UXDiva’s Blog

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.