This year, we thought we give our attendees a special UI13 advice podcast. The show covers getting to the conference, a brief overview of the conference agenda, and lots of tips for getting around the Boston metro.

If you’ve never been to the Boston-Cambridge area, it’s a wonderful place to visit. Plenty of history, sites to see and fun to be had. If you’re like me and light on traveling experience, I asked Jared for a bit of basic traveling advice. If you’re a road warrior like Jared, we have advice on getting around for you, as well. Plus, you’ll know where to eat drink and make merry.

If you’re a regular listener to our podcasts, you’ll notice we didn’t put this in our regular feed. We didn’t want non-attendees to become confused, perhaps think we’ve become a travel company or something.

Below you can listen to the podcast in the player (press the grey play button), or download and take it with you.

The UI13 Attendees Podcast — Direct Link to MP3 File

Not sure what sessions to attend at the User Interface 13 Conference this October? Or looking for more information on what each session covers and who the speakers are? Then we have the podcast for you. We’re so excited about the content and expert speakers at this year’s UI13, we decided to create a podcast to help make sense of everything.

I sat down with Brian Christiansen and we discussed, in detail, each speaker’s topic, and who the session is targeted for. Our goal with this podcast was to help our registered attendees decide which sessions they’d like to attend, and to give even more information to those who might still be on the fence on attending. (Of course, if you’re not able to attend, you’re still welcome to listen in and hear about the speakers and topics.)

In additon to the content and speaker information, we discussed the myriad of fun things to do in the Boston area when you’re not in session. Want tips on where to dine, see a museum, a band or take a tour? We’ve got your tips right here!

We’d love to know if this podcast was useful in selecting your sessions at UI13 or learning more about the conference. Please share your thoughts with us below.

(Don’t forget, you can find out much more about the conference at the User Interface 13 conference site.)

Have you ever thought about how many buttons should be on a mouse?

Bill Verplank has. Bill was part of the Xerox PARC team who was responsible for taking the mouse and many other computing paradigms from theory to indispensable.

I had a chance to speak with Bill about his time at PARC and all of his other influential work for this week’s podcast. If you’re interested in where many of today’s computing metaphors come from, or in design and computing history in general, this is the show for you.

Today’s usability, interaction design, and experience design disciplines have their roots in human factors engineering, which many, including Bill, trace back to the 1950s, when the U.S. government was investing heavily in cockpit design of jet fighters. It was upon that foundation, Bill studied design and engineering at Stanford and did his PhD. work at MIT in man-machine systems.

From there, he spent considerable time with Xerox PARC, working on some of the first office systems, including the Xerox Star, which was a major influence for both the Macintosh user interface and Microsoft Windows. Bill continues to trace his history through some of the most influential design agencies of our time, like IDEO, and winds up with a question of design education: what happens when engineers and artists meet and try to create something usable for humans? Bill is seeing important schools, like the Rhode Island School of Design and Carnegie Mellon University, experimenting with programs that put engineers and artists together. We also debated the impact and interpretation of experience design and its impact on various industries.

Our conversation ended with a preview of Bill’s Spotlight Plenary presentation at our UI Conference this fall. Bill is known for his mesmerizing talks where he sketches his points along with the talk. (At the conference, we’ll have a camera set up so you can watch him sketch as he talks!)

[If you'd like to see Bill Verplank's Design Metaphors Spotlight Plenary keynote in person, please join us at the User Interface Conference, this October in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]

Brian Christiansen and I recorded a special episode comprised entirely of questions from our customers. On August 14, we held the UIE Virtual Seminar - Galleries: The Hardest Working Pages on Your Site. 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:

• A review of Gallery pages and their connection to Scent
• How Gallery Pages are special, and a comparison to a Department page
• The role of Galleries in Intranet environments
• We dive into the use of “learn more” links with a little more depth
• Our observations about how users really “browse” the web
• Advice on coping with large numbers of links on Gallery pages, and what links belong there
• A preview of September’s Virtual Seminar on Critiquing

If you missed our live seminar, a recording of Galleries: The Hardest Working Pages on Your Site is available for viewing.

