User Interface Engineering

Producing a usable design takes time, money, and resources. It also requires an organization’s dedication to focus on usability testing and customer needs throughout the entire design process.

Knowing how to sell usability testing will substantially help it get approved and supported by an organization. Most development teams we work with understand the benefits of usability testing, yet still struggle to communicate the value to stakeholders.

In this week’s article of UIEtips, we’re featuring a popular article that Christine Perfetti wrote last year, which discusses some of the best techniques for getting stakeholders onboard for testing. I think you’ll really enjoy it.

Read the article - Five Techniques for Getting Buy-In for Usability Testing

If usability testing is a concern for you, I highly encourage you to attend Christine’s full-day seminar, Product Usability: Survival Techniques, at the User Interface 13 Conference this October. In this seminar, you’ll learn valuable tools for incorporating usability testing in your development process.

Are you challenged with selling usability testing within your organization? Is your team struggling to get support and buy-in?  How have you gotten your organization onboard? Join the discussion below.

SpoolCast: The History of Interaction with Bill Verplank
Recorded: August 5th, 2008
Brian Christiansen, UIE Podcast Producer
Duration: 38m | File size: 21.5 MB
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 SpoolCast: The History of Interaction with Bill Verplank [38:09m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Have you ever thought about how many buttons should be on a mouse?

Bill Verplank has. Bill was part of the Xerox PARC team who was responsible for taking the mouse and many other computing paradigms from theory to indispensable.

I had a chance to speak with Bill about his time at PARC and all of his other influential work for this week’s podcast. If you’re interested in where many of today’s computing metaphors come from, or in design and computing history in general, this is the show for you.

Today’s usability, interaction design, and experience design disciplines have their roots in human factors engineering, which many, including Bill, trace back to the 1950s, when the U.S. government was investing heavily in cockpit design of jet fighters. It was upon that foundation, Bill studied design and engineering at Stanford and did his PhD. work at MIT in man-machine systems.

From there, he spent considerable time with Xerox PARC, working on some of the first office systems, including the Xerox Star, which was a major influence for both the Macintosh user interface and Microsoft Windows. Bill continues to trace his history through some of the most influential design agencies of our time, like IDEO, and winds up with a question of design education: what happens when engineers and artists meet and try to create something usable for humans? Bill is seeing important schools, like the Rhode Island School of Design and Carnegie Mellon University, experimenting with programs that put engineers and artists together. We also debated the impact and interpretation of experience design and its impact on various industries.

Our conversation ended with a preview of Bill’s Spotlight Plenary presentation at our UI Conference this fall. Bill is known for his mesmerizing talks where he sketches his points along with the talk. (At the conference, we’ll have a camera set up so you can watch him sketch as he talks!)

[If you'd like to see Bill Verplank's Design Metaphors Spotlight Plenary keynote in person, please join us at the User Interface Conference, this October in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]

I recently facilitated several usability tests, watching user after user struggle with our client’s web site. Not one user could find the most valuable content on the site. Every user knew exactly what they wanted and all of the information they were looking for was available — they just had no idea how to find it.

Once they made it to the page with their content, they still struggled. The navigation links and categories were so unclearly written that users weren’t at all sure where to click. They had to work very hard just to figure out what content was available to them on the site.

The content was disorganized, confusing, and lethargic. Fortunately, we knew exactly who to turn to discuss and solve these types of problems. In this week’s feature article, we’re publishing an interview with Donna (Maurer) Spencer, a world renowned information architect.

In this week’s UIEtips article Donna and I discuss how the best information architects successfully tackle specific content challenges. Donna shares the essential skills separating the best information architects from the rest of the pack.

Read the article - Four Essential Skills for Information Architects: An Interview with Donna (Maurer) Spencer

We are so excited by Donna’s work that we’ve invited her to present a full-day seminar, Information Architecture Essentials: Best Practices for Organizing Your Site’s Content, at the User Interface
13 Conference in October. It’s a great place to learn what it takes to become a great information architect.

How have you tackled your site content challenges? In your experience, what skills do the best information architects possess? Share your thoughts and experiences below.

SpoolCast: Q&A Follow-Up from Galleries Seminar
Recorded: August 18th, 2008
Brian Christiansen, UIE Podcast Producer
Duration: 26m | File size: 15 MB
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 SpoolCast: Q&A Follow-Up from Galleries Seminar [26:18m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Brian Christiansen and I recorded a special episode comprised entirely of questions from our customers. On August 14, we held the UIE Virtual Seminar - Galleries: The Hardest Working Pages on Your Site. During the seminar, we received far more questions than time would allow answering. As is tradition, we put together this follow-up podcast to answer even more of your excellent questions.

In this episode, we discussed:

• A review of Gallery pages and their connection to Scent
• How Gallery Pages are special, and a comparison to a Department page
• The role of Galleries in Intranet environments
• We dive into the use of “learn more” links with a little more depth
• Our observations about how users really “browse” the web
• Advice on coping with large numbers of links on Gallery pages, and what links belong there
• A preview of September’s Virtual Seminar on Critiquing

If you missed our live seminar, a recording of Galleries: The Hardest Working Pages on Your Site is available for viewing.

