Lately, I’ve been preaching about how it’s important for UX designers to understand the technology our designs will be implemented in. I’m going to try to put this gospel into practice by unpacking for you the hidden treasures that HTML5 offers UX designers. HTML5 is a big deal. Maybe the biggest deal in Web technology since JavaScript. (I’m still in denial about Flash.) HTML5 is going to make it easy for developers to make websites with desktop application interactivity, performance, and functionality, which is going to open up vast horizons of possibility for UX designers.
Archive for the ‘Tools and Techniques’ Category
A Detailed Look at HTML5 for UX Designers
Monday, August 9th, 2010Mobile Prototyping Tools (Part 1 of 2) – Axure
Thursday, July 15th, 2010In the recent past, I have been tasked with designing mobile applications for iPhone. Axure is the prototyping tool we use at Evantage and it has served me well in terms of creating prototypes for mobile applications and demonstrating them on a laptop. However, I have had trouble viewing the prototypes on an iPhone. The screen size shrinks on the iPhone making it difficult to read the content on the screen. In the near future we expect to use these prototypes to gather feedback from users and design applications for other devices (Android, Blackberry, iPad, etc). To ensure that we have the tools at Evantage to meet the demand, I spent some time looking at the workarounds with Axure and pros and cons of other mobile prototyping tools designed for the UX community.
(more…)
Where business analysis and user experience intersect: the benefits of collaboration
Monday, July 12th, 2010According to Harvard Business Review editor Julia Kirby, 2010 may be the year for a resurgence in companies reconnecting with their users and focusing on user experience, but don’t forget about business analysis! It’s the BA’s job to ensure that the issues and business objectives are understood. When the solution involves end users (of a new or enhanced application/website/product), that’s where we need team up with a user experience (UX) professional.
A Template for Gathering Plausible Prototype Content
Sunday, May 30th, 2010At Evantage, interactive prototyping and iterative prototype testing are key components of our process. We typically work on complex, business critical systems that must serve a wide array of audiences. Iterative prototyping and testing are absolutely crucial to designing a pleasant, usable experience for systems like these. There are many factors that contribute to the effectiveness of prototype testing, but one of the biggest is content. I recently cooked up a tool to help designers articulate their needs and get that content from those who have it.
Fred is speaking at SXSW 2010!
Thursday, March 11th, 2010Are you going to SXSW? If you are then check out “The Right Way to Wireframe!” This is a two-part talk in which myself and three other user experience designers tackled the same business problem using different tools.
In the UX world, we don’t get to see each other’s work very much; this talk changes that. It shows how, no matter what tool you use, the important part is the thought process you go through to arrive at your solution. Here are the links to the two workshops:
The Right Way to Wireframe - Part 1
The Right Way to Wireframe - Part 2
Also, I’m running a little social & technological experiment… I’m sharing all the notes I take at SXSW with the whole world via Evernote. Of course I’ll take notes at panels, but the really interesting part of SXSW is the discussions on the side. Those’ll show up in my notes too. Here’s the URL if you want to follow along!
http://www.evernote.com/pub/fred_beecher/sxsw2010notes
The environment at SXSW is… well, I’ll be kind and say, “fluid.” If you want to see what I may or may not be attending, check out my schedule on Sitby.Us.
User Experience Design Career Development – Part 1: A Formal Career Path
Monday, February 15th, 2010User experience (UX) design has a reputation for being both hard to get into and hard to progress from. I talked about how to get into UX design in my last article, so now I want to talk about where you go once you get in. In some ways, this is actually a harder problem. There are books that introduce you to UX design but none that really show you how to branch out once you’ve established yourself as a UX designer. Fortunately, I work at Evantage, where in 2006 Mary Donnelly and I helped management and HR to define a comprehensive UX design career path. I’m going to share it with you here and then discuss some other options to consider in a follow-up article. (more…)
Maximizing Usability Testing in a Pared Down Project
Friday, July 31st, 2009We all understand that times are hard right now. Finding the money to fund a project can be difficult and you will find yourself paring the project plan way down in order to complete it. Just because the money dries up doesn’t mean user testing needs to dry up. There are plenty of ways to test your site on the cheap. Finding creative ways to keep usability testing in a project can make the best use of the dollars you have, catch issues before any code is written and give a better user experience to your customers.
User Centered Design Process for Healthcare Systems
Friday, June 26th, 2009When I was putting together a presentation on User Experience and Healthcare for Refresh Portland, I stepped back to see if I do anything differently when designing products and applications for Healthcare clients than I do for clients in other industries. After looking at the emerging trends in the Healthcare industry and the shifting landscape of online user behavior, it became clear to me that when designing for Healthcare, I focus more user research and I prefer smaller, more iterative cycles within the design process.
The attached presentation details my insights on the subject and describes the steps I feel one should focus on when designing products and applications for Healthcare users.
Recruiting Agency + User Testing = Nirvana
Thursday, June 11th, 2009We do a lot of user testing here at Evantage. A typical project can have a few rounds of testing. It’s that love of creative solutions for complex problems that leads us to find out if users totally get it or if they are struggling to complete a task we had all high-fived over when the prototype was initially designed. Lots of user testing ensures that we are certain that users will spend time on the site/application/device and find everything they need.
Performing all this testing requires users. Depending on the number of personas or profiles I create for a client this could be anywhere from 7-20 people for each round of testing. This doesn’t seem like much and clients often think that they can save the recruiting costs if they do it internally, but I find that hiring a recruiting agency to find users is more efficient and even cost effective in the long run.
The Five Minute Home Page Usability Evaluation
Thursday, March 26th, 2009A co-worker came into my office today with a printout of a prototype home page a friend of hers was working on. She was wondering if having this contact box on the home page was a good idea or not.
I don’t know when people will learn, but asking me a yes or no question is a Bad Idea. I am not known for my brevity.
What came out of this was what was probably the world’s fastest home page usability evaluation. And in the time it took me to tweet about it, this friend had turned into a potential client. This led me to believe that this kind of ultra-fast evaluation might be a worthwhile business development tool.
So, here is what I did… but is this a repeatable process? Maybe, maybe not. Try it out and let me know.
A template for capturing & analyzing qualitative user experience data
Tuesday, March 17th, 2009Until recently, I captured all my data from interviews, contextual inquiries, walkthroughs, and user testing in Word. For each participant, I’d type my observations etc. into a copy of the test plan. At the end I was left with many many documents which I would print out, spread across my desk, and stare at.
I became dissatisfied with this form of analysis. It resists rigor. So during the second to last round of testing I did, I put all my Word notes into an Excel document to make comparisons more effectively. It was lovely. It took a lot of effort with all that copying & pasting, but it was worth it.