This is an impromptu video of me interacting with the Google+ “add people to circles” feature.

Like most things we interact with in the world, there’s some good and some not-so-good to the experience.

First, the good:
1. The people “cards” are just the right size. The picture is just right also – big enough so I can recognize the person, small enough to fit their name.
2. It was also a smart idea to just show the target’s name (or email if the name is unavailable). It makes for easier and quicker scanning and target acquisition.
3. The whole card is a click target.
4. You can select multiple cards with clicks; no CMD+ or shift+click necessary. However, using a key combination (which some people will carry over from the desktop software interaction paradigm) works just fine as well.

The not-so-good:
1. Drag and drop appears to be the only way to get people into circles. Really? Given Google’s demonstrated commitment to accessibility, I *can’t* believe this is the only way to manage circle assignment. I must be missing something. That just can’t be.
2. A few times I highlighted multiple cards and then inadvertently deselected them. I have no idea why or how.
3. Believe it or not, on first view I thought Google+ had only found 28 (7 x 4) people I knew. It took more time than it should’ve to realize that the card area was scrollable. I might not be able to pin that on Google however. I used Safari on Mac OS X 10.7, which together are a walking advertisement for iOS disappearing scrollbars.

So what does this little spiel demonstrate? I guess it shows that even cutting-edge design with massive resources behind it can still occasionally be a struggle for users. Oh, and don’t forget the accessibility.

I’m on my way back from my company’s all-hands meeting.

After all the excitement and motivation the week inspired, I felt moved to write a UX mini-manifesto. A mini-festo, if you will.

Excuse any grammar or spelling issues; I’m composing in Evernote on my phone. I would love to hear my readers’ and followers’ comments on this post.

You’re an experience design practitioner. In your organizations, you should be responsible for:

• Creating an inviting and well-designed initial user experience.
• Designing and validating:

Along the way, you also:

• Collaborate on the definition and optimization of product development lifecycle processes with our functional neighbors – i.e. PM, Dev, QA, Marketing, and Social/Community Management.
• Measure, track and improve the user experience.
• Discover opportunities to delight customers in ways that are not easily discoverable by market-level research methods.
• Occasionally uncover strategic jobs that customers need doing, and design opportunities for more sustaining vs. incremental product innovations.
• Provide the business with both strategic and tactical customer insights and understanding.

Yale University’s Art Department site might just be the worst site ever created in the history of the Internet, Bitnet, Arpanet, BBS systems, Geocities, AOL, Compuserve, etc. Check it: http://art.yale.edu/

Please don’t blame me if you go blind, insane, or fly into a design-induced rage. I’m just the bearer of awful design news.

As I tweeted, it gets bonus points for having a nice big picture of Hitler front and center. Because, you know, there’s nothing more you can do to terrible design, except maybe to stick a picture of Hitler on it.

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Online survey service. Insufficient guidance on question type selection. Results: see picture.

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Interaction design is all too often simply surface treatment, mere smoke and mirrors. The Kayak site, if you haven’t had the good fortune to use it, is awesome. It works intuitively, powerfully, efficiently. I love me that Kayak.com.

But last week, just when I’m all ready to make a purchase and presumably earn Kayak a little commission scratch, I get this. And a great experience turns to poo.

Don’t get me wrong, Kayak is and will be my go-to flight comparator for the foreseeable future. But when you compare this to the other “oops” messages I’ve been posting lately (see here, here, and here), it just doesn’t stack up.

Thought for the day, peeps: one differentiator between an adequate experience and a great experience is that a great UX turns even the “oops” moments into an opportunity for increasing users’ attachment to your offering.

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This is a good example of how to tell people about new or improved features. Yes, it’s a bit intrusive, but it’s easy to dismiss if you don’t want to look at it.

The dialog is clearly designed to entice me to investigate LinkedIn’s improvements. This is a good, if not-so-subtle pattern for notifying users about changes to your website.

