But when it comes to prototyping tools and methods to use, many of us are unsure what to do.

There’s lots of tools to choose from. It’s often a mystery as to which one will work best for you and what’s best to use based on your situation. That’s where Todd Zaki Warfel comes in (cue the Superman music).

Todd is a thought leader in the user experience design world, as well as the author of the acclaimed book, Prototyping: A Practitioner’s Guide. Thanks to Todd and his publisher Rosenfeld Media, today’s UIETips article is a reprint of chapter 5, Picking the Right Tool, from his book.

In this article, Todd explores what tools people are using and  what kinds of prototypes they make. I’m sure you’ll find this book excerpt of great interest.

Read the article, Prototyping: Picking the Right Tool.

On March 31, 2010, Todd is presenting the next UIE Virtual Seminar on his Eight Guiding Principles for prototyping. Whether you’re just starting with prototyping, or you’re a seasoned veteran, I’m sure you’ll get a lot out of this webinar. And when you register, thanks to Todd and Lou you’ll be sent a pdf copy of Todd’s entire book. Learn more about it Todd’s seminar, A Practitioner’s Guide to Prototyping.

What tools do you use for prototyping? We’d love to hear your experiences below.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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 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.

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.

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…

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.

While attending the User Friendly Conference in Shanghai, China this year, we stayed at the Hau Ting Hotel. During one of the meals there, they handed us this card to rate their service.

Now, the translation issues of Chinglish aside, this card points out problems common with measuring satisfaction.

The first has to do with the polarity. Is a 5 good or bad? If one person rates something with a 5 and the next person rates it with a 1, can you really say they have opposite opinions? Or did they just read the scale differently?

The second has to do with scale. What is the difference between a 5 and a 4 (or a 1 and a 2)? Is there meaning there? Or, as is common, does the individual rate something a 4 because they believe they “never give out 5s”? (Many seasoned statisticians will compensate by always grouping the 4s and 5s together in their reporting, which, for satisfaction is probably the right thing to do.)

The third has to do with rating terms. I have no idea what they mean by “Nattiness”. But, even under the food category, there is “Portion”, which I think I understand—until I go to rate it. Do I rate a 5 is I’m happy with the portion size? Or if I think the portion size was large? Since it was a buffet, is it the size of the portion set out? Or the amount of food I put on my plate?

And finally, the fourth has to do with followup actions. If 80% of the respondents rated “Portion” with a 3, what would the restaurant do differently?

We want to know if our customers and users are satisfied with our efforts. And, if they aren’t, we need to know what to change. Creating an instrument to give us meaningful and actionable feedback is really difficult.

I’m working on a new presentation on measuring customer satisfaction. I’m calling it: Go Ahead! Make My Day! (Dana Chisnell suggested the subtitle should be “Feeling Lucky, Punk?”) Stay tuned…

One of Brian’s comments jumped out at me:

We took our knowledge and created, in a warehouse in San Francisco, an entire lobby made out of white foam core. We built it to scale. Then we brought in consumers to get feedback on the overall experience of the space. We didn’t want feedback on color choices, like blue versus red. Instead we wanted feedback on using welcome pedestals, rather than a clunky front desk. Our associates circle around the space rather than standing in one place, and we wanted customer feedback on that. And the foam core allowed for rapid prototyping. After we got user feedback, we could rip it apart and build it again to get the concept right.

It’s one thing to talk about the abstract notion of protoyping a web page or a dialog box. But to prototype an entire lobby experience? That’s pretty cool.

Not too different than what Apple did with the Apple Store. Who said an old-tyme business like Marriott can’t play the same game as the cool kids. See? There’s hope for us all!

Read the entire interview.

(Hat tip: Dana Chisnell)

At year’s end, it’s common to reflect and revisit what you’ve done. We thought about the articles that had the biggest impact and really got people thinking.

Even if some readers didn’t agree with our conclusions, it started a discussion and brought awareness to some important user experience issues.

Here are the 5 favorite articles from 2009

• A Recession Strategy for Web Apps – In hard economic times, web-based applications are now an important element in an organization’s survival and growth strategy. Recessions are all about cutting waste and focusing in on activities that will have immediate, positive outcomes.
• Gerry McGovern Says “Manage the Tasks”I discuss with Gerry McGovern on how users’ performance on a site correlates strongly with their completion of tasks.
• 5 Design Decision Styles, What’s Yours? - I walk you through the five different styles we’ve found teams use to make design decisions.
• Great Designs Should be Experienced and Not Seen -I talk about how the goal of a designer is to make their site disappear.
• The $300 Million Button – How changing a button increased a site’s annual revenues by $300 million.

Its been a year full of high and low points. Many of us will face a challenging 2010 and user experience will be critical to any successful business. There are exciting things on the horizon and I can bet we’ll be in for a few pleasant surprises in the world of user experience during 2010.

We’ve got great plans in the upcoming year. Watch for new events such as the Web App Masters Tour and an amazing list of presenters for the UIE Virtual Seminars. As always, we’ll keep the articles and podcasts coming.

Ok, that’s kind of a lame riddle, but it’s accurate nonetheless. When we get a wrapped present, we hope the unwrapping will produce something that delights us.

The same is true clicking on a search result. We anticipate it will serve our needs and provide everything we’re seeking.

Unfortunately, much of the time, it doesn’t. The shame is it’s completely preventable — careful thought and design could’ve resulted in a delightful user experience.

In this UIEtips, I talk about some perils we’ve seen when users clicked on sponsored links, only to be disappointed by the results. Read the article, Three Perils with Search Landing Pages.

In addition to sponsored links, you also need to take care of your organic search results. In this week’s UIE Virtual Seminar, we have Shari Thurow sharing critical tips and techniques for getting the most from your search optimization efforts. Don’t miss her webinar.

How do you determine what ads to show when search is involved? Share your thoughts below.

We’ve launched a ton of events in the 21 years we’ve been around. But this time, we were a little stuck for the name. So we put out the call and asked you to help us come up with a name. The only information we provided was that it was a 2 day event, held in 4 cities, and the content will cover best practices for designing web-based applications with top-caliber speakers.

We figured we’d get 30 or 40 ideas to choose from. Boy were we surprised. The entries started pouring in. All in all, we received more than 650 great ideas.

Some were obvious names: Web App Series, Web App Symposium, Web Apps 2010, and Web App Conference.

Some folks went the acronym route: Another Web App Road Extravaganza (AWARE), Browser-Based Application Development (B-BAD), and Interactive Web App National Tour (iWANT).

-palooza was a popular suffix. We received more than 25 submissions, including the likes of Spoolapalooza and Web Appalooza.

And the next most frequent submission we saw had 2×4 (as in two days, four cities) in the name such as Web App 2×4 and UIE2×4.

Some we thought were really amusing: Better than TED, The Justice League of Web Apps (we guess attendees are required to state their super powers), Swiss Army Knife Web Apps and How To Fold All Your Pieces Neatly Into Place, and UIE Web Apps: The Summit Is Not A Mirage.

So how do you choose the right name, one that’ll be the forefront of the event’s brand? To make our decision, we turned to the same techniques we use for prioritizing large amounts of user data.

The Process

As with any good process, we first needed to figure out how we’d know if we did a good job. We needed success criteria. So we went about identifying the qualities of a good UIE event name.

We know that it had to work well with UIE in it. Also, since this event will focus on web-based applications, it had to communicate that somehow.

As we looked at names we sorta liked and ones we didn’t like as much, we started talking about what made them different from each other. That gave us some perspectives: we wanted the name to be remarkable, but not too cute. It needed to be easy for someone to sell to their boss, since many folks will need to ask to come. Because we’ll be in four cities, we wanted that to come through, versus an event that is only held once.

(Coming up with attributes like this is the same way we figure out what makes one study participant different from another, when we’re creating personas. We make playing cards for each participant, pull out two cards, and ask “What’s different between them?” and “What’s the same?”)

We ended up with a list of 15 attributes. But it would be impossible to find a name that matched all of those. So we needed a way to figure out which attributes were most important.

We used another technique from our client work: we gave each attribute a weight. Every person on the team assigned a number from 1 to 5, where 5 is a must-have quality and 1 is a nice-to-have.

To come up with a group consensus, we used a two-step voting process. First, everyone says their number. Then we discussed any differences. (Why did Brian give that one a 2? Why did I give the same thing a 4?) Finally, everyone voted again (because the discussion changes people’s minds) and we chose the mode average. (Some people use median average, but that creates crazy precision that I don’t think is necessary.)

By looking at the final scores, it was clear what criteria our winning name needed to meet. We poured through the giant pile of submissions and one name jumped out.

The New Name of the Web App Thingy

Are you ready? Here it is: The UIE Web App Masters Tour.

It fit all our top criteria and we think it accurately describes how great the two-day, four-city tour of web app experts will be.

The Winners of the Contest

Six submissions were all very close to this name but hence, we can only have one winner. Congratulations to Ilona Posner for submitting the winning name. The other 5 people will receive runner-up prizes of proceedings discs from UI14 and the 2009 Web App Summit.

We also decided to give out the 2009 Web App Summit proceedings to a few creative entries:

• Wicked Web (App) Wizards Conference – Bryn Dews
• Justice League of Web Apps – Josh DiMauro
• Spool’s Web App Circus of Excellence – Caroline Sober

Finally, as promised, we drew three email address at random: Tracie Scott, Mark Malamud, and Martha Roden.

Thanks to everyone who participated. Be sure to follow us on Twitter for the latest updates on The UIE Web App Masters Tour.

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User experience research lives or dies by the appropriateness of the participants in the study. If the participants match the real users, you’re set. But if the participants aren’t like the target users, the project probably dies an ugly death. Worse, the design that is based on the bogus data croaks in public.

Earlier this Fall, I asked usability testing expert Dana Chisnell to present a UIE Virtual Seminar on one of the trickier parts of user research projects—Recruiting for Usability Testing. In her presentation, she talked about how to source and screen participants, how to compensate them, and even why you should do the recruiting rather than outsourcing it. We had more excellent questions from the audience than we could ask during the live event. So, I sat down with Dana to record this podcast and cover some of the remaining issues. If you find yourself wanting more afterward, don’t forget you can still purchase a recording of the 90-minute session, Recruiting for Usability Testing.

During the podcast, Jared asked Dana to dig into these questions, and more:

• Why recruit based on behavior, not demographics?
• How many people should you recruit (as opposed to how many you should test) for a user research project?
• How do you define recruiting criteria for a product that doesn’t exist yet?
• How do you take time zones into consideration when recruiting for remote usability testing?
• How do you word your subject lines in emails for the recruitment process?

Tune in to hear more about recruiting for your usability testing. Still have questions? Start the discussion in our comments, below.

Ok, really it’s just the story of the links. (We’ll talk about the content later, I promise.)

About 10 years ago, we started looking at how users decided to move from one page to the next. Curiously, we found a consistent pattern, independent of the users’ previous experience or the design of the page. Upon reaching a page, the users scanned the page for the phrases or words that were important to them. If they found them, they’d try to click on them (or the link that seemed to go with them).

We call those magic phrases “Trigger Words”, because they trigger the user into action. They are key to understanding the secret to getting your users to the content they’re seeking. Hardly a day goes by where we don’t talk about their importance to one client or another.

That’s why we decided it’s time to republish the article we wrote about them, The Right Trigger Words. While we wrote this back in 2004 and the examples have aged a little (Analog’s home page, for example, now uses flyout menus instead of listing all the trigger words right on the page), the article is still the best resource we have to explain what we mean. I’m betting you’ll enjoy it.

Bringing this article up is timely, because it fits perfectly with Shari Thurow’s upcoming UIE Virtual Seminar, When Search Meets Web Usability. Join us on the 12/16 webinar, and you’ll see how Shari uses trigger words to make sure you’re getting the most out of your search engine optimization efforts.

Are trigger words important to your design strategy? What techniques have you used to identify and integrate them into your site? Share your experiences below.

But it still doesn’t have a name!

Our contest for the Web App Thingy produced more than 550 submissions so far. We’ve gotten some great ideas.

Here’s some of the really interesting submissions:

• Web App-attack!
• Wicked Web (App) Wizards Conference
• Web Apptitude 2010
• Web App Expert Series
• UIE Master Web App Designers Tour
• Web App Touchy-Feely-Event
• Web Jam
• UIE Web App Caravan
• Mega Web App Days

And one of my personal favorites came with a picture: Web App Tour (WAT).

Supply The Best Name and Win!

If we pick your name for the Web App Thingy, you’ll win a free registration. You’ll have 4 different locations to choose from.

And we’ll enter everyone who submits an entry into a drawing. We’re picking 3 people at random to each receive our UI14 Proceedings and UIE Web App Summit 2009 Proceedings Discs.

So, what are you waiting for? Send those submissions before midnight EST, Friday, December 4, 2009 to
contest@uie.com. We’ll announce the winners the week of December 7.

I can’t wait to see your ideas.

We’d looked at sites that had made a huge investment in adding graphics to their sites and at sites that were almost all text. We couldn’t see a difference in the usability of either. Therefore, we concluded, graphic design didn’t play a role. Looking back, this wasn’t a shining moment in our analysis.

All that controversy, however, got us thinking. And almost 15 years later, we now know differently. From all the research we’ve conducted since, we can pinpoint many instances when good graphic design has enhanced the users’ experience.

