feedback. The goal of prototyping isn’t to finish. It is to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of the idea and to identify new directions that further prototypes might take.

If you don’t have a Harvard Business Review premium subscription, it will cost you $6.50 to get the PDF of this article. However, if you are looking for a good way to help your senior management team understand the value of design, this article will be well worth it.

Access the Harvard Business Review Article, Design Thinking by Tim Brown.

Last week, I spoke at the Boston IxDA night of Short Talks, where I gave a 10-minute (!) presentation called Case Study: A Discount Approach to Comparing Multiple Design Alternatives.

Here’s what the session was described as:

What’s the Best Way to Compare Multiple Design Alternatives?

Good design practice suggests you create multiple sketches, which eventually evolve into full-out design alternatives. However, once you have those alternatives, what’s the best way to decide which one wins?

I will review one approach and talk about the pitfalls and advantages to evaluating multiple designs at once.

Because of An Event Apart and our Virtual Seminar, I didn’t have as much time to prepare as I would’ve liked. So, I ended up creating the entire presentation while sitting in the back of the room, waiting my turn to present.

Here’s how it turned out:

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I should mention that the subject of this talk was inspired by the UIEtips article, A Counter-Intuitive Approach to Evaluating Design Alternatives, published on May 19. Thanks to Pauric for inviting me to the meeting to present the idea.

We’ve got another great UIE Virtual Seminar coming up:

The Scent of a Web Page: The Five Types of Navigation Pages
Date: July 17th, 2008 — 1pm ET / Noon CT / 11am MT / 10am PT

You work hard providing top-notch content on your site. Will your users find it? If they don’t find it, all that effort is for nothing. What can you do to guarantee that users find the content they’ve come
looking for?

In July’s UIE Virtual Seminar, I’ll present our most up-to-the-minute research on how users navigate sites. You will learn best practices for designing the different types of navigation pages, including the Home Page and Content Pages.

You’ll come away from this seminar understanding why trigger words are critical to users successfully finding their content, why the best sites prevent users from using Search, how exposing a site’s hierarchy can increase the success of the user, and how designing longer pages helps users find what they seek.

You can read the full seminar details here.

SpoolCast: Followup Q&A from The Scent of Information
Recorded: July 1st, 2008.
Brian Christiansen, UIE Podcast Producer
Duration: 27m | File size: 16 MB
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 SpoolCast: The Scent of Information Virtual Seminar Questions Show [27:04m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Brian Christiansen and I recorded a special episode comprised entirely of questions from our customers. Last week, we held the UIE Virtual Seminar: The Scent of Information: Getting Users to Their Content. During the seminar, we received far more questions than time would allow answering. As is tradition, we put together this follow-up podcast to answer even more of your excellent questions.

In this episode, we discussed where you can find your users’ trigger words, talked about our 7-12 word link recommendation, discussed if you should replace your home page with your site map, and shared some examples of sites that handle long links well. Tune in to hear these and the answers to other questions from our seminar attendees.

If you missed our live seminar, a recording of the session is available for viewing. See The Scent of Information: Getting Users to Their Content for details.

Still have questions about our research into the Scent of Information? Ask them in the comments below!

SpoolCast: Product Evolution with Adaptive Path’s Peter Merholz
Recorded: June 5th, 2008
Brian Christiansen, UIE Podcast Producer
Duration: 37m | File size: 20 MB
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 SpoolCast: Product Evolution with Peter Merholz [36:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This week, our good friend, Peter Merholz, joins us for the show. Peter is the President of Adaptive Path, a leading experience strategy and design consultancy. Peter is the co-author of the recently published book, Subject to Change, which discusses new strategies of thinking and working to adapt into innovative and commercially successful organizations.

In our discussion, I ask Peter about mapping out a product’s evolution. Launching a product is no simple task. Every new product falls on the spectrum somewhere between feature-complete, perfect execution and actually shipping with a pile of features on the cutting room floor. Realistically, most sway towards the latter. But that doesn’t mean your products needs to feel unfinished. Peter and I discussed how the best products never offer their users an incomplete feeling experience. And with proper planning, future features won’t feel simply tacked on. Listen in to our conversation for some real-life advice from Peter on how to actually accomplish this feat.

[Peter Merholz and Andrew Crow will show you how to map out your product's evolution, plus several other techniques for creating great experiences, in their full-day seminar, Subject to Change: Product Strategy and Planning Tools for Great User Experiences, at our User Interface 13 conference that will take place this October 13-16, 2008 in historic Cambridge, Massachusetts.]

We look forward to your questions and thoughts on this podcast. How is your organization staging its product rollouts? Are those rollouts working? Let us know what you think in the comments!

User research is now a critical tool in the toolbox of design teams. However, it only works well if you involve the right participants in the study.

Having the participants that match the design’s audience will give the team feedback on what works well and where the design needs rethinking. By learning from the participants, the team can make informed design decisions on all aspects of the user’s experience.

However, having test participants who don’t match the audience can be very problematic. The team may miss learning about critical problems while they spend valuable time and resources fixing design issues that aren’t really important in real use.

In today’s issue of UIE’s email newsletter, UIEtips, I have the opportunity to interview the talented, Dana Chisnell, whose new book, The Handbook of Usability Testing, which she co-wrote with Jeff Rubin, has just been published. We talk about what happens when teams try to use market research demographics as the basis for recruiting their participants and what the alternatives are.