It’s all about context, yes. Some immensely complex UI’s are necessary in certain domains, for certain workflows. But sometimes you can just look at a UI and know that, for whoever its intended users are, it’s a horrible failure.

So it is with this Ferrari steering wheel. Via FastCompany and @JasonSpector, look upon the horror and of course watch the vid. Bonus points for the headline “Ferrari F10 Steering Wheel Looks Like a Robot Barfed on It.”

Here’s the vid about it too. Enjoy.

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Yes, the world has another after-the-fact design modification to add to its motley collection of hacks, patches, fixes, taped-on signs, and Sharpie-improved user interfaces.

Found at the Kent State University bookstore, where I ducked in to buy an umbrella during a downpour. I was there to do some customer observations for a product line I’m working on, and had to walk between buildings in a solid rain storm.

Notice the attention to detail on the mod. The counter clerks must’ve really been tired of walking people through the transaction flow. They even highlighted “BLUE LIGHTS” with blue marker, just so people would get the message.

This is nine kinds of awesome.

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I know, I know, this is how “The Design of Everyday Things” starts. The difference is that I found this instance at my local bank. The whole “Wells Fargo experience” is chock full of questionable design actually; I’ve struggled with elements of their web site, physical branch locations and ATM’s.

But it’s always good to catch one of those classic design gotchas in the wild, as it were. So look upon it and know that as long as there are problems out there like this, there’s work for those of us who try to make the world a more user-friendly place.

And yes, every time I leave the bank I pull the damn handle. And that’s because physical affordances are more salient and engaging than labels and signs.

I asked the bank employees how many people pull instead of push, and they just sort of heaved a collective sigh. I took that to mean “a lot”.

I’ve gotten more UX mileage out of that bank than you’d believe…

…and by some, I mean two. Three if you include the Slideshare pic from a few days ago, which I’ll lazily repost below.

First, here’s one from Mr. Tweet:

Cute, funny, capitalizes on a well-known existing meme. It’s not too objectionable, meaning it’s not going to piss anyone off in a major way. Overall, a good user experience in a crappy situation (i.e., you’ve tried to browse somewhere or save something, and it didn’t work.)

Next, here’s an RSVP and profile “completer” from eVite:

The context is different of course; this isn’t an error message. I get the fact that they’re trying to help people learn more about each other. Still, the “If I found 1K” question is whimsical but bothersome.

I don’t know why it sticks in my craw like it does; maybe it’s that there’s a disconnect between their intent (connecting people and helping people know each other better) and the execution. I guess it’s just that knowing the answer to that question is a crappy way to build connections between people.

So here’s my bottom line: Mr. Tweet w00t, eVite fail.

Oh, and here’s the Slideshare error message that I liked:

This my friends is how you increase trust and confidence through your UI.

In this case, it’s Travelocity that has done this, with the simple addition of some content about disclosing information before the user makes an irrevocable change.

Good on Travelocity for this one.

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Here’s a server error page that makes you feel good about the company or service.

It humanizes them. By that, I mean that it makes you feel that they have a sense of humor – and humility – and hopefully gets you to realize that there’s people behind the service; it’s not just a faceless corporation.

That’s a good thing.

This is just one of those little details that distinguishes companies who really keep on top of every aspect of the user experience from those that don’t.

Plus, I really like Slideshare.net. I keep all my best slide content there. So there’s that.

(Note: Here’s another guest post from Andreas Bossard, proprietor of the blog News of the Future and author of several excellent UsabilityBlog posts. Today he talks about his travails with the Paypal help system. Enjoy. -Paul)

I wanted to get help in Paypal, that’s why I clicked on “Help” and expected to see the help section of Paypal.
Instead I saw the following:

All that I read when scanning through the page is:

Help information isn’t available in English yet. […] select U.S. English.