Yet there are still instances where a positive contribution is hard to see. In today’s UIEtips, I talk about what we now know about the three different types of graphics commonly found on sites: navigation graphics, content graphics, and ornamental graphics. I’ll show you which ones help the experience and which ones hurt. Read the article Deciding When Graphics Will Help (and When They Won’t).

If you’re interested in creating great experiences using images and icons, you’ll want to check out our next UIE Virtual Seminar with Patrick Hoffman, happening this Thursday in a web browser near you.

Have you had good success with prioritizing graphics in your designs? What’s worked and what hasn’t? Share your experiences below.

In 2010, we’re bringing a cool new series of 2-day events to four US cities. We’re still putting it together, so I can’t share too many details.

I can reveal this: It’s gonna be about the best practices for designing web-based applications. It’ll have the kind of field-leading, edge-defining, top-caliber speakers you’ve come to expect from a UIE event, jam-packed with groovy case studies and inspiring insights.

It needs a name. Web App Thingy ain’t gonna cut it.

We don’t know what to call this 2-day thing. For lack of anything better, we keep calling it the “Web App Thingy”, but we’re dubious that’ll play well outside our walls.

Last year, we held our very successful UIE Web App Summit in Newport Beach. This event is on the same theme, but “Summit” didn’t seem right for something in four cities, where we’re coming to you, instead of you coming to us.

We’ve also done a “Roadshow”, but because we’re thinking this will have a whole bunch of great speakers, we thought this underplayed the real talent that’s coming along.

All-star Super Tour seemed pretentious. So, we’re at a loss as to what we call the thingy.

Give our Thingy a name. Win a free registration.

Would you like to come to our Thingy for free? If so, help us find a better name.

We’re holding a contest. If we like your name, you get to come for free. And 3 people who enter will win a free UI14 Proceedings and 2009 Web App Summit Proceedings Discs.

Send your entries (as many as you want) to contest@uie.com by midnight (EST) on December 4, 2009. Any ideas are good ideas.

We’ll pick three email addresses out of all the submissions at random and send each one our UI14 Conference Proceedings and 2009 Web App Summit Proceedings Discs.

And, if we love your event name enough to use it, you can be our guest at the Web App Thingy (or whatever you called it)! How cool would that be?!? (You’ll walk around the event, pointing at every badge, sign, and napkin, telling everyone around you, “I came up with that!”)

Please, help name our thingy!

Often, when we talk to teams about whether they think they explored enough design alternatives, they tell us they didn’t because of time, resources, or their own lack of imagination.

However, good design doesn’t have to be an expensive process, if you have the right tools and techniques in your toolkit. At last week’s User Interface 14 Conference, I had the opportunity to hear Leah Buley, Donna Spencer, and Dan Rubin share their favorite tools and techniques, showing that design exploration can be an easy tool for any team. In the article, Design-Exploring Options and Making Decision, you’ll read what they had to say.

You can also hear Leah, Donna, and Dan’s presentations, along with the other 6 presenters on the UI14 conference proceedings disc. The disc has over 12 hours of audio recordings, all the handouts from the Featured Talks, and the presentation slides to the eight full-day workshops. Listen to a sample from Leah Buley’s talk on How to be a User Experience Team of One.

Do you have your own tricks for exploring design alternatives? If so, drop us a note below. We’d love to hear from you.

What we found in our research over the last 10 years is that practically every measure of users’ performance correlates strongly with the users completing their task. Users who achieve their objective believe the web site looks more professional, rate it as more fun, tell us it runs faster, and are more satisfied with the site. There’s no doubt: if you want users to love your site, make sure they complete their tasks.

Yet, even though we know task completion is important, many teams don’t have a strategy for it. They adopt a “launch and leave” approach to their sites, moving on to the next project once they’ve pushed something out the door.

To prepare for this issue of UIEtips, I talked with Gerry McGovern about how teams are managing their tasks. This is a hot topic for him right now and he’s got some really interesting insights. I’m sure you’ll find the article fascinating.

We’ve released the interview as a podcast. It’s definitely worth listening to.

If you’re looking to adopt or upgrade your own strategy for managing tasks, there are still a few seats in Gerry’s full-day workshop at the upcoming User Interface 14 conference in Boston next week.

Have you employed a strategy to manage your users’ top tasks? We want to hear what you’re doing. Leave us your thoughts below.

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How many IBM or General Electric television ads do we need to see before we are groaning at the mention of the word “innovation”? It’s too late for me, personally. But that doesn’t mean real innovation is dead. Steve Jobs has been quoted saying Apple will innovate their way through tight times. This past week Apple announced record revenues for the past quarter on impressive sales of premium products that aren’t supposed to sell well during down times. How are they flourishing while their competition is not?

How can you bring real innovation into your projects? That’s what I asked Scott Berkun when we spoke earlier this month. Scott is one of our favorite speakers on the topic of innovation and project management. He tells us you have to be opportunistic and start small. High-priority challenges may be a tempting place to start, but he suggested to first look at low-hanging fruit. You can build momentum for positive change by racking up a number of small wins that together move the project in the right direction. Having these small successes under your belt gives you more influence when attempting larger changes later on.

True innovation starts with you allowing yourself to be creative and recording your ideas religiously in a safe place like a notebook or sketchpad. Don’t self-censor, either. Initial precision and “getting it right” are the antithesis of creativity. It’s essential to let the ideas flow, and your ideas will improve as you continue to record them. Your journal is an incubator of ideas. Not every idea will be a success, and some will be terrible! But Scott says that’s OK. When an opportunity for change arises, you’ll have a treasure trove of ideas to pick though.

Once you have an idea, you need to involve other people to make it happen. The key differentiator in successful, innovative environments is group trust. People need to feel they are safe to share ideas with their team. If you work in an environment where you’re fearful of this, find one person on your team who is the most enthusiastic and try sharing with them. Once you have other people on board with your idea, you’ll have an easier time sharing it with others.

A common difficulty is honest and constructive critique among teams and individuals. This is an area where the most successful teams have excelled. Good critiques take practice and trust within your team. This usually requires time and commitment.

Scott has a lot of great ideas for your team from his years of research into the habits of highly innovative teams. And we have asked him to present his findings in a full-day workshop at our User Interface 14 Conference, this November in Boston. Scott presented on this very topic last year and received rave reviews as one of our most entertaining and informative speakers. You won’t want to miss it.

What experiences have you had trying to introduce new ideas? Politics and “we’ve tried that before” getting in the way? Let us hear about it in the comments.

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, world renowned information architect, Donna Spencer.

Back in August 2008, I interviewed Donna. In our conversation, 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. I think you’ll really enjoy her insights.

Read the article – Four Essential Skills for Information Architects: An Interview with Donna Spencer

Last year, Donna presented an outstanding workshop at the User Interface Conference, Information Architecture Essentials. It was ranked so highly, we decided to bring it back for the User Interface 14 conference. It’s a great place to learn what it takes to become a great information architect and I highly suggest you check out the session.

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.

Moderating a usability test is difficult. There’s a lot going on, and you have to keep it all moving. Years ago, when we were privileged to have Carolyn Snyder working for us, she came up with a simple metaphor for facilitating usability test sessions. We called it the “Flight attendant, Sportscaster, Scientist” metaphor and it really helped us simplify how to moderate the session.

In today’s UIEtips, I explain Carolyn’s metaphor. You’ll learn the tricks used by the best test moderators, so you can become one yourself. I know you’ll enjoy the article.

You can learn more tips in our upcoming UIE Virtual Seminar, Effectively Moderating Usability Tests, with Beth Loring. Beth’s an expert in the topic, having co-authored a book on the subject with Joe Dumas. You’re going to love her session.

Also, if you’re a pro at usability testing, then you’ll want to hone your skills at Dana Chisnell’s upcoming workshop, Mastering the Art of User Research at the User Interface 14 Conference. In Dana’s full-day session, you’ll learn advanced techniques and tricks for pushing your team’s research to the next level.

Have you tried moderating usability tests? Post your thoughts and questions below.

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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. He also gave us a preview of his day-long workshop for non-designers at our User Interface 14 Conference, this November.

Call it low hanging fruit, Dan says, but there are a lot of small, seemingly simple things that combine to have a strong, positive effect upon your site’s impact. If you’ve built with web standards, especially using CSS for style, these small changes can be trivial to execute across your site. Start with the spacing between elements. Consistency with the white space and alignment bring an important sense of order to your pages.

“Humans love patterns and order,” Dan tells us. Patterns and rules are tools pro designers use to organize page elements. Arbitrary placement leave sites looking cluttered and out of sorts. Creating rules — for example, the amount of space between certain elements — is something non-pros can do to bring order to a page. Choose a spacing and alignment scheme and stick to it. The earlier you set these rules and patterns, the easier it is to wrangle your page elements. Once rules are in place, you’re left with fewer arbitrary decisions to make. Arbitrary decisions are often the cause of disorder.

Massive gains can be made by addressing typographical issues. Proper typography establishes the hierarchy of information, guiding your visitors through your site content. Create a visual identity for a kind of content, and then use it consistently. Dan says most pro designers limit the number of typefaces (fonts) in a design to one or two; often one serifed face (Georgia is an example), and one sans-serif (Verdana is an example). From there, Dan advocates restraint, by making the smallest effective change to call attention to differences. Don’t combine large text, bold, italics, and color on one element where bold alone would have sufficed.

Color is a challenging topic. Many feel color choices are subjective, but there are considerations to consider. Using a color palette, like kuler.adobe.com, will help you pick colors that naturally work together… but if you already have brand colors, you should try to stick with them as much as practical. Remember, you can use black, white, and the spectrum of grays to accomplish a lot of your design’s heavy lifting. Be sure, when you do interject colors, to remember that they often have cultural, meanings. Dan used the example of red, in many cultures, representing a warning. Be wary of red in a context where it might lead a user to think they’re being warned when they are not. Try to work with these cultural perceptions instead of against them. Be sure to understand audience; those with color blindness and those from different cultures may literally view your colors differently.

Dan wanted everyone to remember that, in design, “We’re solving problems… but not for ourselves.” He also had another bit of advice, “When you design something right, no one will pat you on the back, because now it works like it’s supposed to.” That might be hard to accept initially, but it means you can make small changes without startling people. An adjustment to the line-height of your text might not be noticed by a regular reader, but they’ll find themselves more comfortably reading the content.

Dan has gathered all this advice and much more into his full-day User Interface 14 workshop, Visual Design Essentials for Non-Designers: Effortless Skills for High-quality Designs. It’s so full of enough valuable content, you’ll keep you tweaking your site for months to come.

Are you responsible for the visual design on your site, without pro-design resources? What effective steps have you found to improve your site? Let us know in the comments.

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Donna Spencer is our long-time, go-to expert on the topic of Information Architecture. We’re happy to bring her stateside again for the upcoming User Interface 14 conference. Recently, I spoke with her, all the way from Australia, in advance of her trip to Boston.

I asked Donna, what happens when, one day, you’re asked into the boss’s office and they drop “the web site” and “information architecture” into your lap? Regardless of your experience, where do you begin? Donna says your first question should be, “Why do we bother to have a web site in the first place?” “What’s its purpose?” She says if you don’t get this out of the way first, you’ll run up against it when you’re further along the trail and it won’t be easy to deal with.

One strategy Donna likes is to work backwards. Start with what should not be on the site. Sometimes pruning your unnecessary or no longer timely content is an effective way of honing the site. You should ask, “What’s the value of this content? Is this still relevant?” Before you can answer this for certain, you need to research your users’ needs thoroughly. Along with establishing the site’s purpose, knowing your users is the most important step to begin with. These two items will work hand in hand.

I asked Donna, once you have these established, should we just dive right into the homepage and start making changes? Generally, the answer is no. A few initial homepage tweaks aren’t always bad, especially if you can get some quick wins there. Hopefully your research has revealed the site sections in most need of assistance. Starting there will often be productive. You should most likely start with the content pages, where more people enter your site and where they spend most of their time. Be sure that your content pages work for their specific content, as all your content will not likely be all cookie-cutter. Generally, Donna shies away from using Lorem Ipsum text for content page designs. Also, if you know your customers don’t generally begin on the homepage, don’t create your navigation by starting with the homepage.

Your goal should be to get something informed in front of people quickly. At some point you’ll need to take what you know and create a first draft. You’ll have to make some of it up. Don’t expect it to be 100% right. Check it against your research, show it to people within the organization, and tweak. Show it to users and see if it functions well. The good and bad should become apparent once you put it through these paces.

These points are of course just a few of the highlights from our conversation. Please join us for the complete discussion in the podcast. If you found this useful, you’ll likely also be interested in Donna’s full-day workshop at UI14, Information Architecture Essentials, Best Practices for Organizing Your Site’s Content, which was UI13’s highest-rated workshop, newly revised and updated. You won’t want to miss it.

Have you had the task of redesigning your site’s IA just dropped in your lap out of the blue? Where would or did you start? Let us know in the comments!

But there are times when a PDF is beneficial to use on your web site. Understanding when it’s appropriate and how the audience uses the PDF will help you decide if placing a PDF on your web site is the right thing to do.

