The SpoolCast: Recent Episodes
Jared Spool
The SpoolCast has been bringing UX learning to designers’ ears around the world since 2005. Dozens and dozens of hours of Jared Spool interviewing some of the greatest minds in design are available for you to explore.
When we’re training teams on our design methods, what we perceive as ‘proper’ may in fact become a hindrance. Our dogmatic approach to our processes may prevent people from ever employing the techniques. Is it better to do it the right way, or to teach a wrong way that will get the job done?
You’ve got a groundbreakingly innovative product idea, and you’ve assembled a crack team of designers. You know exactly what you want to do, but you’re unsure of how to do it. Without a framework to drive your product development, it’s Game Over.
Mobile, ambient technology, and connected devices are about mediating people’s behavior in their environments. Uncovering the whys and hows that drive behavior takes empathy, hours of observation, and masterful prototyping skills. You’ll succeed when you make, test, iterate, and learn.
Design leaders are unsung revolutionaries. They’re often at the forefront of culture change, advocating for a new conversation about creativity and quality. The old one involved meetings, presentations, and top-down mandates, and little to no input from customers.
Creativity isn’t just about expressing yourself. It’s also about solving problems by putting disparate pieces together to form a new, unique whole. Practical Creativity fuels the everyday work and once-in-a-lifetime breakthroughs of designers, engineers, and scientists.
The only job of application navigation is to get users to the right screen. Ideally, all of your users should find what they need in 10 seconds or less, and with only a few clicks. But many enterprise app navigation systems fall short. If you’re facing a much-needed nav overhaul and don’t know where to start, it can be overwhelming.
For the longest time, making a great experience for the user was a business-strategy luxury item. A great product only had to work and ship. A great experience was a nice-to-have, not a requirement. Times have changed. The cost of delivering a product is no longer a barrier to entry. Quality is no longer a differentiator. What’s left? The user’s experience.
Products and service designers deal with complex design problems in equally complex markets. It’s hard to know which solutions are winners and which ones will fail. Fortunately, you can use simple design insights from biology to eliminate doubt and risk, and prepare you for whatever comes your way.
Traditionally, user research has taken on more of a scientific identity. You would do usability testing and research, take a ton of notes, and then compile all of your findings into a report. The effectiveness of that research depended on whether anyone read the report, and then if they could do anything actionable with that data.
The expansion of the web past a desktop-based world into more of a multi-device ecosystem has caused organizations to re-evaluate almost everything they do. Style guides have had to grow to accommodate this new reality of multiple screens sizes and resolutions. When you start incorporating the multitude of products across devices and all the people working on them, organizations are forced to think more “systematically.”
The notion of being a “designer who can code” has been a prevalent topic in recent years. Delivering static PDFs and working in photoshop is seen as inefficient in some circles. Being able to create a clickable or even responsive mockup to present to developers and stakeholders can be a better way to show your intent. It’s also much easier to iterate by changing a few lines of code.
Understanding is what user experience as a field hinges upon. After all if you don’t understand how users are interacting with your product or service, you don’t know what to design for. But how, as a team, do you come to that understanding? Telling the story of a user’s journey highlights areas where you’re right on point and where you’re missing the mark.
Service design seems to go by an increasing array of names: Customer Experience, Cross-Channel UX, or even just “design thinking.” In most cases, these terms describe a holistic approach to your users’ and customers’ needs, no matter where or when they’re interacting with your product or service. In traditionally siloed organizations, it can be no small task to ensure that you are providing the best possible service.
Usability in products and websites is what most organizations strive for. The more usable the product, the more likely that people will use it. Through research and testing, you can root out many issues with clunky interactions that hinder the experience. What isn’t as immediately clear is if some perceived usability issues are actually understandability problems. Your content could be the culprit.
When some people hear the term Lean UX, they dismiss it as simply a nouveau buzzword. There can be some confusion as to its relationship to Agile, both the methodology and the adjective. Some of the biggest resistance came from the idea that Lean UX was shortcutting and lazily undoing much of the groundwork to get organizations to buy into the value of UX. But as waterfall development increasingly becomes “the old way” of doing things, teams are operating in more agile, or Lean, ways.
Product Managers are responsible for the success of a product. As we’ve seen, UX is not misaligned with business goals, in fact it helps achieve those goals. If UX has become a necessity in terms of a driver of business, product managers need to adapt to it. Those who have a respect and understanding for the value of UX, and incorporate it into their product strategies, can better serve their users and customers, as well as the business.
It’s no secret that the content on your site needs to adapt to a variety of viewing environments. Responsive and Adaptive Design have been wonderful for ensuring your design flows and displays appropriately for the multitude of devices out there. But what about your content? How can you be sure your content is in the right place, or even makes sense in these different contexts?
Animation in interfaces has traditionally been seen as purely decorative and unnecessary. There are real accessibility and usability concerns associated with a heavy reliance on Flash. Advances in CSS have allowed for sophisticated animations and transitions that actually add to the experience. In fact, a well timed transition can help alleviate the cognitive load on users.
With the widespread adoption of Agile development methods, Lean UX has grown in popularity in the user experience world. It’s built around small, collaborative, cross-functional teams and is an extremely useful approach for startups and smaller teams. However, challenges arise when trying to adapt it to a larger, enterprise organization.
A website can be made up of relatively complex pieces. You have multiple pages, images, maybe some JavaScript, and it all needs to come together to create this larger experience. But as with things in nature, it can be broken down even further than that into more “atomic” elements.
A customer’s journey may begin on your website or maybe it begins in a physical retail location. But it more than likely won’t end there. Many organizations have a variety of touchpoints where their customers can interact with them. Understanding where, and also when and how a customer is interacting with your product or service is essential to providing them with a great experience.
Offering a mobile design is essential in today’s web. Having an app, however, can be a hotly contested issue. The cries of, “we need to be in the app store!” are heard coming from corner offices. While having a presence there can be beneficial, you have to determine how to best serve your users, and whether a native app or a web based product is the ideal.
Responsive web design's combination of fluid grids and media queries has really changed the design and development process. It’s an elegant way to ensure that one set of code can display appropriately across devices. It is, however, a bit of a problem with large legacy products and waterfall strategies.
Media queries shape and form a web page to display on multiple screen sizes. That’s the core of responsive web design. Users can maintain the same level of experience that they get on the desktop even when they switch to a smaller device. The theory of responsive web design is great, but it’s not a silver bullet. When real world constraints and use cases arise it makes responsive design a bit trickier.
Responsive web design is widely regarded as a must when designing for multiple devices. With just one code base, instead of multiple sites, you can more efficiently make use of your resources. But, how your design looks is only a piece of the overall experience for a user. Having it be able to adapt to different browsers and technology can fully round out the interaction.
User experience, as it has come to be known and understood, is generally associated with the digital space. Designers and developers working in concert to make a site, app, or digital product more usable and well designed. However, a user’s interaction with you as an organization isn’t necessarily confined to just your digital identity. This user experience design can be applied across all channels, such as a call center or physical location.
Have you seen style tiles, element collages, or pattern libraries? These are just a few examples of how designers are reacting to the explosion of devices and interface sizes. After all, thinking about the parts of a “page”—not just the sum of those parts—helps us create smart, scalable, maintainable designs for all those newfangled technologies.
The so called Digital Divide is increasingly being filled with mobile devices. Because of that, you need an understanding of how your designs are appearing and behaving on smaller screens. Cyd Harrell is an expert on user research, and the one we to turn for mobile research. She says that it’s not just how your designs display on these devices but also the behavior of your users as they interact on these more personal gadgets. Users consider their mobile phones to be a much more private device than a desktop computer.
What’s going to make your whole company focus on mobile? How do people interact with their mobiles device? How can you design for this new reality and even create experiences that translate from mobile to laptop to TV?
Why don’t design students coming out of school know about responsive design or creating mobile apps? Why are our self-taught hackers and C.S. grads having a tough time keeping up with the pace of technology innovation? It’s not that schools or professional development programs are slow to adapt; it’s more complicated than that. But our tendency to focus on skills alone just isn’t sustainable. Instead, we need to start investing in the ways we create designers and fuel their growth.
Mobile phones are like research platforms in our pockets. With the right strategy, we can quickly understand our users’ behavior, wherever they are. And given the ubiquity of mobile usage — even among hard-to-reach populations — we as UX designers are especially poised to make our lives easier while designing better products. That is, if we actually do the research. Fortunately, Cyd Harrell knows how to gather data without breaking budgets or extending timelines.
