UX And…

User Experience Design: A Mini-Festo

by Paul Sherman on December 17, 2011 · 4 comments

in Design, Development, Experience Strategy, Product Management, UX And...

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:
  1. Terminology and conceptual models that reflect our target user’ ways of thinking.
  2. Usable workflow and navigation.
  3. Clear, understandable and actionable page and view design. (I’m defining ”view” as an
  4. element of a page that conveys pieces of information to the user, such as a data display
  5. element).
  • Employing consistent visual design and use of design patterns.
  • Creating and maintaining access to and connection with the broader user experience components, e.g. community resources, documentation, etc.
  • Remaining consistent with brand.

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.

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Giving The User Enough Rope

by Paul Sherman on October 15, 2010 · 13 comments

in Design, Product Management, Research, Web

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

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UX’ers: Get Over Yourselves

by Paul Sherman on March 22, 2010 · 9 comments

in Development, Experience Strategy, Organizational, Product Management, UX And...

Yeah, I said it. And by it, I mean that we’re too convinced of our moral superiority, and it’s hampering our ability to effect the very changes we want to make in this world. Read on to discover why.

This post covers a conversation that started at Scott Berkun’s site, where he made the point that comparatively few UX’ers seem to be able or willing to step up and work on persuading their organizations to put greater resources into the user experience of their products and services.

In this article Scott said:

When it comes to the world of UX, designers, usability engineers, and the rest, they tend to complain about how little power they have, but spend little time doing skill development in how to gain influence and power.  The average designer or IA would be better served by going to a sales conference and learning sales and pitching skills, than going to yet another design event. They’re already good at design, but they’re probably not very good at pitching design ideas to non-designers.

At the end of the post, he cited some articles from Dan Szuc and I on how to sell UX. Just happy for the props, I commented last week, saying:

Dan Szuc and I have been working this problem for a few years now, and we too hear the same “if only I could get x” refrain. I’ve been both a UX innie and an outtie (sp?), and I have to say that insider UX’ers often put themselves into the “learned helplessness” state almost reflexively. UX’ers can be their own worst enemies when it comes to getting resources to do the job right. And I speak from experience: I’ve been there, done that. Maybe that’s why Dano and I beat this drum so loud; i.e., “Learn from our mistakes! Here’s how!”

I also noted the discussion in my UsabilityBlog post of last week. In another happy surprise for me, Scott dropped by and responded on UsabilityBlog, saying:

The curious thing is why this fairly old idea (specialists need to persuade) has such a hard time gaining traction among the UI/IX/HCI community. And oddly, it’s seems really hard to sell the UI community on the point of view you offer. Do you have any theories as to why this is? I did a study of sorts on designers about why they fail to explore this question among the design community. But I have thought about doing a similiar thing for the usability/HCI side of things: http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2008/why-design…

I lobbed it back at him when I posted this in response:

Thanks for dropping by and commenting at UsabilityBlog Scott. If I had to venture a guess, I think the reluctance among UX’ers to persuade stems from my contention that most of us are utterly convinced of the rightness of our ways. After all – and this is a mostly a good thing – most of us stumbled onto this field and found it a fantastic lens through which to project our ethical expression onto the world. UX is a place to be a force for good. How awesome is that? Answer: quite awesome indeed. So why *wouldn’t* everyone see our opinions as correct?

But there’s the rub. Our moral certitude gets in our way. In other words: UX’ers belief in our own rightness is quasi-religious. Hey, if that’s the case then there’s no need to persuade others of our rightness; we *know* we’re right. And if they don’t believe us, frak ‘em.

Only there’s that pesky little issue of who’s cutting the checks….hmmm, I better tow the line and *try* to light the way for the blind, convince those who labor in the darkness of not knowing UX, even though they’re little more than inmates running the dark asylum…I think you can see where I’m going with this.

My bottom line advice to our field would be very similar to what my Jewish mother from Queens often says: hey UX’ers, get over yourselves. We don’t poop roses. Not everything we do is an expression of our moral superiority. Most times, we don’t -and aren’t even in a position to – see the big picture. And we don’t know what it’s like to be on the hook for the revenue of a product. In other words, we should have a little more empathy and broaden our horizons a bit.

I’ve made these points before; check this article out for a slightly more polished version of this argument: http://bit.ly/a2Xwux Thanks again, Scott. Good discussion you’ve triggered here.

That list bit.ly link? It leads to the UXmatters article where I first started crystallizing these thoughts: “The User Experience Practitioner As Change Agent.” I just reread the article, and I still agree with its main points. Maybe it’s common for other people to agree with their former selves, but I am not one of those people. When I read my past work, I typically either cringe or have to stifle the urge to get in my time machine and slap my former self for saying something so asinine. But this piece? It’s stood the test of time. And it resonates with people.

