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.

The search log, an often over-looked part of our site analytics, can offer a wealth of great information about how people interact with our design. We know, for example, that users often search for a keyword they don’t find on the screen, in essence creating their own link. Inspecting the search log can tell us what links are missing from the page, delivering us a bunch of productive changes to make to the site.

The best search logs contain more than just keywords. They tell us what page the user searched from and, if we’re lucky, which result the user chose. This information—where the user came from and where the user went after, can tell a story that becomes helpful and insightful.

In this issue of UIEtips, I walk through some of the questions we answer when we’re studying a client’s search log. We’ve had great success with both public-facing sites and intranets, yielding an amazing list of substantial improvements to our clients’ designs. I’m sure you’ll find them beneficial too.

Read the article – Spending Quality Time with Your Search Log

Finding the issues is just the first step to getting to these types of improvements. You need to know how to fix them. Which is where Peter Morville and Mark Burrell come in.

On Tuesday, January 12, Peter and Mark are delivering our next UIE Virtual Seminar: Leveraging Search & Discovery Patterns For Great Online Experiences. This is a must-attend seminar if you’re looking to create a great search experience for your users. When you register for this webinar, you’ll also receive Peter’s new book for free.

Have you peered into your search log? We’d love to hear what you found. Let us know below.

Hot off the presses! We’ve just finalized two more Masters for the UIE Web App Masters Tour, Julie Zhuo and Christian Crumlish. We’re thrilled they can join us.

Julie Zhuo

The designers at Facebook try hard to make Facebook users happy. It’s a hard-to-please audience, and there’s 350 million of them. As Facebook’s Product Design Manager, Julie is at the front of the storm, designing for the site that’s grown from 8 million college students to its current worldwide audience.

She’ll be sharing some of her team’s successful and not-so-successful design experiences, so we can all learn from their experience. The interesting part is that many of the problems they face are just like the ones we face, and their solutions are quite creative. You’ll hear Julie’s experiences at our San Diego stop on the tour.

Christian Crumlish

Many web applications, whether on intranets or public facing, involve making connections with other people. From the address book and contact list, to messaging and content sharing, we see more web apps helping people communicate and collaborate.

We can’t think of a better person, to introduce social features into your web-based applications, than Christian. Working with his co-author, Erin Malone, they have compiled an amazing library of patterns in their new book, Designing Social Interfaces. We’re excited to have him as one of our masters on this tour and can’t wait to hear what wisdom he’ll be sharing with us. We’re fortunate that Christian will be at each stop of the tour.

Stay tuned. We should have more additions to the program tomorrow. And we’re adding more to the site every day, as we get ready for the launch in a few days! Watch along at uietour.com.

This is exciting. We’re putting the finishing touches on our upcoming UIE Web App Masters Tour. An event this momentous takes months to make happen. And now, we’re just days away from having every detail lined up.

Here’s the facts:

We’re going to 4 cities between March and July, 2010: San Diego, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and Seattle. We love these cities for the vibrant tech communities.

We’ve put together a team of leading designers of today’s top web-based applications. We call them the Masters. In each city, we’ll have them unleash two days of inspiring presentations. These folks are the best in the business and we’re thrilled you’ll get the chance to learn first-hand from their experience.

Who are the Masters?

I can tell you about two of them today:

Doug Bowman

What do Google, Wired, Blogger, Capgemini, Mighty Goods, and Adaptive Path all have in common? They’ve all seen the fine work of Doug Bowman, one of the most influential designers on the web. Now, Doug is the Creative Director of Twitter, where he’s helping change the world, one hundred and forty characters at a time. Doug will be sharing his design experiences at the San Diego and Seattle tour locations.

Stephen Anderson

Stephen gave a mind-blowing presentation at the 2009 IA Summit. He discussed how the basics behind game mechanics can help users become more engaged in other types of applications. The minute I walked out of his talk, I knew we had to have him at one of our events. His writing at PoetPainter.com, his presentations, and his work for clients, such as Nokia, Frito-Lay, Sabre Travel Network, and Chesapeake Energy all demonstrate the new insights he brings to application design. We’re thrilled that he’ll be presenting his thoughts in all four cities.

By the way, I’ll be opening and closing each of the events, so you’ll have a chance to hear from me, in addition to Doug, Stephen, and the other presenters we’re lining up.

We’re putting everything about the event at www.uietour.com. Stay tuned for more news…

Last week in UIEtips, we revisited some of our favorite articles from 2009. Now we’re turning our attention to our top podcasts of 2009.

This past year we produced some outstanding podcasts covering a range of topics with several invited experts. We’ve selected our favorite podcasts that we feel strongly benefits anyone who works in the web design world. They’re loaded with some great take-aways.

Our top 5 podcasts, in no particular order, are:

• SpoolCast: Achieving Pattern and Component Reuse

  Dealing with real-life web app production isn’t as glamorous as some aspects of design in the digital realm, but it is full of challenges and can honestly make or break a project. There are ways of truly optimizing certain aspects of the production so that you can create a product with consistent quality at a faster pace. To find out how, I turned to Nathan Curtis.

• SpoolCast: Ajax Aids Accessibility

  If you do it right, using Ajax techniques can improve accessibility. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Ajax, like most techniques and technologies on the web are what you make of them. That’s why I asked Derek Featherstone to speak with me about his latest work. Derek is a world renown expert on web accessibility. As principle of Further Ahead, he also helps clients deploy sites that exploit the latest techniques.

• Presentation: Revealing Design Treasures from the Amazon

  On its surface, Amazon.com just seems like a large e-commerce site, albeit a successful one. Its design isn’t flashy, nor is it much to write home about. But deep within its pages are hidden secrets — secrets that every designer should know about.

• Userability Podcast: The Most Influential Books in UX Published

  This week a question from one of the world’s most well-read cities fittingly enquires about the must-read books in design. Damon Dimmock asks Robert Hoekman and me to recommend their top three books on design.

• SpoolCast: Visual Design for the Non-Designer

  What can a non-designer do to harness the power of visual design without calling professional help? Quite a lot, says internationally-regarded visual designer Dan Rubin. We called Dan to talk about what design techniques are accessible to mere mortals.

We’ve really enjoyed putting together these podcasts and hope you find the content valuable. Thank you for encouraging our behavior throughout 2009. We wish you a successful and productive new year.