To help us with this task we turn to Ginny Redish, renowned usability and web content expert. In today’s UIEtips, we finish the 3 part series from Ginny on breaking up large documents for the web (read part 1 and part 2 if you missed it last week ). This article is based on a chapter in Ginny’s book Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works. In this excerpt, Ginny examines these key areas:

• Should you rely on PDF files for your web content?
• When might a PDF file be appropriate?
• When is a PDF file not appropriate?
• How accessibility plays into the use of PDFs.

We found Ginny’s article to be insightful, and I think you will too.

Is writing and organizing web content one of your responsibilities? At this year’s User Interface 14 conference in Boston, MA, Ginny has a full-day workshop on planning and writing for the web. Her session, on November 1, is sure to be a popular one. Besides talking about the key to a great web site, by starting a conversation with the visitor, she’ll cover selecting and organizing your site’s information, and developing a cohesive content strategy for your site.

Do you use PDFs on your site? How do you determine when to use a PDF? Do you offer the same information on the screen and in a PDF? Share your thoughts below.

In today’s UIEtips, we continue with part 2 of a 3 part series from Ginny Redish on breaking up large documents for the web. The article is based on a chapter in Ginny’s book Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works. In this excerpt, Ginny asks four key questions when deciding to use one page or several pages.

• How much do people want in one visit?
• Am I overloading my site visitors?
• What’s the download time?
• Will people want to print?

I think you’ll find her responses to these questions quite informative. Part 3 will come next week.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of Ginny’s article.

Are you involved with writing and organizing content for your web pages? You’ll want to see Ginny’s full-day workshop, Planning & Writing Web Content that Works, at this year’s User Interface 14 Conference on November 1 in Boston. Ginny will show you you how to uncover users’ needs with personas and scenarios, deliver users to their content by carefully selecting and organizing your site’s information, and how to develop a cohesive content strategy for your site.

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Todd Zaki Warfel has just finished two years of research into the tools and processes used in prototyping web sites. His findings will be published in a book due out this fall and we’ve asked him to give a full-day workshop on the topic at UI14. Did you know some people are actually building prototypes in Microsoft Excel? It’s true. “People are using what they have at their disposal and what they are comfortable with,” Todd tells me.

In the podcast, we discussed a number of the more popular tools that are being used today, from Adobe Fireworks, to Axure RP, to good old PowerPoint. Todd doesn’t think your choice of tool is important if you are able to communicate your ideas effectively to your audience. He thinks it is worth knowing the capabilities of a few other tools in the event you need to do something in the future that your current tool can’t handle.

I got Todd to reveal the process his own shop, Messagefirst, is using to prototype. It may surprise you that they start with rough, black and white sketches which they share with their clients both early and often. Whereas some design shops may work hard on a prototype for three months before first showing it to their client, Todd thinks that’s a bad idea. There’s nothing worse than diving deep into a design direction only to have it unilaterally shot down in the first review.

Instead, you need to get your client to give you lots of feedback very early in the process, starting with basic and rough sketches. It will save both sides a lot of time, effort and frustration. Once the design direction is solidified, Todd and his team move their prototypes into color and interactivity. The Messagefirst crew is now often jumping straight to HTML, CSS and JavaScript for the higher fidelity mockups.

Todd tells us that someone with basic HTML skills can (and have) learned to create high fidelity prototypes in just a couple weeks of effort. The secret is the availability modular tools, for example, CSS frameworks like the 960 Grid System and JavaScript libraries like jQuery. This move to code earlier in the process is becoming more and more popular around the web.

Todd and I talked more about his two years’ worth of findings and he gave us a preview of his UI14 full-day workshop. Tune in to the show for more on prototyping.

We’d love to know what process and tools you’re using in your own designs. Have you incorporated feedback early into your process? Let us know in the comments!

How you display your content so visitors can easily find what they came for is critical in keeping them there. If visitors are overwhelmed with unorganized content, or can’t easily figure out how content is broken up, they’re likely to leave and find what they are looking for elsewhere.

In today’s UIEtips, we hear from one of our favorite speakers and writers, Ginny Redish. In this excerpt from Ginny’s book, “Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works,” Ginny explains how to break up large documents for your web pages by using specific topics and subtopics — time or sequence, task, people, type of information, and questions people ask. I think you’ll get some good pointers in part 1 of this article. Part 2 will be coming later this week.

Read Ginny’s article.

If planning and writing web content is part of your daily activity, then you won’t want to miss Ginny’s full-day workshop at this year’s User Interface 14 Conference in Boston, MA on November 1. Ginny will show you how to uncover users’ needs with personas and scenarios, how to deliver users to their content by carefully selecting and organizing your site’s information, and how to develop a cohesive content strategy for your site.

What’s your process for breaking up information and documents on your web site? We’d love to hear your thoughts below.

Having the participants that match the design’s audience will give the team feedback on what works well and where the design needs rethinking. By learning from the participants, the team can make informed design decisions on all aspects of the user’s experience.

However, having participants that don’t match the audience can be very problematic. The team may miss learning about critical problems while they spend valuable time and resources fixing design issues that aren’t really important in real use.

In today’s UIEtips, I take you back to an interview from July 2008 with Dana Chisnell, the co-author of The Handbook of Usability Testing. We talk about what happens when teams try to use market research demographics as the basis for recruiting their participants and what the alternatives are.

Read my interview with Dana Chisnell, Avoiding Demographics When Recruiting Participants.

We have two great opportunities for you to get more out of your usability testing. On Wednesday, September 30, Dana is presenting a 90 minute UIE Virtual Seminar - Recruiting  for Usability Testing. Dana will show you the tricks to use to maximize your time and money on the right participants to get the right results.

Dana is also giving a full-day workshop, Mastering the Art of User Research, at this year’s User Interface 14 Conference in November. Learn the user research techniques of the pros. Recruit participants easily. Analyze data faster. Communicate results effectively.

I also like to tinker with recipes, experiment, or even make one up from scratch. Sometimes I find inspiration for a dish at a restaurant, or from a bottle of sauce that I find at Trader Joe’s. This is when I really explore all my options with the ingredients I have on hand. I create my own recipe and cooking process. I test out a bunch of ingredients, and see how the flavors blend together. If it doesn’t work, I make up a new process and recipe next time.

It’s not much different when it comes to creating an information architecture. There are lots of steps, variables and so-called ingredients that goes into an information architecture. You may be looking for a set process to follow, but often times there isn’t one. You just have to make it up as you go. And sometimes it turns out more complicated than you thought.

In today’s UIEtips, our good friend and IA expert, Donna Spencer describes some of the steps she goes through when creating an Information Architecture from scratch. You may want to try her process and experiment with it the next time you need to create an information architecture.

Last year, Donna dazzled everyone at the UI13 conference, so we asked her to come back and do another session at this year’s UI14 conference in November. Learn more about Donna’s workshop, Information Architecture Essentials.

What’s your process when creating an information architecture? We’d love to hear your thoughts below.

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One of the most popular speakers in the history of our User Interface Conference is Gerry McGovern. Certainly most of that popularity is thanks to Gerry’s no-nonsense, customer-centric approach to content management strategy. Perhaps a small portion is due to his dulcet Irish brogue. Gerry coined the term “customer care words”, which are distinct words and phrases that visitors are looking for that lead them to success and satisfaction. This is complimentary to a concept we at UIE call “trigger words”, but not quite the same. Trigger words are content-related and navigational–words that help lead you along the path to what you seek. Care words are task-related not content-related; they are the words that visitors need to see to complete the task they are on your site for. These words are not always found in your search logs or in keywords that have led people from Google to your site. But, through polling, testing and observation, care words can be discovered.

Customer care words are both a concept and a eponymous technique that Gerry uses with his clients. When enough participants take part in his processes, his technique both shows top words people are attracted to and, perhaps more importantly, reveals the top tasks the customers are visiting the site to accomplish.

Top task management, quite simply, is what Gerry thinks your site’s whole design should revolve around. Most site owners view their sites as places that house information, but your visitors are on your site to accomplish a task. You should optimize your site, mostly through language, so that it excels in helping visitors accomplish their most common tasks. Traditional site management concentrates on technology, like search engines, and content. But all site projects should ultimately be judged by the satisfaction and success of the users… not by whether your new CMS transition went technically well.

Once the content management system is in place, many organizations write and publish copy without knowing how it will be used. Optimizing your content for top tasks can produce increases in customer satisfaction and task completion. Gerry has seen this with many of his own clients, some of whom were skeptical at first. The biggest objection to optimizing for top tasks is the fear that your customers look to do many things on your site, not just these top tasks. However, if customers have trouble with their common tasks, why would they trust your site to dive into the other ones? In some cases, the top tasks weren’t the most obvious ones to site owners, underlining the importance of both talking to your customers and observing users on your site regularly.

Measuring your customers’ success rate, time-to-completion and their disaster rate–when they think they’ve successfully completed their task, but actually have not–will show you whether or not your changes are beneficial. What’s key is to measure and to revisit these areas until we have them right. Too often, Gerry says, there’s a culture of “launch and leave” with sites: build it and then never revise. Constant, incremental improvement is a better culture to work towards. Gerry has seen seen customer satisfaction rates “sky-rocket” after such changes.

There’s so much more Gerry and I discussed. Please listen to him in his own words on the podcast; your customers will thank you. And if these issues are truly hitting home for you, you won’t want to miss Gerry’s full-day workshop on Mastering Top-task Management for top tasks at our User Interface Conference this November.

How are you ensuring your customers are completing their top tasks successfully on your site? Discuss your methods in the comments below.

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I had the pleasure of chatting with Leah Buley recently, in advance of her appearance at our User Interface Conference. She’ll be speaking about getting to a Good Design Faster with new techniques to getting at your creative ideas. She’s done some wonderful research on early-project design stages that you really need to hear. There’s a ton of great content in this podcast, and I can only share so much with you here, so please tune in for more of her insights.

When Leah told me that wireframes are really holding back the design process, she grabbed my attention. Designers sit down with some rough ideas and start trying to fit them into one or two pages. Next they start sliding design elements around until things feel good, and then they show it to someone for feedback. That someone or group then sees a design that’s pretty far along, and looks pretty concrete. If some of the ideas in the wireframe are not developed as much as they should be, it’s difficult to stop the forward momentum and reassess.

How can we explore a range of solutions before diving into a single solution? Wireframes are very useful to the process, but instead, we should consider delaying them. Before wireframes, Leah suggests a very open, cross-team exploratory stage. Invite people from across your organization and even collaborate with those who might not normally be within the core design group.

Leah suggests a week-long ‘design sprint’ that begins with a group brainstorming meeting in the morning with lots of people… and everyone’s opinions count. Then that afternoon, the group sketches out a large number of low-fidelity sketches further exploring the experience they’re looking to design, based on the morning’s activities. Sketching many iterations based on different perspectives like, ‘how would we optimize this for a first-time user?’ ‘how about for a power-user?’ ‘how about for this demographic?’

Then the week-long process continues. Grouping the different approaches together, sort the best from the bunch, mixing and matching the best ideas and build upon them (Leah calls this ’sketch-boarding’). Next, take the sketches and flows with the most potential, and make those the first round of wireframes, which you present to a group critique. At the end of the week, take the feedback from the group critique to improve the wireframes.

The end result is a wireframe that has a tremendous amount of collaborative thought behind it. Instead of surprising many stakeholders at this point, their good ideas are already baked inside. You can now share these fire-tested ideas with the next groups that need to see them. This is clearly different from the way many groups and designers are using wireframes today, and I think it’s a really powerful proposition.

Leah and I also talked about ways to become an effective sketcher, how to run productive group critique sessions and much more. You really need to listen in, this could really help your teams process. After our conversation, I’m even more excited to see her full-day workshop on this topic this November at UI14 in Boston. I hope to see you there, as well.

Till then, what are your experiences with the early rounds of design? What are you doing in advance of your wireframing? Can you see implementing this process in your organization? Let us know in the comments!

There’s an on-going debate in the design community: are teams better off with generalists or specialists? Those taking the generalist side argue that a breadth of abilities helps more. On the specialists’ side, they claim it is the depth of specific abilities delivering the benefit.

From our research in what makes up the most successful teams, it turns out they are both right. And they are both wrong.

A team with three people, each of whom has basic skills in visual design, information architecture, and content design, will produce about the same results as a three-person team where there’s a specialist for each area. But the teams that do the best have three individuals, each of whom have advanced skills in all three areas.

The implications of this are clear: if you want to create a best-of-breed team, you need to constantly be raising the skills and capabilities of every team member in the critical design areas. Specializing in three areas is much more valuable than specializing in one.

In this issue of UIEtips, I discuss the interplay that happens between visual design, information architecture, and content design. I talk about how the areas interact and how to ensure you’re creating the best designs. I hope you’ll enjoy the article.

By the way, it’s no accident that this November’s User Interface Conference has full-day workshops on visual design, information architecture, and content design. We recognize these are critical skills for every team, so we made sure we found the best experts to show you what it takes to succeed. You’ll want to bring your entire team. And if you register by Friday, August 28, you’ll get the lowest conference rate available.

What are you doing to boost your skills in these three areas? We’d love to hear from you. Share your experiences below.

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One of my favorite people to speak with about the state of content on the web is Ginny Redish. She’s one of those people who cuts to the point so decisively that you’re left asking yourself… “why didn’t I think of that?”

Ginny has made her career by helping organizations engage their users with captivating content. I had a chance to speak with her regarding what she’s up to and what she plans to talk about at our upcoming User Interface Conference and I was not disappointed.

