Tag / Design
What I’d Rather Talk About When You’re Talking About UX
My model of Interaction Design, or if you prefer, product design. Or even UX design. We can also discuss this diagram instead of discussing UX Design as a term.
I blame Alan Cooper. This time. In a moment of pique (or boredom, or if he’s like me, procrastination) he tweeted,
There is no such thing as UX design.
— Alan Cooper (@MrAlanCooper) May 4, 2018
“There is no such things as UX Design.” Please, for his sake and mine, do NOT reply. He apologized for it the next day.
I would like to apologize to all of my followers for my tweet yesterday about “UX design.” 1
— Alan Cooper (@MrAlanCooper) May 4, 2018
My issue with the debate that ensued is: I don’t think it’s a useful or even interesting conversation to have. Ok, UX doesn’t exist.
So what?
Ok, UX does exist.
So what?
People are designing digital products that live in a larger ecosystem, and according to Sturgeon’s law, 95% of them suck at it. Instead of discussing what to call it, let’s move on to making less suck.
I respo..
The Intuitive and the Unlearnable
Why some designs won’t ever stop sucking Again, it starts on ze twitters
I have a phrase, "Unlearnable design," for when something is so counter-intuitive you keep making the same mistake over and over.
My example: I always click the comment icon on twitter to read comments. Does not work (if it did, might improve dialog.)
Do you have one?
— ~c (@cwodtke) May 26, 2018
Intuitive is one of the most used terms in tech. Everyone wants their app to be intuitive. It’s worth asking what intuitive means, really? Working Knowledge offers this definition
Intuition is compressed experience.
Which means for an app to be intuitive (or more correctly, intuitable) it must be consistent with the end-user’s experience. Some product folks think that means if Apple or Facebook does it, they can too. For example, the unusable hamburger menu. But your user’s world is bigger than the hottest bro-co, and even the big guys make mistakes.
To make interfaces truly intuitable, we have to understand metaph..
Comparative Research Done Right
Kate Rutter Leads a Comparator Research Discussion
or, Competitive Research the Creative Founder Way For a long time, I’ve been disappointed by competitive research approaches. Most strike me as a bunch of bumbling around and seeing what you see… sometimes you write it down in a spreadsheet. Designers fixate on widgets, product managers take screenshot of pricing pages — without a diagnostics framework, it‘s haphazard and sub-optimal. I knew important things were being missed.
Over the years, I’d developed my own tricks for understanding the competitive landscape, but I wasn’t doing much better. It took co-teaching with Kate Rutter to show me the grand picture.
Kate uses The Molecule as a framing model for startup success. This was developed at LUXr, the first Lean UX firm, founded with janice fraser.
Learn more here https://www.slideshare.net/intelleto/luxralnlean
The molecule acts as a guide to answer three questions for your startup: who are your customers, what problem are they ..
Protected: Theoretical Foundations of Design Thinking Part I: John E. Arnold’s Creative Thinking Theories
This content is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:
Password:
Taking Risks, Earning Trust and Including Co-Workers: User-Centred Design at Deutsche Bahn Operations
In 2016, Andreas Bürgler heard the term “design thinking” being tossed around left and right. “There was a lot of discussion about design thinking, everybody used it as a buzzword, and I felt that few people really knew what it actually meant. I saw some charts, but that was too little for me. I wanted to really learn it myself.” During a three-day Open Course in design thinking at the HPI Academy with Katrin Lütkemöller-Shaw, he realised that this way of user-centred working inspired his “mind and heart”: “This was my thing: to work on topics that are interesting for the users and help them. To build a prototype quickly, and to learn what fits and doesn’t fit immediately.” At the same time, interviewing real users came as an unusual experience: “Having this direct, immediate contact with the user was a challenge”, Bürgler says, and adds with a smile: “You are suddenly talking to the customer – alert!”
The Need to Innovate Topics of disruptive innovation have already become central un..
Feeling in Control: Bank of America Helps Customers to “Keep the Change”
The bank hoped to bring a human-centered angle to an industry which is hardly known for innovation. They were especially interested in the customer segment of boomer-age women with children. To conduct the ethnographic research, a team of five BoA employees partnered up with four agency designers. In their user research, the group conducted interviews and observed families in Atlanta, Baltimore, and San Francisco. According to IDEO designer Sally Madsen, the team was “talking to people who were great at saving, and people who struggled with it, taking inspiration from some of the existing, every-day habits people have around savings“. They observed a dozen families, and followed mothers around when they went shopping or dining. Soon, they realized an interesting pattern: In many families, mothers were in charge of managing finances. An extreme group in this pattern turned out to be single mothers: They are often on a tight budget and have to keep track of their spending meticulously.
..
What a Design Sprint CAN’T Do (for Enterprise Teams)
Editors Note: This is an excerpt from InVision’s Enterprise Design Sprints Handbook, which highlights the methodology behind successful design operations.
The original design-sprint format popularized by the Google Ventures team has been interpreted by some as a one-size-fits-all model. This was never the intention, and it’s definitely not the case for enterprise-level projects. Although UX, design and product teams have adapted sprints to find new applications for its prototyping value, it can’t be used in every situation.
Below are some situations in which a design sprint is not useful for enterprises. (It’s worth noting that this list is specific to enterprises. In some startups or small innovation groups, a design sprint might be the appropriate tool in these situations.)
For small iterative changes to an existing feature(s) If you have an established product and you’re making small iterative updates, a design sprint is going to be too much tool. Rather, use one of the many exer..
Government’s Content Strategy is the Linchpin of Citizen Experience
The future of good government hinges on content strategy.
This is important for everyone to understand because not just government employees and consultants who work with dot-gov websites are affected by the way agencies deliver content. Ultimately, content planning, organization, usability, and governance for online systems — and the human-to-human interactions they facilitate — affect the lives of people who use them every day. If the content strategy is bad, so goes the citizen experience.
We all can relate to the need for governments to deliver a better customer experience, whether it’s getting the right envelopes in your mailbox or connecting veterans with healthcare commensurate to their selfless sacrifices.
And while content strategy alone can’t fix broken business processes or improve the quality of healthcare, it’s absolutely critical to helping citizens locate, understand, and connect with public services. It’s a tool to help government employees better deliver the right i..
These UX Designers are Rethinking the Voter Ballot
I was five the first time I went to vote, excited for a field trip with my dad that conflicted with bed time. The polling place was a school gym. The room echoed with the clunk of machine levers as each vote was cast, and I munched on brownies from the bake sale set up in the lobby. That visit, which was repeated each election throughout my childhood, made it statistically far more likely that I would become a regular voter myself. Many people aren’t exposed to the voting process at a young age, and millions never make it to the polls.
Whitney Quesenbery and Dana Chisnell, co-founders of The Center for Civic Design, are focused on those people: where they fall off the voter journey, and how to get them back on. So they’ve set out to bring UX strategies to the myriad systems of local, state, and federal election offices, using human centered design thinking to shepherd citizens through the registration process to the moment they mark their choice on the ballot.
Chisnell and Quesenber..