Tagging has been around for more than 8 years. The technique, also called folksonomy, is simple: users apply their own words or phrases to content they uncover, leaving a trail back for themselves and for future content seekers. Each tag conveys meaning, giving a path to discovering new content that traditional navigation can’t.

Since their inception, we’ve seen some excellent implementations and some disastrous ones. The excellent implementations quickly lead users to the content they seek, and help discover items they didn’t know existed or wouldn’t have found otherwise. When implemented poorly, the tags just confuse the users and clutter the interface, not adding any value or meaning.

In this issue of UIEtips, Stephanie Lemieux explores what tagging might look like inside of the enterprise firewall. How does it work when we’re applying tags to serious business content? If you’re wondered whether there are benefits to a folksonomy on an intranet, you’ll want to read her article.

Read the article Social Tagging and the Enterprise—Does Tagging Work at Work?

Stephanie is taking tagging further, exploring the implementation patterns for both public-facing sites and enterprise content, in her upcoming UIE Virtual Seminar, Tagging with Folksonomies in a Taxonomy World. Learn more about the March 10 webinar and Stephanie’s insights and ideas for successful implementations.

Get the details on Tagging with Folksonomies in a Taxonomy World.

Have you explored tagging within your organization? What have you found that works? What should others avoid? We’d love to hear your experiences below.

When our applications grow large and complex, how do we help users find the right commands and functions? If we were talking about large data sets, we’d build in a search capability. Would search also work for finding commands?

Our good friend, Hagan Rivers, explores that question in this issue of UIEtips. Inspired by our recent UIE Virtual Seminar on Search & Discovery Patterns with Peter Morville and Mark Burrell, Hagan started thinking about her own area of expertise: making complex navigation simple. That’s when her article, Browse vs. Search in Application Navigation, was born. We know you’ll enjoy it.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

At our upcoming UIE Web App Masters Tour, Hagan will be sharing with us her secrets for dealing with gnarly, complex web app navigation issues. She’s just one of the great designers we’re featuring in this four city tour, which starts in San Diego next month. Details for the tour are at www.UIEtour.com.

Are you building large applications where users need help finding commands? What techniques have you tried? We’d love to hear your experiences below.

Robert Hoekman, Jr and I are teaming forces once again, to do our best to answer your UX questions.

If you’re not familiar with it, Robert and I do a little podcast show we call Userability. You ask us a question. We give you an answer. Occasionally, we give you a good answer. Sometimes, we (and by “we” I mean Robert) gives you the right answer.

It’s time to get more questions. If you’d like to be on our show, just enter your question here or send us an email to userability@uie.com. We’ll select the most entertaining and interesting questions, then set up a time to record the answers.

Personas have been part of the UX toolbox for a while. Yet we’ve always wondered why teams don’t use them more often. A few years back, we set off to answer that question.

We discovered a variety of ways to create personas — each valuable in their own right. With our clients, we’ve been using a field-research-based technique. This method creates robust, data-based persona characters and scenarios.

Tamara Adlin has a fabulous workshop technique, one she calls Ad-Hoc Personas, which builds the characters out of information that the organization already knows.

Steve Mulder has some great techniques for using analytics and market research to gather and validate persona characteristics.

From our research, we’ve found all of these are useful methods and, when done well, deliver value.

When we analyzed the results, the initial findings show teams that approach personas the right way get great benefits from them. Unfortunately, many teams don’t realize what makes a persona project successful. They focus on the wrong aspects, dooming their project
to failure.

In this issue of UIEtips, I share the essence of successful persona projects — the key factors teams should understand. It turns out that once you know the right way to approach the project, it’s straightforward to make it successful.

Read the article, The Essence of a Successful Persona Project.

In the article, I talk about how impressed we are with Tamara Adlin’s Ad-Hoc Personas technique. We think this is an essential tool for getting everyone in the organization on the same page. Don’t miss the UIE Virtual Seminar on Thursday, February18, where Tamara walks us through the method. Read all about it.

Have you been successful at creating and using personas in your design work? Which factors do you think helped the most? Share your thoughts below.

It’s hard to have a conversation about great design without mentioning Apple. Usually, we’re talking about the design of the iPod, iPhone, or last week’s newly announced iPad.