By now, companies know they need to be “on mobile.” But should that experience be a native app, a mobile web app, or something in between? The answer rarely is such a simple choice. And if you’ve ever entered into mobile discussions with a series of stakeholders, it may seem impossible to reach consensus.
Many teams follow a linear design process with a big reveal—ta-da!—once the aesthetics, layout, and flow are “ready” for client feedback. Weeks later, the front-end developer enters to turn an approved design into a responsive site that functions perfectly across devices. Now imagine showing clients your work in Week 1. How would everyone respond to unpolished designs?
Integrating UX into an Agile workflow has historically been a bit of a challenge. This could be due to a general lack of communication with the development team, or not feeling like the proper time or value is given to UX within the organization. Through her research, Aviva Rosenstein discovered that many problems people were having are commonplace. Additionally, she found that others had actually already worked out solutions to some of these.
The concept of strategy can be fuzzy at best. And the word strategy tends to hold a different meaning depending on who you’re talking to. Jim Kalbach says that strategy needs to show causality. He defines it as a hypothesis of a desired position, and a belief about how you’re going to succeed and overcome challenges.
Product roadmaps are a useful tool for managers and the development they oversee. Usability testing and research informs user experience decisions. Both of these goals, in the end, benefit the users. So why can’t your process contribute to both of these goals?
The web is everywhere. It’s on our desks, in our pockets, and on screens of all sizes. The complexity involved with building a website grows with each new device it must support. This cross-platform consistency requirement makes a concrete, static design process unsustainable. As flexible and responsive as the sites we’re building have to be, so too does our process for building them.
Lately, Jared Spool has been mulling over what he defines as deliverables and artifacts in the design process. The idea is that deliverables are more authoritative and complete, whereas artifacts are more conversational and exploratory. Scenarios are an important part of the design process and Jared was curious where they might fit in. So he enlisted Kim Goodwin to chat about it in this podcast.
User experience is rarely something you do completely alone. Even if people on the team don’t necessarily focus on UX, they could be indirectly acting in favor of it. Sometimes it comes from a lack of understanding exactly what user experience is or means. People with different approaches and skillsets can be valuable assets when incorporated into the larger human centered design focus.
User Experience is really all about delighting your users. You want them to accomplish tasks with ease and not encounter any roadblocks that are a direct result of your design. Many of the delightful things about an app or interface go unnoticed because they are the tiniest of features. These microinteractions can set the tone for your users and dictate the feel and performance of your design.
Oftentimes really simple changes can have dramatic effects on a user’s ability to interpret data. Stephen cites the many examples of designers taking stabs at airline boarding pass redesigns and the evolution Target’s Pharmacy prescription bottle went through. Presenting the information in a much clearer way reduces the cognitive barrier.
When you break down written language, it’s really just a carefully crafted set of tiny symbols. It’s easy to dismiss these meticulous creations in daily life as simply, reading. The shape, readability, and size of these symbols are all factors in effectively communicating ideas, and have been for thousands of years. In essence, typography itself is more than just picking a font.
In traditional website design and development it’s common to start with the design and add your content later in the process. You may even use “lorem ipsum” as a placeholder to know where the content eventually needs to live. This causes the content creator to craft words to fit the design instead of building a design to fit the content. Without the right content your users will likely have a lackluster experience no matter how good-looking the design.
In the realm of user experience, disciplines and titles can take on different meanings. Determining buzzword jargon from actual, useful distinctions and processes is sometimes a bit tricky. The term Service Design has been with us for a while now. Some see it as just plain, good UX. Marc Stickdorn sees it as more than that.
Luke says it’s necessary to look at how your service or product is framed in the broader picture. Most are built upon tradition web structures, and then “mobilized” now that smartphones and tablet growth has exploded. He compares the difference between mobile and PC to that of television and radio. You wouldn’t just drop a radio program onto TV without optimizing it for that platform. The same should be considered for mobile as a medium.
In traditional development environments, requirements are what you base the project’s direction on. However, requirements assume that you know what you’re doing and why you’re building it. Substituting your thinking to adopt a hypothesis approach allows you to examine where you may be wrong. Lean UX itself embraces hypotheses to quickly determine what is and isn’t true about a project and which is the right path to go down.
The goal of any site is to have great, compelling content. But what constitutes great content? How is the success of a blog post or a video measured? How can you be sure the time and effort put into crafting your content is providing an adequate return on investment?
The notion that “wireframes are dead” has been coming up every so often over the past few years. In truth, wireframes are still a valuable way for teams to communicate. Building up scenarios through state changes helps to both show and define a user’s journey through your design.
Ultimately, your content is the reason users visit your site. Taxonomy can build a structure underneath that content, making it much more dynamic. By employing a layer of taxonomy, your CMS can better understand the relationships between the content. This allows you to easily surface related content, dynamically display bits of information, and improve your users’ experience.
The web is no longer fixed width. Designs are more malleable than ever because of fluid grids, media queries, and everything else that comes with responsive web design. This makes using static photoshop comps as a deliverable unmanageable. Design workflows inevitably have to change and adapt as the way we design for the web evolves.
Frameworks and design patterns are no strangers in the world of web design. As responsive web design becomes common practice, making sure these templates work across every imaginable screen and device is trickier. There have been attempts to break down page elements in separate modules, but you often never see it fully assembled.
With the mobile web, specifically m dot sites increasingly becoming a thing of the past, responsive web design has become common practice. The ability for your site to display across screen sizes and devices, reduces development time and allows for one design to work anywhere. However, this shouldn’t signal a shift away from mobile-first thinking.
The “designer who can code” has been dubbed the elusive unicorn of the UX realm. But more important than being equally good at both skill sets is being able to communicate with the other side. If designers understand even a little bit about code it breaks down silos within the team. Greater communication leads to shared understanding. This collaborative environment allows for faster iteration and better design.
Responsive web design seems to come up in every other discussion or article about UX these days. And rightfully so as it’s an elegant way to make sure your design adapts to the multitude of devices on the market. But with the Internet of Things looming, it’s becoming more than just the visuals of your site that are of major concern. How your content displays on a car dashboard, “can a watch handle this page weight?”, or “is this refrigerator JavaScript enabled?” are not unrealistic issues moving forward.
There’s a traditional way of building a product. Normally there’s a huge time investment made as you come up with the idea, design, build and re-build until it’s released. At this point you’re hoping this solution solves the users’ problems, and also that it doesn’t crash and burn. And if it does fail, there’s going to be some hell to pay.
As responsive web design becomes more prevalent, our approach to designing for the web is changing. With former assumptions, as dismissive as they may have been, that the web was a fixed width, it was easier to have a more linear workflow. With the need for the web to reconfigure and adapt to different devices and displays, designers and developers need to adapt to changing workflows.
Getting great participants for usability studies can provide invaluable insights for your design process. But if you aren’t doing your own recruiting, you could be missing out on additional important information. Dana Chisnell has learned that the best way to find great participants is to think of recruiting as bonus user research.
Ensuring that your site is responsive or adaptive is becoming essential to your mobile design strategy. With the plethora of devices available, users want to be able to access your site on whichever one they’re using. The days of the separate mobile site are gone. But as your design is reflowing to display perfectly across devices, what’s happening to your content?
As much as we may like to pretend, there is nothing natural about usability testing. There’s always a level of concentration involved that likely wouldn’t be present in a natural setting. This “unnaturalness” is magnified when testing mobile applications. Users have to focus on things like posture and how they’re holding the device while trying to interact with it realistically.
Nowadays, design is an increasingly important business tool. As Jared Spool reminds us, Apple is one of the largest companies in the world, largely based upon continually engaging in good design. A great user experience can be a differentiator in the business landscape. For Jason Ulaszek, a good design starts with good research to guide and direct the organization’s decisions.
Technology changes quickly. A lot of organizations struggle to keep up with this change. It’s not just mobile design that’s throwing a wrench in the spokes. Content strategy and information architecture are more important than ever in this changing, multi device landscape. Karen McGrane believes in the not too distant future IAs and UXers will be leading organizations in the face of these changes.
In considering your user's experience with your design, keep in mind that there's a difference between something looking good and being good. But how do you determine good? How can you measure it? If, for example, you’re a print company building a digital presence, do you focus on retention or acquisition based on the shifting experience? It’s easy to ask for something that already exists, but much harder to describe something that one might want or need.
Given the amount of communications a user takes in on a daily basis, how you speak to them is incredibly important. The “voice” a company uses contributes to the establishment of the brand as well a creates a distinguishing identifier that sets it apart within the daily deluge of content users encounter. A consistent voice can help a user feel comfortable and familiar with your organization.
