Organizational Stuff

Guidelines For Design Guidelines

by Paul Sherman on January 8, 2010 · 1 comment

in Everything Else

This post grew out of my response to a question on the IxDA discussion board. Russ Wilson, fellow Austinite, UX VP at a large software co., and all-around good guy, posed this question:

I’d like to get people’s opinions on the value of “company-wide” design guidelines (for software applications/websites)?In theory, design guidelines could help to remove design bottlenecks by empowering others to create and apply the guidelines… but in reality they can also be hard to implement, confusing,restrictive, etc.

My response was:

…I can share some lessons I’ve learned while building guidelines and leading teams that produced and consumed guidelines.

1. Treat design guidelines as a design problem in and of itself. Make the guidelines findable, learnable, usable (and memorable) for the intended consumers. This means you need to understand your users’ needs. Some questions to ask yourself and your team are:

* Do they need to know the why behind the guidelines, or do they just need to know how to be compliant?

* Consider whether they (and therefore you) are constrained by the UI toolkit and available controls. That is, do they need implementation-specific guidelines? This is more typical for platform-specific software and certain web-delivered apps. Or do you have degrees of freedom more typical of web-based apps?

2. Make sure people can quickly and easily access the digital assets they’ll need to successfully implement the guidelines. Provide links to the assets (i.e., images, controls, CSS, code snippets, etc.) that will help designers and devs to implement the guidelines. Put the relevant links as close as possible to the guideline. Basically, put on your Tufte hat. (What can I say, I’m almost done with “Beautiful Evidence” so I’m looking at everything through Tuftian lenses right now.)

3. Make it so people can discuss and annotate the guidelines. Also, it’s constructive when the community can submit examples of how they’ve implemented or adapted guidelines. At some point you may find it useful to convert a community submission into a full guideline.

4. Examples examples examples. (And more examples.) It’s often helpful to mock up one of your organization’s existing applications to illustrate one or more guidelines. If nothing else, the team can then practice “cargo cult design” and just emulate your example.

5. Socialize the guidelines…but also socialize a release plan for future guideline changes. Design and dev teams absolutely hate to find out that they’ve complied with R1.0 of the guidelines, but you’ve rev’ed them to R1.1 or 2.0. If you’re making changes to the guidelines, make sure people know when the changes will be rolled out. And of course provide as many sneak peaks as you can.

6. Make sure that you coordinate with the folks who own the visual aspects of your organization’s brand. A little synergy here goes a long way. And they’re usually a great source of brand digital assets.

I thought this was blog-worthy, so I decided to post it. I’d love to hear about others’ experiences in this area of design and user experience management.

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My Usability Marathon Preso

by Paul Sherman on October 14, 2009 · 0 comments

in Experience Strategy

I just posted my Usability Marathon presentation to Slideshare. (I love Slideshare btw…no surprise; Rashmi Sinha started out as a UX person.)

I’m getting good feedback and nice retweets on Twitter; which is a good sign.

Normally, I’d pull some choice quotes to whet your appetite. But I’ve got a pile of storyboarding and wireframing to do this week, so it’s back to the UX grind (but what a satisfying fun grind!).

Enjoy.

Usability…Or Strategic User Experience? ::? Usability Marathon 2

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ProductCamp Austin Summer 2009 – User Experience Presos

by Paul Sherman on August 26, 2009 · 1 comment

in Design

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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Many Questions About HuffPost & Facebook Connect

by Paul Sherman on August 23, 2009 · 5 comments

in Everything Else

Welcome to the brave new world of ubiquitous social networking and the mashing up of traditional media and social networking.

In the past I’ve held forth on how opaque I feel Facebook’s applications are about what information they share, and how uneasy it makes me to respond to cause requests, games, contests etc. on Facebook. This latest instantiation of Facebook’s “see everywhere, be everywhere” strategy makes me feel as skittish as ever.

I lean left, but with a broad libertarian / 2nd Amendment streak. What can I say; I’m a Texas Democrat. So I occasionally read the Huffington Post, although I don’t blindly agree with everything it says.

So this latest offer to publish HuffPost content to my wall doesn’t really sit well with me. And it triggers many questions, such as:

  • What content appears on my wall? Do I have control of what shows and what doesn’t?
  • Will wingnut comments from the stories appear on my wall?
  • What happens if I want to disconnect HuffPost content? How easy is that? Will I be able to?
  • What information will HuffPost gather about me if I sign up? What do they do with it?
  • If a Facebook friend or I comment on HuffPost stories; what can HuffPost do with the content?

Take note of that last one, folks. I actually clicked on HuffPost’s terms of use link in the dialog box to see if I could figure out what rights they were claiming. As usual, I was shown a screenful of legal BS.

But take note of these two sentences, which I *assume* (but am not sure) comprise the core of the agreement between HuffPost and me:

By posting or submitting content on or to the Service (regardless of the form or medium with respect to such content, whether text, videos, photographs, audio or otherwise), you are giving THP, and its affiliates, agents and third party contractors the right to display or publish such content on the Service and its affiliated publications (either in the form submitted or in the form of a derivative or adapted work), to store such content, and to distribute such content and use such content for promotional and marketing purposes. Without limiting the generality of the foregoing, with respect to any video submissions to THP made by you from time to time, you understand and agree that (unless you and we agree otherwise) THP may, or may permit users to, based solely on functionality provided and enabled by the THP website, compile, re-edit, adapt or modify your video submission, or create derivative works therefrom, either on a stand-alone basis or in combination with other video submissions, and (unless you and we agree otherwise) you shall have no rights with respect thereto and THP or its licensees shall be free to display and publish the same (as so compiled, re-edited, adapted, modified or derived) for any period.

