User Interface Engineering

The User Interface Conference is a 15-year tradition of building up the designer’s skill set. Each year our team of expert instructors gets better and better. These are people so rich in experience, we could just sit around for days listening to their stories on how they’ve achieved their success.

This year’s topics are an eclectic collection that really says a lot about the current state of online web and software design. The program tells the story of the full development cycle, from coming up with innovative ideas, to making those ideas a reality, to growing the design to fill out its nooks and crannies.

Here’s the UI15 line-up and why we chose these amazing presenters

Leah Buley’s Good Design Fast session was so popular last year because it really resonated with everyone. We all want to be innovative, to generate new ideas that will blow away our customers and our co-workers. Leah’s session looks at the design process. Whether creating a brand new product or service, or trying to rethink what your existing offerings could be, this workshop delivers the tools to make that happen quickly and effectively.

Dave Gray has opened our eyes on what visual thinking can do. By creating a simple visual vocabulary, filled with simple elements that even a self-proclaimed worst drawer can handle, Dave opens up a world of communication for all of us. We can take complex ideas and lay them out for others, in a simple and understandable way. Seeing our ideas visually gives us a view into the thinking behind them, and lets us see where everything fits together.

For years we’ve tried to get Tamara Adlin on our program. Finally, it’s happening. Tamara is the high priestess of building personas in the design process. Her experience and high energy will keep you captivated as she explains her techniques for effective persona development. The designs that come from teams with a strong understanding of their personas are worlds better than anything else we see.

Nobody knows more about interaction design than Kim Goodwin. She’s a regular high point at our conferences. Kim as the great ability to talk about all phases of the design process, from understanding the users and innovating new ideas, through creating screens and flows, to the final refinements and finishing touches. Every designer deserves a day in their career to hear Kim demonstrate her masterful design techniques.

Luke Wroblewski owns the title of The World’s Most Authoritative Expert on Web Form Design. Luke has spent the last few years studying every possible approach, testing each idea for effectiveness, and is now a walking encyclopedia on the topic. Whether you’re asking your users to create a new account, fill out an application, or file their taxes, when it comes to web-based forms, you need to hear Luke’s wisdom on what works and what doesn’t.

Dan Rubin has a magical way of taking the elements of good graphic design — typography, layout, color, and imagery — and demonstrating how they improve the usability, effectiveness, and feel of a design. After hearing Dan, we suddenly understood what separated great looking sites from those that were frustrating. If you need to know the secrets of how great visual designers get their great results, attend Dan’s workshop.

In the last year, Kristina Halvorson has actively put the most important element — the content — front and center. She’s at the forefront of the new discipline — Content Strategy. It combines copywriting, information architecture, web governance, and business strategy to help organizations get complete control over the most important ingredient of their sites. Attending this workshop will change the way you think about managing your site’s content.

Nathan Curtis‘ knowledge of building design patterns and component libraries is encyclopedic. After listening to Nathan, you’ll share our excitement about the benefits of having an effective pattern and component library. His techniques for discovering, documenting, and curating the library elements are powerfully easy to implement in any organization. Nathan’s workshop is essential for anyone looking to grow their design efforts to meet enterprise-wide scale.

Avoiding Eeny, meeny, miny, moe

There are a lot of choices to make here. We know, it’s a tough decision on which workshops to sign up for. We’ll make it a little easier for you. All you have to do now is register for UI15. You’ll choose the workshops later. When you register by September 9, we promise you’ll get the workshops of your choice. Plus, there’s an added bonus of saving your company $400.

Learn more about the program and register at www.uiconf.com.

Explore the conference program. Planning on attending? Register by 9/9/10 for the lowest rate of $1295.

The Vulcans had something good with that mind-meld thing. Just put your fingertips on someone else’s forehead and your two minds become one. I wonder if Vulcan designers used that technique to ensure everyone knew how to come up with a coherent, integrated design, even though they all worked on different pieces?

Without the mind-meld thing, we have to resort to more primitive approaches to get everyone on the same page. In the past, we’ve tried templates, guidelines, and style guides. However, these have not proven to be very effective and end up frustrating teams more than helping the design process.

A few years back, we started seeing the emergence of pattern libraries as a solution to this problem. However, recently our research has shown us that pattern libraries only get you so far. For the rest of the solution, a component library can fill the gaps.