Creating visualizations from data can be a powerful and intriguing way to present findings. But way too many design teams sit on vast amounts of data. They also spend entirely too much time making static images rather than interactive tools.
Getting two people to agree on something is a difficult task in any aspect of life. Getting a whole team to agree on a design, where underlying feelings, ownership, and organizational hierarchy are involved, can be an even greater challenge. That’s not even counting the dreaded “swoop and poop” scenario. The trick is to get everyone involved early in the design process and a design studio is a perfect tool for just that.
In some scenarios, getting a user to convert or react to a call to action is the desired outcome. It means your design and experience work. But if users are coming to and then quickly leaving your site, what are they really experiencing? If they don’t take the time to explore and discover they may not have any loyalty to you or the experience. And if you’re dealing in complex decisions, you want your users to take the time they need to fully understand and commit to their choice.
UX folks often have to sell the importance of the field to stakeholders. That’s also the case with user research. The costs and time associated with starting a research program, and actually interacting with users, are sources of a lot of friction. Organizations are now seeing the value in user research but it’s daunting to know where to begin. It’s also difficult to fit research into an already established process.
Critique is often confused with being negative and critical. However, the basis of critique is communication. Having strongly grounded communication is necessary for any relationship in life, work related or not.
Culling through massive amounts of data is a headache. A dense table of aggregated data points can be useful in theory, but the manner in which it’s displayed is often a hindrance. Even more than that, showing that data in a chart or graph is confusing if it’s not effectively labeled. Data is useless when you can’t make good decisions from it.
Everyone wants to be innovative, to be the next iPhone, or Google. Innovation in itself is a tricky proposition. There’s really no way to aim for it as a goal and it’s not something you can declare you’re going to achieve. Many companies and products have been innovative though, so there must be some way to do it.
It’s common in the current technological landscape for teams to have remote members. Firing up a Skype session to join the whole team in a meeting is easy. However, having a remote element to your team is not without complications. There can be hurdles in terms of collaboration, not to mention the possibility of technical issues. In the end, co-located or remote won’t matter if the meeting itself is poorly designed.
Scenarios can represent the ideal picture of a user’s experience with a product or service because you can see how and when they’ll interact. However, a scenario is often missing the details of what's going on at this moment in time and that can be a sticking point. This is where the value of the journey map emerges.
Do you think about the ringer on your phone and the ability to turn it off? Dan Saffer uses this example to kick off his book Microinteractions. Silencing the ringer on your phone is a common feature. If that feature is clunky or hard to find it interferes with needing to silence it quickly, in a crowded movie theatre for example. These tiny interactions that surround the main functionality are integral to rounding out the entire experience.
Assumptions tend to be the downfall of many research projects. Making design decisions based on generalizations of what people are likely to do leads to surprises once you finally get your product in front of actual users. The result? Rework and frustration due to an overall lack of communication within the team.
Typography wears many hats in the user experience world. It’s part of the overall look of the visual design. It can convey tone and meaning of the content. Well set type can improve the user experience through readability and be an important piece of the accessibility puzzle for users with low vision. As with most things involving the web these days, typography isn’t immune to the disruption caused by mobile and multi-device design.
The world of web application design is expanding at a rapid rate. We’re now expected to design great experiences across a huge variety of platforms, from small screens to large displays. The flood of iPad applications and successful online businesses are showing our executives that design matters.
Ever wonder how many “World’s Best Coffee” signs exist in the world? The world is a big place, so that claim may or may not be entirely accurate. These days, with social media being so prevalent, it’s important that your messaging is truthful and that your product or service delivers on those promises. Otherwise you run the risk of losing the trust of your customer base, and scaring away potential users.
Shared understanding is important to any team working towards a common goal. Ensuring every member of the team is on the same page can be difficult. Sketching is a quick, lightweight method for communicating design ideas or interactions. Starting with sketching early in the design process lets everyone share the same vision.
A beautiful design means little if it’s not useful. Content is the key to making it useful. From the outset of the design process, you must consider the content for the site. Members of the design and development teams should work along side the content strategist to ensure the right content is delivered with the right message.
The proliferation of mobile devices has made it necessary to rethink your web experiences. The mobile phone and tablet, along with retina displays, have substantially changed how a user experiences your design. Responsive web design has emerged as a solution in some cases, but even though connection speeds on mobile networks are increasing, performance remains an issue.
With the emergence of techniques like responsive web design, many of the traditional prototyping methods become difficult to employ. Sketches and wireframes have in some cases given way to HTML and CSS prototyping so that users and clients can experience a richer, more complete interaction.
Accessibility is important, but somewhere along the way it got an undeserved reputation for being ugly, costly, and driven only by technical-compliance requirements. Making it an integral part of your design early creates something that is beautiful, inexpensive, and user-experience-driven. When someone with a disability comes across usability issues in your design, they're likely to be amplified. Something of minor inconvenience for a user could be a significant roadblock to another using assistive technology.
As more web capable devices hit the market, designers need to consider where and how their designs will be seen. Unfortunately, the same consideration isn't always made when it comes to content. With design changing so much in a multichannel environment, content must be structured independent of how it will eventually look.
Des Traynor is an expert on crafting microcopy. In his virtual seminar, Microcopy That Strengthens your Design’s Experience, Des identifies the key questions to ask when creating microcopy so that it doesn’t get lost or created by accident. The audience asked a bunch of great questions during the live seminar and Des joins Adam Churchill to answer some questions in this podcast.
Building a prototype is a great way to test your design early on with users. Whether you choose to go for a high-fidelity representation, or go lo-fi with paper, you can learn a lot about the usability of your site. Often, teams are concerned with which technique or tool to use because of the litany that are available.
What makes a user want to download an app in the first place? Ideally, it’s the promise of fulfilling a goal or need for the user. With the hundreds of thousands of options available, and the immediacy of the mobile context, you have a small window of opportunity to engage your user. If users can’t easily use your app, they simply won’t.
Mobile changes everything about how we conduct usability research. Not only has the way we design and build websites and apps had to adapt, how we study them has to as well. Traditional research methods won’t translate to a mobile environment.
The ultimate goal for user experience is that users enjoy using your product or service. Many companies use satisfaction as a metric for measuring their success. But satisfaction is really just the lack of frustration. You should be focused on what you can do to delight your users.
Responsive web design allows the notion of “one web” to be a reality. Designers are increasingly able to sell to their organization the idea of delivering content to multiple platforms. Putting it into practice is another story.
With so many teams and divisions within organizations, falling into a pattern of designing within your own silo is incredibly easy. Mobile teams are focused on the mobile products. Desktop teams are concerned with the desktop experience. But customers interact with your product or service from an increasing variety of touchpoints. They expect a seamless experience across channels and devices, but this is often not the case.
We’ve all sat through terrible meetings before. Part of what makes those meetings so bad is poor communication. Being present in a meeting doesn’t guarantee that your attendees will retain the important information from the meeting, or feel like they played any role in it. Improving the way that things are heard, seen, and discussed will go a long way to improving your meetings overall.
Websites are full of links. How useful these links are in helping users complete tasks is another story. Links have to guide users as they follow the scent of information. A vague or confusing link often leads users down a wrong path and in turn increases their rate of failure.
Most interactions have an underlying rhythm. For example, an application may ask you to scan a list of items, then click one, leading to another list to scan and click. Scan, click, scan, click. You can get into a groove. Systems increasingly have rhythm too: animated transitions, hover responses, and digital physics. Static is so last year.
E pluribus unum? Better yet, out of one, create many—many channels within a multifaceted but unified experience. That’s the challenge of experience design among constrained budgets, tight timelines, and unlimited interaction expectations. Content strategy’s communication foundation, the message architecture, can help you answer that challenge.
When smartphones and tablets first emerged, designers focused on channel differences like screen size in order to understand the basics in this new area. It’s time to set aside channel-centric planning and think of a user’s context first.
If we focus too much on content, we ignore what we know about how our associative brain comes to makes sense new information. Think about how many people respond before reading past the first sentence of an email, or how a magazine article doesn’t get the same reaction when displayed in HTML. Or consider how knowing the author of a publication influences your judgement of that content.
Science fiction films often take liberties with the technology that they display. After all, it is fiction. Though they can make up essentially whatever they want, technologies still need to be somewhat realistic to the audience. This influences the way that sci-fi technology is presented in film, but in turn, it's how sci-fi influences technological advances in the real world.
In the current multi-device, interconnected landscape, a user can interact with your product or service from a variety of touchpoints. At each, you must address the user’s needs at a particular place and time. Those needs will be determined by where they are in the experience.
