UXDiva’s Blog

Recently I read a few job descriptions for positions for User Experience positions, and the reaction that I had was that there is still some confusion about what a User Experience designer does. There is no magic wand that allows a UX designer to make something more ‘user friendly’. There’s no eye-for-design that reveals usability flaws. Certainly there are some design principals that can help, but user experience design goes a step deeper than just whats on the surface.

After my experience this past week, I stumbled across a blog article on Pleasure and Pain by Whitney Hess that jived completely with my thoughts when I read these job descriptions. Her article published  in Mashable is titled “10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design.” In her article, Whitney describes that “there is no one-size-fits-all advice for UX.”

I too have shared the ‘blank stare’ that she describes when she tells someone she is a user experience designer, and I too tell people that I make things easy to use. More than that, being a User Experience designer is really taking a holistic approach to making sure that what you design ‘makes sense’. This goes beyond the graphics, the verbiage, and can even transcend into culture.

From Whitney’s article she lists the following as the 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design.

The following below the list is my commentary on these 10 Myths.

The 10 things user experience design is NOT…

1. .. user interface design

2. ..a step in the process

3. .. about technology

4. ..just about usability

5. ..just about the user

6. ..expensive

7. ..easy

8. ..the role of one person or department

9. .. a single discipline

10. .. a choice.

User experience is not:

1. ..user interface design. Having a holistic look at something goes beyond what you see on the UI. It also takes into account the interaction of the user and the cosmetic graphics on the screen. It also includes things like ‘time’. You can design a beautiful UI, but if you don’t consider how long it takes the page to load, then the user’s frustration will cancel out however beautiful the design in. In fact, on a web site, chances are the user won’t even wait to see the design.

2. .. a step in the process. During the engineering process of any user-centric application, it is important to get user input, before, during and after the development process. Even when you think a page final, the need to iterate may manifest itself by feedback as put into production in different environments. You should never consider a design unchangeable, after all, the only thing that stays the same is change.

3. ..about technology. One of the questions I hear a lot as a UI designer, is “which platform do I prefer, Mac, or PC?” To me the platform is just another tool to get something done. User experience is something that surrounds you. It can be the dull droning of sounds in your work environment, or the ambient lighting in your workspace. There are variables that the UX designer does or does not have control over, but the possibilities in the entire user environment should be taken into consideration when designing. Things like input and output controls, and various artifacts all influence design decisions.

4. …just about usability. The success or failure of a product does not always boil down to usability. There has to be a need for a product for it to be widely adopted.

5. ..just about the user. There will always be a need for for business goals to be met in a design. There are constraints as far as time, resources and expense in creating a successful product. Collecting user information is very important, but you also need to have buy-in from your stakeholders, and make sure that your designs can be implemented by engineers.

6. ..expensive. I often times think there is a misconception that user testing, or collecting user data is an expensive undertaking. However, the cost of creating an application that is unusable, or losing market-share to a competitor because users enjoy using their product more is a lot more expensive than doing some leg-work upfront. User testing does not have to be in a laboratory with one-way glass mirrors. The most challenging part of doing user-testing can be finding the users for the test. But once you get over the recruitment process, it can be as simple as just observing someone while they use an application, or go through some hand drawn wireframes. In desperate situations I’ve even collected some user data through phone conversations or email. It is better to collect whatever information from users you can than just trying to wing-it.

7. ..easy. I mentioned getting users for user testing right? Don’t fall into the trap of becoming your own user. Sure it’s important to use the application that you’re designing for at least to some extent, but don’t try to cut corners and forgo getting real feedback from outside sources. When you start making assumptions is when you quit innovating your designs.

8. .. the role of one person or department. Many people in UX are often called evangelists. This is because in order to spread a culture of UX in organizations they constantly need to talk about it.  User Experience is a very important part of Customer Experience as a whole. The UX designer needs to be in tune with Customer Service representatives, Marketing, Development, Management, Product Management and try to get everyone engaged in providing information that shapes the way users interact with the applications being designed. It’s important to collect information on previous versions so you work on making the next version more compelling.