Still have questions or comments about gallery pages? Ask them in the comments below!

(Producer’s note: My apologies to the Discount Tire folks for calling you “Direct Tire” once in the episode. I got it right the second time, though!)

What is the difference between good and great interaction designers?

That is the subject matter for this week’s show, which features a compelling conversation with Kim Goodwin. Kim is the VP of Design and General Manager at Cooper, one of the world’s premier design consultancies, in San Francisco. She suggests that three traits of great designers include design judgment, communication skills, and the ability to observe people’s behavior and then design something that can give them a good experience.

Design judgment is the ability to know if your solution is good or not. Great designers have the ability to look at their own work with a critical eye, and implement outside suggestions that make their solutions better. Effective critique is essential.

• The teams at Cooper follow the fifteen minute rule—if you’re experiencing difficulty with a design for fifteen minutes, get another brain in on the solution.
• Critique early, critique often. Critiques test your solutions and challenge your assumptions.
• Being solo is tough. Don’t have the advantage of a design team? Kim suggests reading is huge supplier of continuous inspiration and education. Analyze well-designed products. Keep sharp by going out and meeting other designers.
• Good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment. Failure is part of the system. Failure is an experience imperative to growth.

Communication skills are incredibly important. Active listening skills are important for extracting the most information out of a conversation. Active listening takes practice.

• Listen thoughtfully and dig for the needs behind the words.
• Approach any situation with the axiom “I don’t know what I don’t know.”
• Don’t lock yourself into a solution until you’ve really soaked in the full scope of the problem. When ideas inevitably pop-up, sketch them out quickly, so you can capture the ideas and then clear them away so they don’t distract you from absorbing the total problem.

Be open to the world. Kim’s advice is to make no assumptions, go see the problems.

• Accept that you may not know the problem as well as you think you do.
• There are people that may already have the context and solutions. Explore them.
• Simply be curious about your environment. Designers have boundless curiosity.

Kim has even more thoughts in the podcast about concise communication, time management and collaboration skills, you’ll want to give it a listen.

You can hear Kim Goodwin present her workshop, The Essentials of Interaction Design at the User Interface 13 Conference in Cambridge, MA — October 13-16, 2008. She’ll cover fundamental skills like sketching, workflow, storyboarding; and explore innovative techniques to keep the ideas flowing and designers fresh.

How are you staying sharp and curious as a designer? Share your questions and experiences in the comments.

“We’re struggling with how to measure how well we are innovating […] Are we innovating better this year than last year? How would I know?”

If you work in a larger company and you haven’t heard a statement like this, you’re going to. Innovation has become such a buzzword, it’s nearly meaningless. But that doesn’t mean innovation itself is dead. In this week’s show, we sat down with Scott Berkun, the dynamic speaker and author of “The Myths of Innovation.”

Innovation is critical, but it’s not being defined for those folks challenged with implementing it. Innovation is hard work. Scott asks that we face facts here; to find big, new ideas that will change things for the better will never be easy.

OK, how do we innovate? Scott suggests that the key word is risk. The best organizations (Google, Apple, Pixar and 3M are offered as examples) promote this through a culture where it’s OK to take risks, where failure is acceptable if valuable lessons can be learned. Whenever risks can be taken in a safe environment innovation is much more likely to be successful.

Often times middle management is actually the key to fostering this environment. They see the organizational “big picture” and can shield the front line workers who are challenged with focusing on the work. It allows for in-house entrepreneurship, allowing for creativity and flexibility outside of their traditional responsibilities. Google’s “20% time” is a popular example of time where employees can branch out on self-made projects. In Google’s case, it gave birth to products like GMail.

Innovation happens in both small and large organizations, but in large companies, it takes dedicated resources, and the expectation of some amount of failure. Scott has found that in organizations resistant to change, you can find success in pitching that innovation is the tradition of the company.

As for Innovation and User Experience, in the early design stage there’s a delicate balance between collecting data from users and knowing where to take calculated risks that may run counter to the data. When taking a different approach, don’t be afraid to step out on a limb. Then test to see if it works.