Speed and performance are a critical aspect of mobile design. Using media queries to design your site responsively is a great way to ensure proper display on mobile devices. But just shrinking a desktop site to work on a mobile device can affect performance.
“Meetings are a waste of time.” “Meetings, ugh—I have real work to do.” Heard these? The perception of meetings worsens when you have an unproductive one. The entire team feels like their time could have been better spent.
In any website, there’s a lot of thought that goes into the visual design. But a great visual design is worthless if the site isn't useful. If the content is confusing, poorly constructed, or even just missing, your users are going to have a horrible experience. Karen McGrane suggests the solution was once much simpler. You'd determine your content, stick it into your design, and never worry about it again. With the web changing as drastically as it has over the past few years, content can no longer be static.
SharePoint is a powerful tool, but the complexity associated with it can leave users overwhelmed. Users trying to manage content and share information through SharePoint often experience frustration. Seeing where UX fits within SharePoint isn’t always clear.
Scenarios are a powerful tool in the design process. They focus on the user experience in its entirety, giving the reason a user is engaging with your product or service. Scenarios allow you to think about the gaps between the experiences. They are great for crossing organizational silos.
Prototyping is an effective way to communicate design ideas. Static PDFs, PSDs, and wireframes can help get your point across but aren’t dynamic. Usually, any necessary changes are logged away as to-dos. They’re then taken back, fixed, and presented again. Nathan Curtis and the team at EightShapes are prototyping with HTML and CSS more in their design process. They find that employing these techniques leads to greater efficiency.
Context is an important consideration in designing a mobile experience. As new devices enter the market, designers have to contend with new form factors and consider things such as ergonomics. Even things such as Apple’s retina displays affect approaches to design.
Your content is visible practically everywhere. Content strategists need to structure content to allow for viewing on an array of devices. What does that mean for your content management system? And what do you need to build into your content to make it flexible and adaptable?
Structure aids collaboration and helps achieve consensus. If everyone is participating in a structured environment, you begin with a greater level of understanding. Using a design studio as a process can get everyone on the team communicating and moving in the same direction.
It’s difficult to predict how users will access your designs and your content. More and more, people are connecting to the internet through some sort of mobile device. Using the latest advances in HTML and CSS can leave aspects of your site incompatible with some browsers. How do you ensure that you’re providing a good experience to your users over a broad spectrum of scenarios?
It’s impossible to design something if you don’t know who you’re designing for. Developing personas through user research is a great way to create a portrait of your users. But once you have your personas, what do you do with them? That’s a question Whitney Quesenbery says she encounters more and more lately.
Critique is an integral part of the design process. Contrasting from feedback, critique is more focused and specific. Often, rather than a gut reaction, it is framed within the context of a dialogue. It is centered around arriving at an understanding.
Nathan discusses how the team at EightShapes brought their modular philosophy to creating rich interactive prototypes using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. He explains how, through modular thinking, they were able to write scripts that chunked aspects of their designs to repurpose and reuse across multiple pages.
Reputation is everything. On sites where users can rate and review products or services, the result is, well, reputation. But a problem can arise when ratings aren’t accompanied by a qualifying review. A user could have had a negative experience with service or shipping but the product itself could be stellar.
A data visualization, when done well, can be an incredibly powerful way to communicate information. It ultimately boils down to the choices you make in how to design and present the data. If you make the wrong choice you can run the risk of not accurately displaying the data or struggling to effectively tell its story.
Content is everywhere. With the amount of content users are confronted with everyday it can be challenging to garner their attention. Compounding this problem is the fact that designers and developers are often tasked with writing content that end users see. This can be an intimidating prospect if you’re unaccustomed to crafting copy.
Getting data from your users is a fundamental part of creating great user experiences. Surveys are a great way to get feedback and learn about your users. The problem is everyone has sat through a painful, monotonous survey that asked a series of frustrating and seemingly pointless questions. As with anything in UX, if your users sense they’re in for a painful experience they simply won’t engage with your survey.
A dashboard is often the first screen that a user sees in your UI. The importance of visual design and data visualizations is high. But good looks aside, the dashboard has to meet the users’ needs. Beautiful dashboards are futile if the presented information isn't useful to the user to accomplish their tasks.
Change is always an interruption. For those switching to an Agile process, the transition doesn’t always go so smoothly. Suddenly, with things moving so quickly, the role of UX gets lost in the shuffle. User experience is often disregarded in Agile development.
The right data can be more effective than words when it comes to telling a story. Even if you have the data, you have to present it in the correct manner. Choosing the right axes, colors and placement are all a big part of putting together a great visualization. Noah Iliinsky demonstrates what goes into creating an effective visualization.
Touch screen devices are commonplace. It's now expected that your mobile experience work as well as, if not better than, your desktop experience. With faster connection speeds, cameras, GPS, gyroscopes, and accelerometers, we can deliver information to users in new ways. But we can also receive information from them as well.
With mobile, you simply can't have as much content on your pages as you do on the desktop. Intranet access within enterprises is crucial and accessing it with mobile devices is beneficial. However, the vast amount of pages and content is cumbersome and impractical for a mobile setting. James Robertson asks, what are the few essential things users need while they are away from their desks?
Lean UX can eliminate the contractual obligations inherent with specification documents and other deliverables. Designers and developers find it frustrating to put so much effort into a project then not see it ship at the end. Using the Lean UX process, you’re constantly validating your designs, especially early in the process. This motivates the team to work towards the same end goal.
There's a belief that user experience insight is lacking in Agile development. Trying to shoehorn UX practices into an Agile process results in a lot of frustration. Often, developers build stuff faster than the designers can design it. The whole process often focuses on the delivery more than the quality of the experience. Anders Ramsay believes that UX and Agile can coexist.
Technologies are often misunderstood at their outset. This misunderstanding leads to a lack of adoption. This lack of adoption leads to the technology not reaching it’s full potential or not being utilized in useful ways. This is essentially what happened to JavaScript. Its detractors said it wasn’t a real programming language, and it’s capabilities were ignored. Dave McFarland notes that Google’s use of JavaScript in Google Maps makes a lot of people take notice.
Mobile is greatly influencing the user experience community. It’s challenging traditional approaches to design, but also bringing with it a host of new opportunities. Being a user experience practitioner in this changing environment is a bit scary. Yet coupling existing skill sets with the constraints of designing in the mobile space makes for an exciting world full of possibility.
Touchscreen devices give you the ability to directly manipulate content. This allows designers to create interfaces where the content itself is the control. This lessens the need for buttons and can reduce the level of complexity within your design. The problem is making the user aware of the availability of gestures in your design. Gestures, especially multi-touch gestures, are powerful control mechanisms but useless if the users aren't aware of them.
The goal of any site is for the right audience to find the right information. But beyond your actual content there are many things that can cause findability issues. These tend to be unanswered questions about your primary audience and whether or not you’re satisfying the need of that audience. Good information architecture can help guide your design decisions so that your users can effectively engage with your content.
A common trap in designing data visualizations is focusing on all the different ways to represent the data, rather than the questions that the data should answer. The presentation of a data set is pointless if it’s not useful, usable, or if people can’t understand it. With so much data to choose from how do you keep the goal of the visualization in mind? How are you sure you’re telling the right story?
The goal of Lean UX is to take the focus of user-centered design off of documentation and put it squarely on the experience. The way to do this is to view any design idea as a hypothesis. With a focus on the experience, you can validate or invalidate this hypothesis much quicker. The sooner you reach this validation, the sooner you can focus on designing and building the correct solution.
The Agile development process is accused often of being too focused on delivery over the user experience. But that’s not to say that Agile is the bane of UX. Anders Ramsay believes it’s important to distinguish between Agile methods and Agile values. Many, such as fast prototyping and shared understanding are also valuable in the user experience world.
While the traditional “mouse and cursor” interfaces are still in use, many of us are becoming familiar with touch-based interactions. The power and capabilities of mobile and tablet devices is growing. Often, these devices are the more convenient alternative for users to access your content. But beyond accessing your information, how are they interacting with your design?
A designer can never have too many tools and methods for creating their designs. Many times conveying interactions in a static wireframe is difficult. So designers have turned to HTML and CSS to create wireframes and prototypes to provide a richer interaction. JQuery can also be thrown into the mix to further this process along.
The term Lean UX is bandied about quite a bit these days. Along with it, there seems to be some confusion as to whether this is just a buzzword, a new way of working, or simply a new description for what people in the UX realm already do. Jeff Gothelf of The Ladders is a champion of Lean UX, so Jared Spool sat down with him to find out what Lean UX was all about.
