User Experience, Design, Technology, Life

The inaugural UX London brought together some of the world’s leading practitioners of user experience for presentations and workshops and I was lucky enough to attend. Overall the three day conference was inspiring and I left safe in the knowledge that there is a bright future for user experience and that I want to continue to be a part of it.  The conference started with a day of presentations by such luminaries as Peter Merholz, Jared Spool, Luke Wroblewski and ‘The Don’ Norman. Days two and three were a mixture of half day workshops and further talks. I wanted to use this opportunity to share what I learned before I forget…

Notes from day one

The silo-ing of customer experience is a legacy of org-chart mentalities. By engaging everyone from the CEO down in the design process, we become facilitators for a much more successful outcome. This kind of total collaboration doesn’t slow down the process, but it may be a hard slog to get everyone incolved. – Peter Merholz

There is nothing tangible about service, but the value of a service is in the experience. – Eric Reiss

Parti is a term taken from architecture and means the basic scheme or concept of an architectural design, the big idea. In the context of web design, the parti derives from all the data and metrics we collect ahead of designing the early concepts. Everything from usage metrics, customer feedback and corporate strategy to concept test results and market forces combines to form the parti. – Luke Wroblewski

Users experience products from the outside in, through the interface and physical form, so in other words, the interface becomes the product. While it may be easier to focus on form and technology, the best products are designed from the inside out, meaning everything flows from behaviour. To design from the inside out, use behaviour as a design strategy, making it the differentiator, rather than features. Stop looking for users’ goals and preferences and start looking at what they do and why. Look for motivations, expectations and actions. – Dan Saffer

Designs can’t intuit anything, people intuit things, calling a design ‘intuitive’ is a shortcut. In order to make something ‘intuitive’, we must reduce the gap between current knowledge, which the user brings with them to the design and target knowledge, which they need to have to complete their task. Design happens in the gap between current and target knowledge and when the two meet, a design becomes ‘intuitive’. Field studies help us to find out more about current knowledge and usability studies can help us determine target knowledge. Both should be used to to create ‘intuitive’ designs. – Jared Spool

‘Decorating’ data, rather than using visual design to provide better access is dangerous. Find the story in the data, assign different visual cues to each dimension and remove anything that isn’t telling the story in order to visualise data successfully. – Jeffrey Veen

Whenever anyone says they want something, oppose it, question it. Life is complex and the tools we build have to match life, so the problem becomes one of understanding, not simplicity. Complexity is not bad, complicated is. In order to make something simple, you compensate by making other things complex. Complexity is good, it’s good to feel the world disappear as you engage in something you are doing. It’s enjoyable and productive. The reason the iPod is such a success is that it is a complex, but complete system, exposing only the parts of its complexity that a user needs at any given time. – Don Norman

Notes from day two workshops

Some new (to me) brainstorming ideas, including giving participants real incentives, like a ticket to a prize draw for every 10 ideas generated. Some interesting techniques include brainwriting, where each participant starts sketching an idea for three minutes, then passes it to their neighbour to continue until the sheet comes full circle back to the originator and using poetry to reduce the problem down to a haiku or bento, which apparently really focusses you in on the important parts of the problem. To further focus in on the problem, keep questioning the concept, swipe ideas from other fields or domains, move up or down levels of abstraction (called laddering) or pretend to make something completely opposite to what you are trying to design (bizarro world). Once all the outputs from the brainstorm have been clustered, use them to define design principles, which help pick the right concept, help make design decisions and help find the Buddha Nature of the product. Design principles should be short, memorable, cross-feature, specific (“Easy to use” is to broad) and non-conflicting. – Dan Saffer

Every link on a page gives of a scent that users follow, providing this scent gets stronger with each click, users will get increasingly confident that they are heading the right way and the number of clicks is irrelevant, i.e. the three click rule is “bullshit” (Jared’s words, not mine). Users don’t mind scrolling, providing the page doesn’t suffer from “Iceberg Syndrome”, i.e. users believe that the content below the fold is more of the same of what is above the fold. Other barriers to scrolling include horizontal rules, horizontal banners or banner sized white spaces and two column paragraphs that end at the same ‘height’. Users lose scent if they have to use the back button, which is “the button of doom” (Jared made us repeat this phrase several times), if they have to ‘pogo stick’ back and forth between gallery pages and content pages or if they have to use search. In fact by using search on a given page, users are telling us the target words they expect to find on that page. Breadcrumb trails act much like the back button and observation has shown that they are only used in ‘failure conditions’. Link order is important and in 99% of cases, alphabetical lists may as well be completely random. Finally, longer pages work better and pagination should be avoided where possible. – Jared Spool

Notes from day three workshops

‘Pencils Before Pixels’. Carry a sketchbook all the time (I once again do, after a hiatus of many, many years) and practice all the time. Be fast and loose, use icons, images and symbols and date your pages. Respect the borders, especially the gutters, print annotations neatly and remember that white space is ok. – Mark Baskinger & William Bardel

When putting together discussion guides for design research, start with a very broad question, then narrow down into specifics. The standard 45-60 minute interviews with 6-8 users plan works, but ensure that it is appropriate for the problem you are trying to understand. Bear in mind that the problem is not always what it first appears to be and define your research questions to provide the best answers. Research as close to the context of the problem as possible and don’t narrow in on the context too early. – Leisa Reichelt