I have a friggin’ doctorate and I have trouble parsing this passage. I *think* I know what it means, but you know what? I’m really not sure that I get it.

Out of curiousity I submitted the passage to an online readability analyzer. The results should surprise no one…here’s how it did:

  • The passage scored an off-the-charts 48.45 on the Gunning-Fogg Index (scores typically range from 0-30).
  • It rated a mind-bending NEGATIVE 36 on the Flesch Reading Ease Score (scores range from 0=hard to 100=easy)
  • The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level index indicates how many years of education someone typically needs to understand a sample of text. For example, an 8 would indicate that an eighth-grade education would be required to understand the content; a 14 indicates that you’d have to be a college sophomore to grok it. This passage scored a Talmudic FORTY THREE.

I started this rant thinking I was commenting on the difficulty of knowing the ramifications of your actions in this new world of interconnected social media and networking sites. I’m ending on a different rant, but it’s all related to user experience. Here it is in a nutshell:

Hi there social media sites, this is your user talking to you. If you want me to connect up my account to your “strategic partners” and help you “monetize your user base”, DON’T make your user agreements so dense and hard to understand. It only scares me off and makes me worry that you’ll take my data and do whatever you want with it.

In other words…DON’T give your lawyers final edit over your terms of service agreements. They’re hurting your user experience and your brand image. And what’s worse (from your shareholders’ point of view, that is), they’re probably suppressing uptake of these new services because they’ve made it so dang hard to figure out.

Back in June Jared Spool pointed out at the UPA 2009 conference that the user experience field is behind the curve when it come to this new world of interconnected sites and accounts. It ain’t just about usability anymore…and it really hasn’t been for the last five years or so.

If the user experience field is going to remain relevant in this new world, we HAVE to create new guidelines and standards for how sites and services communicate with their users about how and where they use their information, and what rights users have to control how their information is used.

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Teaser 1: UPA 2009 UX Industry Salary Survey

by Paul Sherman on August 3, 2009 · 2 comments

in Everything Else

Normally I suck at promotion. Particularly self-promotion, which is obviously a problem for my user experience consultancy. But since this is the last year I will be leading the Usability Professionals’ Association salary survey project (I go off the board after this year), I thought I’d go out with a bit of a pop. I cranked away over the weekend to complete the final draft of the the UPA’s 2009 UX industry salary survey. It’ll be available on Friday. There are some *really* interesting results…but before I drop teaser #1, let me give props where they’re due:

  • Ken Becker did a fantastic job on data cleansing, normalizing and initial analysis.
  • Karl Steiner also did great work producing the data tables and charts and helping me on subsequent analyses.
  • Jeff Sauro did some major statistical heavy lifting and contributed a comprehensive report addendum looking at the relationships between multiple variables.

OK, I lied…just a little more background before the teaser:

  • This is the fourth UX industry salary survey by the UPA. After a sputtering start in 2001, the UPA has conducted biennial (I got that right, right? Biennial = every two years?) surveys in 2005, 2007, and this year.
  • I took on the project as part of my board of director duties in 2005, and have evolved the format to where it is today. I am also the report writer and main point of contact for the project until the end of this year.

I know, I know…you’re thinking “enough with the hat tips and background, just gimme some data already!” Frankly, I’m enjoying this more than I should, but alright, here ya go:

  • The over-time rate of increase in average salary has slowed in 2009, a fact that should surprise absolutely no one. The media is full of stories about companies cutting workers’ salaries by 10%, mandating unpaid vacation, etc. The fact that there was any increase at all in UX salaries was surprising to me.
  • When we started looking at the data in detail, the main source of the increase was *quite* interesting… let’s just say that the “gender gap”; i.e., the difference in men’s and women’s salaries for comparable work, appears to be not long for this world. At least in the user experience industry.

Sorry, that’s all you get for now. More later this week! (And the report will be available on Friday.)

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New UXMatters Article: 8 Things You Should Be Doing In Your UX Practice, But Probably Aren’t

by Paul Sherman on July 20, 2009 · 1 comment

in Experience Strategy

So I’m seeing a nice little Twitter spike about my latest UXmatters article “8 Things You Should Be Doing In Your UX Practice, But Probably Aren’t.”

It was a column borne of equal parts desperation and writers’ block. Then I remembered how much mileage Cracked.com gets out of the “X Things” format, and decided to try a UX-specific version. You take your inspiration where you can get it, right? Honest truth, I had low expectations for myself.

The funny thing was when I finished it, I realized that the article didn’t actively suck. In fact it was kinda decent. Of course, it helped that I had some good advice and suggestions from Susan Hura, John Rhodes, and Dan Szuc. But no one said I couldn’t turn to friends/colleagues/wife for a little inspiration.

So here’s a little taste of the article; for more go to the site and check it out yourself. Quoting me:

…here are 8 things you should be doing to improve and grow in your professional practice, but that you’re probably not doing—or not doing enough:

  • Communicate simply
  • Read, read, read
  • Pick a new UX tool and experiment with it
  • Hold a UX stand-down and operational review
  • Stretch yourself outside of user experience
  • Think about your UX career path
  • Repurpose your UX assets
  • Depart from script on user research visits

I hope you enjoy the article, and feel free to comment either here or at UXmatters if you have more things to suggest.

8 Things You Should Be Doing In Your Personal UX Practice… :: ? Paul Sherman

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My UPA09 “UX Kit” Presentation & Bonus Audience Comments

by Paul Sherman on June 15, 2009 · 9 comments

in Design, Experience Strategy

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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