Now if only I can craft the call to action more effectively. I honestly wouldn’t mind if this area became my “UX brand.” It’d be in keeping with my training as an organizational / human factors psychologist, and honor the systems approach of my dissertation mentor, Bob Helmreich.

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Lowering Conversion The Quick And Easy Way

by Paul Sherman on March 17, 2010 · 9 comments

in Experience Strategy, Product Management, UX And..., Web

I’m getting tired of having to bring this up. (See here and here for prior scoldings.)

Software and service providers, listen to me: it’s a bad user experience to prevent the use of “plus” email addressing when capturing visitor emails. But it’s not about us, it’s really about you: preventing plus addressing is almost definitely depressing several of your key performance indicators. Why? Because it lowers conversion, and when conversion falls, your other KPI‘s fall like dominos.

Here’s the latest offender:

Starbucks Email Fail

The web team at Starbucks needs to understand that when they prevent the visitor from using plus addressing, they not only create a negative user experience, they also increase abandonment, a.k.a the anti-conversion. And isn’t conversion the whole point (OK, a major point) of having a web presence?

So I strongly suggest to Starbucks – and any other organization that captures emails – that you consider changing this policy. Plus addressing is perfectly acceptable according to the RFC gods, and it allows some of your (more organized, meticulous, and/or obsessive-compulsive) potential customers to better manage their email flow.

Don’t prevent us from managing the flood of communications in a manner that makes our lives easier. If you make signing up easier, more people will sign up.

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New Ask UXmatters Article On Building UX Organizations

by Paul Sherman on February 25, 2010 · 1 comment

in Development, Experience Strategy, Product Management, UX And...

Janet Six over at UXmatters posted her latest “Ask UXmatters” article. This time it’s about building UX teams. She featured a bunch of my thinking on how to prepare and change organizational cultures for more effective user experience implementations. Which was gratifying. I’m glad the field finds my content useful. (You can always read that stuff in my UX Kit, which I just happened to revise this week, adding some salary and job title updates).

But I thought the other Ask UXmatters contributors had some fantastic points and I want to call them out here.

Dan Szuc of Apogee lists a number of questions a UX team *should* be asking itself. I think he nailed it when he said this:

What do you see as success for your UX group?

To me Dan defined the essence of the issue: when you’re building a UX group, it’s critical to define what success looks like. It may be metrics-driven; e.g., “we shall be usability testing 80% of our company’s product line by EO 2010″, etc. It could be anything really. But of course it helps if your success definition is tied to and aligned with your larger organization’s goals…

Joel Grossman recommends taking a business-case approach to building a UX organization:

Start by preparing a business case, outlining the expected qualitative and quantitative benefits that will accrue to the organization,” suggests Joel. “Define a series of milestones that take you from the current state of affairs to an end-state that will maximize the benefits you’ve identified in the business case.

Agree and agree. Except: true “business case” documents are quite formal affairs. I certainly agree with Joel about demonstrating the qual and quant benefits. But I recommend against adopting a B-school format for your document. Keep it short and to the point. I’m pretty sure this is what Joel meant as well, but I wanted to clarify my thinking on this a bit.

Steve Baty of Meld warns against taking a centralized approach, which I heartily agree with:

I’d be cautious about moving toward a centralized service model in this case…Think instead about what you’re hoping to achieve through that move (i.e., of going centralized):

  • consistency of approach
  • efficient use of resources
  • shared customer or user insights
  • shared UX principles across interactions and touchpoints

I don’t know if Steve was reacting to my content or not. But I should say that I definitely do NOT advocate for centralizing UX in a big way. My view, which I think Steve shares, is that user experience efforts belong with the product teams they collaborate with. UX resources shouldn’t all be piled atop the organization in a service bureau model. And they certainly shouldn’t let themselves be seen as sitting on some fancy “UX throne” issuing UX directives from on high. And even when some centralized user experience concentration is called for, it should be about providing consistency and efficiency; i.e., some “UX glue” across the organization.

Having been on the wrong end of the barrel during several workforce reductions involving centralized UX functions, I have to say that UX contributors and managers are safer when they’re allied with (and aligned with) the product teams they serve. It’s all too easy to lay off an entire centralized UX group, because they’re not directly tied to any specific profit center. When things get tough, an embedded UX group has a much better chance of survival, albeit with attrition.

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My Usability Marathon 2 Preso Embed

by Paul Sherman on February 21, 2010 · 3 comments

in Development, Experience Strategy, Product Management, UX And...

I thought I did a decent job presenting about strategic user experience at Usability Marathon 2. I just remembered that they posted the webinar slides (and voice as well, if I’m not mistaken).

So here it is. I received good feedback on it. YMMV. But I hope you enjoy it.

Usability…Or Strategic User Experience?

View more presentations from Paul Sherman.

Usability Marathon 2 ::  Paul Sherman

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Tablets Are (Probably) Superfluous

by Paul Sherman on February 2, 2010 · 11 comments

in Design, Hardware, Product Management

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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