UX professionals have made a lot of progress in large organizations. Companies realize the importance of connecting with their users more and more. User research is becoming firmly rooted in many organizations as companies try to produce better products and services for their users. But user research itself can be narrow in focus and full of biases. Lou Rosenfeld of Rosenfeld Media, suggests that by breaking down the silos that exist between other research practices, we can create a complementary research experience. This will produce even better analysis and therefore, better products as a whole.
Gamestorming can allow collaboration to happen. It quickly gets a lot of people working together, sharing ideas, and getting creative. Words may be tricky because you're not certain if someone has interpreted what you’ve said the way you meant it. The beauty of Gamestorming is it gets people to think visually and physically express their thoughts and ideas on paper.
Story mapping is a way to build a model of user experiences. More than that, in the Agile context, it allows you to tactically plan for what should go into each release. It is a way to get everyone on the team thinking and talking about user experience. Getting people into a discussion mode starts to create a very collaborative environment. Jeff discusses how to create a story map and how it fits into the Agile process.
Mobile is the “hot topic” these days. It’s increasingly at the front of designers’ minds. In a world where the power and capabilities of the device in your pocket are so great, the possibilities become somewhat astounding. The mobile landscape is changing so rapidly that it makes developing a formal strategy to “figure mobile out” all but impossible. Luke discusses how taking advantage of the market as it is today and the capabilities of these devices can lead to the refinement and evolution of your product.
It’s easy for applications to get overcomplicated and bogged down with data - especially in an enterprise setting. It’s hard to keep track of so many different things. When dashboards and widgets are employed, the goal is to make your life easier, but often that’s not the result. The solution - simplifying these applications for specific use cases and giving the right people the right information they need for their given task. Hagan Rivers spends her time meeting with teams to show them exactly what they need to do to streamline these complex applications.
As we use a multitude of devices to access the same content, we expect a similar experience across platforms. If you have a great user experience on the desktop, it would be easy to rationalize that your mobile experience, for example, shouldn’t be painful. User experience professionals now need to consider how and where their applications and content are being accessed more than ever before. Developing rich interactions across all of these platforms can be a daunting task. Bill Scott discusses how employing design patterns can help ensure that your users have a great experience wherever they use your product.
With the amount of content coming at you from all sides, it can be difficult to make sense of it all and present it in a logical fashion. Curation allows you to create order out of all the chaos. Borrowed from the world of museums, curating your content allows you to form a narrative, showing your users what they can and should do with your content. Margot showcases lessons she has adopted from museum curators. She shows what content strategists take from these lessons and apply to their practice.
Everybody strives to arrive at the end of a project with a great design. But often times the “brilliant idea” isn’t easy to communicate and takes a long time to develop. Brandon Schauer believes that you can develop techniques to help this communication, arriving at good design in shorter amounts of time. By putting your ideas on paper and post-its, and getting everyone participating, you create a collaborative environment that allows these ideas to grow and develop.
Developing a good set of fundamentals is key to successful user experience design. But if you work for an organization that doesn’t recognize the importance of design, just possessing the skills isn’t enough. It will prove difficult for you to change the company’s culture if they view UX as this huge, disruptive endeavor. Cennydd believes that you can take a lightweight approach to introducing user experience without people realizing that you’re actually doing it.
You can’t ask people what they want. They can’t tell you. The answer is almost always narrow in focus, concerned with the here and now rather than the future. How do you get them to give you the observations you need to design what they will want? Conducting field research to actually learn about your users can lead to innovative new ideas. Steve knows that going out into the field provides real opportunities to see what the world surrounding your product is like.
A good starting point is crucial. It sets the tone for everything that comes after. All too often, projects are unsuccessful or labor through growing pains because the importance of this starting point was overlooked. When done right, the kickoff to a project will leave the team energized, inspired, and engaged. Kevin discusses that kickoff meetings are the time to identify business strategy as well as company culture. It’s also important to assess any risks associated with the project.
The introduction of CSS3 and HTML5 brought with it a host of new capabilities. With most modern browsers supporting CSS3 and HTML5, implementing them into your designs is becoming easier. Understanding the things that are now possible with these new standards can help you create better designs more efficiently and effectively than ever before. Stephanie and Greg discuss what the introduction of HTML5 and CSS3 means for designers and developers, and what can be accomplished today by putting it into practice.
Combining compelling storytelling with research data can help you craft realistic scenarios to guide your design process. Getting to know the specific needs of your users will allow you to address any potential problems they may have. As a consultant, Kim Goodwin uses her experience and expertise in working with teams to develop effective scenarios. In this podcast, Kim discusses the role that scenarios play in the design process with Jared Spool.
Incorporating CSS3 into your designs allows you to create innovative designs with less code and reliance on images. The level of compatibility with many of the browser options out there is already impressive and it continues to grow. Taking advantage of the new CSS3 features helps to shift heavier visual elements to the browser itself. Dan discusses examples and tips in this podcast.
Storytelling is a natural form of expression. We’ve all been telling stories from a very young age. Scenarios are the stories that drive design decisions. They put the design into the context of how and why the user will interact with it. Kim Goodwin uses her immense experience to outline the relationship between personas and scenarios and how to bring them into your design process.
Prototypes help, be they paper, wireframes or PDFs, to exhibit a design idea. They allow you to communicate your idea visually and test aspects of the design. As effective as they are, they have their limitations. Nathan Curtis of EightShapes uses HTML prototypes in his team’s design process. Using HTML, they test functionality and interactions in ways that are impossible while using static PDFs.
Mobile design is becoming more important everyday. As the technology and capabilities get better so does the users’ experience. Taking advantage of this technology affords you to opportunity to create experiences that your users have only dreamed of. Luke discusses the capabilities of mobile devices, new usage, and the future possibilities.
Great design principles guide your team to creating designs that delight your users. Having a set of great principles will allow your team to turn ordinary design into extraordinary design. But not everyone has great design principles. What even constitutes a great design principle? Jared dives into our latest research on what teams are doing it right and which are missing the mark.
Conducting research and gathering data are crucial parts in the process of creating great design. But once you have all of the data, what do you do with it? How do you know you’re extracting the right conclusions and not leaving anything important on the table? Steve Portigal discusses the methods of synthesis and ideation to approach this crucial next step.
Analyzing data is a great way to make design decisions. But when your analytics log contains billions of clicks, how do you distinguish which ones you should use in forming those decisions? Users’ behavior and activity can provide you with great information and insights. But when do you look to that and when do you trust your own instincts? Julie Zhuo discusses Facebook’s design process.
“Thinking mobile” goes beyond scaling down an existing app to fit a smaller screen or making decisions about what content to include. Because the app can be used anywhere by nature and the interface is manipulated with thumbs and fingers, there are much more than just aesthetics to consider. Josh discusses mobile design with Adam Churchill.
The surge in mobile technology is incredible. Manufacturers ship over a million touchscreen phones every day. These devices allow people to interact with the web in new ways. Streamlining your design for mobile helps you focus on what is absolutely necessary. In this podcast, Luke joins Jared Spool in a discussion about designing mobile experiences.
Mike Lee is the Senior Digital Strategy Advisor at AARP. With much of the organization’s 53-year heritage being within “traditional” media realms, shifting it’s publishing and broadcast businesses into the online world is no small task. In this podcast, Mike joins Jared Spool to discuss some of the design challenges, the ways AARP has transitioned to the web, and how they have been exploring and taking advantage of mobile and tablet technologies.
Information Visualization uses the brain’s innate ability to recognize patterns to create visual representations of data. When you see a great visualization, it’s as if you are looking through the eyes of an expert. Noah Iliinsky gives examples of the types of visualizations in common use, why and when they are useful, and how to think about different types.
Whether it's on the design side or development side there are tricks and techniques you can benefit from. Often, these tips can save you time and frustration. You may not even be aware of them unless someone actually shows them to you. Being able to see someone else's approach reveals knowledge that you can't find anywhere else. In this podcast, Jonathan Snook and Steve Smith join Jared Spool to discuss some of their best tips and techniques they learned from each other.
More types of devices are accessing your web content everyday. Have you figured out how to accommodate them? Ethan Marcotte is leading the charge in this area, with his work on Responsive Design, which can help your content scale and adapt to new devices.
Translating information and data into a useful visualization is challenging. When creating information visualizations, as with any design process, it’s imperative to keep your audience in mind. With quality visualizations, they can understand and analyze complex information. In this podcast, Noah joins Jared Spool for a discussion about how to interpret information visually in a way that is most effective for users to process the information and be successful in their tasks.