Ginny is using a new analogy in her workshops. Navigation and search, design, and technology are the three legs of a stool. In the stool sits the content: what your visitors are coming for. Why do we spend all of our time building the stool, then all-but ignore what the stool is built to support? It’s like putting a beautiful front door on your house, and having nothing inside!

Another analogy Ginny shared was “the web as a telephone.” You’ve put all this stuff up on the web so people won’t have to call you and ask for information. But if you don’t give it to them in that conversational, informative manner… they’re going to call you up anyhow! People come to your web site to answer the questions they have about your organization or your products. Have a conversation with your customers though your web site’s content just as you would have through the telephone.

You can create significant savings for your organization by writing your content as a conversation. Ginny regularly travels the country to work with organizations and their content. After one of her clients re-wrote their site’s content following the techniques in her book, her client told her they were able to reduce the number of people staffing the phones by three full-time positions!

One way to avoid success is through FAQs. Ginny says if you have FAQs on your site, that’s a sure-fire sign that the site content covering that topic has failed. If you’re receiving questions frequently, that means it’s time to update your site content because either the content is missing or isn’t findable by your customers. Remember, each topic should be a complete conversation with your customer.

Ginny has found that writing toward personas can help produce this successful form of content creation. Of course the next step after writing is to test the content with your customers to see if it indeed answers their questions. But there’s an important next step, especially if you’re a larger organization. You must work cross-silos to make sure different departments are not having contradictory conversations with the same customers. You also have to ensure that all the information on your site is current. If one department updates data, they all must still agree!

There was so much more in our conversation, so please tune in to the podcast for more inspirational ideas to get your site’s content fully tuned up.

Ginny will be presenting Planning & Writing Web Content that Works, Content as Conversations at the User Interface 14 Conference this fall in Boston. Clearly, it’s not one to miss.

What stumbling blocks are you hitting with your organization’s content? Let’s discuss in the comments.

One of the most frequent phrases we utter is “it depends” and that is truer than ever when talking about the design process. A big part of the dependency is what the design needs to focus on to be competitive. And a big surprise for many designers is how that focus needs to change as as the market matures.

In today’s UIEtips, I continue with the second part of my article on how you can derive your design process strategy from market maturity. If you haven’t read part 1, you may want read that first. In this part, I talk about the mature stages, focusing on experience and commodity. I’m betting you’ll find what stage your designs fall into and some tips on what to look at as things change.

Does your team need to move from stage 2 (features) to stage 3 (experience)? Do you work on a design that moved all the way to stage 4 (commodity)? If so, we’d love to hear your experiences. Share your thoughts with us below.

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A couple of weeks ago we held a UIE Virtual Seminar with Ethan Marcotte from Happy Cog West, a designer of beautiful websites. As always, we had a number of excellent questions from the live audience that we couldn’t attend to during the seminar, so Adam Churchill got together with Ethan to record this podcast and cover a number of those remaining questions.

If you didn’t attend the live seminar, and are interested lessons learned from case studies on collaboration between designers and developers, then you’ll still enjoy this podcast. If you find yourself wanting more afterwards, don’t forget you can still purchase a recording of the session for another 90 minutes of “couples therapy.”

During the podcast, Adam asked Ethan to dig into these questions:

• When using a typographic grid on fluid sites, can you talk about what happens when the browser window is pulled in narrower than the “ideal” width or min width?
• At what point do you folks check the accessibility and cross-browser compatibility?
• Is the transition any different between front-end developer and the back-end developer?
• Have you ever encountered a problem between the designer and a back end coder? If so, what was the problem? How did you overcome it?

Tune in to hear more about Comps vs. Code. Still have questions? Start the discussion in our comments, below.

Google made a big investment in the Heathrow Google Space project. However, you don’t need Google’s large bank account to pull this off. It’s really quite simple and inexpensive get great insights by conducting field-based research. 

In today’s UIEtips, we have a great article by author and usability testing expert, Dana Chisnell, explaining how you can easily conduct usability tests “in the wild.” She shares some of the trade offs between field-based testing and more traditional lab-based tests. (And she should know! She wrote THE book on usability testing – The Handbook of Usability Testing.)

By the way, Dana will be one of the great speakers sharing her wisdom and experience at this year’s User Interface 14 Conference. I’m very excited about her full-day workshop, Advanced User Research: Dirty Little Secrets, where she’ll reveal oodles of tricks and techniques that nobody ever talks about. I’ve reviewed the course outline and you’re going to love the advanced techniques she’s covering. 

Have you brought your user research efforts into the wild? What’s worked and what hasn’t? Share your experiences with us below.

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Last month we held a UIE Virtual Seminar where I presented my talk, Search, Scent, and the Happiness of Pursuit. As always, we had a number of excellent questions from the live audience that we couldn’t attend to during the seminar, so, with a little help from Adam Churchill, I recorded this podcast and cover a number of those remaining questions.

If you didn’t attend the live seminar, and are interested in helping users find what they seek, then you’ll still enjoy this podcast. If you find yourself wanting more afterwards, don’t forget you can still purchase a recording of the session for another 90 minutes of Search, Scent, and the Happiness of Pursuit.

During the podcast, I dig into these questions:

• Should the failed search log be getting smaller if the design is good?
• Is there a correlation between search volume and customer satisfaction?
• How important is the number of search results shown? Do users want to see lots of results and filter down, or see fewer results and browse?
• Would you expect these results to change if you were studying Intranet sites?
• Is Advanced Search relevant or necessary?

Tune in to get some tips on how to get your users to what they seek. Still have questions? Start the discussion in our comments, below.

In today’s UIEtips, we continue with part 2. In this article, Daniel explores specific aspects of faceted search interfaces that raise front-end usability concerns such as the search box and dealing with multiple selection. He then looks at a more holistic approach through design patterns.

If you’re in the process of implementing faceted search within your web site, or thinking about doing so, you’ll want to watch the upcoming UIE Virtual Seminar with Daniel Tunkelang and Pete Bell on faceted search. You’ll get some real insights into the challenges and tricks when implementing faceted search. And, as a bonus, you’ll get a free copy of Daniel’s book Faceted Search when you register. Read all about the virtual seminar and see a preview. 

Have you planned out a faceted search interface to your data? What were some of the hurdles you ran into? How did you work through them? Share your experiences below.

(If you aren’t familar with faceted search, Stephanie Lemieux wrote a great introduction, Designing for Faceted Search,  in a previous UIEtips.)

But setting up a system for faceted search has its challenges. Do it poorly and you will confuse and frustrate your users. They won’t reap the benefits of the design.

In today’s UIEtips, Daniel Tunkelang discusses the concerns designers face when building out the front-end of a faceted search system. He discusses where and when the design should present facets to the users and options for organizing them. If you’re embarking on a faceted search implementation, you’ll definitely enjoy this article.

Today’s article is an excerpt from Daniel’s new book: Faceted Search. You can get this book free when you register for Daniel and Pete’s UIE Virtual Seminar, also called Faceted Search. I recommend you gather your team together on August 20, 2009 and watch this seminar, as you’ll get some real insights in the challenges and tricks to implementing Faceted Search. Lots of stuff the search vendor’s salesman probably didn’t tell you. 

Have you planned out a faceted search interface to your data? What were some of the hurdles you ran into? How did you work through them? Share your experiences with us below.

Take that two-way communication out of your process, and the design that emerges from the development process doesn’t work the way we thought it would.  You increase your development costs, and deliver a product that’s lost all of it’s interactive goodness.

Unless you’re doing your own implementation, practically impossible for a serious production application, you need to find a way to succinctly communicate what’s important and how it should all work. In this week’s issue of UIEtips, I bring back an article, Getting the Most from Design Deliverables, that discusses how the best design teams go about successfully communicating their ideas to the development team. I think you’ll really enjoy it.

Also, we think this article ties in nicely with our upcoming UIE Virtual Seminar: Comps vs. Code: Case Studies on Collaboration Between Site Designers & Developers with Ethan Marcotte.  On July 30, Ethan will use four case studies to teach some insightful lessons about the collaboration between designer and developer. See a preview.

How do you hand off projects at the transition phases in your organization? What types of reviews do you build into the transitions?  Join the discussion below.

In this week’s UIEtips, I conclude our feature discussion on producing great search results pages. In the article, Producing Great Search Results: Harder than It Looks, Part 2, I share behavior patterns we’ve uncovered as we researched how people interact with the results from a search query, including how they deal with link relevancy and the chunking of results. When we initially published these articles, there was some interesting buzz across the blogosphere. Our findings didn’t match conventional thinking. Almost a year has passed since the original prinitng, and I wouldn’t be surprised if these articles still creates some buzz. Below you can read comments from when we originally printed part 2.

If Search is high on your priority list, then you’ll want to attend the next UIE Virtual Seminar that I’m presenting: Search, Scent, and the Happiness of Pursuit. In this seminar, I’ll smash some important myths to smithereens. You’ll see how the home page isn’t where people are searching from (and why that changes your entire Search strategy). And you’ll see how Search is more related to the links on your site than you ever imagined. Learn more about this UIE Virtual Seminar. 

When you’re watching your users interact with your site’s search result pages, what behaviors have you noticed? We’d love to hear your insights below.

I was just in a pattern review meeting, and the age-old discussion of whether to use icons and labels vs. just icons or just labels came up. Years ago, I recall Jared Spool and UIE posting an article in which their tests showed that icons and labels together were generally better. I can’t seem to find it…. could you folks point me to it?

Thanks!
– Joe

P.S. FWIW, I prefer a design *guideline* that would state to use icons + labels unless there is a obviously standard icon, such as email or pdf icons. Of course, even those might not be clear to some user groups. The design guideline runs contrary against visual minimalism. As with all things, you make your choices and do your best to test it.

The article is from the old 1990’s Eye for Design days. It’s something that never made it to the web, probably because nobody has asked us about it in 15 years.

The facts about icons:

1. Text + image works better than just image or just text. However, just text works better than just image.
2. While icon images are learned, icon positions are learned faster. People remember a function by where it lives in 2D space more than by what the art is. (If you change the art, but keep the same location, users aren’t too impeded. If you move the location, but keep the art, users become frustrated.)
3. The speed at which the average user can deduce an icon’s function from the image is directly proportional to the speed at which the design team can agree on what the ideal image for that function should be. (In other words, things that are obvious—question mark for help—are obvious to both the designers and the users. Things that aren’t obvious—what is the icon for “advanced privacy options”?—won’t be obvious to either group in anything less than geologic time periods.)

You won’t find this to be any more true than in the design of effective search results pages. Search results look easy. After all, the engine has done all the heavy lifting. It’s taken the user’s query and scoured through the millions of bits of data to narrow the results down to a presentable set. All you have to do now is just display the results, right?

Well, after watching hundreds of users try to accomplish their goals with hundreds of web sites, we can now say, without any hesitation, that it’s not easy to produce a great search results page. In fact, we’re confident that it really takes a lot of hard work and skill to make something that will create a delightful experience for your users.

In today’s UIEtips, we look back at an article originally published a year ago, Producing Great Search Results: Harder than It Looks – part 1. Fortunately, having now watched all of these users, we’ve seen some really interesting patterns in how the most effective search results pages pull it off. And, over the next two weeks, we’ll share those with you.

Read my article, Producing Great Search Results: Harder Than It Looks, Part 1.

If you’re looking for ways to improve search on your web site for your users, then you’ll want to attend the next UIE Virtual Seminar that I’m presenting: Search, Scent and the Pursuit of User Happiness. In
this seminar, I’ll share some of Search’s best-kept secrets such as: a hidden resource on your server that shows you exactly how to make search more effective, and why focusing on “searchers” is a
design strategy that gets teams into trouble. Learn More.

Have you been working on your search results pages? Have you noticed design patterns that have made your site more effective? We want to hear about your experience. Share your thoughts with us below.

Using the model is easy. First, you ask a few questions to determine where the organization’s products are relative to their market maturity. The theory then tells you what recommendations are most likely to get attention.

For example, getting resources to conduct in-depth user research on users and scenarios is much easier in stage 3 (experience) than it is in stage 1 (technology) and stage 2 (features). In those stages, it’s easier to find a corporate champion for feature-focused, lightweight research.

This UIEtips contains part one of a two-part article on the Market Maturity model. I describe the first two stages, sharing how to identify if that’s where your team is, and what project priorities will make the most sense. I hope you enjoy it.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

The Market Maturity model is just one of several perspectives  I’m sharing at the upcoming UIE Roadshow: Secrets Behind Designing Great User Experiences. There’s still room in the Seattle, Denver, and DC full-day workshops. Register with the promotion code SHOW09 and get $75 off the price. 

Is your team dealing with stage 1 (technology) or stage 2 (features) issues? If so, what’s your strategy been? We’d love to hear your thoughts. Share them with us below. 

You may have noticed that the last two UIEtips articles concentrated on UX teams. The first article was on Building and Managing a Successful UX Team. The second article was Five Techniques for Getting Buy-In for Usability Testing. Following the rule of three principal, I’m focusing this next article, once again, on the UX team. Today’s article goes back to December 2007 and concentrates on various skills required for a successful UX team.

Over the last 9 years, we’ve been looking carefully at how to put a user experience team together. We’ve studied dozens of teams, some that are very good at production great designs, while others regularly struggle to produce anything that makes users happy. As we’ve looked at the differences between the teams, we’ve started to notice some patterns.

