April 23, 2012

Attention to details, hard work and giving a shit

I often hear from new clients "Apple kind of usability" as if it was some sort of magic. No. It's attention to details, hard work and giving a shit.

Clients often evaluate designers on the basis of whether they have it or not, but this is entirely wrong approach, because things like attention to details, hard work and giving a shit are available to everyone.

Design as a profession has been romanticized for a long time, and I find that some designers actually enjoy this mysterious aura around them and support the myth that they are the ones whom the gods of creativity are talking to.

The problem is that this illustion creates very mundane problems for both designers and other project stakeholders. Clients often don't realize that most of the design work is as down-to-earth as accounting. So when I work with new clients and ask them a bunch of very down-to-earth questions about product expectations, it comes as a surprise to them, because they thought all I was supposed to do is to give them Don Draper's mysterious smile, walk out of the office and come back with a masterpiece in 2 weeks.

If you want to do a good job - break the myth, tell them what Apple kind of usability really is.

March 27, 2012

Nice findings to read on IxD, UXD, design process and business

Recent findings - brilliant reads, perhaps a bit advanced level though:

- Interaction Design Encyclopedia: articles by various UXD and IxD experts and commentary by many well known practitioners: http://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/ The Encyclopedia is still in the making, so you can subscribe to releases of new chapters.

- Working Through Screens: 100 ideas for Envisioning Powerful, Engaging and Productibe User Experiences in Knowledge Work: http://flashbulbinteraction.com/WTS_opening.html It's full of great insights!

- How Do You Design? http://www.dubberly.com/articles/how-do-you-design.html I'm in the middle of reading it - great piece of very profound knowledge on design process

- Lessons from a 40 years old: http://a.wholelottanothing.org/2012/03/my-webstock-talk.html Rethinking the startup go-go-go fast train scene and living the life burried in Minimal Viable Products

Enjoy!

March 6, 2012

From Wireframes to Graphics: How Visual Designers Work with Wireframes

The Background Story

Over the years of working as a UX designer with multiple clients I had a chance to work with very different design and development teams, and naturally see very different end products being delivered. What particularly strikes me is that the product of designers who create visual design for wireframed interfaces tends to fall very neatly into 2 types:

A. Aesthetically pleasing look & feel that takes the wireframed interface to the next level, clearly communicates product message and the behavior planned by UX/Interaction designers

B. A PSD file that contains the same wireframes, only with some colors and, if you're lucky, some textures applied to them

The B concerns me a lot as this is not what visual design should ever be, unless the project requires wireframes to be extremely hi-fi and doesn't allow much liberty.

So recently I started to talk to some fellow UX designers, started discussions on Quora and UX Stack Exchange, and I found that in fact many other teams are familiar with the B. There were many potential reasons mentioned for the B to be happening, so I decided to do baby steps and choose one of them to tackle.

The Problem

Here are some common problems people mention about the B:

1. Visual designers feel too constrained by the pre-defined schematics of the wireframes to take more initiative and liberty in choosing visual style

2. Lack of visual design strategy in companies and not enough communication in terms of what exactly the company means by “modern, crisp, elegant, clean, sexy, etc. look”

3. Very often the clients expect the visual design to be as close to the wireframes as possible because they have signed off on the wireframes, and this creates a certain "tradition"

4. Visual designers don't get involved enough in the interface planning phase and don't get to research and suggest their own solutions, instead wireframes are simply handed over to them with the typical "here is how it should work"

5. Sometimes visual designers lack experience in working with wireframes

I will try to tackle #5 as improving it will help resolve other issues. #5 is also the easiest to tackle as the lack of experience actually is not a problem, it's a temporary and necessary state of any skill set. We all have lack of experience in millions of things every day.

What I will personally do about colored wireframes and the lack of experience

So how do you grow your experience? You practice and learn from more experienced professionals. I'd like to think that I can help with the latter.

I have created a short, 5 questions survey here: http://goo.gl/myLhv and I invite visual designers with a considerable experience in working with wireframes to participate and share their workflow and methods, challenges and frustrations.

What I plan to do with the results of the questionnaire: analize, compile and share a study or a collection of personal stories and advice with the purpose of...

a) helping the teams I'm working with to understand the process of working with wireframes

b) helping less experienced designers learn from more experienced designers

c) sharing knowledge with anyone who is interested in learning how designers do it, because frankly, most of the time people seem to think that this is what's going on when a visual designer receives a bunch of wireframes:

Oh, God, what kind of ads will I get after searching for this kind of images...

So, ehm, don't be shy, participate and ask your fellow designers to participate as well! Once again, the survey is here: http://goo.gl/myLhv Thank you all in advance!

February 21, 2012

Lots of talking about death and User Experience Design

I spotted a very interesting theme trending - the death of user experience design (with variety of explanations and nuances on what exactly it means) Here is what my journey into the world of the dead looked like:

First I stumbled upon UX Research is Dead, Long Live Reasearch, then amused by the similarity of the headline I read Marketing is Dead, Long Live UX. Supporting the same train of thought was Is this the beginning of the "Success by UX" era? where @cross_andrew points out that organizations won't get far without well established UX design discipline/organization-wide attitude.