Stephen Anderson, designer and creator of the Mental Notes card deck, believes your users must be emotionally engaged if you want them to exhibit a certain behavior. Stephen uses simple visual representations to help people make choices and understand complex information. In this podcast, Stephen and Jared Spool discuss creating designs that engage your users’ emotions.
Certain tips and tricks you can only learn from watching the best in the field do what they do. Peeking over the shoulder of an expert can teach you valuable techniques and insights that you won’t find in any book. That is exactly how the designers at Sidebar Creative learn from each other.
Information architecture exists in all levels of design, from the most abstract to the most concrete. Everything from thinking about the content of the site right down to embedding a navigation strategy determines the structure of a website. Through his experience, Dan Brown has developed a set of principles for information architecture.
With mobile quickly emerging as a viable and practical source of web based content, designers need to know how to adapt and keep up. With the sheer number of different devices out there it can be a daunting prospect. Josh joins Jared Spool in this podcast for a discussion about making the decision between mobile web and native apps.
The number of places that you can access the web grows every day. But are you designing for it? How do your users see your content? And more importantly, how are they interacting with it? Bill Scott joins Jared Spool and discusses the challenges and a few of the surprises that come with designing for multiple platforms.
Kate Brigham is the Patient Experience Manager at PatientsLikeMe. Rather than focusing solely on forums and discussion, she has helped create an environment that encourages sharing amongst the patients. In this podcast, Kate talks to Jared Spool about how PatientsLikeMe uses data visualizations to help create the level of understanding within the community.
How do you bridge the gap between the search engine and your site? You want that transition to be as smooth and natural for your users as possible. Ideally, they would start with their search, arrive at your site and accomplish what they set out to. Often times, it doesn’t work out that easily. Shari Thurow offers techniques and tricks to satisfy the goals of your users.
Visual design is often considered an artistic realm. Many times people shy away from design or limit their involvement despite being completely capable of creating a great design. Learning the basics of design can help dispel the notion that it is only for the artistic. According to Dan Rubin, “there’s a big separation between being artistic and being creative.”
Web applications live in a strange world: half application, half website. Making a command look like a command can be tricky. Do you make it a button? Should it be a link? David discusses a number of considerations for creating or updating your application's visual design
Effective communication is the basis for keeping your team organized. But how can you be certain that everyone in your organization is on the same page when it comes to business goals, objectives and the user experience perspective? Using personas can set in you that direction and Tamara Adlin specializes in just that.
Seductive interactions leverage the latest advancements in social science, psychology, and behavioral economics. Stephen Anderson shows us specific examples of sites who’ve designed serendipity, arousal, rewards, and other seductive elements into their applications.
Knowing exactly how to design web forms is a struggle. Forms are often a critical step in a user’s journey. It’s easy to frustrate them if your forms aren’t well thought out or well crafted. Luckily, Luke Wroblewski is one of the world’s foremost experts on web form design.
When approaching your information architecture, you’ll realize most sets of content can be organized in more than one way. You need to figure out which works best for your audience, your content, and your project’s goal. Donna Spencer shows you the most popular approaches, and offers tips on when and how to use each.
Design has made a lot of progress in the corporate landscape over the past decade, but many designers still find themselves justifying their existence on a fairly regular basis. In Kim Goodwin’s talk, “Getting Design Into the Corporate DNA” from the 2010 User Interface Conference, she explains that it’s a matter of changing the culture of your organization.
Prototyping is an iterative process. You generate design concepts. You test them. You discover what works, what needs improving, and opportunities for new ideas. Tune in to this podcast to hear Todd Zaki Warfel talk about prototyping.
For years, the mobile web experience was little more than an afterthought as most design teams focused on catering their designs to the desktop. As Luke Wroblewski explains in his session “Why You Should Design for Mobile First” from the User Interface 15 Conference, this is becoming an increasingly backwards way of thinking.
At this year’s User Interface Conference, Kristina Halvorson presented “Message and Medium: Better Content by Design.” Here's a sample of her talk from the conference.
SEO and User Experience shouldn't be at odds with one another. That's what Vanessa Fox and Tamara Adlin tell us in this week's SpoolCast with Jared Spool.
Leah Buley discusses her latest findings in her work with small teams and solo UXers with our Jared Spool.
Scenarios are comprehensive stories that describe the way a persona would interacts with your product or service. If there is a grand dutchess of personas, scenarios, and design processes, it's Kim Goodwin. That's why we asked Kim to do a workshop on turning user research into action at UI15. Jared Spool spoke with her to preview that workshop, and clear up confusion surrounding scenarios in this podcast.
To give you a taste of Luke Wroblewski's upcoming UI15 talk, Jared Spool had a chance to speak with him about some of the latest trends, good and bad, in web input.
Today we're revisiting search patterns by sharing the followup podcast Jared Spool recorded with Mark Burrell of Endeca. Jared and Mark discuss a few bonus questions from the previous Virtual Seminar. Included in the full post are a few highlights from the podcast.
Jared Spool chats with Nathan Curtis about the reuse and standardization of components that make up your web site.
Web applications can get wild. You know the kind; something that's on your corporate intranet with an obscure purpose, hundreds of screens and some kind of navigation kudzu growing in every direction. Hagan Rivers is one of our favorite wranglers of such apps. Listen to a sample of Hagan's Escaping Navigation Hell from the Web App Masters Tour in this episode of the SpoolCast.
It's becoming common to see behavioral cues in everyday web applications. Stephen Anderson is the first person we think of when it comes to these kinds of interactions. Stephen is an independent consultant and creator of the Mental Notes, a set of reference cards with design insights from the world of psychology. Stephen is one of the most popular speakers at the Web App Masters Tour and we want to share a sample of his talk, Designing Seductive Business Apps.
We tell our clients this constantly: the organizations who are most successful are the ones who are on intimate terms with how and why their customers use their product. But how? To answer that question, we invited our friend Steve Portigal to host a UIE Virtual Seminar recently on the topic of interviewing. In this podcast we revisit the topic and answer several remaining questions from his seminar.
Bill Scott's Designing for Interesting Moments was one of the highlights of the first stop on UIE's Web App Masters tour, in San Diego. We wanted everyone to benefit from his research into web interactions, so we're bringing you this audio and visual sample.
As soon as we saw Erin Malone and Christian Crumlish’s new book, Designing Social Interfaces, we knew you’d want to hear about their rich collection of social patterns and principles.
Ken Kellogg, the Director of User Research at Marriott International, sits down with Jared Spool to discuss the process of design and research that lay beneath a web site that generated $6.5 billion in revenues in 2009.
Jason Fried brings a unique viewpoint to any design discussion, one informed by years of success with his company, 37signals. Recently, Jared Spool was able to chat with Jason about 37signals' current work. If you're joining us at the UIE Web App Masters Tour in Minneapolis or Philadelphia, Jason will go into even more detail
Julie Zhuo is the principal designer behind the Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect experiences, and has contributed to the last two major site redesigns. She sat down to chat with our Jared Spool.
Bill Scott chats with Jared Spool about rich interactions, his new book about them, and his deep history with them at Sabre, Yahoo! and now Netflix. Bill is one of the stellar presenters scheduled for all four cities on the UIE Web App Masters Tour.
The world's foremost authority on web forms is Luke Wroblewski, author of the heralded book, Web Form Design. It's no coincidence that we lean on Luke often to join us at events like our upcoming Web App Masters Tour. Jared Spool sat down with Luke to discuss what's been happening with web forms since his book came out. It winds up there have been some interesting developments recently.
In this podcast, Jared Spool sits down with Peter Morville to answer many excellent questions from the recent Leveraging Search and Discovery Patterns virtual seminar. Even if you did not attend, there's a lot of great information in this podcast.
We turn to Hagan Rivers for insight on designing challenging web applications year-after-year because she just keeps coming up with better and better ideas. Recently, Jared sat down to talk with Hagan to discuss her somewhat radical notion, designing web app navigation as its own, separate application.
How can we design systems that encourage the behaviors we want? In this episode, Jared speaks with Stephen Anderson about using human psychology in web apps to encourage users' behavior.
A followup conversation with Fred Beecher answering more questions about prototyping tools and techniques, after his popular, recent Virtual Seminar on the topic.
Back in October, we asked usability testing expert Beth Loring to present a UIE Virtual Seminar on how to Effectively Moderate Usability Tests. As is often the case, we got lots of great questions from the live audience, but just couldn’t get to them all. Adam and Beth got together to record this podcast and cover some of the remaining issues.
