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.

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:

| View | Upload your own

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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

This week, Ajax design expert Jeremy Keith joins us from Brighton, England. Jeremy is the technical lead at Clearleft, a leading design consultancy in the UK. He’s the author of the popular books, “DOM scripting” and “Bulletproof Ajax.”

Ajax has really evolved since the term was coined. The technologies that we use to make responsive web pages and applications continue to evolve as well. Jeremy has his fingers on the pulse of these changes, and has a lot to tell us about the when, the where, and the why of using Ajax.

Talking with Jeremy was fascinating and, during the interview, he offered several juicy nuggets about using Ajax effectively. For example, he suggested that we think twice about if our business logic should be in the client-side environment. He proposed the server should be doing the heavy lifting, since this is a controlled environment. The interactivity should appear within the browser, so the interactions appear quick and seamless.

His rationale is interesting: Since browsers are diverse and quickly changing environments, Jeremy recommends we use them primarily for display and interaction, and we should resist the urge to process too much data with JavaScript. Instead, we should move the data to the server for processing. It may increase your bandwidth or server load, but both of these, he argues, are good problems to have—it means your app is popular!

Of course, you’ll want to listen to the rest of the podcast to hear the other wisdom that Jeremy has about using Ajax in production environments.

[For even more wisdom, you'll want to attend Jeremy's full-day seminar, Bulletproof Ajax: Designing Interactive and Usable Ajax Solutions, 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 deploying Ajax to improve your experience? Let us know what you think in the comments!

Where: Cinghiale Restaurant, 822 Lancaster Street, Baltimore, MD 21202

When: Wednesday, June 18, 5:30-7:30

RSVP for the event.
(RSVPing isn’t required, but will help us make sure we don’t run out of food or drinks.)

Buy the book

In 1994, Jeff Rubin wrote the first edition of the Handbook. This became the bible of those of us in the usability world.

Now, Jeff Rubin and Dana Chisnell have completely updated it. It’s a marvelous edition, filled with insights and useful tips and techniques. It’s a resource that every user experience practitioner should have at their fingertips.

If you’re going to be in Baltimore, either for the annual UPA conference or by choice, you need to stop by and help us celebrate this new edition. Co-author Dana Chisnell will be there, along with UIE’s Christine Perfetti, myself, and a whole host of great people from the world of user experience and design.

There will also be food, drinks, and door prizes, along with great discussion and probably some funky music. It will be great fun.

We hope to see you there.

This week, I had the pleasure of speaking with Donna (Maurer) Spencer, a world-renowned information architect and owner of the freelance agency MaadMob, based in Canberra, Australia. For nearly 10 years, Donna has been a prominent player in the information architecture world, sharing her experiences for designing some of the most challenging clients around: large government sites.

For this interview, I asked Donna, “What separates good information architects from great information architects?”

Donna said that she believes that great IAs can think structurally, can synthesize many inputs at once, can work strategically, and can work in the smallest details. A good IA can get by doing these things very occasionally, or not at all. But, great IAs do all of these constantly, bringing more value to the project.

Over the years, Donna has come into contact with some diverse and multi-talented IAs. She noted that one thing they all have in common is they all do more than just information architecture. Donna told us how she keeps herself balanced by also practicing other user experience disciplines, such as interaction design.

Donna also suggested that perhaps the strongest skill the great information architect needs is people skills. It’s one thing to build a quality taxonomy or navigation system, but if you cannot interface with your own team or the client, you may find your usefulness diminishes greatly.

This was a great interview. We had a lot of fun making it and I’ll bet you’ll enjoy listening to it.

This October, Donna present a full-day workshop, “Information Architecture Essentials: Best Practices for Organizing Your Site’s Content”, at the User Interface 13 Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It’s a great place to learn what it takes to become a great information architect.

We look forward to your questions and thoughts on this podcast. Do you agree with Donna about what it takes to become a great information architect? Is there anything she left out? Let us know what you think in the comments!

Asking for their expectations makes sense: if we know what they are already preconditioned to look for, and we design to that, then they’ll know where to find things in our designs. It seems very simple.

Unfortunately, we quickly find out that expectations don’t drive how users interact with our designs. They look elsewhere, to the visual clues and a well-designed flow, to ensure they have the delightful experience we’re hoping for.