Of course, this is just a taste of the half hour discussion we had, so you’ll want to listen to the entire thing to get the most of Scott’s insights on the subject.

[ You can hear Scott Berkun speak more about Innovation at the User Interface 13 Conference in Cambridge, MA — October 13-16, 2008. The structure of his workshop, The Myths of Innovation: How to Lead Breakthrough Projects, will be broken out into the following:
• What does a breakthrough mean?
• Training from the history of great innovation
• Jargon and terms in the business of innovation, and how to deal with them
• Creative thinking
For more information about UI13, check out our conference site, UIConf.com ]

Does your organization foster innovation as well as it could? Share your questions and experiences with innovation in the comments.

The Agile development process is about breaking things into small pieces and acting on each piece really quickly. Yet, traditional user experience practices aren’t used to working fast. How do we adjust our practices to survive in a fast-paced agile process?

That’s the question we posted to Jeff Patton, the noted independent UX/Agile consultant and speaker, who joined me on this week’s show.

During our conversation, Jeff and I discussed some of the issues surrounding development speed that UX practitioners encounter when working in an Agile development team. While we talked, Jeff shared these observations from successful teams:

• Rapid Iterations: We’ve known for a while that fast iterations can help design, but now the rest of the team is iterating quickly too. Jeff proposed regularly using development partners — people you revisit — can help you with low-hassle usability testing and feedback sessions.
• Continuity: One of the key challenges in the agile environment is that working with small pieces of the project can lead to a lack of continuity between the pieces. Jeff suggested that a key role of the user experience professional on the team is to maintain the big picture: seeing what’s been built and what’s about to be built, and ensuring those pieces come together to form a coherent experience.
• Are your designers your users? It’s been said that Apple’s designers created the iPhone for themselves, without user testing. When the designers are avid users of a product, this can be successful, but such instances are rare. For most projects, it’s nearly impossible for designers to consistently put themselves in their users’ shoes. In agile environments, there may be more temptation to skip the user testing and go with designer intuition. Successful designers acknowledge that this intuition, talented though it may be, is usually no substitute for real user research.
• The RITE Method: Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation, is a successful method developed at Microsoft. It combines fast iterations with testing, looking to make improvements after each participant. Jeff suggests this is something agile teams should investigate.

Of course, I’m not doing Jeff’s ideas justice with this summary. You really want to listen to the entire interview to hear all of his wisdom.

[Jeff is teaching a full-day workshop, “Bringing User-Centered Design Practices Into Agile Development Projects”, at our User Interface Conference this October in Cambridge, MA. If you work in a fast-paced agile environment, Jeff's seminar is for you.]

Questions, comments? What have you done to adapt to the speed of the Agile process? Let us know about your experiences in the comments.

“Can you make it look pretty?”
“Can you make the logo bigger?”
“Can you make this more discoverable?”
“Can you make that pop?”

Heard these before? Or said them? In this week’s show, our friend Luke Wroblewski, Senior Principal of Product Ideation and Design for Yahoo, joins me to discuss visual design on the web. Luke shares his thoughts on the concept of visual design and it’s importance in helping users accomplish core tasks and strategic business goals.

• Cues from Your Client such as “can you make this look pretty?” Do you understand why these common requests are red flags, and understand the danger in them? Visual design is more than just styling. A fresh coat of paint doesn’t solve core problems, good visual design can.
• Design is Inevitable and not a step that can be skipped or filled in. It can be good or bad, but any product will have design as a component. Luke suggests there are some core principles that can be used to prioritize the presentation of information, actions and interactivity. One recommendation is to spend time with the team to prioritize what’s important about the project and keep that content independent of the design layout.
• Visual Design is a Priority. Uncover the importance of starting with visual design. Luke’s experience shows that in successful projects the visual organization needs to be a key consideration early in the process.
• Do You Greek? When building something, such as a web page, be sure to include all the elements up front – even the text - to ensure that design will take into account every aspect. It’s important to use the visual presentation to form a hierarchy for this real information. Luke enforces the point that real elements and real constraints will help us understand if the end result will work.
• Set Context Appropriately for the team. Skip “what do you think?” and paint the picture underlying the design. Those making suggestions on fonts, colors, and layout may not be comfortable making decisions on the strategic direction for the product so they stick to these minor aspects in which everyone can have an opinion. Decisions like these made in isolation don’t always yield overall coherent design or balance.

