2010 seems like a turning point for user experience professionals. The decade has seen success stories like Amazon and Zappos that have made businesses sit up and value the power of understanding customer needs. There has been a surge in people across generations using online media for everyday activities and some of the trends in social media, mobile applications and technology have opened new doors for user experience professionals. At Evantage we have started experiencing the impact of some of these trends.
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Archive for the ‘User Experience’ Category
Does Your Website Really Need a Mobile App?
Thursday, January 21st, 2010Word on the street is that if you have a great site you should create a mobile app. I’ve been hearing it a lot from clients lately that everybody is on their phone and “if users could access our information then our product will be more valuable.” Is this just a fad or is it valid? Well, that depends on your customers and your business goals. (more…)
Getting Started in User Experience Design
Monday, November 16th, 2009In the past few months I’ve taken on two and-a-half mentees through the Information Architecture Institute’s mentorship program (two are local, one is remote… sorry Tyler, I know you’re a full person!). This has got me thinking even more than usual about how to get started in user experience (UX) design, so I’ve decided to save myself some time and write a post that collects all the resources and advice I usually give out on this topic. I hope this is useful for you, but if you feel like I’ve missed something there’s a comments box at the bottom. ; )
Sustainability and User Experience Join Together for World Usability Day
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009This Thursday marks the fourth year of World Usability Day. Held the second Thursday of November every year, it is an event that celebrates the design around us that makes our lives easier. This year’s focus on sustainability and design.
Having always been an environmental geek, the theme of this year’s World Usability Day is especially important to me. Sustainability and creative reuse has been a focus of mine since I was in an organization lobbying for recycling containers in high school. I’ve always focused on how daily actions can affect the Earth. I was one of the few people who used her palm pilot to store directions to friend’s homes and measurements for an ottoman I was building because I did not want to waste paper. My current phone maps directions, stores measurements and even lets me check in for a flight without the hassle and guilt of paper. Not only does this design create less waste, it also makes me more organized.
The last few years has seen a greater consciousness in how we treat the world and how thoughtful design of systems and products can improve someone’s day. Instead of jumping into design, we take a moment to study how people use existing technology and how they live their lives or do their jobs and then make recommendations for the systems and products they use. This may result in a higher initial cost, but the benefit is a long term savings that resounds with many people in this economy. I realize that this doesn’t work for everyone. For example, my brother isn’t an eco freak like myself, but he loves smaller energy bills and I love that he makes less of an impact on the Earth.
Join the discussion of this year’s celebration. UPA chapters around the world have events focusing on sustainability and user experience. Find your local chapter event.
The Aesthetics of Interaction: A Response to Tog’s iPhone Home Screen Redesign
Wednesday, October 21st, 2009The week before last, the legendary Bruce Tognazzini posted an article to his AskTog column proposing a solution to several problems he sees with the home screen. I read it, but my reaction was not the fawning idolatry I’d expected. It’s very difficult for me to say this but… his redesign is inelegant. The problems he identified are real and relevant, but I couldn’t help but react negatively to what I perceived to be an aesthetic dissonance in his solution. It doesn’t fit the playful aesthetic that is characteristic of the iPhone OS. So I’ve let the problems steep in my brain for a few days, and I think I’ve come up with a more elegant (or at least more iPhone-ish) solution.
Documenting User Research
Tuesday, September 1st, 2009As a user experience consultant, I spend a fair amount of time at the beginning of a project reading existing user research reports. These reports help me understand the user research done in the past, the outcome and what, if anything was identified for further exploration. For small and relatively simple projects these reports are fairly easy to thread together. But for large and more complex projects that involve multiple user experience professionals conducting user experience activities in parallel, tracing the user research history just six months after the project is complicated and can sometimes be challenging.
Here are the six data points that I think every user research report must include.
Nine Essential Characteristics of Good UX Designers
Thursday, July 23rd, 2009Someone sent a message to the Adaptive Path Alums mailing list last fall asserting that Information Architects (IAs) need to be really great coders to do their jobs. I was aghast. I uttered many things, loudly, that are inappropriate for a professional blog. The clincher for me was this line, “[IAs] need to wake up in the middle of the night and code SQL joins.” No. No, we don’t. I collected myself and wrote a response just snarky enough for me to feel I’d made my point. This discussion went back and forth for a bit, but it ended up somewhere interesting. To make my ultimate point, I thought hard about it and defined the nine essential characteristics you must possess to make a good software user experience designer.
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.
A look at Healthcare Systems and Web 2.0
Friday, May 22nd, 2009Recently I attended the Health 2.0 conference and was impressed by the drive and the passion displayed by everyone to transform the Healthcare industry. This included entrepreneurs, policy makers, patient advocates, physicians, corporate and research organizations. The conference discussions highlighted the changing role of patients and physicians and showcased the different ways in which Web 2.0 tools had been used to help bring this change. It was a good platform to get a sneak preview into the future of the digital landscape of Healthcare and evaluate some of our strategies for getting there.
Sustainability = Accessibility
Wednesday, May 13th, 2009I received the new Dwell magazine (Volume 9, issue 6, May 2009 “Beyond Green”) a couple of weeks ago. As I read the editor’s note about sustainability, I kept replacing the word sustainability with accessibility.
In Dwell Sam Grawe, editor-in-chief, states we as individuals need to make micro-decisions to improve sustainability and “government, corporations, and other institutions need to lay a framework that makes adopting those decisions easy.” (May 2009) The 508 law (Rehabilitation Act) was passed “to require Federal agencies to make their electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities.” (http://www.section508.gov/) Currently, the law applies only to federal agencies. Corporations and we as individuals are responsible for ensuring that this expands to other areas.
Lesson in User Research: Car rental experience
Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008Last week, as I was driving out of the rental car garage at Minneapolis airport I realized that I did not like the car I had just rented. The windows were getting foggy, it was 36 F and I was still trying to figure out how the vent-control-knob worked. The knob that I found [image 1] was different from what I was used to [image 2]. It had icons on top, instead of around it. It could be pressed and rotated while I was used to only rotating it and it was split in between making me wonder if I needed to be press both sides of it. I tried different permutations and combinations but windows did not clear up. So I decided to roll them down a bit. This was not the interaction I had anticipated. Mentally I had Xed the check box for renting this car again. (more…)