So I need to change the language to U.S. English. Okay, I try to remember all the steps that they tell me, go through them and reach this page:

Hmm. I cannot see U.S. English. How to select U.S. English now? I think I will contact the Help Center. …But wait a minute… I could not access the help pages, that’s why I came to this page in the first place. I’m trapped in a can-not-get-help-loop. *argh*

Note: If I select German, then the help center is shown! But if I was an English speaker I would not be able to get help. I think this bug exists only for Swiss users, otherwise it would be fixed since a long time.

What to learn from this mistake by Paypal:

• Let me select the language for the help pages directly
• Or give me a direct link
• But no lengthy instructions please

When I clicked the help link, I need help immediately!

Yesterday I posted about a discussion Jared Spool and I had about the import of the iPad.

I made the claim that the handset would continue to be the innovation driver, and as soon as it had the computing horsepower to drive a large LCD monitor and run productivity applications, it would be the primary and dominant computing platform.

Several smart commenters weighed in as well, so check out their comments here at the post’s permalink.

Anyway, it turns out I’m not much of a prognosticator. It’s already being done.

Check out the video to see Citrix’s Nirvana phone driving a full-size LCD, keyboard, and mouse, and running Windows.

Now *that’s* what I’m talking about.

I really thought I’d be able to resist bloviating about the iPad. But then I read this tweet from Jared Spool:

Is nobody else talking about the iPad’s interesting facet? It brings the gap between phone & computer manufacturers closer together.

It got pushed to his Facebook as an update, where I flippantly responded:

And that’s a good thing why?? :-)

Graciously, Jared ignored my dumbass comment and persisted, writing this:

Seriously, I think there’s going to be some really interesting synthesis here. Nokia, LG, and Motorola really haven’t done anything scaled up before. The laptop & netbook players haven’t gone this small.

The competition will be interesting. Of course, there will be a lot of crap produced. (It’s Sturgeon’s Law.) But, there will be some really interesting innovations.

All because Apple had the balls to try something nobody else had done before. I think that’s the most significant part of all this….

(And here’s a question: How will Google respond? After all, they have Android on the low end and Chromium on the high end, but neither will really talk to each other.)

His follow-up got me to thinking. I didn’t respond point-by-point to his last comments, but his points helped me to suddenly sharpen my thinking and spin out a scenario in which tablets aren’t the wave of the future, but phones will continue to be.

So below I present to you my reasoning for why and how tablets are at best a diversion, and the real innovation will continue to happen with handsets. Read on for yet another opinion on the future of computing.

I agree with what you’re saying J. But my thinking is that until we have a truly convertible handheld-slash-desktop (and mobile computing) solution, the gap will continue to be a chasm into which product after product will fall into.

Now I’m not the most visionary person in the world, but it seems to me that the big, latent, unmet needs are this:

1. I need a mobile device that fits in my pocket, that allows me to do [pretty much what the iPhone, Android, and BB handsets do].
2. I need a computing device that gives me my familiar input devices (read: keyboard and pointing device), gives me access to my apps and content, and provides a large enough viewing area so I can work productively.

Notice that I didn’t say “contains my apps and content.” That was intentional. It doesn’t take a tech visionary to see that both our apps AND our content are migrating to the cloud.

Anecdotally, I can affirm that I am mighty tired of “curating” the content on my hard disks. I’d rather that stuff just lives in, is accessible from, and gets backed up in the cloud. And I WILL pay money for that. So, long story long, you’re right, the iPad comes close. But I think the real opportunity is this:

1. My phone-like mobile device does it’s thing while I’m mobile.
2. When I need to sit somewhere and work, I dock it. Then it pushes (at the VERY least) 1280×800 to an LCD, and automagically connects to my keyboard and mouse, to my suite of apps (wherever they may live – Office Live, Google Apps, whatever), and to my content. (And of course it brings up all my social interfaces.)

Obviously, handsets don’t have the horsepower to do this…yet. But they will. It’s clear that current PC architectures have massively oversolved for the computing horsepower problem, and if you’ve read any Clayton Christensen you know this is a scenario that’s ripe for disruption by a “good enough” solution that addresses the market’s new value dimensions.