One emerging pattern focuses on the skills found in the team. While it’s a no-brainer to say that the more skilled the team, the better the results, it’s more difficult to hone in on the specific skills that make a difference.

Our research has isolated eighteen skills that the best teams all master. We’ve divided these into two groups: Core UX Skills that are unique to the user experience process and Enterprise UX Skills that the team shares with other parts of the organization, such as marketing, IT, and product management.

In this issue of UIEtips, I describe these skills and a simple method for assessing where a team is at. Managers can use this assessment to identify areas of improvements for the team as a whole and individual members.

Read today’s article.

Have you assessed your team’s capabilities? What techniques have you used? Are there skills you think are important that aren’t on the list? We’d love to hear from you. Leave your thoughts below.

[If you manage a UX team, or you're part of a UX team, I think you'll find our next UIE Virtual Seminar of great interest. This Wednesday, June 17, Sarah Bloomer will present Upgrading Your UX Team. Some of the topics Sarah will touch on in this Virtual Seminar include: the key ingredients of developing a successful UX team, how to setup your team, and where it fits within the organization. Learn more about the next UIE Virtual Seminar.]

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 today’s UIEtips newsletter, we look back on an article that former UIE staff member Christine Perfetti wrote in April 2007. The article, Five Techniques for Getting Buy-In for Usability Testing, discusses some of the best techniques for getting stakeholders onboard for testing. I think you’ll really enjoy it.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

If you find this article interesting, I highly encourage you to attend the June 17 UIE Virtual Seminar on Upgrading Your UX Team,with Sarah Bloomer. In this seminar, Sarah will touch on how to get buy in for usability testing. Use the promotion code MYARCHIVE when you register and receive life-time access to the recording of this seminar at no additional charge.

Knowing how to identify and communicate the value of a User Experience project will gain you design strategy approval and support throughout the organization. Most organizations we work with understand the need for UX efforts, yet they still struggle with how to best incorporate the team into the development process.

Back in 2006, former UIE staff member, Christine Perfetti interviewed Sarah Bloomer and Susan Wolfe, two premier User Experience experts, to discuss how organizations can make their UX practices a success. I find this interview is still dead-on three years later.

One of the most frequent questions we’re asked is how do you go about setting up a UX team. What criteria should I use in the hiring processes, and how do I get executive buy-in on the UX vision?  To answer these questions, and many others, we’ve asked Sarah Bloomer to present our next UIE Virtual Seminar, Upgrading Your UX Team. We’re offering the recording of this presentation at no additional cost when you register with the promotion code MYARCHIVE.

Are you challenged with building a UX team within your organization? Is your team struggling to get support and buy-in from your organization? How have you gotten your organization onboard? Join the discussion below.

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Robert Hoekman, Jr. recently joined us for a Virtual Seminar on Interaction Design Frameworks, called, Web Anatomy: Interaction Design with Frameworks. The concept is a new one, and Robert and I are exploring and introducing the concept in new book due out shortly. The seminar (which is still available) was well-received, and we asked Robert back to help us answer some audience questions we did not have time to discuss during the seminar.

Here’s the list of the questions we discussed,

• Do you see being able to abstract information architecture into set frameworks?
• Should design patterns really be referred to as production patterns that fit within creative frameworks?
• Are you basing design patterns on generally accepted Web standards or what’s standard within the uses of the business?
• If you’re assembling a site with anatomical framework pieces, how do you avoid building a Frankenstein?
• Is there any relationship between an IxD framework, and a UI framework like jQuery?
• If everything is encapsulated and solved with an Interaction Design framework… will there be less need for Interaction designers in the future and more need for visual designers to differentiate?

Tune in and see how Robert thinks frameworks could make your job noticeably easier and perhaps even more interesting. If you still have questions, let us know in the comments.

Since it’s inception, we’ve answered questions ranging from design exploration, career changes from coding to interface design and usability, and the most common UIs that confuse or impede the average user.

Robert Hoekman and I use our wits, humor, and knowledge (it occasionally creeps in) to answer these vexing questions. I know when I get notified about an exciting new episode I want to immediately check it out, however I’m usually too busy to do it at that moment, and then it slips my mind.

I’ve always appreciated receiving a summary on episodes I may have missed, so I thought you might appreciate it too.

Our latest episodes, podcasts 5-8, cover these topics:

• The most important UX activity in a web project
• Why so many basic usability failures are still around
• How a consultant can woo over a design team
• How to deal with link treatments when content display varies

With each podcast there is a place to share your thoughts with us, or you can let us know what you think below.  

If you want to hear more of me, you can see me live in Seattle, Denver, or DC at the UIE Roadshow: Secrets Behind Designing Great User Experiences. Use the promotion code SHOW09 and get $75 off the registration price.

Enjoy the podcasts.

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.

If one looks closely at what the team at Amazon has built, it’s filled with innovative functionality and clever designs, all of which creates a delightful experience for its users and directly produces regular profits for its shareholders. But not all is perfect. Some design changes in the last few years have not been the success that the team had hoped for. Amazon’s exceptional qualities and imperfections are critical knowledge for any designer that wants to dig deep into what makes the site tick.

In this entertaining presentation, Jared will share some of UIE’s latest research into the hidden treasures of (the) Amazon. You’ll learn:

• The simple Yes/No question that increased revenues by more than $1 billion
• The elegant subtlety of Amazon’s security system
• Why Amazon’s business model is more than meets the eye (and why designers need to care)
• The wins and losses that Amazon has had with social media functionality

Want to see it? Here it is (with audio recorded at An Event Apart Seattle 2009):

If you’re so inclined, you can download a PDF of the slides.

All these questions are addressed in the conclusion of our series on top articles on Experience Design. If you missed out on part 1, we covered these articles:

• Market Maturity: A four-stage frame work based on where products are in the marketing place
• Top Priorities for Talking Horses: Three top priorities designers should focus on to make sure your their web site works
• The Road to Recommendation: Four steps to go through when creating a recommendation for change. 

In today’s UIEtips, we have four articles related to Experience Design. The first article, The 3 Qs for Great Experience Design, discusses three questions to help us determine if a team will produce designs that deliver great experiences. The second article, Getting the Most from Design Deliverables, looks at three goals when developing design deliverables. The third article, Designing Embraceable Change, addresses how to handle major design changes with your users. And our last article, Five Design Decision Styles. What’s Yours? explores different decision processes when developing designs.

As always, please share your thoughts with us. We’d like to know how you communicate your design deliverables, determine your design decision style, and hear how you communicate major change with your users? Join the discussion about this week’s topic below.

Looking to take your user experience team to the next level? Check out the UIE Roadshow! We’re excited to continue our new UIE Roadshow: Secrets Behind Designing Great User Experiences, a full-day workshop, based on 10 years of our extensive research. Register with the promotion code SHOW09 and save $75.

Recently we’ve re-published two articles focusing on experience design. The first article, The 3 Steps for Creating an Experience Vision, focused on specific steps design teams should take to create an experience vision. The second article, Knowledge Navigator Deconstructed: Builidng an Envisionment, looks at a successful envisionment that focuses on the users’ ideal experiences and creative techniques for making that vision clear to everyone on the project.

I continue to build on the experience design theme with this week’s UIEtips. In part one of this two-part series, I go back to an oldie but a goodie on Market Maturity and tell you why this 1997 article is still relevant today. I also look back on two other articles; Top Priorities for Talking Horses and The Road to Recommendation.

Looking to take your user experience team to the next level? Check out the UIE Roadshow! We’re excited to continue our new UIE Roadshow: Secrets Behind Designing Great User Experiences, a full-day workshop, based on 10 years of our extensive research.  

As always, please share your thoughts with us. Is your design team having trouble focusing on the users? Does your organization have an experience vision? Join the discussion about this week’s topic below.

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Last week we held a UIE Virtual Seminar with Seth Earley and Stephanie Lemieux of Earley & Associates, a premier builder of industrial-strength taxonomies for organizations large and small. As always, we had a number of excellent questions from the live audience that we couldn’t attend to during the seminar, so I got together with Seth and Stephanie to record this podcast and cover a number of those remaining questions.

If you didn’t attend the live seminar, and are interested in taxonomies, then you’ll still enjoy this podcast. If you find yourself wanting more afterwards, don’t forget you can still purchase a recording of the session for another 90 minutes of taxonomy know-how.

During the podcast, I asked Seth and Stephanie to dig into these questions:

• What are “business drivers” and how do they relate to building a taxonomy?
• In the development of taxonomies, how do you avoid being bogged down in an organization’s structure and keep focused from a navigational vantage point?
• Do you use Personas to help develop your taxonomies? Why? How?
• How early do you integrate usability testing in the development process?
• We had many questions about Earley’s experience working with a global enterprise taxonomy system that they developed for Motorola. Stephanie discussed that process.
• How should you think about long term curation of your taxonomy?
• …and more

Tune in to get some tips on how to tune up your taxonomy. Still have questions? Start the discussion in our comments, below.

However, on most projects, they are few and far between. That’s because, even in the most innovative projects, the portion that counts as never-been-tried-before is only about 20% of the project.

The remainder is supporting functionality — things the new functionality needs to work. That supporting functionality doesn’t get the heart pumping or the adrenaline flowing. It’s just nose-to-the-grindstone, must-do work that is part of every project.

But what if we could reduce that work and make it possible to spend more time on the fun, exciting innovative parts? Well, that’s just one benefit of having a solid re-use strategy.

In today’s UIEtips article, we explore the use of Patterns, Components, and Interaction Design Frameworks. These critical development tools, which make up what we’re calling the Re-use Trilogy, give developers a chance to increase the percentage of time they spend on the fun stuff, while delivering better quality results. Read today’s article to see how this works.

Has your team tried building a pattern, component, or interaction design framework? What has your experience with these tools been? We’d love to hear what you’ve learned. Share your thoughts below.

On Wednesday, May 27, you’ll have a chance to learn more about Interaction Design Frameworks. Robert Hoekman, Jr will show you how this important new tool can jumpstart your designs and ensure you deliver high-quality experiences. Watch a sneak preview of the Virtual seminar.

It’s the same thing that happens when my friends send me a link saying, “You should really see this. The site is awful!” I don’t really need to see any more really awful sites.

What I’m very interested in are really great sites — sites that deliver fabulous experiences. However my friends don’t send me these. That’s because when they are absorbed in a great experience, the site itself disappears.

In today’s article, Great Designs Should Be Experienced and Not Seen, I talk about how the goal of a designer is to make their site disappear. Of course, this has ramifications, but our ultimate goal is to focus the user on their own experience, not on our design elements. 

After you’ve read the article, let me know what you’ve been doing to make your designs more invisible. I’d love to hear your thoughts below.

Making your design invisible is just one of the many insights I’ll be revealing in our upcoming UIE Roadshow, Secrets Behind Designing Great User Experiences. We’re bringing this critically acclaimed full-day workshop to Denver, Seattle, and Washington DC in June. Sign up by June 5 with promotion code SHOW09 and get $75 off the individual price.

In part 2, we have new topics to muse over. Are you building out a web 2.0 strategy? Having trouble communicating and documenting the design process? How do you tie the visions of company culture and customer experience together?

We answer these burning questions and others with four more podcasts in the final part of this series. Here I focus on the following experts:

• Steve Mulder and Riccardo LaRosa on Web 2.0 Strategy and Design 
• Dan Brown on Documenting Design
• Brian Kalma on melding Zappos’ company culture with their customer experience
• Robert Hoekman on introducing design frameworks

So lets get started with this week’s podcasts.

Web 2.0 Strategy and Design with Steve Mulder and Riccardo LaRosa

When creating a web 2.0 strategy, you start thinking about what features to build, how to tell if the features are working as expected, and how results change over time. We brought these considersations to two of our favorite people when it comes to Web2.0 Strategy; Steve Mulder and Riccardo LaRosa

In this podcast, Steve and Riccardo focus on these issues and bring some great case study examples from Reebok and HumanaOne to life. We also talk about how starting small and iterating is most successful,but not an easy sell in many situations. You’ll want to listen to how they overcame this challenge and other Web 2.0 adventures they had.

Read more detail on Steve and Riccardo’s interview.

Documenting Design with Dan Brown

In this interview, Dan and I explore the documents that help make large design projects go smoothly. We discuss how these important docs can become living documents (ones that evolve when necessary) and how Dan believes there’s value in seeing them as actual team members. This may sound odd, but Dan nicely clarifies what he means in the podcast.  

During the podcast, we spent some time with two types of documents: concept models and flow charts. These particular documents are intriguing because they don’t cover concrete ideas (which are easier to document), but instead cover the higher-level abstract ideas that often power the site invisibly.

Read more detail on Dan’s interview.  

Company Culture Meets Customer Experience with Brian Kalma

Looking for ways to tie your company culture and customer experience together? Then you definitely want to hear this interview with Brian Kalma of Zappos. I reached out to Brian to find out how Zappos, a company that conducted over a billion dollars in online sales last year, brings together their web site, call center, and social media outreach, to create a unique customer experience.

Brian discusses Zappos’ four-week training program that everyone must go through within the company; how the entire company (over 1300 is part of his design team; and how Twitter and Facebook has empowered their employees to communicate with customers.

Read more detail on Brian’s interview. 