We’re revisiting an article that Nathan Curtis wrote for us in January 2009. Nathan does a great job outlining what patterns and components are and how they’re related. I think you’ll find this article quite beneficial and a good refresher if you’re already working with patterns and components.

Read the article, Components Versus Patterns.

If you’re thinking a pattern or component library can help your team be more efficient and create better designs, then you’ll want to check out Nathan’s full-day workshop: Standards, Reuse, Consistency, & Libraries. Nathan received rave reviews on a similar workshop he presented at the Web App Summit in 2009. Get more details on his workshop and the other 7 at http://uiconf.com.

Nathan is presenting at this year’s UI15 conference. Explore his workshop and the other full-day workshops. Planning on attending? Register by 9/9/10 for the lowest rate.

Designers care about the user experience. Marketers are concerned with SEO and conversion. The reality is that both need to work hand-in-hand to make more relevant and persuasive content that turns into higher search rankings. How do you get everyone on the same page?

Google comes to the rescue with their Quality Score. It’s an algorithm that ranks how relevant and persuasive the content is. The Quality Score will help designers produce a better site, while helping marketers get better search rankings. Become best friends with Google’s Quality Score and you’re sure to improve the relevance of your content and meet search metric goals.

Not many understand Google’s Quality Score. Plenty of you may not have even heard of it. For this week’s UIEtips article, we asked Jeffrey Eisenberg to explain how Google’s Quality Score works and why Google provides a financial incentive for paid searches that produce better user experiences. Jeffrey and his brother Bryan have helped numerous companies craft accountable digital marketing strategies that emphasize the optimization of customer experiences. I think you’ll learn a lot from this article.

Read the article, Google, User Experience, & Thinking Beyond Conversion.

We’re fortunate that Jeffrey and Bryan are also conducting our next virtual seminar, Produce a More Persuasive Site: Where Design and Marketing Meet. At the end of this Thursday’s (8/26) seminar, you’ll understand how to improve your Quality Score. They’ll share 7 perspectives to help you determine the relevance in your content. And they’ll give you 10 tips to improve your credibility, demonstrate value, and enhance the persuasiveness of your navigation.

Did you know about Google’s Quality Score? What have you done to improve your score? Share your thoughts with us below.

I’ve got a real mystery on my hands. I’m hoping you can help me figure it out.

Here’s the background: Since 1996, we’ve held an annual event we call the User Interface Conference. Hundreds of folks come every year to learn the latest thinking for creating great user experiences.

Over the 15 years, our attendance numbers have grown at a reasonable rate—usually 15% to 20% each year. During the rough economic years, 2001 and 2009, we saw some declines, but, on average, 15%-20% is a solid range for most years.

This is the mystery: The conference isn’t until November and registration opened barely a month ago, yet our numbers are more than double what they were at this time last year. That’s more than 100% growth rate! And we don’t know why!?! Maybe you could help us figure it out?

We have some theories

It certainly could be the program. This year we have brand new full-day seminars on visual thinking, building personas for SEO, and content strategy. We’ve also brought back previous years’ top workshops on creating good designs fast, visual design for non-designers, and web form design. Plus we’ve added in some great seminars about designing with scenarios and designing pattern libraries. I know I’m biased, but it’s definitely one of the best programs ever. But is it really twice as good as last year? I don’t know.

It might be a sign the economy is coming back strong in the tech sector. But many of the folks registered are from non-tech companies. We’re seeing folks from financial services, universities, and even state and local governments. People from every economic sector are signing up. Overall, the economy does seem to be coming back, but it’s certainly not twice as good as where we were last year. That can’t explain it.

Of course, we’re seeing huge interest in designing great experiences. Executives and senior management are using design as a competitive advantage. And look at the job postings, great designers are like gold. Could it be that folks are signing up for UI15 because of the valuable skills they’ll gain to enhance their careers?

Or could it be the format of the conference? UI15 is unique because we focus the majority of the program on full-day workshops. The topics we cover at UI15 are crazy intense, filled with techniques that are rich in subtly and nuance. Spending the entire day on a deep dive gets you to new insights you won’t find in shorter sessions. Yet we’ve always had the full-day format, and past attendees tell us this is the best part.