In this week’s issue of our email newsletter, UIEtips, I look at some of our recent research to see how the users’ expectations played a role in the effectiveness of the design of sign-in functionality. We watched users take advantage of their frequent flyer programs as they traveled and looked to see if the variety of site designs had an impact on their behavior. I think you’ll find it interesting.

Read my article, The Wheres and Whens of Users’ Expectations, here.

How have you integrated the users’ expectations into your design process? Have you ignored them? Or, do you take stock to ensure you’re doing exactly what they expect? Please share your experiences below.

Both visual and interaction design are key skills for designing effective systems. At this year’s User Interface 13 Conference, October 13-16, in Cambridge MA, we’ve asked world-renowned experts, Luke Wroblewski and Kim Goodwin, to each conduct full-day seminars on these topics.

It was a brilliant idea, if only Blockbuster had thought of it first. Five years earlier, a little west coast startup named Netflix came up with the idea of home-delivered DVDs. The little startup slayed the established consumer giant by delivering a new and innovative product.

Our clients regularly discuss Netflix’s story. They ask us how they can make their company’s products and services just as successful. Among our recommendations, we always tell these folks to read Scott
Berkun’s research on innovation. Scott, the author of the popular book, the Myths of Innovation, is the expert we recommend clients talk to when they’re struggling to develop innovative designs.

In this week’s issue of our email newsletter, UIEtips, we’ve asked Scott to share an excellent article he’s written on innovation. In his article, Scott offers practical secrets to help you build new and innovative products. I think you’ll really enjoy it.

Read Scott’s article: How to Innovate Right Now.

Are you challenged with creating new products that recreate and capture the market? Is your team struggling to develop innovative designs? Share your thoughts below.

We’re so excited by Scott’s work that we’ve invited him to present his full-day seminar, The Myths of Innovation: How to Lead Breakthrough Projects, at the User Interface 13 Conference this October. If you’re interested, make sure to sign up by June 10th to receive our free special gift: a Flip Video camcorder.

What many people don’t know is that Flickr wasn’t originally a site for sharing photos. It was originally conceived as an online game, “The Game Neverending.” But when the design team started facing business obstacles with the game, they quickly shifted their priorities and recognized the value of the photosharing application. As a result, Flickr fundamentally changed the way we look at web applications.

At UIE, we hear all the time from clients working to build products and sites that capture the market, hoping to duplicate the success of sites such as Flickr. If you’re challenged with creating innovative designs, you’ll really want to read Scott Berkun’s writings on the subject. Scott is the author of the book, “The Myths of Innovation,” and an expert when it comes to the history of innovation.

Also, in this week’s article for our email newsletter, we’re republishing a great interview UIE’s Christine Perfetti conducted with Scott last year about his research in the area of innovation. This is one of our most popular articles. If you missed it, I think you’ll really enjoy it.

You can check out Christine’s interview with Scott here.

How does your design team go about developing innovative designs? Please share your thoughts below.

It’s now fixed, so you should have no trouble getting future podcasts.

If you haven’t been listening to our podcasts and would like to hear the great things we’re talking about, just click here if you use iTunes or copy this link into your podcast application. A third option is to look at all the great interviews, presentations, and tips we’ve recorded and play them directly from your browser.

Do you have ideas for future recordings? Have you been enjoying the recordings we’ve made so far?

Let us know your thoughts right here on the blog.

[Many thanks to Josh Porter at Bokardo Design for helping us fix the problem.]

Under the guise of making this study as valuable as possible, these teams make the novice mistake of trying to do too much. Their ambitious approach puts the project in jeopardy. A failed usability study can send a message through the organization that the technique is too expensive and difficult to do well.

In this week’s article for our email newsletter, I talk about a team who wants to evaluate a bunch of design prototypes with their first test, resulting in far more work than they originally realized. Instead, I propose a counter-intuitive way for them to get the necessary feedback without having users compare each alternative.

You can read my article here.

Have you needed to evaluate multiple designs with limited time and budget? What would you have proposed for our clients?