Netbooks are an ongoing attempt to serve these new dimensions of value, but they’re constrained by having to run either bloated legacy OS’s or not-ready-for-primetime Linux distros. Plus, they don’t serve as  phones very well. Imagine holding one up to your ear… it’s like Maxwell Smart with a shoe to his head.

And you probably noticed I didn’t address the “how do I work productively when I’m mobile?” scenario. I’ll grant you that. But it’s certainly not an impossibility…I can envision a netbook form factor device with a big-@ss slot for receiving – you guessed it – my mobile phone-slash-computing engine.

So, to sum up:

1. You’re right, things are getting interesting, and
2. If product makers can make the phone the bearer of CPU horsepower, connectivity, and OS, then everything else becomes a terminal that the phone docks to or slides into.

And I’m adding here that this last point is what makes tablets superfluous.

Thoughts?

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Here’s the thing about LingsCars.com: It works.

Yes, it’s ugly as sin, an affront to the design sensibilities of practically everyone.

And this picture doesn’t do it justice. Go to the site, you need to see the seizure-inducing blinky-blinky.

But it works. It really does.

Let’s unpack that a bit. What do I mean when I say it works?

It’s simple. The site fulfills the goals of the business, which I’m guessing are:

1. To lease cars to customers.
2. To create a memorable experience and make Ling’s Cars top-of-mind for UK people who want to lease an auto.

By those simple measures, the site is learnable, memorable, usable, and creates a unique brand experience to boot. (No, that is not a pun on the UK’s use of boot for trunk.)

Go ahead. Check it out for yourself. And give yourself these “typical” usability test goals, just to prove my point about the usability of LingsCars.com:

1. Go find the link that takes you to Ling’s cheapest leasing deals.
2. You want to ask Ling’s Cars a question. Can you chat online with someone at Ling’s cars? Find a way to do that.
3. You want to lease a Volvo automobile, but aren’t sure which one you want. What does Ling offer?
4. You’d like to see what the lease prices are for every one of Ling’s autos. Find a way to look at all the prices together in one place.

And here’s the kicker: I’ve established that it’s somewhat usable. Now, is it memorable? You bet it is. Admit it – the memory of the first time you saw lingscars.com is burned into your synapses. Psychologists call this “flashbulb memory” – memories that are so strong, you remember where you were, what you were doing, and a host of little details associated with the memory.

Granted, your flashbulb memory of Ling’s Cars is probably of the Kennedy assassination, Challenger explosion, or 9/11 variety. But still, I guarantee that you won’t soon forget about Ling’s Cars.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m actually experiencing prodromal migraine symptoms just having Ling’s site in my peripheral vision. I’m not defending the so-bad-it’s-good design in and of itself. What I’m saying is that even the worst design can serve its organization’s goals. It’s a high-risk strategy, yes. But does it work in Ling’s case? I think it does.

Update: A commenter below points out that the site doesn’t exactly fill you with warm fuzzies about the reputation of Ling’s Cars. That is, it doesn’t score points in the professionalism and trust categories.

I would argue that certain businesses need that more than others. If (like me) you grew up in the 70′s and 80′s in the NYC area, you probably remember those Crazy Eddie’s commercials. “Crazy Eddie’s! Our prices are so low, it’s insane!” And of course the pitchman jumped around like a lunatic. They didn’t come across as a staid and somber corporate entity. But they didn’t need to. They were differentiating on price. For electronics, that’s frequently the deciding factor.

Is it the same with car leasing in the UK? I have no idea. But I suspect that Ling is indeed trying to differentiate on price – notice the frequent references to “low prices” on the site. And do you need to build a staid and somber site to trumpet your price differentiation? Probably not. In fact, one could make the argument that the site actually *supports* the price differentiation claim thusly:

Ling’s Cars…our prices are so low, we don’t even bother spending a lot of money on our site…we just home-build it so we can keep our prices low.