Then I read @Cennydd's thoughts on The Fall and Rise of User Experience - where he explains that UX and design literacy is mainstream now and that the amount of pollution and stagnation in UX discipline is growing (excellent read btw)

Finally I read User Experience Design is Dead, Long Live User Experience by @peterme where he suggets that the phrase UX Design is redundant and can even be harmful as it assumes it's only the designers vs. organizations as a whole who need to worry about user experience. About the same time I got to enjoy I don't believe in UX design by @adamconnor - very thoughtful points about the problem with UX design. I hope these discussions will result in something bigger than UX designers just changing the wording in their titles.

And today I read The Death of Death by @berkun - good points about the whole business of something being proclaimed as dead.

Does this all mean that we, people who care about improving life experiences, used our collective brain and finally decided to rebel against UX design in organizations/freelance businesses where:

a) it's used to formally announce that they do care about the users and are hand in hand with today's much advertised UX thinking

b) it's pushed forward as (often fake) advantage to sell products and services - if everyone's offering it, gotta jump on board!

c) it's "that thing those guys called UX designers do" and where those guys are treated as mad schientists or a bunch of smart asses with no real job to do

d) it's easy for anyone with mediocre talents, experience and knowledge of the domain claim themselves to be a professional

Or is this whole death thing just shananigans used as a "cheap way to draw attention" (cited from @berkun's post)?

I would like to believe it's the former.

*wow, I repeated user experience/UX 19 times in this post.

February 19, 2012

We are Masters of Sequence

No matter how much we seem to be willing to learn or how much of that knowledge we seem to be willing to use, we're not very smart and we're lazy. In some branches of Physics, universe is considered "lazy" - everything strives to require as less effort as possible. Human wayfinding seems to be lazy as well - even if we possess the right knowledge for analysis we'll use hacks that require less effort to get things done. I keep noticing that sequence of actions is one of them.

Buying a subway ticket in a ticket machine in Bangkok can be confusing to visitors because there is no way to buy several tickets in one session. When you watch people trying to do that you'll notice that people won't just poke around or try to read labels, they'll first of all try to repeat the sequence of actions previous person did in hope that this might solve the problem.

Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/alfianz/47895761/

When people tried to switch language from Thai to English on DVD player in our guesthouse in Krabi (Thailand) they didn't start analysing how the system works, they followed the exact sequence of steps the local guy did before to switch the language. They obiovusly had no idea what those buttons and steps did, they just remembered the sequence.

When you enter a store to buy water and you see a guy coming to the counter with a bottle of water, very often you don't start looking for clues or patterns in the store, you just try to retrace that guy's route to find the water - "where did he get that? I saw him coming out from that back section. It must be there!"

In many cases this strategy will fail - e.g. if you do exactly the same steps as the previous person did with a ticket machine, you'll probably get a wrong ticket, nevertheless following sequence may be the first thing that you choose to do unconsciously.

This makes me think that so many people get things done on a daily basis relying on sequence of steps that produced the desired results for other people. We're indeed masters of sequence.

This also makes me think that perhaps product design teams focus too much on making sure users understand the principles of how their products work (on conceptual level, not functional details level) Perhaps we should pay a little bit more attention to creating experiences that translate this human love for hacks into the interfaces.

Frequent use of a sovereign* application will eventually teach its users the "right" way, beginners though will still rely on the easiest wayfinding. If we can accommodate the usual mental patterns of a lazy brain, it would be even easier for the users to keep hacking through their lives - something we seem to truly love doing. Something to think about.

*Sovereign apps: used by Alan Cooper along with Transient apps in About Face 3, shortly defined here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_posture

February 10, 2012

Latest UX food for thought

The tyranny of the grid: http://madebymany.com/blog/the-tyranny-of-the-grid

Timeless advice about Chief Customer Officers: http://experiencematters.wordpress.com/2012/02/10/advice-for-chief-customer-officers/

The Path (the Path Path) to fail: http://www.inkblurt.com/2012/02/08/the-path-to-fail/

Stories from UXD masterminds: http://www.scribd.com/doc/40698393/UX-Storytellers

Everything you thought you knew about learning is wrong: http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2012/01/everything-about-learning/

January 30, 2012

Latest Little Big Details

Facebook Birthdays: http://littlebigdetails.com/post/11921050283/facebook-if-several-friends-have-their-birthdays

Amazon Reviews: http://littlebigdetails.com/post/16761762320/amazon-com-shows-the-most-helpful-favorable

Facebook Comment Translate: http://littlebigdetails.com/post/16117036663/facebook-when-a-comment-is-not-in-your-set

January 18, 2012

The Importance of Optimization Phase

I personally love optimization phase of the design process. This is usually relatively short phase of a design project where you look at your work (wireframes, interaction schemes, prototypes, etc.) and ask yourself "can X be done in a more efficient way?" or "Is there a way of making X more responsive?"

This phase is critical, in my experience most of the best solutions came up during optimization. However, in many cases this phase is skipped alltogether - the designs are done, design reviews done, big and small issues solved, we're good to go.

What a bit more time spent on optimization does is push the designers beyond this dangerous "done" status - is there anything else we can still simplify, reduce, re-use, enhance, etc.? This would be one of Saint-Exupery covered cases: "A designer knows he has achieved perfection [...] when there is nothing left to take away"

Optimization is not usability testing. It actually does not require any user participation in order to be able ask yourself whether you can still improve on details. All you need is a common sense and knowledge of UI patterns and their best applications.

For me a screen after optimization will almost always look and behave much better than the version that has been declared as "done" by the team. Give it a chance if you haven't yet!