Managing usability studies on a shoestring budget is just one of the great full-day topics we’ll have at the User Interface 13 Conference, this October 13-16, in Cambridge, MA. If you register by Tuesday, May 20, you’ll get a great registration price and a Flip Ultra Video Camera. See UI13 Conference site for more information.

This is not easy to do. You really have to know something about the users, what they are trying to do, and how they go about doing it. Just having that information will likely push the team to add more features, not less, so you then need a solid vision of how simplicity will make it better. Finally, you have to be ruthless and stubborn, cutting all the unnecessary bits out and sticking to your guns about keeping to the essentials.

The designers of a new video camera, the Flip Video, have cleverly done just this. As a result, the camera is stealing market share from the big players and garnering great reviews in the press mainstream press. (Oprah even featured it on her show.)

In this week’s article for our email newsletter, I look at four ways the Flip has simplified the act of filming and sharing movies, while keeping the value in the design. These are lessons I think we all can learn from.

You can read my article here.

By the way, we think the Flip Ultra Camera is so remarkable that we’re giving one away to everyone who registers by May 20th for our User Interface 13 Conference. We thought a product with a great design was the right way to start out a great conference.

Have you been working to make your designs simpler? What lessons have you learned in the process?

In this podcast, I had the pleasure of speaking with Sean Kane. Sean helped build one of the world’s most successful web applications as the Director of UI Engineering at Netflix. Last year, Sean left Netflix to co-found Get Listed, a start-up that is going to revolutionize the job search business.

Moving from a mature organization that understands the role of experience design to a brand-new start-up environment without any of the same infrastructure or support can be a real challenge. A challenge that is not unlike the challenge that many UX practitioners face when trying to bootstrap their user experience efforts in a growing organization.

I asked Sean to reflect a little on his previous experience at Netflix and about the challenges he’s facing at Get Listed. We started by talking about Netflix’s culture of metrics and the impact it has on their design. We then discussed the culture shock he’s experienced as he moved to this new gig. Finally, we talked about building both a web app and and a web app team from scratch.

It was interesting to see how the impact of his experience at Netflix is reflecting the decisions he’s making while shaping his new startup environment. I believe anyone who is building out their own user experience efforts will find Sean’s thoughts inspiring.

I think you’ll enjoy this podcast. We look forward to your questions and thoughts. Let us know what you think in the comments!

[Note: We had prepared this podcast to be released earlier this year, but due to schedule conflicts, its release was delayed. As a result, the intro mentions the very successful 2008 Web App Summit as if it's still to come. But don't worry: we'll have another one next year, so stay tuned!]

“What’s that catchy intro music?”

Today, I thought I’d share.

SpoolCast: Mocean Worker - Right Now

SpoolCast Crew: Cal Tjader - Soul Sauce

Josh and Jared Show: Medeski Martin & Wood - End of the World Party

Usability Tools Podcasts: Medeski Martin & Wood - Mami Gato

All of these titles are also be available through iTunes, as well.

We license this music through ASCAP.

Many of the interviewees have strong opinions about car brands. And it’s rarely the craftsmanship or engineering of the car that gave them the strong opinion. Instead, it’s something the dealer did or didn’t do. In fact, in many cases, the car could have a problem and, if handled well by the dealer, the customer would come away with a positive opinion of the overall brand.

Many of our clients are working on improving their brand, yet they often overlook what can happen when a problem arises. If the experience in handling the problem is positive, that could strengthen that customer’s engagement with the brand. However, if they somehow make the customer feel worse, then the brand suffers.

In this week’s article for our email newsletter, UIEtips, I talk about how teams from FindTape.com, Netflix, and BestBuy.com designed for problems that arise. In each case, their design helped customers end up with an improved experience and a stronger brand.

You can read my article here.

Have you tried to anticipate your user’s problems in your design? What experiences have you had with your designs? Leave your thoughts and comments below.

[On the subject of how designers can strengthen their brands, this is the subject of our next UIE Virtual Seminar. On May 14, I'll be presenting "Strike Up the Brand: How Smart Design Can Strengthen Your Brand."]

In this week’s SpoolCast, I had a chance to speak with Bill Scott. Bill has been one of my heroes for years, having really pushed the envelope as an evangelist for the public Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. He then went on to work on the Yahoo! Teachers project, where he took his knowledge of Ajax and Web 2.0 techniques and applied it to a creative solution for educators. Most recently, Bill has become the Director of UI Engineering at Netflix, where he now is driving how technology can enhance the user experience at one of the companies that understands what it takes.