Still have questions or comments about gallery pages? Ask them in the comments below!

(Producer’s note: My apologies to the Discount Tire folks for calling you “Direct Tire” once in the episode. I got it right the second time, though!)

We’ve received some interesting comments about last week’s article on site maps as design cop-outs. Christian & Michael both asked: Why is it a cop-out to provide a site map anyway? Christian explained that they are easy to create and maintain, so what’s the big deal?

The same is true of the article topic in this week’s issue of UIEtips, Design cop-out #2: Breadcrumbs. Like site maps, breadcrumbs are hard to do well. And they are also a treatment of the symptom, with the real problem that the user is on the wrong page to begin with. Work to ensure the only place users end up is on the right page, and you’ll no longer need to provide breadcrumbs to rescue them.

Read the article - Design Cop-out #2: Breadcrumbs

Information architecture — organizing the site’s content to make things easy to find — is just one of the full-day, in-depth seminar topics we’ll be covering at the User Interface 13 Conference, October 13-16, in Cambridge, MA. If you want to learn state-of-the-art techniques from the world’s most renowned experts in design and usability, this is the place you need to be.

What are your thoughts about breadcrumbs, site maps, and other design cop outs? How have you tackled the key challenges in your site’s information architecture? We’d love to hear your thoughts.
Leave us a comment below.

We’ve got a unique and exciting UIE Virtual Seminar coming up in September:

Testing Your Critiquing Skills: Site Navigation
Date: Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
Time: 1pm ET / Noon CT / 11am MT / 10am PT

When looking over someone else’s design, how do you ensure you’re delivering valuable insights that bring new perspectives to the table?

The best critique not only delivers value to the original designer, but to everyone involved, because it raises the discourse to the underlying fundamentals and goals, not just the specifics of color and font size. Learning to critique well is like many other skills: the more you practice, the better you get.

You’ll know you’ve delivered a great critique when:

* The designer is receptive and engaged in the discussion, instead of being defensive and argumentative
* The designer becomes introspective and talks about how they want to revisit some of the underlying precepts of the design
* Other team members use the critique to look at other on-going work

You can read the full seminar details here.

SpoolCast: Excelling at Interaction Design with Kim Goodwin
Recorded: August 5th, 2008
Brian Christiansen, UIE Podcast Producer
Duration: 29m | File size: 16 MB
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 Excelling at Interaction Design with Kim Goodwin [28:39m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

What is the difference between good and great interaction designers?

That is the subject matter for this week’s show, which features a compelling conversation with Kim Goodwin. Kim is the VP of Design and General Manager at Cooper, one of the world’s premier design consultancies, in San Francisco. She suggests that three traits of great designers include design judgment, communication skills, and the ability to observe people’s behavior and then design something that can give them a good experience.

Design judgment is the ability to know if your solution is good or not. Great designers have the ability to look at their own work with a critical eye, and implement outside suggestions that make their solutions better. Effective critique is essential.

• The teams at Cooper follow the fifteen minute rule—if you’re experiencing difficulty with a design for fifteen minutes, get another brain in on the solution.
• Critique early, critique often. Critiques test your solutions and challenge your assumptions.
• Being solo is tough. Don’t have the advantage of a design team? Kim suggests reading is huge supplier of continuous inspiration and education. Analyze well-designed products. Keep sharp by going out and meeting other designers.
• Good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment. Failure is part of the system. Failure is an experience imperative to growth.

Communication skills are incredibly important. Active listening skills are important for extracting the most information out of a conversation. Active listening takes practice.

• Listen thoughtfully and dig for the needs behind the words.
• Approach any situation with the axiom “I don’t know what I don’t know.”
• Don’t lock yourself into a solution until you’ve really soaked in the full scope of the problem. When ideas inevitably pop-up, sketch them out quickly, so you can capture the ideas and then clear them away so they don’t distract you from absorbing the total problem.

Be open to the world. Kim’s advice is to make no assumptions, go see the problems.

• Accept that you may not know the problem as well as you think you do.
• There are people that may already have the context and solutions. Explore them.
• Simply be curious about your environment. Designers have boundless curiosity.

Kim has even more thoughts in the podcast about concise communication, time management and collaboration skills, you’ll want to give it a listen.

You can hear Kim Goodwin present her workshop, The Essentials of Interaction Design at the User Interface 13 Conference in Cambridge, MA — October 13-16, 2008. She’ll cover fundamental skills like sketching, workflow, storyboarding; and explore innovative techniques to keep the ideas flowing and designers fresh.

How are you staying sharp and curious as a designer? Share your questions and experiences in the comments.

The design process is filled with tradeoffs. We have to decide what functions are in and what functions are left on the cutting room floor. We have to decide how we’re going to present the functions to the user and what we’re going to hide from them. And we have to decide what problems we’re going to fix and what we’re going to simply patch up.