However, those aren’t the only interesting challenges Apple’s talented designers have tackled. They’ve done an amazing job with something that wouldn’t get a lot of attention otherwise: the web site checkout forms.

In the last two issues of UIEtips, Luke Wroblewski dissects the newly redesigned Apple.com checkout process. As always, his critique is brilliant, providing a ton of great tips for anyone designing interactive forms. I know you’ll enjoy it.

Read the article – The Apple Store’s Checkout Form Redesign, Part 1
and
Read the article – The Apple Store’s Checkout Form Redesign, Part 2

Luke is a Master of web forms and that is why we asked him to be part of the UIE Web App Masters Tour taking place in 4 different cities from March – July 2010. Luke will show you how to move beyond static web forms by leveraging the best of today’s technologies and capabilities. Learn more about the Tour, Luke’s topic, and the other Masters at http://www.UIETour.com.

What do you think of Apple’s redesign? Did they do it right or would you have changed it? We’d love to know your thoughts below.

Web-based applications are a different beast than other types of software or web sites. Web app designers not only have to take care of the users’ goals, but also ensure that the business needs are taken into account.

The business needs can be complex. They come from all over the enterprise, originating from initiatives (like marketing campaigns), infrastructure (like inventory constraints), and regulations (like export restrictions). Suddenly, a simple task, like paying for a product, becomes crazy-complicated.

In today’s UIEtips, I discuss how the best designers thrive within this world of wacky constraints, coming up with ingenious ways to meet the business requirements while producing a delightful user experience. If you design web apps, this should be interesting.

Read the article, Web Apps: Where Business Needs & User Needs Collide.

Web app design is at the forefront of our minds this month. That’s because we’ve just launched our 4-city UIE Web App Masters Tour. We’re wicked excited about the program and I’m betting you’ll be too as soon as you check it out. Go see it at www.UIETour.com.

Have you bumped into business constraints in your web app designs? Have you come up with a creative way to work around them? We’d love to hear your experiences. Leave your thoughts below.

UIEtips 1/19/10: Interview-Based Tasks: Learning from Leonardo DiCaprio

When we do our jobs well, important decisions are made correctly. Designs are improved. Experiences transition from frustrating to delightful. Assuming we do our jobs well.

Doing our jobs well is very hard work. A thousand details need to line up just perfectly. If we don’t get things just right, important decisions are made wrong. Designs regress. Experiences frustrate even more.

As user experience professionals, it’s all about the assumptions we make. If we assume correctly, things go well. It’s when we make false assumptions that problems occur. How do we know when our assumptions are any good?

In this week’s article, we look back to an article originally published in 2006; Interview-Based Tasks: Learning from Leonardo DiCaprio. In the article, I address the assumption question head-on by looking at a testing technique known as interview-based tasks. This non-traditional approach to usability tests helps work around the assumptions built into standard task design, allowing teams more flexibility and insight into what users actually need from the design.

When using interview-based tasks, the art of asking the question is critical. How you prepare for the interview, build rapport with the interviewee, and how to work with varying levels of experience and expertise will determine how successful the interview-based task is completed.

That’s where Steve Portigal comes in. Our next UIE Virtual Seminar is on Deep Dive Interviewing Secrets: Making Sure You Don’t Leave Key Information Behind. This is a not-to-miss-seminar if you want to know more behind the art of the question.

Have you tried interview-based tasks? What insights did you gain from it? How else have you checked the assumptions that go into your work? Join the discussion by submitting a comment below.

This month, I’m making the rounds in New England, New York, and Old Washington DC.

Presentation: Revealing Design Treasures of The Amazon

• STC NNE – Wednesday, January 13, 2010, 6pm
  The Northern New England Society for Technical Communicators Chapter
  Dion Center, Rivier College, Nashua, NH
• NYC UPA – Tuesday, January 19, 2010, 6pm
  New York City Usability Professionals Association Chapter
  Bloomberg L.P., 731 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10022
• GBCACM & Boston IEEE – Thursday, January 21, 2010, 7pm
  Greater Boston ACM Chapter & Boston IEEE Chapter
  IBM Innovation Center, Waltham, MA

Presentation: What Makes A Design Seem Intuitive?