During our conversation, we talked about some of the innovative techniques he’s using at Netflix, what he learned from the Yahoo! Teachers project, and his most recent work on Anti-patterns — learning from what we shouldn’t be doing.

I think you’ll enjoy this podcast. We look forward to your questions and thoughts. Let us know in the comments!

[Note: We had prepared this podcast to be released earlier this year, but due to schedule conflicts, its release was delayed. As a result, the intro mentions the very successful 2008 Web App Summit as if it's still to come. But don't worry: we'll have another one next year, so stay tuned!]

May 2008

May 5-6, Chicago

Web Design World/Chicago
Web 2.0: The Power Behind the Hype - 5/5 10:15-11:15am
Enhancing Experiences with AJAX, RIAs, and Browser-Side Intelligence - 5/6 2:00-4:15pm
Deconstructing… You! (with Jim Heid and Lance Loveday) - 5/6 - 4:30-5:30pm

I don’t get to Chicago too often, so this is going to be fun. Let me know if you’d like connect up while I’m there.

May 28, Boston

UPA-Boston’s Seventh Annual Mini UPA Conference
Web Apps: The Collision of Design and Business - 5/28 9:15-10:00am

The Boston UPA Chapter does an amazing job putting together a nice program for a great price: $135 ($75 if you’re a student) I’ve found the presentations here to be as good as those I see at conferences that cost four times or more.

June 2008

June 4, Philadephia

STC’s 2008 Technical Communication Summit
What Makes A Design Seem Intuitive? - 6/4 10:30-11:30am

Keynotes at this conference by Howard Rheingold and Richard Saul Wurman make it very attractive.

June 16-20, Baltimore

UPA 2008

I haven’t spoken at this conference since 2001 for reasons that nobody seems to know. However, I’ve been known to show up on occasion. Could happen this year. Stranger things have happened.

June 23-24, Boston

An Event Apart - Boston
Scent of a Web Page - 6/23 5:00-6:00pm

My second time speaking at An Event Apart, the conference put on my Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer. This is a great gathering of the some of the brightest minds in the design world. (And me.)

July 2008

July 15-16, Philadelphia

Higher Education Web Symposium - University of Pennsylvania
Cooking Up Gourmet User Experiences on a Fast-Food Budget - 7/16 9:00-10:15a

I’ll be presenting the keynote after full day workshops from Steve Mulder and Ricardo LaRosa (AJAX & Web 2.0), Eric Meyer & Stephanie Sullivan (CSS Tips & Techniques), Luke Wroblewski (Web Form Design Best Practices), and Usability Testing (Dana Chisnell). $299 gets you a full day workshop and the second day of great sessions. (As of last week, they were almost sold out.)

July 19-20, Boston

Podcamp Boston

I’ve gone to the last two podcamps and had a blast. I expect I’ll do something here again, at least on the 19th. (I have to fly to Seattle on the 20th.)

July 21-23, Seattle

Web Design World/Seattle
Web 2.0: The Power Behind the Hype - 5/5 10:15-11:15am
Enhancing Experiences with AJAX, RIAs, and Browser-Side Intelligence - 5/6 2:00-4:15pm

They are still nailing down the program, but this is what it looks like now. I expect I’ll be doing an evening presentation or get together while I’m here.

I’ve posted the slides above and have synched it up with audio from the conference. (Unfortunately, there was a mic-input problem during the recording and they ended up using the built-in mics instead of the sounds system. So, the recording is noisy and unintelligible in places. Sorry about that.)

Here’s the description of the talk:

Journey to the Center of Design

User-centered design was born in the 1980s, amidst a world filled with frustration with blinking VCR clocks and computer command lines. Up until this time, developers focused on making the devices work, giving little heed to how they’d be used. Terms like “user friendly” and “easy to use,” buzzwords for the UCD movement, soon became as common as “new and improved” on laundry soap.

We guarantee a journey that shouldn’t be missed.

| View | Upload your own

You can download the slides (without audio). On the Slideshare site, you can view this presentation full screen to see the details.