User experience research lives or dies by the appropriateness of the participants in the study. If the participants match the real users, you're set. We held a Virtual Seminar with Dana Chisnell to discuss recruiting for usability testing, and this is the followup podcast to that seminar. In the podcast, Dana answers remaining questions from the seminar.
How can you bring real innovation into your projects? That's what I asked Scott Berkun when we spoke earlier this month. Scott has a lot of great ideas for your team from his years of research into the habits of highly innovative teams. In addition to this interview, Scott will be presenting at our User Interface Conference in November.
What can a non-designer do to harness the power of visual design without calling professional help? Quite a lot, says internationally-regarded visual designer Dan Rubin. We called Dan to talk about what design techniques are accessible to mere mortals. He also gave us a preview of his day-long workshop for non-designers at our User Interface 14 Conference, this November.
Donna Spencer is our long-time, go-to expert on the topic of Information Architecture. We're happy to bring her stateside again for the upcoming User Interface 14 conference. Recently, I spoke with her, all the way from Australia, in advance of her trip to Boston.
Todd Zaki Warfel has just finished two years of research into the tools and processes used in prototyping web sites. His findings will be published in a book due out this fall and we've asked him to give a full-day workshop on the topic at UI14. Todd sat down with us to talk all about prototyping tools and processes, and previews his upcoming workshop at UI14.
One of the most popular speakers in the history of our User Interface Conference is Gerry McGovern. Certainly most of that popularity is thanks to Gerry's no-nonsense, customer-centric approach to content management strategy. Gerry joins us in this podcast to discuss customer care words and managing top tasks.
Leah Buley brings us her insight to getting to the good design faster in your process and improving the input you receive from your organization. There are some great ideas here that you should listen to.
Ginny Redish joins us to discuss why the web should act like a telephone conversation between you and your customers.
A couple of weeks ago we held a UIE Virtual Seminar with Ethan Marcotte from Happy Cog West, a designer of beautiful websites. As always, we had a number of excellent questions from the live audience that we couldn’t attend to during the seminar, so Adam Churchill got together with Ethan to record this podcast and cover a number of those remaining questions.
Last month we held a UIE Virtual Seminar where I presented my talk, Search, Scent, and the Happiness of Pursuit. As always, we had a number of excellent questions from the live audience that we couldn’t attend to during the seminar, so, with a little help from Adam Churchill, I recorded this podcast and cover a number of those remaining questions.
(Audio podcast edition) Revealing Design Treasures from The Amazon: On its surface, Amazon.com just seems like a large e-commerce site, albeit a successful one. Its design isn’t flashy, nor is it much to write home about. But deep within its pages are hidden secrets — secrets that every designer should know about.
Robert Hoekman, Jr. recently joined us for a Virtual Seminar on Interaction Design Frameworks, called, Web Anatomy: Interaction Design with Frameworks. The concept is a new one, and Robert and I are exploring and introducing the concept in new book due out shortly. The seminar (which is still available) was well-received, and we asked Robert back to help us answer some audience questions we did not have time to discuss during the seminar.
Seth Earley & Stephanie Lemieux answer questions about their recent UIE Virtual Seminar on Taxonomy.
This week I wanted to share my interview with Brian Kalma, Director of User Experience and Web Strategy for darling of Internet retail, Zappos.com. In case you've somehow missed out on their meteoric rise to top of online retail, now conducting over a billion dollars in sales a year, you're in for a treat.
Hagan Rivers returns to answer followup questions from her recent virutal seminar on Better Web App Navigation
This week Robert Hoekman, Jr joins us to discuss a new design process he's been developing called "Design Frameworks." Drawn loosely from the idea of the Frameworks that software developers use to more efficiently build software, design frameworks are an aid to assembling a design.
This week we are happy to share with you a followup podcast to our recent Virtual Seminar with Jeff Patton, one of the world's foremost teachers and consultants on the agile development process. If you missed the seminar, don't worry, if you're interested in agile, there's plenty here for you too.
Planning documents for web app projects are often overlooked, despite their importance in the success of the product. James Box and Richard Rutter of Clearleft share their successful process of creating rough interactive prototypes for clients when creating web applications.
If you do it right, using Ajax techniques can improve accessibility. Surprised? You shouldn't be. Ajax, like most techniques and technologies on the web are what you make of them. That's why I asked Derek Featherstone to speak with me about his latest work. Derek is a world renown expert on web accessibility. As principle of Further Ahead, he also helps clients deploy sites that exploit the latest techniques. These two statements do not need to be at odds with each other!
This week we chat with out friend Luke Wroblewski about Web Form Design. He discussed some of the most frequent questions he gets asked about form design considerations, since having penned a popular book on the subject. He offered a lot of helpful advice. Tune in to learn more.
Dealing with real-life web app production isn't as glamorous as some aspects of design in the digital realm, but it is full of challenges and can honestly make or break a project. There are ways of truly optimizing certain aspects of the production so that you can create a product with consistent quality at a faster pace. To find out how, I turned to Nathan Curtis.
This week our long time friend Molly Holzschlag joins us to discuss the cutting edge of web standards as they apply to web application development. Listen in while we talk about the effects that HTML 5, ECMAScript and other standards will have on the web.
We love to talk to Steve Mulder (from Molecular) and Riccardo La Rosa (from Isobar) about building out a Web 2.0 strategy and incorporating elements, such as social features and highly-interactive elements to the design. Listen to their stories of helping major brands integrate social and highly-interactive experiences.
At the beginning of this month, we had Joshua Porter in the office to present his Design for Sign-up talk. Designing for sign-up should be simple, yet it's often the most challenging area of your design. Josh had some great ideas on how to increase the ease of sign-up and how to motivate your users to want to. We got back together with Josh to follow-up on the seminar so we could answer a number of viewer's questions that we didn't have time for in the seminar.
We recently had our friend Patrick Hofmann a designer with Google Australia in for a Virtual Seminar covering the Essentials of Effective Visual Design. His wealth of knowledge from his years of design and usability research into visual design provided an incredibly interesting and popular seminar. As usual, we received many more excellent questions that we could deal with during the seminar, so we recorded this podcast.
If you ask designers what the most frustrating parts about designing a project are, one of the top answers would undoubtedly be "communicating and documenting the design process." And with good reason... it's not easy. That's why I interviewed Dan Brown for this week's SpoolCast. I don't know of anyone who knows more about solid design communications than Dan, the co-founder and principal of Eight Shapes, a UX firm in Washington, D.C.
Back in October we had the good fortune to host Dana Chisnell's popular Virtual Seminar entitled "The Quick, the Cheap, and the Insightful: Conducting Usability Tests in the Wild", where she told us you don't have to run usability tests by the book to get great value out of them. Quite a statement considering she (co-)wrote the book! As usual, we received many more excellent questions that we could deal with during the seminar, so we recorded this podcast.
This week we take a walk through computing history with noted engineer and designer Bill Verplank, who was present at many of the defining points!
We 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.
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.
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."
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.
“Can you make the logo bigger?” Heard that one before? So have we. This week, we talk with Yahoo!'s Luke Wroblewski, an expert on visual design on the web, about the misconceptions that about around this topic!
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.
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.
This week, our good friend Peter Merholz joins us for the show. Peter is president of the noted experience strategy and design consultancy Adaptive Path. In our discussion, I asked 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.
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 Fransisco. Dana is also the co-author of the recently-released second edition of the Handbook of Usability Testing, a book so fine, I agreed to write the foreword.
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. We talked about the evolution and best use of the techniques we call Ajax.
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. In this episode I asked Donna, "What separates good Information Architects from great Information Architects?"
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.
In this week’s SpoolCast I had a chance to speak about Design Patterns and Anti-Patterns with Bill Scott. Bill is the Director UI Engineering at Netflix, a position he took after working several years for Yahoo as an Ajax Evangelist. At Yahoo! Bill led engineering on the Yahoo! Teachers project and curated the public Yahoo! Design Pattern Library.
In February we held one of our most popular Virtual Seminars ever, Mental Models: Getting Into Your Customer's Head, presented by Indi Young. We had a number of compelling questions left over from the seminar, and we wanted Indi to have a chance to answer them.
Almost every company has to struggle with the balance between customer needs and internal business objectives. In this episode the crew examines the recent situation at Facebook. While trying to please both users and build a business model, the fast moving organization has stepped on many toes.
How do you communicate complex and interactive design ideas to the development team? To answer this question, I had a chance to speak with with D. Keith Robinson, the Creative Director of Blue Flavor. We had a great discussion regarding the “backstage” portion of web app design.