• Interaction Design School at School of Visual Arts – Wednesday, January 20, 2010, Noon
  School of Visual Arts, New York, NY

Other Events

• UXCamp DC – Saturday, January 23, 2010
  Children’s Studio School of Art and Architecture – 1301 V Street, NW – Washington, DC 20009
• Boston Interaction Holiday Party – Wednesday, January 2010
  Red Fez, 1222 Washington Street, Boston, MA 02118

With today’s additions to the UIE Web App Masters Tour, we complete our line up for the first stop in San Diego. (When is that, you ask? Why it’s March 23-24. We can’t wait to be there.)

Joining the other seven presenters for our two-day deep dive into all things wonderful about Web Apps will be:

Hagan Rivers

I’ll say it: I love Hagan. She’s an amazing designer who knows her stuff. And, unlike many designers, she’s really great at explaining the why behind her design. She’s presented at our previous Web App Summit and User Interface Conference events, always delighting the crowd.

Hagan was involved in the first web-based applications, back when she worked for Netscape in ye olde early days, where she was the lead designer on versions 1.0 through 4.0. You don’t get much more in-the-trenches experience than that. Now, she’s at Two Rivers Consulting, where she’s still pushing the envelope in web app design.

Luke Wroblewski

I think of Luke as a wunderkind. Like Hagan, he started in the early days of the web, working at NCSA where the original Mosaic browser was born. He then moved on to eBay and is now Chief Design Architect for Yahoo!, where he works on designs used every day by Yahoo!’s 700 million users.

Luke’s first book, Site Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability, was what brought my attention to him. But it’s his most recent book, Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks, that I think really shows his talents. You’d think a book about Web Forms would be boring, but from the first words (“Forms suck.”), he had me. (In fact, I just noticed my copy of his book has gone missing—again! This will be the third time I’ve replaced it. Keep good track of yours as they like to walk away.)

Luke’s been speaking at our events for years and is also one of our top-rated speakers. So we’re thrilled he’ll be joining us on the tour.

Both Luke & Hagan will be at all four stops on the tour, starting in San Diego.

Get Notified As More Details Come Along

What’s that? You want to be notified on additional details and registration? No problem, just leave us your email address and we’ll send you a quick note when we have more information.

Stay tuned as the next thing is to announce the San Diego schedule and what each of our masters will be speaking on. I can’t wait to hear them!

Good news, everyone.

We’ve lined up two more Masters for our UIE Web App Masters Tour. We’re thrilled to announce Bill Scott and Ken Kellogg will be joining us.

Bill Scott

First, let me say this: Bill is the nicest person on the entire planet. You’ll notice this the moment you talk to him. But that’s not why we invited him.

I wanted him on the Masters Tour because he’s brilliant, particularly when it comes to design patterns for web-based applications. Bill spoke at our Web App Summit a few years back and dazzled the audience with his presentation on Anti Patterns—things you shouldn’t do when designing.

In addition to co-authoring the book, Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions, Bill is also the Director of UI Engineering at Netflix. All of these things add up to one thing: you’re going to love his insights. Bill will be with us in all four cities.

Ken Kellogg

Managing the design of a $6.5 billion a year website is no easy challenge. Especially when that website is owned by one of the oldest, most respected brands in the world. While many of us deal with the battle of old ways against modern thinking, this is on an epic scale.

That’s why I wanted you to hear from Ken Kellogg, who sits directly in the middle of that battle, as the Director of User Research for Marriott International. Ken is currently guiding major design changes through Marriott.com and will report, first hand, what that has been like. His stories will inspire you. You can hear Ken talk about his experiences at every stop on our tour.

It’s coming together.

Bill and Ken join a great slate, including Doug Bowman, Stephen Anderson, Julie Zhuo, and Christian Crumlish. Oh, I’ll be there too (but you probably knew that).

Just a few more presenters to go and we’ll have a full program. This is getting exciting now.

Get Notified As More Details Come Along

What’s that? You want to be notified on additional details and registration? No problem, just leave us your email address and we’ll send you a quick note when we have more information.