Another factor might be the amazing team of experts we’ve assembled this year. Everyone who knows Luke Wroblewski, Kristina Halvorson, Dave Gray, Leah Buley, Dan Rubin, Nathan Curtis, Tamara Adlin, or Kim Goodwin agrees they are the best of the best. They’ve (quite literally) written the books on their topics. They’re tremendously engaging presenters—I could listen to them for hours (and have)! Is that the reason behind this mysterious increase?

I’m scratching my head wondering what’s going on? Why is everyone signing up all of a sudden?

Here’s the problem we’re facing

While registrations are 200% of last year, our room space isn’t. We only budgeted to be slightly larger, using that 15%-20% growth rate as our goal.

If these registration rates keep up, we will definitely sell out. That means folks who wait to register may not get into the workshops they want. (Plus, if they wait beyond 8/26, the price goes up $400.) All those folks who have told me they are planning to come, but haven’t registered yet, better register soon if they want a guaranteed seat. (We’ll have a waiting list, but I don’t expect many on that list will get in.)

So, what’s your theory? Why are we getting so many registrations this year? I’d love to hear what you think. Share your ideas below.

Explore the conference site for answers to the mystery. Planning on attending? Register by August 26, 2010 for the lowest rate.

When we prepare for our user research sessions, it’s easy to focus on the questions we should ask. But what about the ones we shouldn’t ask?

Our goal, of course, is to learn everything we can. We need to leverage the research time, to ensure we’re filling our brains with the information we’ll need to create great designs.

In today’s UIEtips, I talk about three questions I’ve learned not to ask in sessions. By avoiding these questions, we get to the information we need faster. Read the article Three Questions You Shouldn’t Ask During User Research.

Once you’ve learned what you need from the research, you’ll want to put it in a form that helps you speed through your design process. That’s exactly what scenarios help you do and, coincidentally, why we’ve asked Kim Goodwin to come to UI15. She’ll teach us how to make scenarios work. You can find out about Kim and the other great UI15 experts at UICONF.com.

Explore all the workshop presenters. Register by August 26, 2010 for the lowest rate.

Have you compiled your own questions that you shouldn’t ask? Share your list below.

Event: UIE Book Club: Kristina Halvorson’s Content Strategy for the Web
Date: Tuesday, August 17, 2010 (TODAY!) from 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM (ET)
Location: http://live.5by5.tv
Call to ask your question: +1 407 278-4070

This is all very exciting. The first UIE Book Club is almost upon us. I’m so excited you’ll be part of it.

Join us today at 2pm Eastern, 1pm Central, and 11am Pacific. (If you’re in Mountain Time, you’re definitely clever enough to figure out the pattern. Except for Arizona. Those folks mess me up every time.)

Point your browser at http://live.5by5.tv.

That’s where you’ll find Kristina and me.

There’s two ways you can put your questions to Kristina. We’ll have an online chat room, where you can type in your question.

But even better is our dial-in lines. You can dial +1 407 278-4070 and talk directly to Kristina and me. (If you get a busy signal, it means we’ve filled up all the available lines. Just watch the show and we’ll tell you when the lines are free again.)

If everything goes as planned, we’ll record both the video and audio of the session, so you can pass it on to your colleagues at work (or catch it if you can’t join us).

See you there.

Picking the right assumptions to measure against can improve our results, but basing our measures on the wrong assumptions can send us in the wrong direction.

Former UIEer Joshua Porter wrote a blog post recently, Why A/B Testing Isn’t Just About Small Changes, that captured the attention of the twitterati. His point, which is a good one, is that if you just tweak small things, you hit the problem of running into a local maxima, where you think you’ve got the best result, when in fact there’s better ones you can’t see. Josh’s point is that radical design changes can be helpful to avoid hitting a local maxima unintentionally.

To support his point, he draws on the A/B Test results of Luke Steven’s home page. Luke is writing a book and decided to change his home page, which previously contained his portfolio, to let folks sign up for an email when the new book is published. Luke tested two designs and was shocked to see a 131% improvement with his alternative design.

Luke Steven’s first design alternative with lots of details about the book.

The experiment is simple. He started with a page that had lots of details about the book. Over the test period 655 folks visited the page and, from that, there were 33 “conversions” (people signing up for the book)—a 5.0% conversion rate.

Luke’s second design alternative, with virtually no details about the book.