Today’s podcast features a fascinating conversation I had with New York Times graphic journalists, Andrew DeVigal and Steve Duenes. Andrew and Steve are part of the team responsible for taking data and raw information from the day’s news and turning it into highly interactive and informative online experiences.
Derek Featherstone travels the globe as a premier expert speaker on web accessibility, and I had a chance to sit down and interview him for the SpoolCast. I think you’ll find our talk enjoyable and informative!
Like many of us, Cameron Moll works in a large, complex organization. This means managing design decisions and wrestling (often inflexible) enterprise technology. He talked to me about how he has integrated his real-world experiences into his UI12 tutorial and how he is working on bringing elegance and great function to his complex work projects.
In this interview, Kevin Cheng and Jared Spool discuss the use of comics to express user experience ideas early in the brainstorming stage of a project. Comics show the team how a user will experience the design.
This week the crew discusses a controversial blog posting, the role of usability research in product development, and experience design vision work and its application in the consumer and enterprise space.
In today's SpoolCast, Christine Perfetti, UIE's Managing Director, sits down with Kim Goodwin, the General Manager and Vice President of Design at Cooper. The folks at Cooper are widely regarded for their design methods, including Goal-Directed Design and Personas.
In today's SpoolCast, I had the opportunity to speak with Gerry McGovern. Gerry is a widely-acclaimed speaker author and consultant on the topic of web content.
Jared Interviews Patrick Hofmann at UPA 2007 Austin and gets his insight on internationalization, visual communication, and getting writers and engineers to express themselves visually.
SpoolCast Crew Episode 5 - featuring Nate Bolt, DeWayne Purdy, Kyle Pero, Daniel Szuc, Joshua Porter and Jared Spool. This week: iPhone, MS Surface, Second Life and more!
This week Josh and I talk about all the ways we get in trouble. Whether its speaking in public or writing on our blogs, sometimes we kick up a sandstorm unintentionally. STC2007, Art vs. Design, and the Facebook API platform.
Kate Gomoll is president and founder of Gomoll Research & Design. Back in March, we hosted Kate for a UIE Virtual Seminar on Field Studies, and recorded a followup podcast. We thought Kate’s insights were so useful that we’ve decided to share them with all of our SpoolCast listeners.
In this audio recording from January's UIE Web App Summit, Adaptive Path's Peter Merholz and UIE's Jared Spool lead an entertaining discussion about the magic behind the scenes at Web 2.0 star Flickr.
In mid-May I was asked to sit down for an interview with my good friend and former UIE colleague Carolyn Snyder at the 54th Technical Communication Summit of the Society for Technical Communication. (STC) Carolyn assembled some great questions from STC members and we had a grand time discussing them with the audience.
In this audio recording from January's UIE Web App Summit, eBay's Christian Rohrer provides a peek behind the curtain at eBay's User Experience (UX) process.
The second episode of the Josh and Jared Show, where Joshua Porter and Jared Spool get together and discuss the interesting happenings in the world of experience design. This week: MySpace, Life Stages, Virb, Twitter, social design field research, and more.
In the keynote presentation I gave at our User Interface 11 Conference, I highlighted how the most successful experience design teams are thriving in the fast-paced environment. If you missed it, or would like to share it, click through to our blog where we've also included the slides and a full transcription. (Originally recorded at the UI11 Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts on October 10, 2006.)
In our latest talk from our archives we present Luke Wroblewski. He's a leading thinker, noted author and speaker in the field of visual design and design strategy; and a senior principal designer at Yahoo! He gave his talk "Using Design to Articulate and Define Strategic Direction" to rave reviews at our User Interface 11 Conference that we held in October of 2006.
We discuss the big user experience stories from 2006, including the Wii, the Target accessibility law suit, moderated vs. unmoderated testing techniques, and more.
We discuss the big user experience stories from 2006, including the Wii, the Target accessibility law suit, moderated vs. unmoderated testing techniques, and more.
We discuss the big user experience stories from 2006, including the Wii, the Target accessibility law suit, moderated vs. unmoderated testing techniques, and more.
This is the inaugural episode of a new show we're temporarily calling The Josh and Jared Show. Every few weeks, my colleague Joshua Porter and I will get together and discuss the interesting happenings in the world of experience design. This episode focused on the role of information architecture and some of the changes the discipline is undergoing.
In this presentation, David Malouf moves beyond the usual story of patterns, code, and tips and tricks, and talk more about aesthetics, experience design, brand, and total environmental context of use. He layers those elements over a discussion around trying to define “richness” in the context of general application design and then try to apply it to a continuum of various types of computer and network based solutions.
In this interview, UIE's Joshua Porter and Jared Spool talk with David Malouf, Senior User Experience Designer at Symbol Technologies, and Bill Scott, Ajax Evangelist and Design Manager for Yahoo's recently released Design Pattern Library. They discuss Rich Internet Application development, Ajax, and other important issues surrounding the creation of sophisticated web apps.
We discuss card sorting techniques, social collaborative tools, the state of UX organizations across the country, and whether World Usability Day is a good idea or not.
I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Hagan Rivers and discuss her latest report, The Designers Guide to Web Applications, Part 1: Structure and Flows. We talked about the origins of Hubs and Interviews, two basic structures commonly found in many applications. We also discussed her nifty method of diagramming out a web-based application and her method for making changes with her clients' applications.
We discuss card sorting techniques, social collaborative tools, the state of UX organizations across the country, and whether World Usability Day is a good idea or not.
We discuss card sorting techniques, social collaborative tools, the state of UX organizations across the country, and whether World Usability Day is a good idea or not.
Recorded October 2, 2006, we discuss card sorting techniques, social collaborative tools, the state of UX organizations across the country, and whether World Usability Day is a good idea or not.
Recorded September 11, 2006, we discuss dream panels, CUE studies, whether we're an engineering discipline or a craft, the value of heuristic evaluations, and how whether we should learn anything from Facebook's recent loss of face.
(Duration: 27m 36s)Recorded September 11, 2006, we discuss dream panels, CUE studies, whether we're an engineering discipline or a craft, the value of heuristic evaluations, and how whether we should learn anything from Facebook's recent loss of face.Present for this recording were Jared M. Spool, DeWayne Purdy, Kyle Pero, Lyle Kantrovich, Rashmi Sinha, Nate Bolt, and Joshua Porter.
Recorded September 11, 2006, we discuss dream panels, CUE studies, whether we're an engineering discipline or a craft, the value of heuristic evaluations, and how whether we should learn anything from Facebook's recent loss of face.
We discuss dream panels, CUE studies, whether we're an engineering discipline or a craft, the value of heuristic evaluations, and how whether we should learn anything from Facebook's recent loss of face.
Recorded August 23, 2006, this inaugural podcast discusses innovative design, the definition of usability, and the role of knowledge. In other words, simple topics to pass the time.
Recorded August 23, 2006, this inaugural podcast discusses innovative design, the definition of usability, and the role of knowledge. In other words, simple topics to pass the time.
Recorded August 23, 2006, this inaugural podcast discusses innovative design, the definition of usability, and the role of knowledge. In other words, simple topics to pass the time.
Recorded August 23, 2006, this inaugural podcast discusses innovative design, the definition of usability, and the role of knowledge. In other words, simple topics to pass the time.
Recently, Jared had a chance to discuss these issues with Barry, in preparation for Barry's keynote at the upcoming User Interface 11 conference. We recorded the discussion and have added it to the UIE Brain Sparks Audio Library for your listening pleasure.
Josh Porter and Jared Spool discuss many of the questions we received during Josh's Users as Information Architects: Is Tagging Right for Your Site? Virtual Seminar -- Part 2.
Josh Porter and Jared Spool discuss many of the questions we received during Josh's Users as Information Architects: Is Tagging Right for Your Site? Virtual Seminar.
Happy Users are the brass ring of web site design. Ultimately, the designers of every site have making users happy as their primary objective. However, many designs end up frustrating instead. Since 1996, User Interface Engineering's main research objective is to understand how to achieve designs which produce happy users. UIE's researchers have found that user happiness is directly tied to whether the users accomplish their goals on the site. What prevents users from accomplishing their goals? Almost always, it's poor design caused by a design team that doesn't have all the information they need to make the right decisions.
When building a web site, how do you know what content your users need? How do you decide when you’ve provided enough content? While we know a lot about designing the structure of a web site, planning and developing the content is still very much of a craft in web site design. In our first released recording, this presentation highlights the latest research of User Interface Engineering’s research to help web site designers understand what content users might be seeking.