Read my interview with Dana Chisnell, Avoiding Demographics When Recruiting Participants.

If you are looking to get the most out of your usability testing, you’ll want to attend Dana’s full-day seminar, Usability Testing Guerilla Techniques: Collecting User Data on a Shoestring, at the User Interface Conference in October. Dana will show you how to get the most out of usability testing with a limited budget.

Have you struggled with recruiting participants for user research studies? We’d love to hear your thoughts below.

Today at 1pm EST, we’re holding our next UIE Virtual Seminar, The Scent of Information: Getting Users to Their Content.

In this 90-minute online presentation, I’ll share the results of years of research examining how the best sites navigate users to their content. I’ll introduce you to the concept of the Scent of Information, the biggest secret to successfully getting users to the content they’re looking for on your site.

You’ll learn:

• How the successful sites provide a strong scent and what happens when they don’t
• How users follow a scent trail and the different ways your design could be blocking scent
• How the quality of links, page length, page density, and graphics affect whether users find their content

There’s still room to sign up for the live event. You can gather your team around a computer and watch it together! (If you can’t see it live today, we’ll make a recorded version available in a few days.)

More details about today’s UIE Virtual Seminar.

SpoolCast: Usability Guerilla Techniques — An Interview with Dana Chisnell
Recorded: June 7th, 2008.
Brian Christiansen, UIE Podcast Producer
Duration: 24m | File size: 12.5 MB
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[ Text Transcript Available ]

 

 SpoolCast: Usability Guerillas with Dana Chisnell [23:29m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This week, I had the great honor of speaking with Dana Chisnell, noted usability expert and principal at Usability Works, a consultancy based in San Francisco. Dana is also the co-author of the recently-released second edition of the Handbook of Usability Testing—a book so fine that I was thrilled when they asked me to write the foreword.

In this interview, I asked Dana what makes the best user researchers better than the pack. Dana suggested that great user researchers dig deeper into who the users are. They don’t just stop after watching novices interact with the design for the first time. Instead, they look to constantly learn about the full range of people who use the design.

Also, the top user researchers look beyond the use of functionality to the entire experience. Dana shared how Enterprise Rent-a-Car spends a lot of time and energy thinking about every interaction they have with their customers. They stand around in their retail outlets and watch individuals getting their cars and turning the cars in, looking at how the experiences fit together.

Dana had a lot more to say about what makes the best stand above the rest. You’ll want to listen to the rest of the podcast to hear her thoughts on the subject of excellence in user research.

[For even more insight, you'll want to attend Dana's full-day seminar, Usability Testing Guerilla Techniques: Collecting User Data on a Shoestring, at our User Interface 13 conference that will take place this October 13-16, 2008 in historic Cambridge, Massachusetts.]

We look forward to your questions and thoughts on this podcast. How are you integrating usability testing into your organization? Let us know what you think in the comments!

I’ve recently had the opportunity to observe a master chef teach a class of good cooks how to create some great dishes. While the cooks all knew how to make the dishes, the chef’s version was notably better.

It wasn’t that the chef used a different recipe or better ingredients. What made the difference was that he knew some real subtleties to the preparation process.

He knew how thin to slice the peppers to get just the right amount of spice. He knew how long to cook the scallops, so they were the right amount of firmness on the outside, yet still juicy on the inside. He knew how slowly to whisk the mousse, so that it was light and fluffy in the bowl.

Subtleties are just that: subtle. They are things you wouldn’t normally notice or think of. Yet, they can be the difference between good and great.

In this week’s issue of our email newsletter, UIEtips, we look at similar subtleties in the design of online applications. We’ll explore three different instances when a subtle approach made a huge difference to the resulting design.

Read my article, Interaction Design: It’s All About the Subtleties, here.

If you find discussions about Interaction Design fascinating like I do, then you’re really going to enjoy Kim Goodwin’s full-day seminar, The Essentials of Interaction Design, at the upcoming UI13 conference. This has been one of our most popular sessions — something you probably shouldn’t miss. More details about Kim’s session and other great seminars at http://www.uiconf.com

Have you discovered some subtleties that have made your designs go from good to great? If so, we’d love to hear about them below.

If you’re considering using Ajax in your design, you need to consider what happens when JavaScript is not available. This can happen when the user has disabled it in their browser. It can also come about when the user needs some types of assistive devices, such as a screen reader.

JavaScript is an essential component of Ajax, so when it’s missing, it’s a big deal. Does that mean that you can’t use Ajax in your design if there’s a possibility some of your users may not have this necessary capability?

To answer this question, we’ve turned to Jeremy Keith. Jeremy has written *the* book on designing with Ajax (appropriately called “Bulletproof Ajax”). In today’s issue of our email newsletter, UIEtips, Jeremy has shared his strategy for creating applications with Ajax that do the right thing when JavaScript isn’t available. He calls his strategy, Hijax.

Read Jeremy’s article, Hijax: Progressive Enhancement with Ajax

Jeremy will be sharing the details of Hijax and other techniques for creating successful applications using Ajax in his full-day seminar, Bulletproof Ajax: Designing Interactive and Usable Ajax Solutions, at the User Interface 13 Conference in this coming October. If you enjoy Jeremy’s article, you’re really going to enjoy his seminar.

Have you developed a strategy to deal with creating successful applications when working with browsers and assistive devices that don’t have JavaScript enabled? If so, we’d love to hear your thoughts below.