At the same time, other visitors saw a different page. This one just asked the question “Are you a designer?” and mentioned there would be a new book, but didn’t explain what it was about. You’d think that having fewer details would get fewer conversions, but out of the 661 conversions, 77 converted—an 11.6% conversion rate. The less-detailed design got Luke twice as many conversions.

Luke wrote that his big takeaway was “Engaging visitors through appropriate copy improved sign ups by 100%+”. For Luke, getting more email addresses was an improvement and the second, less detailed design did that quite handsomely.

That got me wondering.

Luke has seemingly made an assumption: Any email address is a good email address. This is a basic approach to marketing—we need a mailing list, let’s collect email addresses. If we get enough email addresses, we’ll get some people who buy from us, and we’ll make money. (This is the entire premise behind the spam industry. Just keep mailing and someone is bound to buy.)

Yet, for small marketers, list quality plays a huge role. So, what if Luke had made a different assumption to measure against? What if he only went after email addresses of people who bought the book?

Now, the book isn’t out yet, so we don’t know the quality of Luke’s list. But let’s make up some numbers and see what happens.

The first design alternative said a little about what the book will contain: how to kick ass with web analytics, A/V testing, usability testing, and advanced CSS & CSS3. Sounds pretty good.

What if fewer people signed up for the email because it didn’t sound that interesting to most of the visitors? From that, we could assume that the people who did sign up were interested in the book. Let’s say 50% of those folks would likely buy the book when it’s published. From the trial, 50% of the 33 who signed up for the list is 17 people who we predict might buy the book. If Luke used sales as his conversion (instead of sign ups), that would make it a 2.6% conversion rate.

The second design alternative didn’t say anything about the book, other than the vague statements of “it’s what comes after web standards” and “you’re going to love it.” People are less likely to know what they are signing up for. While more people signed up, I think we can safely assume that more won’t be interested in the book once they hear about it. Let’s say that only 10% of those folks would likely buy the book. From that page’s trial, 10% of the 77 who signed up is 8 people who we predict might buy the book, a 1.2% conversion rate.

So, if our wild-ass predictions are right, the new assumptions suggest that design alternative A is the clear winner, twice as good as alternative B—the exact opposite of what Luke’s initial testing showed.

Of course, there’s a lot of fabrication here. We don’t know the quality of either list. We’re only guessing that the quality of one list is better than the other.

(Luke could measure the quality of the list today. He could, for example, send an email to each of the 110 emails he’s collected. A simple email with a choice: “I’m not interested. Please stop emailing me.” or “Send me the coupon.” would do the trick. That would tell us more about the list quality.)

The assumption “any email address is win” is different from “anyone who buys the book is a win.” Luke chose the former to measure his design success. Had he chosen the latter, it could’ve taken his design in a different direction.

We need to make sure we’re measuring the right assumptions.

Recently Johnny Holland published two of my essays on a distinction I call Hands vs. Brains. (You can read part 1 & part 2.)

My thinking about Hands and Brains have come from a distinction between, in my mind, contracting and consulting work. We get a ton of calls at UIE to help people with usability and design work, but it’s clear after a few moments of discussion with the prospective client that they’re looking for contracting—someone to do the work for them and not for consulting—someone to show them how to get them to the next level.

UIE doesn’t do contracting, but lots of folks do, so I’m always on the lookout for people who are great contractors. Understanding the distinction is really important and I wrote the Johnny Holland essays to help create a language around the two types.

Apparently, I hit a nerve, because a lot of folks have been reacting to the piece in ways I didn’t expect. I wanted to take a moment and discuss some of those reactions.

What If I Do Both?

This seems to be the biggest reaction, by far. Someone who is an information architect, for example, says they are quite capable of doing both the Hands work and the Brains work. So, why should they have to choose one?

It’s true that you can be quite capable of doing both. However, most projects don’t want or need both. They either want Hands, because they don’t have enough resources and need the work completed. Or they want Brains, because they are stuck and can’t figure out how to bring their designs to a new level.

So, it’s important, when talking about a potential project to discover which one it requires, then decide, do I want to do that? Doing one basically traps you for that client—once they see you as Hands, you’l always be Hands to them. Same for Brains. It’s important to make your choice carefully.

Strategy Is Good, But Without Execution, It Fails

100% Correct. But that doesn’t mean the people who do strategy are the ones doing the execution. In fact, almost always, it’s the wrong thing to do.