Maybe that’s a stretch. Thoughts?

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Old-school readers of UsabilityBlog may remember my (ranty but well-reasoned) diatribe against EULA’s and how they’re presented in software user interfaces. (Also check out my follow-up posts here and here.)

This picture I took the other day  reminded me how easy it is to corrupt and degrade the user experience with obtuse and unfriendly language.

In this case, I was at the bank setting up an account. The rep handed me the account agreement, and then told me that the bank didn’t require me to sign the actual forms anymore; they’d recently begun collecting signatures electronically. I have to admit that bothered me a bit, because my “electronic” signature looks nothing like my pen and ink signature.

Putting that aside, the experience of providing my signature on the device was not good.

The face of the device I needed to “write” on was raised about 4-5 inches, and there was no way to comfortably position my hand while signing. The bezel was not flush with the screen, which caused the edge of my hand to bend in an unnatural way,  further deforming my signature.

And then there was the lawyerly language. We’ve all had the intimidating and negative experience of viewing a legal document in paper form. I don’t think a single person will dispute the fact that legalese is intimidating and obtuse. Not surprisingly, that experience is intensified when rendered digitally. And then there’s the ridiculous aspect of referring to something “herein”, which applies to a document, but certainly not to anything “in” the UI of the device I was interacting with.

And no, the full agreement was not presented onscreen for me to page through. The rep simply handed me the written agreement, then slid this device across the desk for me to “sign.”

The various user experience disciplines – usability, information architecture, interaction design, etc. – have been laboring for the 20-odd years of the tech boom to create great user experiences. Let’s not let the lawyers screw it up.

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Check it out now. Today. Go on, you know you want to. And here’s the scary thing: IT’S STILL BEING UPDATED REGULARLY. How scary/awesome is that?

Here’s the URL: http://www.Havenworks.com.

I should also post Ling’s Cars. I’ll get around to that this week. In the meantime, enjoy HavenWorks, and try not to have a seizure. (And if you do, it’s not my fault.)

This is just a quick pointer to my latest UXmatters column, which is a follow-on to my article from September about the perils and pitfalls of testing your own designs.

In this follow-on, I revisited some of my more bombastic points about testing one’s own designs. Thanks to some excellent comments by several colleagues (and colleague-slash-wife), I modified and built upon my original recommendations and provide some modified guidelines. Here’s the summary guidelines. To understand the reasoning behind them, go read the whole article.

Guideline 1—When testing your own designs, don’t think of it as a test to pass or fail, think of it as part of your design process.

Guideline 1a—Test early, test as often as possible, and test lo-fi prototypes rather than making usability testing a make-or-break event in your design lifecycle.

Guideline 2—When testing your own designs, you should seek disconfirming evidence, but be alert for joys and delighters, too.

Guideline 3—When you’re trying to solve a design problem, usability testing serves design. It’s a tool. Use it to improve your design, not to justify your actions.

Comments about these guidelines? Email me via UsabilityBlog, or comment at UXmatters.

Testing Your Own Designs Redux ::? Paul Sherman via UXmatters

You *will* smile when you see this design. Trust me. You will.

Then come back and we can talk about why it’s so smile-evoking.

Philco PC from Dave Schultze on Vimeo.

]]> http://www.usabilityblog.com/2009/12/design-to-make-you-smile/feed/ 6 http://www.usabilityblog.com/2009/09/testing-your-own-designs-discussion/ http://www.usabilityblog.com/2009/09/testing-your-own-designs-discussion/#comments Thu, 10 Sep 2009 12:50:54 +0000 Paul Sherman http://www.usabilityblog.com/?p=489

I’m putting an article together for UXmatters on the topic of usability testing and validating one’s own designs. My goal is to develop some guidelines for self-testing.