The problem comes when the patches become, in our minds, mainstream functionality. We call these design cop-outs — when designers patch the symptoms instead of addressing the core problems.

Design cop-outs come in many different flavors. For example, you might let users choose options instead of designing it for them. Sure, some personalization is probably OK, but why should the user decide between a “minimized database” or “maximized for search”? How would the user know any better than the design team what is appropriate?

This is the cop-out: instead of doing the research to determine what will best serve the users, the team opted to leave the finishing touches to the user. In turn, the user is wholly unequipped to make the right decision and becomes frustrated because they are being asked.

In this issue of UIEtips, we explore another common cop-out: the site map. Sure, site maps seem like a useful tool. (After all, the site map is an invaluable developer tool for tracking the entirety of the site.) But, for users, it can become a catch-all for content the team doesn’t know how to organize.

Read the article: Site Maps: An Information Architecture Cop-Out

Thinking about organizing your site’s content is the domain of information architecture. At this October’s User Interface 13 Conference, we’ve invited Donna (Maurer) Spencer — world renowned expert in information architecture — to give a full-day, in-depth seminar to get you started on this all important topic.

What has your team done about your site map? Have you discovered it’s an essential part of your site? Or are you trying to reduce it? Share your thoughts and experiences below.

SpoolCast: Creating a Culture of Innovation with Scott Berkun
Recorded: July 23rd, 2008
Brian Christiansen, UIE Podcast Producer
Duration: 31m | File size: 17.5 MB
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 SpoolCast: Creating a Culture of Innovation with Scott Berkun [30:34m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

“We’re struggling with how to measure how well we are innovating […] Are we innovating better this year than last year? How would I know?”

If you work in a larger company and you haven’t heard a statement like this, you’re going to. Innovation has become such a buzzword, it’s nearly meaningless. But that doesn’t mean innovation itself is dead. In this week’s show, we sat down with Scott Berkun, the dynamic speaker and author of “The Myths of Innovation.”

Innovation is critical, but it’s not being defined for those folks challenged with implementing it. Innovation is hard work. Scott asks that we face facts here; to find big, new ideas that will change things for the better will never be easy.

OK, how do we innovate? Scott suggests that the key word is risk. The best organizations (Google, Apple, Pixar and 3M are offered as examples) promote this through a culture where it’s OK to take risks, where failure is acceptable if valuable lessons can be learned. Whenever risks can be taken in a safe environment innovation is much more likely to be successful.

Often times middle management is actually the key to fostering this environment. They see the organizational “big picture” and can shield the front line workers who are challenged with focusing on the work. It allows for in-house entrepreneurship, allowing for creativity and flexibility outside of their traditional responsibilities. Google’s “20% time” is a popular example of time where employees can branch out on self-made projects. In Google’s case, it gave birth to products like GMail.

Innovation happens in both small and large organizations, but in large companies, it takes dedicated resources, and the expectation of some amount of failure. Scott has found that in organizations resistant to change, you can find success in pitching that innovation is the tradition of the company.

As for Innovation and User Experience, in the early design stage there’s a delicate balance between collecting data from users and knowing where to take calculated risks that may run counter to the data. When taking a different approach, don’t be afraid to step out on a limb. Then test to see if it works.

Of course, this is just a taste of the half hour discussion we had, so you’ll want to listen to the entire thing to get the most of Scott’s insights on the subject.

[ You can hear Scott Berkun speak more about Innovation at the User Interface 13 Conference in Cambridge, MA — October 13-16, 2008. The structure of his workshop, The Myths of Innovation: How to Lead Breakthrough Projects, will be broken out into the following:
• What does a breakthrough mean?
• Training from the history of great innovation
• Jargon and terms in the business of innovation, and how to deal with them
• Creative thinking
For more information about UI13, check out our conference site, UIConf.com ]

Does your organization foster innovation as well as it could? Share your questions and experiences with innovation in the comments.

User Interface 13 conference is just over 2 months away. World-class speakers like Kim Goodwin, Luke Wroblewski, Jeremy Keith, Scott Berkun, Bill Verplank, and others will be attending and presenting on today’s most critical issues surrounding web design, information architecture, and usability. Would you like to help us out? UI13 is being held from October 13-16, 2008 in Cambridge, MA at the Boston Marriott Cambridge hotel. We are currently looking for volunteers who are available to assist us throughout the full four days of the conference and with initial set-up on Sunday.

Volunteers will be asked to arrive around 1 pm on Sunday, October 12th and stay until the end of the conference. Throughout the main four days of the conference, volunteers will be assigned to a full-day workshop and short talks to assist conference speakers with their needs. We’ll make every effort to accommodate your preference for which sessions you’d like to attend.

Volunteers are responsible for paying for all travel and hotel accommodations, but we will provide breakfast and lunch Monday through Thursday of the Summit. The registration fee is waived for volunteers. If you’re interested in volunteering, or if you have any questions, please send your replies directly to Lauren Cramer at lcramer@uie.com. Priority will be given to full-time students and those of you available to help out for the full event from Monday, October 13th through Thursday, October 16, plus initial set-up on Sunday.