The strategy has to include how the job will get done. The strategist has to know who will do the execution work.

Many Brains consultants will help find the Hands contractors/employees to get the job done. They’ll help build the team with those who are the most capable.

Execution is key but being the one doing the execution isn’t.

To Be Great At Brains, I Have To Master Hands

Absolutely. Brains have to know how to do the work of Hands. It’s gotta be second nature. They’ve got to understand how it’s done and what excellent work looks like.

However, once you start doing Brains work, it’s rare you’ll do that work again. You need to know what to expect from the Hands who will be working for you, but you won’t do it yourself.

Think of the executive chef in a restaurant. They have to know how to prep and cook every recipe. But that doesn’t mean they do that for every meal. In fact, it’s a bad use of resources and talent.

This is All About the Economics

Doing Hands work takes a long time, because it’s rigorous production work. Brains work doesn’t take as long, to deliver the same value to the team.

Hands work, because it takes longer, charges a smaller hourly rate. Brains work, because it’s shorter, charges more. Often two to three times as much (or more). Where Hands work might charge $50 to $75 per hour, Brains will charge $150 to $300 per hour. (Many really good Brains consultants charge a *lot* more.) A Hand’s engagement could last months or even years. Brain’s engagements rarely go beyond weeks and are sometimes only a few days or hours.

This is why, at the client, you can’t do both. If you try to do both Brains and Hands work on a project, you’ve got a rate mismatch. You’re either charging too little or too much for part of the work you’re doing. (And explaining to the client why you’re changing rates in the middle won’t be easy.)

Even if you love doing both, you need to decide where you’re want to focus. Go for the joy of seeing your work produced by delivering great Hands work. Have the excitement of creative big-picture problem solving with awesome Brains work. Pick your pleasure and go for it.

The disciplines of experience design and marketing overlap, but sometimes the measurements for their success butt heads. You want your users to find exactly what they’re looking for, and for that content to be easily understood. Yet there’s conflict with marketing due to different goals and objectives, such as chasing paid search or other SEO objectives.

We’ve asked two uber-talented online marketing experts to show us a tool that will make both groups happy. Our next UIE Virtual Seminar, Produce a More Persuasive Site: Where Design & Marketing Meet with Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg, is happening Thursday, August 26, 2010.

Google gives us a standard you can employ to get others in your organization all on the same page, doing things you want them to do, to help you improve your site. It’s Google’s Quality Score.

The Eisenbergs will teach you that the Quality Score is based upon three elements: relevance, credibility, and navigation. Bryan & Jeffrey will share 7 perspectives to help you determine the relevance in your content. And they’ll give you 10 tips to improve your credibility, demonstrate value, and enhance the persuasiveness of your navigation.

What’s your relationship with your marketing team? This is a perfect virtual seminar to invite them to, and learn how both groups can be on the same page. Share your success and war stories below.

You’re in the middle of your workout. Working up a good sweat, listening to music, zoning out, when it suddenly hits you (sort of like the V-8 commercials), you could have been listening to a Spoolcast interview with an accomplished UX expert. Why not workout your brain too?

Regularly, we produce podcast interviews from UX experts as follow ups to their recent UIE Virtual Seminar. There’s never enough time to answer all the excellent questions from the attendees. So we record Q&A sessions with the presenters and share it with everyone (no need to attend the webinar to follow the podcast).

In today’s UIEtips, I interview two fascinating people, Peter Morville and Steve Portigal. Peter presented one of our most popular webinars, Leveraging Search & Discovery Patterns for Great Online Experiences. In his follow-up podcast, Peter discusses how browsing doesn’t scale, as well as two popular patterns: best result first pattern and advanced search.

Listen to Peter Morville’s podcast.

Steve’s webinar, Deep Dive Interviewing Secrets: Making Sure You Don’t Leave Key Information Behind, told us what you must do for an effective interview process (hint, listening is involved). In this podcast, Steve and I discuss various aspects of the interviewing process and share some entertaining stories.

Listen to Steve Portigal’s podcast.

There’s a slew of podcasts to explore on our web site. Subscribe to our RSS feed and have all the latest podcasts at your fingertips automatically.

We’d love to hear what you think about these podcasts. Share your feedback below.