What do you think of this presentation?

We need someone who has the insight and right touch to take this program and make it sing. This person is going to know the design community, what they need, and how to craft a great online educational product for them.

If you know such a person, forward them this ad and have them contact us right away. We’d really appreciate it.

In February we held one of our most popular Virtual Seminars ever, Mental Models: Getting Into Your Customer’s Head, presented by Indi Young. Indi explained her mental model method of organizing the beliefs and philosophies of users, then comparing them to the current and planned functionality, to see if the users’ needs align with the design.

When we were done with the seminar, we had a number of compelling questions left over from the seminar. In this Podcast, we got back in touch with Indi and discussed some of the more interesting ones.

Indi had some interesting opinions on:

• whether you use surveys for data collection,
• how long it will take to do a mental model assessment,
• how you ensure the accuracy of the interpretation of the data you collect,
• and much more…

[Note: Unfortunately, while we were recording, there was a motor running in the background and the mic was picking it up. Brian worked extremely hard to scrub this noise out as much as possible, but there are places where doing so would've made it hard to understand what Indi was saying. We apologize in advance if the recording is a little difficult to listen to in places.]

Later this month, Indi will be presenting her full-day workshop on this subject, Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior at our Web App Summit in Coronado, California. We’ve almost sold out, sign up now for one of the few remaining seats! You won’t want to miss it.

In the podcast and seminar, Indi expounded upon the information in her new book, Mental Models, Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior. If you’re interested in purchasing the book, enjoy a 10% discount with our compliments. Use the code FOUIE010 at checkout. (The code stands for “Friends of UIE.”)

Cities, Dates, and Program Details

April 3 in Boston, May 16 in Chicago: Steve Krug’s workshop, Don’t Make Me Think: Discount Usability Testing

April 4 in Boston, May 15 in Chicago: Lou Rosenfeld’s workshop, Site Search Analytics for a Better User Experience

Special Discount for Our Readers

If you enter discount code UIEPAL, you will receive $100 off each workshop. If you sign up before the early bird deadline using promotion code UIEPAL, you will pay a discounted rate of $695 for one workshop and $1195 for both workshops — a savings of $100 off each day.

Sign up today for these fantastic workshops.

You can read my article here.

At UIE, a big part of our research agenda focuses on how to create web applications that delight users. In the upcoming months, we’ll share our tips and techniques in our weekly Usability Tools podcast.

What are some of the challenges you’ve had to address when building web-based applications?

That’s the subject of a presentation I’m giving twice over the next week. The first time is tonight, at Yahoo!’s Sunnyvale offices, and open the public. The second time is at South by Southwest Interactive on Sunday.

I get really nervous when presenting this talk, since the magical illusions I’ve embedded into it take more concentration and focus than a normal presentation, where all I need to do is focus on the lecture portion. So, if you come, please be gentle.

Here’s the official talk description:

Magic and Mental Models: Using Illusion to Simplify Designs

As children, we’re told the world is a magical place. Babies are delivered by storks. The tooth fairy harvests retired teeth in exchange for currency. Bunnies deliver candies in brightly covered baskets on a spring holiday. The world’s adults use magic to explain away the complexity of life.

In our work, confusing complexity is the natural result of an unchecked design and development process. Teams work hard, responding to customer requests through incremental improvement and feature enhancements, yet they often end up with a dismaying array of features that make users unhappy.

In this entertaining presentation, Jared will share some of his recent research into the craft of professional magic. He’ll demonstrate the parallels between the world of magical illusions and the world of digital design, comparing the similarities between professional illusions and some of today’s top design techniques.

In this presentation, you’ll learn how:

• Illusions performed by professional magicians follow the same design principles as your computer’s file system
• Designers can create specific mental models to eliminate perceived complexity
• Simple design tricks can make designs seem to be faster than they really are
• Whimsicality, attention, and functionality are essential elements to creating delightful experiences

You’ll see examples of illusions built into a variety of designs, including those from Microsoft, Flickr, Netflix, iTunes, and Facebook. Jared will also, possibly at his own peril, reveal the secrets from several magical illusions to show you just how the tricks were created and the effects are realized, giving you the ammunition necessary to build illusions into your own designs.