 9. ..a single discipline. Before I became a human factors engineer, my background was in business analysis and design. I still use a lot of those skills as an HFE, but I have also find myself in the position to be a teacher, a writer, an information architect, a usability tester, an interviewer, and every once in a while a schmoozer. Someone who works in User Experience design may have to go in the field to do Contextual Interviews to collect work processes for users. They document their findings, do analysis, create knowledge maps, mental models, do card sorting exercises, create wireframes, write specifications, design screens, and teach their peers how to use new designs.

10. a Choice.  User Experience design helps reduce surprises when a product launches. Collecting user information, doing research, performing user testing, getting feedback and implementing feedback are some of the top ways you can ensure that your users will become fanatical about your products. Not doing these processes, leaves room for a lot of risk that the competition who does these processes will have the advantage. Many companies do not emphasize how important it is that your customers find pleasure in using the products that you provide for them.

That wraps up my commentary on the 10 Myths of User Experience. Just remember that it’s not just GUI design, it’s much, much more. It’s not important just to talk about User Experience, but to put it into practice in everything you do as a UX designer every day.

What a ride 2009 has been. I am so fortunate to have so many blessings during this year that has been so hard for so many people due to the economy. Here are some of the things that I’m thankful for:

• I am always the most grateful for William Otto. He is spectacular and only gets better every day.
• William will be out of diapers soon
• William attending a great daycare/school.
• Going to Mark and Jaime’s awesome Superbowl party.
• Having a Girls Night Out with Jaime and her beautiful sisters memorial day weekend.
• Spending time with Brooks and Linda at Graysen’s 2nd birthday party.
• Taking William to Funtastic Friday’s in Hollywood.
• Getting to watch William growing from a toddler to a little boy.
• Getting to take William to his first Easter Egg  Hunt, and watch him celebrate that he got 1 egg, and spending Easter with Nicole, Dan and their beautiful kids.
• Spending time celebrating with my friends at The Melting Pot for my birthday this year.
• Playing with William in his inflatable pool and water guns on hot summer days.
• Celebrating William’s 2nd birthday at the park with so many wonderful friends.
• Getting to see Jane’s Addition and NIN in concert this year with Damion and Dave.
• Spending time at the Hollywood Arts and Culture center, and getting introduced to the famous dog artist Tillamook Cheddar.
• Spending time with Joe, Carolina, Ellie, when they came to visit from Hawaii, and getting to hang out with Karina and her new family.
• Going to Jungle Island with William and Damion.
• Getting to have a Girls Weekend out in South Beach for Arelis’s Birthday/Bachelorette party.
• Watching Arelis and Will exchange their wedding vows in Orlando and having an awesome time with our friends.
• Visits from my mom, who is willing to drive for 5.5 hours to spend 1 night at my house.
• Living with my wonderful roomate Krystal, who I am always having fun with.
• Grandma Denton who loves to spend time with William.
• Living downtown, and being able to go downstairs and walk to the Cinema Paradiso, or the Downtowner.
• Catching up with Brian and Diane on his birthday and getting to reconnect with so many of my friends from the Keys that I haven’t seen in years.
• All of the free little festivals I’ve stumbled upon this year while living Downtown.
• Loving my job, working in a great project, and working for Brian who is an awesome boss.
• Being there for my friends when they need me.
• President Obama and all of the great changes he’s working for in this country.
• The air I breath and the sunshine I feel on my face on so many beautiful Florida days.
• Driving in my convertible with the top down.
• Waking up each morning to create a new day.
• Reconnecting with friends that I haven’t had contact with in many years and keeping up with them on Facebook.
• New friends that I’ve made this year.

Even though 2009 had its challenges, it has still been a great year.

I just read over Jared Spool’s article titled Deriving Design Strategy from Market Maturity, and something he mentions is something that I have to deal with every day as a UX designer. In my position as a Human Factors Engineer for a company that produces web enabled applications,  I have to choose my battles on a daily basis. In order to be successful, there must be collaborative relationships with the business, development and customers.

In this economy everyone is trying to re-use code as much as possible, so it’s pretty rare that you would get the opportunity to create a UI completely from scratch. There are front-end frameworks to be leveraged (Adobe Flex for example), there is back-end code reuse, and there are branding standards to be adhered to. This means that there is never 100% flexibility. Even in situations as small as what terminology to use, the decisions can be shaped by localization costs. Expense will always been a major factor in UI design even if it may not be obvious, and it’s something that all designers must live with.