Luke Wroblewski is a Senior Principal of Product Ideation & Design for Yahoo and has his own shop, LukeW Interface Designs. He is the author of two books, the new top seller Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks and the popular Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability.

In fact, we have a special offer to pass along. Rosenfeld Media, publishers of Luke’s book would like to extend the following to SpoolCast listeners: Receive 10% off Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks when you purchase the book at their site, and use the promotional code “UIEWFD“.

[Luke is teaching a full-day workshop, “Visual Design for the Web: Communicating with Customers”, at our User Interface 13 this October in Cambridge, MA. Luke is one of our most highly rated presenters from previous events.]

Questions, comments? What experiences have you had wrangling visual design in your organization? Let us know in the comments.

Brian Christiansen and I recorded a special episode comprised entirely of questions from our customers. On July 17, we held the UIE Virtual Seminar: The Scent of a Web Page—The Five Types of Navigation Pages. 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:

• how we determined “failure” and “success” when we studied users
• how our research applies to college sites
• the undesirable trait of pogosticking up and down between levels of pages and why that’s a sign of navigation failure
• examples of link-rich homepages that users love
• why, contrary to popular opinion, users still don’t like to search

In the podcast, we referred to an article we wrote a little while back, called Lifestyles of Link-Rich Pages, which provides more information on long-links and our home page research.

If you missed our live seminar, a recording of the session is available for viewing. See The Scent of a Web Page for details.

Still have questions about the five types of navigation pages? Ask them in the comments below!

In this episode of Usability Tools, Brian Christiansen and I continue on how to moderate a usability test. As I mentioned last week, the episode got so long that we decided to break it into two parts. You can find part 1 here. This week’s show focuses upon the step-by-step tasks of running the session with a participant and your observers.

Good moderating is critically important to a successful session. Here are a few points we touched upon in the show:

• Practice and repetition improves your moderation skills. Start the session on the right foot by greeting your user on time and by laying out exactly what will happen during the session.
• Inform your user of their rights as a participant; their comfort is key. Have and follow a testing protocol which will lead you through all the information, and through all the testing steps. It should also govern your observers.
• End your session on time. Respecting the time of your participants and observers is paramount. Walk your user out, both out of politeness and because small talk may lead to critical insights.

There’s much more in the show. If you have questions about the role of the moderator, feel free to ask them in the comments. We’ll try to answer them and may even work them into a future show.

[This show is the first in a series we're going to do on the fundamentals of usability testing. In future shows, we'll cover the entire gamut of testing, from initial planning, through task design, to data analysis and beyond. We want to create a complete resource that you'll share with your entire team.]

In this episode of Usability Tools, Brian Christiansen and I talk about how to moderate a usability test. Turns out, the episode got so long that we decided to break it into two parts. This week’s show focuses upon the different roles a single moderator needs to take on during the session.

The usability test moderator has a lot of influence on the success of the test. Moderating isn’t rocket science, but you’ll need to understand the basics before you sit down with your users.

In this week’s show, I talk about the three roles a moderator needs to play during the test.

First is the scientist. The scientist makes sure your tasks get done, notes get taken, and keeps the show on track.

Then we have the sportscaster. The sportscaster gives play-by-play so the design team members don’t miss anything the user does.

Lastly, there’s the role of the flight attendant. This is the most important role. Keeping your test participant happy and comfortable is your number one job.

Tune in to learn the specifics of each role and how they affect one another.

If you have questions about the role of the moderator, feel free to ask them in the comments. We’ll try to answer them and may even work them into a future show. Stay tuned for the second part of the Moderating show next week.

[This show is the first in a series we're going to do on the fundamentals of usability testing. In future shows, we'll cover the entire gamut of testing, from initial planning, through task design, to data analysis and beyond. We want to create a complete resource that you'll share with your entire team.]

Update: Part 2 is now posted.

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!]

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!]