Introducing Interaction Design with Frameworks, with Robert Hoekman

So what are design frameworks anyway? Drawn loosely from the idea of coding frameworks that software developers use to more efficiently build software, design frameworks are an aid to assembling a design.

In this podcast, Robert Hoekman joins us to discuss design frameworks. You can compare frameworks to design patterns, although patterns tend to be smaller, more specific solutions. Frameworks, when built out, can contain design patterns. 

Frameworks help create consistency in interface elements to help solidify the UX. Robert uses frameworks on all his current projects. He starts out with a check list of all the main elements what will help a person accomplish a goal.

Read more detail on Robert’s interview.  

Podcast Library

The Web App Expert podcast interview series is just a small taste of the podcasts we offer. Look for our ongoing podcast show - Userability, where folks like you call in with their UX issues of the day. And we have many other podcasts on a smattering of topics from various experts.

Creating a Great User Experience at Your Organization

Brian Kalma’s podcast is all about creating a great user experience at Zappos. It’s exactly what we’re going to talk about at the UIE Roadshow: Secrets Behind Designing Great User Experiences, except we’ll be focusing on how to create a great user experience at YOUR organization. We’ll be in Seattle, Denver and Washington, DC at the end of June. Explore the program and be sure to use the promotion code SHOW09 when you register for a $75 discount off the individual price.

Enjoy the podcasts.

The answer to these questions, and many more, are in a series of podcast interviews I did with web app experts. Twitter has been abuzz over these interviews and we want to make sure you get to hear what all the tweets are about.(By the way, if you want be notified about each new podcast, or any UIE news, follow us on Twitter @uie.)

Coincidentally, all these experts presented at UIE’s Web App Summit in late April. We offer a special CD with presentations from these experts. At the end of the post, there are details on this CD offer.

In part 1 of a 2 part series, I focus on the following experts:

• Derek Featherstone on how Ajax techniques can improve accessibility
• Nathan Curtis on using patterns and component libraries and the efficiencies you gain from them
• Luke Wroblewski on frequently asked questions with web form design
• Molly Holzchlag on web standards for web apps, specifically with HTML5 and CSS3
• Richard Rutter and James Box on why they use rough interactive prototyping over traditional deliverables 

Sounds intriquing? Here are this week’s 5 podcasts. 

Ajax Aids Accessibility with Derek Featherstone

Does Ajax aid accessibility? Yes, if you do it right, using Ajax techniques can improve accessibility. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Ajax is like most techniques and technologies on the web — they are what you make of them.

In this podcast, Derek Featherstone, principal of Further Ahead, tells us that we first need to know how to think about Ajax as a design tool. Today’s toolkits (such as jQuery) can really help designers build functional prototypes to demonstrate their interaction concepts to developers, who will then integrate theirideas into the production system. Taking advantage of the many available libraries gives you a sandbox for trying out interactions without having to know the best practices for implementing the code.

More detail on Derek’s interview.

Achieving Pattern and Component Reuse with Nathan Curtis

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, principal and co-founder of EightShapes.

Hear how design pattern libraries and component libraries are defined. And how having these libraries can save you tremendous production time.

Using these repositories prevents each team from inventing their own wheels and engineering them from scratch. Nathan than compares pattern and component libraries to style guides, which were the first step toward this idea — one that is too often broken, over restrictive, and simply ignored. 

More detail on Nathan’s interview.

Web Form Design with Luke Wroblewski

How many pages should my complex form be? Are Dynamic Forms a good idea? When I get questions like these and others on web form design,I turn to to Luke Wroblewski, author of Web Form Design: Filling inthe Blanks and Senior Principal of Product Ideation & Design for Yahoo. Luke also has his own shop, LukeW Interface Designs.

In this podcast, you’ll hear the answers to the approve questions. Luke explains why there is no easy answer on the number of pages for complex forms and how the content should shape the form. And he’ll talke about how to use Dynamic Form correctly. In addition to answering some other questions, Luke also points out why he’s particularly interested in the concept of parti.

More detail on Luke’s interview. 

Web Standards for Web Apps with Molly Holzschlag

There are a number of new standards that have come out recently, HTML5 being perhaps the most notable for web applications, because it was brought forth with applications in mind. New features, like canvas, are designed to improve dynamic interactions between the presentation layer and the behavior layer. JavaScript’s usage has really matured and is almost indispensable with developers.

In this podcast, I reach out to my long time friend, Molly Holzschlag to discuss the impact these and other advancements are having on web application design and development, along with the tremendous benefits building with standards (or even a subset of them) brings to the lifecycle of a product.

Molly is the unsinkable author of a metric ton of web development books, is a noted teacher, and an in-demand consultant in the field. There’s likely no one better to ask about web standards than Molly.

More detail on Molly’s interview.

Roughing it with Interactive Prototypes with Richard Rutter and James Box

Without planning, web apps have no where to go. Planning documents for web app projects are often overlooked, despite their importance in the success of the product. As a designer, no matter how great your research is, or how amazing your programmers are, if your planning documents do not develop well, your project will fail.

James Box and Richard Rutter of Clearleft have been working on ways to plan highly interactive web apps that make the process more efficient.

Instead of using traditional deliverables, they show clients what they call ‘design tools.’ The advantage to these is that they stress design as a process, rather than set in stone. This method aids the flow of dialog between the designers and the client.

More details on Richard and James interview.

Information about Part 2

I think you’ll find great nuggets of information from all of these podcasts. Early next week, I’ll finish this series of podcasts with:

• Steve Mulder and Riccardo LaRosa on Web 2.0 Strategy & Design
• Dan Brown on Documenting Design 
• Robert Hoekman on Interaction Design with Frameworks 
• Brian Kalma on Company Culture Meets Customer Experience

CD Offer

If you enjoy listening to these podcasts you’ll want to check out the Web App Summit proceedings CD where you can hear the audio presentations from the Summit. For only $185, your CD will include 14 audio recordings and 22 presentation decks. Get more information on pricing and ordering the CD.  

Enjoy the podcasts.

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This week I wanted to share my interview with Brian Kalma, Director of User Experience and Web Strategy for the darling of Internet retail, Zappos.com. In case you’ve somehow missed out on their meteoric rise to top of online retail, now conducting over a billion dollars in sales a year, then you’re in for a treat. I can’t think of a company with a more interesting case study in employee involvement and fanatical customer service. It’s really nice to see a company succeed for all the right reasons.

Zappos is a unique place. Every employee hired at their corporate headquarters in Las Vegas is required to go through the four-week customer loyalty (call-center training) course, including answering phones. So every employee has a strong grasp on the experience of their customers, from lawyers to VPs, managers to software developers.

You might be involved with a design team with a handful of designers or perhaps a large number of stake holders. Brian has a similar experience, with one notable exception. He regularly conducts web strategy meetings with an open invitation to the entire company. That’s more than 1,300 people! But design ideas are just the beginning. Employees are also encouraged to participate in other ways, from recording product videos, to being models on the site. In fact, all models on the site, which sells shoes, clothing, accessories, and more every day, are just regular employees.

On top of these duties, Brian also passionately supports Zappos’ social media outreach, where all employees are encouraged to look for comments about their company on places like Twitter and Facebook, and then actively engage with those customers, without oversight. For many companies, that would be a nightmare. Brian says it’s an amazing by-product of their dedication to their employees and their employees’ dedication to the customers. This is the basis of the Zappos culture, which Brian has to translate into content on their web site and use to drive sales.

And drive sales he has. 75% of their sales are from repeat customers, spending more than 2.5 times more in the following months than their initial purchase. And I asked Brian how he leverages their unique culture into their web presence to make these sales figures possible.

Tune into to the podcast for more details on the life of Brian at Zappos and their experience success stories.

[I should also mention that Brian is one of the expert speakers on our Web App Summit Proceedings disc, which we're now taking orders for. If you couldn't make it to the summit, this disc provides hundreds of pages of speaker materials, and 19 hours of presentation audio. Brian's 75-minute talk, Baking a Corporate Culture into the Online Experience is one of the 14 presentations included on the disc. The disc is a great source of information and inspiration for your work. Learn more about the Web App Summit Proceedings. You won't regret it!]

While the process of conveying the vision to key decision makers on the project and within the organization is very important, the methods used to share the vision can vary greatly depending on budget, available resources, and the pool of creative talent. Teams can use any technique, from expensive video-shoots with actors to low-fidelity stop-motion animation, as long as the vision helps the design team and stakeholders progress in the same direction and inspires team members to produce an improved experience.

In this week’s UIEtips article, I once again go back to an article UIE published in June 2007. In this article, Knowledge Navigator Deconstructed: Building an Envisionment, I discuss how a successful envisionment that focuses on the users’ ideal experiences can lead a design team’s direction for years to come. I also explore the many creative techniques for making that vision clear to everyone involved with the project.

Does your organization have an experience vision? How are you guiding your design direction toward your users’ ideal experiences? What methods to share this vision have you used? Join the discussion about this week’s topic below.

Also, I’m conducting a one day workshop in three different cities on Secrets Behind Designing Great User Experiences. One of the topics covered is the Making of a UX Vision. I take the concepts I discuss in the article into greater depth. 

(I once bumped into the editor of my favorite magazine and told him his publication lived on the back of my toilet. His response? ”That’s the highest praise you can ever give a magazine editor! Thank you! You’ve made my day.”)

While it’s great to always have something to read nearby, finding a specific item is close to impossible. There’s no order or organization that even comes close to making anything easy to find. Not ideal for someone who has made their living helping people create usable information resources, eh?

Now, imagine if every other asset in the house (such as clothing, dishes, or financial records) was equally as randomly distributed. The house would grind to a halt.

Yet many organizations find themselves almost in that situation daily. Every week, we hear from clients who have Intranets where every user complains how hard it is to find the things they need to do their job.

Enter the taxonomy. Once you start to organize the information, you need to identify the right way to classify and store that information. And taxonomies go well beyond just the categories on a web site. Done well, they become a tool that you can use repeatedly to structure and optimize almost every business practice.

In today’s UIEtips, we have an article about one such application: using a taxonomy to create faceted navigation. Stephanie Lemieux,from Earley & Associates, shares her tips on what facets are and how teams can implement them effectively. If you’ve been wondering about this guided approach to navigation, this article is a must read.

By the way, we’re very excited about Stephanie Lemieux and Seth Earley’s upcoming UIE Virtual Seminar, New Ways to Think About Taxonomy: The Role of Taxonomies in Your Organization. This is our first seminar on this critical topic — a must for anyone who needs to improve the way their business is managing their critical information assets. Space is limited so register early for the May 7 seminar.

Have you implemented faceted navigation in your web site? What challenges did you run into? Share your experiences below.

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Hagan Rivers is one of our favorite go-to people for web app design, and we recently had her host a UIE Virtual Seminar on Designing Better Navigation for Web Applications. The seminar (which is still available) was brilliant, and we asked her back to answer some audience questions we did not have time to discuss during the seminar.

Here’s the list of the questions we discussed,

• How do you conduct your user research?
• How do you measure user confidence in the navigation?
• What are your thoughts on activating menus with a click versus “on hover”?
• What is your opinion on breadcrumbs? What about advanced breadcrumbs, like on lonelyplanet.com?
• How do you scale navigation for larger web apps or sites (circa 40,000 pages)?
• What are your thoughts on user segmentation, and navigation based on that (for example, UT’s Be A Longhorn)?
• At what point during the project do you design the global navigation?
• Are there different considerations when you’re educating users about a new process or activity?

During our discussion of the user research question, we recommended Indi Young’s Mental Models as a great book on the topic. Don’t miss her UIE Virtual Seminar on Mental Models, either.

Tune in for the meaty answers. This podcast had almost as much information as the seminar! Still have questions? Discuss them in the comments below!

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This week Robert Hoekman, Jr. joins us to discuss Design Frameworks. Drawn loosely from the idea of coding frameworks that software developers use to more efficiently build software, design frameworks are an aid to assembling a design.

Frameworks sprung from research into web ROI that Robert conducted after a parade of clients came to him looking to improve their conversion rates. In the case of these clients, he needed to find the essential elements that encourage people to sign up for a web app.

From there, he applied that process to other areas, like search elements. What combination of essential design elements had to be assembled for users to successfully obtain their goals?

You can compare frameworks to design patterns, although patterns tend to be smaller, more specific solutions. Frameworks, when built out, can contain design patterns. Robert wrote a five-piece blog post series for Peachpit on his development of a sign-up a framework, called Five Tips in Five Days. Robert will detail the full story in a new book, co-authored with me, coming soon from New Riders.

Frameworks help create consistency in interface elements to help solidify the UX. Robert uses frameworks on all his current projects. He starts out with a check list of all the main elements what will help a person accomplish a goal. Projects will require frameworks for many different parts of the project and they need to dovetail with one another. Robert shared with us a story of what happens when they do not. It winds up that examining where frameworks clash can act as a diagnostic tool for some usability issues.

Tune into to the podcast for more details and a preview of the full-day workshop the Robert will be conducting at the UIE Web App Summit, entitled Web App Anatomy: Effective Interaction Design with Frameworks. We hope you join us April 19-22, 2009 in sunny Newport Beach to learn more about this useful new design method.

But, at some point, we need to check to see if we’re going in the right direction. Are we creating what we are striving for? Is what we want actually buildable?