I’d love to get your feedback on some questions I have:

• Testing your own designs: all-around bad idea? Or is it possible to do it well?
• If so, what should you do / not do when testing designs you’ve created?
• What should you look out for?
• Got a good story or anecdote to share? Please do. Either success stories or cautionary tales are welcomed.

Thanks in advance. -Paul

Let me be up-front about this from the beginning: this is a half-formed thought. But its implications are very, very interesting.

So here’s what just happened: I had a desire to take in some emerging thoughts in the user experience field. I wanted some fresh thinking, some exposure to new presentations.

For about 8 years, my first instinct has been a) browse to Google, b) type in “user experience”, and c) browse the list of returned search results to see if anything new strikes my fancy.

This morning, I didn’t do that.

Without even realizing I was changing an ingrained habit, I went to Twitter.com, typed “#ux” in the search box, and browsed the list of returned tweets. I clicked a few, starred a few, and made a mental note to come back and check out some of the links to preso’s.

Then I sat bolt upright when I realized what had just happened.

This, colleagues and readers, is an early warning. An indication that one of my consumer habits is open to change, and could very well tip into a new and different routine.

And if it happened to me, it can happen to any of us.

I don’t know if you’re grokking the import of what happened, so I’ll restate it: something in my sub- or semi-conscious mind decided that the resource I’ve been relying on for years might not be cutting it any more, and it directed me to try a more real-time and dynamic resource.

I will certainly follow up on this in future posts. But right now, I think this incident opens up several interesting research and design questions, such as:

• How much of customer behavior is consciously directed, and how much is directed by the sub-, un-, or semi-conscious?
• What factors influence customers’ willingness to change behavior?
• What are the leverage points for changing customers’/users’ habits?

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Found this on Digg.com today, and promptly added it to my “Questionable_Designs” set on Flickr.

What a great example of after-the-fact design modification.

It makes me wonder what the context was. Did someone set this up for a young child or an older relative? Or did they do it for themselves?

In any case, it’s a great reminder of why us user experience professionals do what we do.

For those of us in design: remember, you shouldn’t design for *all* the edge cases. You shouldn’t even design for most of them.

Why? Because you clutter the user interface when you try to account for all possible user needs.

A reasonable question to ask at this point is this: if you have a set of rich capabilities that *some* small subset of people might want to access, what do you do?

That answer is actually easy. There’s two things you can do in this very specific case of a TV remote.

Both of them are examples of what I think of as “beyond here be dragons” design. Without going into the etiology of that (in retrospect kinda obtuse) metaphor, let’s just say that it’s often a VERY good idea to surface the UI for your minimal main user stories while burying the controls and interactions for the complex edge case capabilities behind an access point that clearly indicates that the functionality is not intended for most people.

So how do you do this for a TV remote?

• Method 1: Put the advanced functions underneath a sliding cover. This was all the rage 8-10 years ago. Not seen as much today.

Advantages: The cover makes it clear that, well, beyond here be dragons. Effective.

Disadvantages: Presence of physical parts probably means higher cost to manufacture. Physical parts (i.e., cover and slide) also wear out.

• Method 2: Put the advanced functions in the onscreen portion of the UI. The simple controls on the remote can then be used to step through the advanced dialogs and tasks.

Advantages: No additional hardware requirements. Provided the unit can receive updates, the software interactions can be improved if the initial UI design support for the complex stuff isn’t, shall we say, usable.

Disadvantages: Slowwww. Error-prone, especially for interactions requiring alphanumeric input via “point and pick”.

For some reason this slipped my mind for the last two weeks. On August 15th I delivered two talks at ProductCamp Austin 2009. Before I link you to the talks I wanted to give hat tips to the crew who put together this ProductCamp. It was a fantastic, energetic, and crowd-driven “un”conference, and I highly recommend attending one if you get the chance. They’re springing up in many major metro areas, so finding one shouldn’t be hard. You can learn more about BarCamps at this site.