I would say that I have designed 50% more interfaces than what are actually going to be leveraged in the application that is being delivered. But I always have to keep in mind that we are designing iteratively, and each of the pieces that aren’t going to be in this months release, may get slated to be in the next future release. This also gives me time to revisit the design based on customer feedback on existing functionality, and when I iteratively get back to these features I can see if I can improve them before they finally get included.

One of the important aspects of my role is not to dictate the way things are going to look or work, I have to show flexibility to the development teams and to the business, and my role is to gather customer data to hone my designs to their needs.  Based on customer data, I present suggested designs to the business and development and get their feedback before any development work is started. As the developers begin to work, if there are any holes in the design they know that I am the centralized point of contact for getting their questions answered–hopefully by customers.

Being in a Human Factors position will often times require social stills between many different groups. You want to have a great relationship with the business (Product Management), the developers and the customers if you expect to make a difference and get your designs approved and implimented.

UXDiva posts have become sparce lately. This is because I’ve been heads-down working on transforming a java based web app into a Flex-based Rich Internet Application. This is been such a great experience being able to leverage new technology to create different design patterns, and ease of use.

There have been plenty of challenges during this process. Having a solid information architecture for the suite of products in development would be nice. One of the design issues that has come up is the use of a “delete” button. Should we offer a delete button, or should the user just use the delete key on their keyboard? It seems to me that every opportunity should be taken to use keyboard shortcuts as much as possible. However, if one of the applications in the suite follows that design pattern, then they all should. Needless to say I’m losing this battle.

Another design challenge has been determining when to refresh the user’s screen. We try to avoid refreshes as much as possible because it inhibits the speed of the application, however, how to we let the users know that their view is not updated. When you have the possibility of hundreds of users using an Infrastructure management tool, and several people could be making changes to the infrastructure at once, when does it become a collaboration tool? Do we notify the user when new connections have been made? How do we determine how much information is too much information?

Due to the lack of customer exposure doing the design process, we will have to hash out some of these details during the product beta, but it would have been nice to have all these details before development started. Sometimes you never know how something is going to feel until you use it.

–That’s all for me today, signing off! UXDiva.

There are several ways that a web site or a web-enabled application communicates to users. In a previous post I wrote about how important it is to write a Creative Brief to bring focus to user communication through your design. Another important aspect of communication is through Branding. Branding is not just a color, logo and a font, but it’s a promise. Effective branding means that you are fulfilling promises by providing a positive customer experience.

Often times one of the items in a creative brief may be to support the brand. If that’s the case, the brand and the creative brief should be aligned. If you want to portray a feeling of trust to your users, you need to make sure that you provide a feeling of consistency. Consistency may manifest itself in color, font, look and feel, but it should also be conveyed through the user interactions with the application itself. This means that there should be no real surprises to the user.

Providing an intuitive interface gives the user a feeling of familiarity and provides comfort just as a positive branding experience. People tend towards the things that they are familiar with, and consistency is another great way of reinforcing familiarity.

Effective branding is an important competency of user experience, and it needs to be consistent, and it should be reflected throughout all user communication. This could be user interfaces, advertisements, signage, and collateral to name a few. Creative briefs, style guides, and POP are a few of the ways that designers communicate their branding standards throughout all of these different mediums. When an enterprise grows it’s important that the key players involved in creating branded items adhere to strict branding guidelines to keep consistant. Sometimes this can take coordination, but it’s something that should permeate an organizations company culture.

I recently was sent a link about a Q&A session on Usability by Jared Spool. There was a time where I had time to surf the internet to keep up to date on usability information in the community, but lately I’ve been so busy working on a project that reading this article  really reminded me that I need to spend more time observing the work practices of our users. According to Jared, the number one mistake of a designer is not to treat observing users as a nice-to-have an not a requirement. Due to the economic climate, I have had to come up with some work around solutions to spending time with users, through surveys, emails, phone interviews, but nothing really replaces the 1 on 1 user observation.