Our research shows that teams that don’t take time to ask and answer these questions get themselves into trouble downstream. They come to the end of the project with something that isn’t fitting together and not meeting the users or businesses’ needs.

In today’s UIEtips, I talk about a simple trick we discovered when we were out researching in the field. It’s called hunkering and it provides designers a check-and-balance system for ensuring the design they’re creating turns out great. I think you’ll find the article, Hunkering: Putting Disorientation into the Design Process, interesting.

In just a few weeks, the UIE Web App Summit will start, showcasing some of today’s most effective techniques for designing web-based applications. You’ll want to catch great full-day workshops, such as Dan Brown’s Communicating Design: Essential Deliverables for Highly Effective Design Teams or James Box and Richard Rutter’s Wireframing and Prototyping for Highly Interactive Web Apps. Read about all the amazing sessions.

Do you have your own hunkering tricks? Do you have other techniques for staying in touch with your design ideas? Share your methods below.

Unfortunately, we can’t always communicate our design ideas that way. We’re not always in the same room, in front of the design. Sometimes we have to communicate through documents. Sometimes, we need our thoughts to last beyond the ephemeral moment of speech.

That’s where annotations come in. Annotations are critically important to our design process, since they help us augment the work product to communicate things that aren’t readily apparent in the diagram itself.

Yet we almost never talk about them. Is there a right way to do them? Are there ways to do them better?

For today’s UIEtips, I had a chance to sit down with Dan Brown, co-Founder and co-Principal of EightShapes. Dan wrote the fabulous book, Communicating Design, and he’s given a ton of thought to the best ways we can get our design ideas out to the team, so they have them when they’re making important decisions. Read Dan’s interview.

It’s no surprise that Dan’s full-day workshop, Communicating Design: Essential Deliverables for Highly Effective Teams, is one of the most popular at the upcoming UIE Web App Summit. More than ever, teams need every tool they can get to be effective and Dan’s toolbox is the envy of us all. Find out more about his workshop and other great sessions.

Have you developed your own techniques for annotating your work deliverables? Let us know your tips and tricks below.

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This week we are happy to share with you a followup podcast to our recent Virtual Seminar with Jeff Patton, one of the world’s foremost teachers and consultants on the agile development process. If you missed the seminar, don’t worry, if you’re interested in agile, there’s plenty here for you too.

During the seminar we received, as usual, more questions than we had time to answer. So Jeff and I discussed them here. Our first question asked about the international nature of agile. Jeff noted while the ideas of agile were founded in the U.S. there’s a great deal of momentum and excitement for the process in Europe and Asia, as well.

A question was raised about the use of low-fidelity prototypes within the agile process. Jeff prescribes to the value of paper prototyping and is a fan of UIE-alum Carolyn Synder’s work in the field. Jeff believes that paper prototyping fits well within the process and says it’s worth the work to convince doubters who may not immediately see the value. He also brought up the use of testing those early prototypes on just about anyone, even if they aren’t your ideal user. It’s better to test on someone than no one, and in between your regularly planned tests with your targeted audience, short sessions with most folks will still yield important, and fast feedback.

Jeff and I discussed many more things including,

• RITE and introducing design concepts to developers
• The role of iterations in refining current work and how to move forward developing new components
• The emerging confluence of UI design patterns and the agile methodology
• The prioritization of quality in the agile process and your organization as a whole
• Converging UX and agile: upcoming agile conferences, and is Alan Cooper coming around to agile?

During the podcast, we mentioned these two links:

Salesforce’s Postcard Patterns – An Agile UI Pattern Creation Process, a presentation from IxDA ‘09, and

Agile Usability: Best Practices for User Experience on Agile Development Projects a 95 page PDF report.

Jeff is a wonderful explainer in the Q&A format and I think you’ll learn a lot from our conversation. You’re welcome to leave your questions in the comments below, as well.

The article quickly became one of the most popular articles we’ve ever published. People love the fact that a small design change could be linked to a huge increase in revenues. It’s the ultimate ROI story.

Yet in our research at User Interface Engineering, we see these kinds of increases all the time. And $300 million isn’t anywhere close to the biggest.

In today’s article, The Magic Behind Amazon’s 2.7 Billion Dollar Question, I talk about a design element whose income contribution is possibly 10 times larger. It’s a simple question on the Amazon site – one you’ve probably seen a thousand times – yet it is critical to the success of the business.

Unlike the previous story, where we worked on the project, this story comes from our research of Amazon, independent of any projects we’ve done for them. Therefore, our revenue projections are estimates this time. But even if we’re off by an order of magnitude, it’s still an impressive number that tells us how a well-thought-out design can make a big difference.

Increasing the effectiveness of a design is exactly what we’re talking about at the UIE Web App Summit, in Newport Beach, CA, April 19-22. Not signed up yet? Register now!

Have you had any design changes that had a big impact on your organization’s bottom line? We’d love to hear your stories. Share you thoughts below.

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Without planning, web apps have no where to go. Planning documents for web app projects are often overlooked, despite their importance in the success of the product. As a designer, no matter how great your research is, or how amazing your programmers are, if your planning documents do not develop well, your project will fail.

One of the great user experience success stories in the U.K. is the Brighton-based agency Clearleft. They’ve developed successful, sophisticated methods of planning for their projects. I was able to get a hold of two of their talented crew to discuss those methods in this episode of the SpoolCast.

James Box (UX) and Richard Rutter (Co-founder and Production Director) have been working on ways to plan highly interactive web apps that make the process more efficient. And that’s exactly what we spoke about during the podcast.

James and Richard first told me that they hold back from traditional deliverables, and show clients what they call ‘design tools.’ Some clients prefer tidy deliverables, but many clients like these rougher documents. The advantage to these is that they stress design as a process, rather than set in stone. Sometimes overly polished documents can make a solution appear complete, without the client being able to change its course.

This method aids the flow of dialog between the designers and the client. Rough prototypes help your client stay focused on the core issues you’re demonstrating, like interactions, while avoiding getting caught up on visual elements that aren’t important at this very moment. As an example, when possible, they leave color out altogether.

A key element to the success of their design tools is that prototypes are interactive. They make many prototypes with HTML and enough jQuery to demonstrate the interaction. They don’t feel this process takes any longer than using relatively static tools like Visio or OmniGraffle, and offers more utility. They’re always looking for ways to improve the process with reusable pattern and code libraries.

There were more quality nuggets in the conversation too, so please tune in for more on peer reviewing, prioritizing usability testing and real code production.

James and Richard will be joining us in California this April for our Web App Summit, where they will be conducting a full-day workshop on “Wireframing and Prototyping for Highly Interactive Web Apps.” If you enjoyed this conversation, please join us to learn how their techniques can help in your organization.

Have you moved to interactive prototyping for expressing complex situations? Let us know in the comments.

When we think of a team that communicates, the first things that comes to mind are hallway conversations, meetings, and emails. But, as our research continues to show, are only a part of the communication puzzle.

It turns out that one of the differences between the successful teams and the struggling teams is their use of diagrams and maps. Struggling teams almost always try to communicate important design ideas through talking or word-based documents, while the successful teams put a heavy emphasis on diagrams.

Often times, these diagrams become living documents — things the team revisits and updates frequently. And it’s the process of discussing and modifying that makes the inherent design concepts clear.

In today’s article, In Which a Concept Model Makes Me Giddy, Dan Brown shares with us one of his favorite diagramming tools: The Concept Map. Dan, who wrote the now classic book, Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning, recommends concept maps to help team members visualize the relationships between a design’s components and the people who use it. Whether you are new to concept maps or have been using them in your work for a while, I think you’ll find Dan’s thinking behind them as fascinating as I do.

I’m really excited about Dan’s full-day seminar at the UIE Web App Summit. His session, Communicating Design: Essential Deliverables for Highly Effective Design Teams, is sure to be one of the audience favorites. You don’t want to miss this hit session.

Have you tried concept maps for your team? Have you discovered ways to communicate through diagrams? Share your experiences with us below.

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Yes, if you do it right, using Ajax techniques can improve accessibility. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Ajax is like most techniques and technologies on the web—they are what you make of them.

I had a chance to talk with Derek Featherstone, a world renown expert on web accessibility and principal of Further Ahead, a consulting firm out of Ottawa, Ontario that helps their clients get the most out of their web site designs.

In the podcast, Derek tells us that we first need to know how to think about Ajax as a design tool. Today’s toolkits (such as jQuery) can really help designers build functional prototypes to demonstrate their interaction concepts to developers, who will then integrate their ideas into the production system. Taking advantage of the many available libraries gives you a sandbox for trying out interactions without having to know the best practices for implementing the code.

Derek also discussed common misconceptions about Ajax. He said that, while implementing Ajax that aids accessibility has its challenges, it’s within the technical reach of most developers.

I was glad when he reminded me that many interactions that improve experiences for people with special needs also improve the experience of average users. Techniques like managing large data sets on one page through Ajax-powered content updates can also help users with special needs by maintaining context which is normally degraded by full-page refreshes.

As always, I found Derek’s insights fascinating and I bet you will too.

[In case you hadn't heard, this year we asked Derek to build a brand-new, full-day seminar just for UIE's Web App Summit. His session, Designing Great Interactive Experiences for Everyone: Implementing Ajax and Accessibility will unleash a torrent of information about integrating Ajax best practices into your design workflow.

For people who are new to Ajax, he'll define the technologies and techniques involved, and describe what they're really good for and what they are not. For those who are using Ajax currently, Derek will delve into where to get your biggest wins with these interactions and what the best practices are for enhancing accessibility with Ajax. It's going to be a great session from one of our best-rated presenters. You won't want to miss it.]

Yet many teams don’t know how to iterate effectively. They spend too long building out a design and then don’t collect any useful information to tell if they’ve achieved what they set out to get. They end up deploying their result, only to discover their users are unhappy with what was built.

In today’s article, The Anatomy of an Iteration, we dive deep into what it takes to conduct successful iterations. I explain the four iteration steps and share some best practices. I’m sure you’ll find it helpful to make sure your team is learning everything they can in their design process.

Iterations are a key part of the prototyping process. If you’re looking to improve your prototypes, you’ll want to attend Richard Rutter and James Box’s full-day seminar, Wireframing and Prototyping for Highly Interactive Web Apps at the UIE Web App Summit.

Have you learned any tricks to help keep your iterations short and effective? We’d love to hear your experiences. Share them below.

Growing documents

Brown begins by suggesting that designers start documents with a basic nucleus of necessary information then adding detail in layers. He also put forward the idea that ideal documentation should be able to give a bird’s eye view and address the road-level details that developers and quality analysts need.

It seems to me that multiple documents become the best approach to meeting this ideal of providing the bird’s eye view and road level detail. In past work I’ve tended to use site maps or high level flow diagrams to give the high level information then use wireframes or lo-fi prototypes to get into the road level detail. (There is also need for technical documentation of both bird’s eye and road level detail but these tend to fall to the Front End and Back End team leads.)

Read Brian’s thoughts on the interview.

One of the challenges of being part of a bigger solution is the need to scale the development process. And in that, we’ve seen changes in two directions: moving towards the micro level with component libraries and moving towards the macro level with frameworks.

A few weeks ago, we published an article by Nathan Curtis on the differences between patterns and components. Nathan asserted (and we agree) that patterns describe cross-application behaviors, while components are the place within an application where the behaviors and the implementation meet.

Today, we’re taking a look in the other direction. Robert Hoekman talks about the differences between patterns and frameworks. He describes how a framework is a systemic view of a specific portion of the system. To contrast with Nathan’s components, frameworks are the place where behaviors meet enterprise-wide thinking.

If you’re involved in making web-based applications a key development platform, then you’ll want to understand how frameworks will make large-scale projects that much easier. Today’s article, Web Anatomy: Introducing Interaction Design Frameworks, is a good introduction as to why that is.

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. If you want to know more about frameworks, you’ll want to attend Robert’s full-day seminar, Web App Anatomy: Effective Interaction Design with Frameworks, at the UIE Web App Summit in April. And you’ll love combining it with Nathan Curtis’s seminar on patterns and components. More details on both at http://webappsummit.com

Have you started to put together frameworks? Is this something you’re exploring? Share your thoughts and comments below.

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When I tell people that one of our most popular conference sessions of all-time is about Web Form Design, people think I’m pulling their leg. Those people, of course, haven’t actually attended a workshop conducted by Luke Wroblewski.

Luke Wroblewski is a Senior Principal of Product Ideation & Design for Yahoo and has his own shop, LukeW Interface Designs. He is the author of two books, the new top seller Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks and the popular Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability.

Since writing a popular book on the subject, Luke has found himself inundated with questions tall and small about form design problems. He shared his two most asked questions (and answers) with me.

How many pages should my complex form be?
Of course, there’s no easy answer to this question. A key point to consider when resolving this challenge is context. If you met the person filling out your form in person, how would you ask them these questions? That will help you arrange the questions, and if you find natural groupings for many questions, these may be natural pagination points. If they don’t naturally break, perhaps that’s an argument for one long page.

Luke discussed Matthew Frederick’s 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School at this point in the conversation. He was particularly interested in the concept of parti.

Dynamic Forms, are they a good idea?
Forms where the site assists the user, when done well, can really help relieve stress on your user. A classic example of this is choosing a screen name for an account. No one wants to pick a name, password and hit submit, only to be told it’s not available and bounced back to the first form, with all the fields emptied to start from scratch… and still not knowing if the next name they choose will work! Live database queries for items like these can be a godsend. Additionally, language presented during these rich interactions presents the opportunity for a pleasant human interaction.