The first talk I gave was “How To Achieve A Great User Experience For Enterprise Software” and the second was “From Personas To Production: The Role of Personas, Design Briefs, Stories, Storyboards, and Wireframes in the Ideation – Design – Build Process.” The second one had more people than the enterprise talk; which I guess shouldn’t really surprise me as the enterprise talk is more specialized. But the enterprise attendees were full of good questions and there was lots of good within-audience discussion. The feedback I’ve gotten on these two has ranged from slightly to strongly positive. So I’ll put them in the “win” column.

Oh and my past presentations are also available on Slideshare.net here.

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I know that as a professional user experience practitioner I should avoid angry rants, as they’re (mostly) unproductive.

But here’s the thing: I am PISSED OFF right now, I feel cheated and abused by this printer’s designers, and I have no real recourse except to call out the manufacturer and tell them just how thoroughly they have failed me… and in all probability, many other customers.

I’ve owned this printer – a Canon MX860 – for about a month. So far so good, I’ve been able to connect it to my network and print plain paper documents with no problems.

So this morning I tried to print a half-dozen photos so I could send pics of the kids to my 99-year old grandmother. Sending attachments or a link to my Flickr account is not a viable option. She wants pictures, big pictures. Pictures she can hold in her hands.

No can do. I’ve spent more than 45 minutes crawling around the backside of this stupid time vampire of a machine, trying to figure out why it insists on printing from the rear tray, and realizing I don’t know how to load this until-now-unknown-to-me rear tray.

I’m angry. This stupid piece of crap printer just stole almost an hour of my time. And I still don’t have the damn pictures to send to my grandmother.

So you fail, Canon. You fail hard. It’s a pity actually. I really like and enjoy my Canon cameras. But you’ve just stolen – yes, stolen, as in consumed without my agreeing to it – an hour of my time. Think that’s a trivial amount? It’s not. Not when you multiply it by x number of people who’ve also struggled to print photos. And I’m sure “x” is not a small number.

Today I’m posting the presentation and source document from my UPA2009 presentation “A Kit For Building User Experience Teams in R&D Organizations.” The talk went very well; nearly everyone in the (somewhat small but whatever) audience spoke up and contributed.

Happily, when I posted links to this content on Twitter I got about a half-dozen retweets, which for a second-stringer like me is not too shabby. So I think you’ll like this preso and the kit doc, which I’ve released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. BTW you can learn more about this license and what it means at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/. Basically, it means you are welcome to make use of the content as long as you attribute it to me and you share any derivative works under the same license. Which I think is more than fair, and leads to boatloads of good UX karma besides.

And here’s a little bonus: I asked my friend and session chair Lyle Kantrovich (@lkantrov for the Twitterati in the crowd) to take notes on the audience comments and contributions; which he peevishly (kidding! I meant happily) did. I’ve posted his notes below.

Before I link you out to the content you might be interested in the “story behind the story” of this presentation. About 7 or 8 months ago I decided to submit to UPA2009, and scoured my hard drive for something appropriate. I realized that I had created a comprehensive resource while at Sage that detailed how to staff, budget and run a user experience team at a medium-to-large software organization. I figured that this was as good a submission as any. Plus, it really fit my whole “get the organizational structure and processes right” theme. If you’ve been reading me for any length of time you know I have a passion for this area of our field, having trained in social/organizational psychology and built several teams over the past 12 years.

So I submitted a proposal, which went something like this:

This submission provides an overview of a “User Experience Kit” that one user-centered design team developed as an implementation guide for other product teams within their global organization. This kit was first released in mid-2007 within the organization, and has been used in the organization to guide the creation of four additional teams since then. The primary audience for this presentation is people who are able to drive change in their organizations and have the authority to support those changes with allocation of resources.

And it got accepted. Yay.

Of course I put off writing the presentation for months, but not for the usual reason (i.e., pure procrastination). As the day of the talk drew nearer, it became clear to me that the kit itself was a really boring story. And I don’t do boring. I HATE boring. I have high standards for presenting, I do it well, and I was stressing out about how boring this talk was shaping up to be.