I had recently been thinking of scheduling some time with internal users, according to Jared I should be spending at least 2 hours every six weeks. I think it’s time that I schedule some time with these people, and to make sure that I am creating satisfying user experiences.  

I also found a copy of the Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines from the Department of Health and Human Services. I really enjoy this guide because it uses real research and sources for answers to so many web-related questions that come up during the design process. This is a valuable resource for when you can’t get to users to get the answers that you may need.

I also just read on mariobourque.com that Mario is going to be conference lead and committee member for IDEA2009, and IxDA2010. Hopefully my product will be released, the economy will pick up and I will be able to get more active in the UX community again, and attend some of the upcoming conferences this year. Attending a UX conference is always a way to refresh your skills and learn some new ones in the field of Usability and Human Computer Intraction.

This past few weeks I have observed something that has been nothing short of amazing. I have been working on a project for over a year now. The product is part of a line of products that are being produced at multiple sites. In the past few weeks I have witnessed a previously sense  of cooperation across multiple sites. Egos appear to have gone to the wayside. Contributors are chipping in, communicating, collaborating and generally being pleasant to work with. What on earth has been going on? The only thing I can think of is that the fear brought on by the recession has made people rethink the way they do things.

Shortly after I decided I wanted to write a blog post about this, I read Bruce Temkin’s blog about a New York Times article he just read called Why Bad Times Nurture New Inventions, the article in the NYT mades the following observations:

Bhide: “The deck gets reshuffled in a recession as habits are re-examined and patterns of behavior are broken, perhaps to greater degree than when things are humming along at a steady state. And that’s what creates business opportunities.” Bhide discusses Kindles, iPods, and computers and the 1980s.

Nelson: “America’s financial panics have often been the periods of its most interesting commercial and logistical innovations. Plummeting commodity prices combined with new observations about manufacturing or trade often suggest new solutions to old problems.” Nelson discusses wool manufacturers circa 1815, industrial food canners circa 1873, and integrated circuits in the 1970s.

McGrath: “With business as usual off the table in a recession, people become more open to new and efficient ways of doing things. And they’re forced to show more entrepreneurial discipline – you have to expend imagination before spending money.” McGrath discusses recent companies Kiva Systems and Hulu.

Kelly: “Inventors and innovative entrepreneurs should be smiling. That timeworn proverb about “an ill wind that blows no good” truly applies in an economic downturn. No doubt, in garages across the country, innovators are hard at work as opportunity bangs on the doors. Answering the call, however, will require them to step back and take a hard look at the current environment.” Kelly discusses small entrepreneurs.

Lindstrom: “What do Lindt chocolate, the Rubik’s Cube, French perfumes and a pair of Wellies have in common? They’ve all had increased profits during this recession. The number of products getting these results, however, is small and getting smaller by the day. These brands, which may weather the storm, offer some hints for start-up businesses.” Lindstrom describes two concepts: 1) don’t ask consumers what they want; figure out what they need; and 2) practical features give consumers a reason to make a purchase.

So even though times may be uncertain and possibly full of despair, when you witness new innovation, collaboration, and people actually putting forth an effert to produce better work, it helps to unobfuscate the light at the end of the tunnel.

Yesterday I got quite a surprise. As I arrived at work, I went to remove my laptop computer out of the trunk of my car, and lo-and-behold it was not there! Someone stole my laptop out of the locked trunk of my car during the night. I was stunned and shocked. This became an emotional experience for me. On top of it all, I was meeting with a mortgage broker that evening, so I had a printed copy of my credit report in the backpack that my computer was in. This means whoever the thief is, has a copy of my name, address, birthday and social security number. After filing a police report, I immediately called Equifax to protect my identity, but there’s really not a whole lot you can do until someone steals it. I also subscribed to their monthly credit monitoring service.

The police said that 3 people on my street within a block of each other called and reported stolen items. I guess with the poor economy I should look into how I can protect myself and my family from any other incidents like this in the future. I’ve spent the past 24 hours trying to do damage control.

Today a coworker emailed a video about an item called a bump lock that only licensed locksmiths are supposed to have. The video snippet talked about how people can buy these on the Internet, and how they easily open most locks. I am afraid that people are going to start getting desperate if the economy does not start improving.