That is, until I realized that the more interesting story was *why* I had to create a UX implementation guide/kit, what it said about my then-organization (and other organizations), and what we as a field should be doing about it.

And then everything was alright, I wrote some entertaining slides (keep on the lookout for “Captain Obvious”) and I gave a kick-@ss talk.

So, without further ado, here’s what I covered in my talk:

• The sad truth about the need for a “UX kit”
• A bit about the kit itself
• An extended discussion about launching UX teams and spreading UX in medium to large orgs

As I mentioned above, Lyle was kind enough to capture discussion notes, which I’m including immediately below. However, I recommend looking at the preso first (either in .pdf format or on SlideShare) and getting the kit source doc before reading the discussion notes.

Thanks again Lyle for capturing the audience comments. Here they are:

• Come back with data to show the value of what happened during UX processes.
• Be more of a teacher – share UX? techniques (aka “UX freeze-tag”).
• Be flexible.
• Triage projects early on – to discuss how UX can help.
• Focus on convincing people who can be convinced.
• Have an open-door policy on usability lab.
• Create an internal blog with test highlight clips.
• Conduct a quarterly UI workshop.
• Stay relevant – you know if you’re relevant by # of people coming to you.
• Focus on money/budget & key influencers in the organization.
• UX has to manage a lot of different things at the same time.
• “Customer Experience Bar Raiser Review Board”? – executives that help set UX direction.
• Selfishly share the glory – co-present success stories with clients/partners.
• Find a mentor/peer outside your organization to learn from, commiserate with and share with.
• Find an aspirational (design/product) example – something that reflects what you’d like the UX to look like.

A Kit For Building UX Teams [preso pdf]? [kit doc]? ::? Paul Sherman

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I don’t know if this happens to all y’all, but I always have a hell of a time figuring out which button *opens* the elevator doors and which button *closes* them.

It happens every time I get in an elevator. Invariably, after I’ve already boarded someone runs to make the elevator before the doors close completely. As soon as I see them, I try to be helpful. I go to hit the “door open” button, hesitate, shift my gaze from one to the other in a semi-panic, and then jab the WRONG button.

I think I’ve figured out why I have such trouble discriminating between the two icons: the “door open” button (on the left in this picture) looks to me like the image of a *closed* door, and for some reason the action implied by the outward-facing arrows just doesn’t register with me.

Similarly, the “door close” button on the right, with its two strong vertical lines defining the outer edge of the icon, just seems to me to look like two open doors. And like the other image, I just don’t grok the arrows in the picture.

Is it just me that has this particular problem, or is does this design confuse others as well?

Just noticed a tweet pointing out this designer’s Flash homepage.

Creative? Undoubtedly yes. Also annoying and a bit nauseating.

I’m not going to get on a usability soapbox about this. It speaks for itself. And it? speaks a mixed message.

(Click picture to see full-sized)

Hey, what can I say. Sometimes I’m on a tear and I write lofty big-picture conceptual pieces on the state of the user experience industry. Other times I can crank out an incisive, perceptive screed that absolutely devastates a design.

And still other times, you get this: a post about a garden variety, seen-it-before bad design. In this case, you’ve got your classic chromostereopsis issue, where the red-text-on-blue-background renders the text shimmery and hard to read.

And dare I say it…this isn’t exactly the most attractive landing page on the Interwebs. All told, it just reeks of “we’re too cheap to hire a designer, and we’re doing well enough that we don’t care.”

Hat tip to Ghost in the Pixel’s Uday Gajender for putting together this well organized resource page. Nicely done.

And Whitney Quesenbery of WQUsability tweeted this UX toolkit-slash-process map, which I’m dutifully blogging here. Credit where it’s due: the page indicates that the toolkit was created by Bas Leurs, Peter Conradie, Joel Laumans, and Rosalieke Verboom of Rotterdam University.