Good examples for dynamic interactions with forms can be found in the search box of Apple.com and the signup form for Jeremy Keith’s Huffduffer.com

Luke will be presenting his popular full-day workshop Web Application Form Design at our Web App Summit, this April, 2009 in Newport Beach, California. Why not come see what all the excitement is about?

Web forms have you down? You can always take comfort in the comments below… if you can endure our form.

So, it’s a nice fifteen minutes of fame when we get picked up by the popular press, in this case, Fast Company magazine:

Cliff Kuang did a nice job describing the research I described in my $300 Million Button article from a few weeks ago:

UIE studied people actually using the site, and it turns out that the prospect of registering was enough to turn some users away; meanwhile, even return users had problems logging in because they didn’t remember the email address or password they signed up with. (45% of users apparently had multiple registrations—a few had up to 10.) Granted, these represented a small portion of users. But for a retailer with $25 billion, even small portions signify huge lost profits.

So UIE redesigned the site, replacing the “register” button with “continue.” They also added a message, saying that registering wasn’t required to checkout, but was optional and might be helpful if you returned.

Sales went up 45%—$15 million in the first month, and $300 million in the first year.

Read Cliff’s write up on FastCompany.com.

Take a multi-step dialog sequence, such as, say, signing up for a new account. Each step will have the content — the fields the user will fill in, including their name, address, and billing information. Yet, each step also requires some user interface chrome — those design elements that move the user to the next step (or back to the previous one, when something needs revisiting).

What I find interesting is, often in the design process, we focus more on the chrome than on the content. Yet, it’s the content that is most important to the user — the part of the UI they need to focus on most. The chrome, when it’s working well, should seem invisible and natural.

In today’s UIEtips article, Previous and Next Actions in Web Forms, Luke Wroblewski shows us what we need to know to make an important part of that chrome invisible: the Previous and Next actions. He’s done a fabulous job of dissecting the problem and talking about exactly what needs to happen to make the interface seem natural to the user, which, in turn, lets them focus on the content.

Luke, of course, is *the man* to talk to when thinking about these things. His brilliant book, Web Form Design: Filling In The Blanks, is chock-full of great insights. We’re pleased he’ll be repeating his full-day seminar, Web Application Form Design, at our upcoming Web App Summit.

What’s been your experience with the sticky problem of Previous and Next actions? Do you have a solution that works well with your audience? We’d love to hear your experiences and questions. Leave a comment below.

That’s why we’ve put together a series of podcasts with some of the experts in the field: Dan Brown, Molly Holzshlag, Steve Mulder, Riccardo LaRosa, and Nathan Curtis. In these interviews, we talk about documenting design, web standards for web apps, Web 2.0 design strategy, and using patterns and components. I’m sure you’ll find it both interesting and insightful.

You can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, or you can listen directly on your PC.

By the way, Dan, Molly, Steve, Riccardo, and Nathan are all presenting full-day workshops on these topics at the UIE Web App Summit.

Documenting Design with Dan Brown

If you ask designers what the most frustrating parts about designing a project are, one of the top answers would undoubtedly be “communicating and documenting the design process.” And with good reason… it’s not easy.

That’s why we interviewed Dan Brown. I don’t know of anyone who knows more about solid design communications than Dan, the co-founder and principal of Eight Shapes, a UX firm in Washington, D.C. Dan wrote the excellent book Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning, one of our favorite design resources.

In this interview, Dan and I explore the documents that help make large design projects go smoothly. We discuss how these important docs can become living documents (one that evolves when necessary) and how
Dan believes there’s value in seeing them as actual team members. That may sound weird unless you think about large teams and the meetings. Sometimes, it’s easier to “ask the document” how something should work instead of figuring out who would be the best person to ask. At meetings, these documents can sit at the table and answer questions, as well!

In the podcast, we spent some time with two documents he cover’s in his book: concept models and flow charts. These particular documents are intriguing because they don’t cover concrete ideas (which are easier to document), but instead cover the higher-level abstract ideas that often power the site invisibly.

Listen to Dan’s interview.

Web 2.0 Strategy and Design with Steve Mulder and Riccardo LaRosa

We love to talk to Steve Mulder (from Molecular) and Riccardo La Rosa (from Isobar) about building out a Web 2.0 strategy and incorporating elements, such as social features and highly-interactive elements to the design.

Steve and Riccardo work with mainstream organizations. In this interview, they told me about the solutions they worked on with Reebok (a sports apparel company) and HumanaOne (a direct-to-consumer health
insurance company). We talked about the challenges they faced on these projects and what they needed to do to overcome them.

During the podcast, we discussed how to determine what features to build, how to tell if the features are working as expected, and how results changed over time. We talked about how starting small and iterating is most successful, but not an easy sell in many situations. You’ll want to listen to hear how they overcame this challenge and other Web 2.0 adventures they had.

Listen to Steve and Riccardo.

Web Standards for Web Apps with Molly Holzschlag

UIE reached out to Molly Holzschlag, to discuss the cutting edge of web standards as they apply to web application development. Molly is the unsinkable author of, what seems to be a million, books on web development, is a noted teacher, and an in-demand consultant in the field. There’s likely no one better to ask about web standards than Molly.

In this podcast, Molly and Jared discuss a number of new standards, such as HTML5, JavaScript, and other advancements, and the impacts it’s having on web application design and development. Also discussed is the tremendous benefits building with standards (or even a subset of them) brings to the lifecycle of a product.

In this podcast, Molly and I discussed the impact these and other advancements are having on web application design and development, along with the tremendous benefits building with standards (or even a
subset of them) brings to the lifecycle of a product.

Listen to Molly.

Achieving Pattern and Component Reuse with Nathan Curtis

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.

Nathan Curtis is a principal and co-founder of Eight Shapes in Washington, D.C., where he is spearheading research into design patterns and component libraries. Eight Shapes turns out great work in the UX and IA realms with some impressive clients.

In our discussion, Nathan and I first define design pattern libraries and component libraries. A pattern library is a repository for ideas and solutions to design interaction problems. Component libraries are comprised of actual functioning parts, with real code. If you’re designing even a moderately large site, having repositories can save you tremendous production time. You can multiply these savings if you have multiple teams working on different portions of the same property. Each team doesn’t need to invent their own wheels and engineer them from scratch.

We go into more detail in the podcast and also compare these to style guides, which were the first step towards this idea—one that is too often broken, over restrictive, and simply ignored.

Tune in to hear how pattern and component libraries can help you.

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.

Nathan Curtis is a principal and co-founder of Eight Shapes in Washington, D.C., where he is spearheading research into design patterns and component libraries. Eight Shapes turns out great work in the UX and IA realms, with some impressive clients.

In our discussion, Nathan and I first defined design pattern libraries and component libraries. A pattern library is a repository for ideas and solutions to design interaction problems. Component libraries are comprised of actual functioning parts with real code. An example would be a log-in process. Your pattern would define the experience of logging into your application, from the interaction, and often visual standpoint. Your component would be the chunk of code that represents the set of fields and controls that can be replicated across your organization’s web properties, so that you can easily create a consistent experience for your users, no matter where they may enter your system.

You can see just from this one example that if you’re designing even a moderately large site, having repositories like these can save you tremendous production time. You can multiply those savings if you have multiple teams working on different portions of the same property. Each team doesn’t need to invent their own wheels and engineer them from scratch.

We go into more detail in the podcast and also compare these to style guides, which were the first step toward this idea—one that is too often broken, over restrictive, and simply ignored. Tune in to hear how pattern and component libraries can help you avoid these traps.

Nathan will teach us much more about how to build out your own library of reusable patterns and components in a full-day seminar at our Web App Summit, coming April 2009 to Newport Beach, California. You won’t want to miss it.

Have you employed a pattern or component library in your projects? What experiences can you share? Please let us know in the comments.

During his session, Jason walked us through his thought process for several interesting design elements. He talked about the initial approaches, the problems they were trying to solve, and the path his thinking took to get to the final result. It was clear, from listening to him, that the design of these products isn’t accidental. It’s very deliberate and considered, relying on Jason’s (and the rest of his team’s) expertise and experience.

Jason admits they do very little user testing or field research. They don’t create personas to help validate their idea. Instead, they rely on the information they already have and their detail-oriented
approach to making the thousands of design decisions that go into every project.

Does this mean that every team could succeed without the traditional research techniques, relying on their own expertise and experience? That’s a question we’ve been researching for a few years now and finally have an answer: It depends.

In today’s UIEtips, “5 Design Decision Styles. What’s Yours?” I’ll walk you through the five different styles we’ve found teams use to make design decisions. I’ve outlined what each style is, the effort it takes, and how to decide when that style will work for your team.

Understanding how your team makes design decisions is critical. That’s why we’ve included it as just one piece of our new full-day Roadshow, Secrets Behind Designing Great User Experiences. This event brings together more than ten years of research into great design management. If you found today’s article interesting, you certainly want to attend one of the Roadshow workshops.

What design decision styles does your team employ? How do you decide which ones to use for any given project? Let us know your experiences below.

The client had hired us because they were concerned about checkout-process abandonment. Their analytics were showing a 13% drop off in sales, which, based on the average value of the abandoned shopping carts, was worth about $1.2 million a year in additional revenue.

Checkout-process abandonment is common in e-commerce sites and something that you can easily detect with your site’s usage logs. You just look at the number of people who get to the first screen and then the number of people who actually complete the transaction. Everyone who doesn’t make it is an abandonment.

When the team contacted us, they’d already pretty much decided what the problem was and how they were going to fix it, even though they had never watched any shoppers make purchases. And they were dead wrong. Not only was their fix not going to help, our research showed that it was going to increase abandonment.

Two weeks of usability testing on the live site (and on competitors’ sites), followed by two weeks of iterative paper prototype testing produced a streamlined checkout process, which, once implemented, showed a dramatic increase in revenues. It’s amazing what you’ll learn when you actually watch your users.

Today’s article, The $300 Million Button, talks about the bulk of that increase — how a simple change to a common screen produced $300,000,000 of additional revenue over the next year. I’m sure you’ll find it interesting.

Improving forms, like a checkout process, can show immediate results in your design’s user experience. We’re fortunate that at this year’s UIE Web App Summit, we have Luke Wroblewski repeating last year’s top-rated Web Application Form Design full-day seminar. If your site has forms (and what site doesn’t these days), this is a must-take course!

Have you seen results from changes to your forms? We’d love to hear your experiences. Share them with us below.

Fast forward three years and today we get a comment from Tessie asking:

I am currently designing a pattern library for my company. Can you recommend any pattern library systems which we can purchase which is easy to update and features a commenting system?

I didn’t know the answer, so I pinged Nathan Curtis, who is our go-to-guy on building pattern libraries these days. Here’s what he wrote back:

Good question. In my experience, I’ve not come across a pre-fab application for documenting patterns, components, or other libraries of reusable design assets that have the types of attributes (e.g., Use When) and other specific features. Instead, I’ve seen that teams have gone one of four routes to publish library documentation:

1. Home-grown systems: This is expensive and time-consuming, but ultimately the most advanced and tailored solution for an organization. Yahoo has written (on boxesandarrows.com) and subsequently spoken extensively about the challenges and roadmap they’ve traversed. Sun Microsystems has also use a custom website as the cornerstone of their efforts; lucky for us, they expose it to the community too at sun.com/webdesign/.
2. Collaboration tools: One team effectively used Jive Software’s Clearspace tool that includes a well suited three-prong feature set: wiki (articles per pattern & component, including editing permissions for team & individual, commenting and ratings), discussion boards (new requests, general discussions), and blog (publish ongoing notifications and articles about the overall library).
3. Basic tools: Other teams have set up a wiki or tried to transform a basic collaborative tool to publish patterns. This may be a good short term fix, but isn’t really a tenable long term solution unless you can really start to customize it.
4. Documents: For better or worse, some teams don’t have access to web-based solutions for publishing a library, and this really hamstrings their efforts. That said, they’ve gone to great lengths to compose documents (like a “Component Guide”, “User Experience Guide”, or “Pattern Library”) that become a versioned document managed over time. Additionally, with a modular documentation system, they can architect their guides in such a way that pages can be linked to project-specific documents as appendices or even key pages to scale changes or overlay annotations.

Hope this helps!

I think it does! What do you think?

[You may have heard: Nathan will be presenting his full-day workshop, Achieving Reuse with Patterns and Libraries at the UIE Web App Summit. Check it out!]

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.

That’s why we’re thrilled that Nathan Curtis is presenting at this year’s Web App Summit, to help us navigate the pattern and component library world. And, for today’s UIEtips, he’s got a great article on Components Versus Patterns that explains the differences between the two (and why you may need both).

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 seminar: Achieving Reuse with Patterns and Components. We’re excited about this brand new seminar and think it’s perfect for teams looking to get uniformity and increase development speed, without sacrificing creativity.

Have you considered using a pattern or component library for your project? What moves have you made in that direction? We want to hear you stories below.

Robert Hoekman, world famous author of Designing the Obvious and Designing the Moment, and I, Jared M. Spool, a person who co-authored a book in 1996 that you’ve probably never seen, are joining forces to do the unthinkable: We’re starting a new weekly podcast to answer any user experience or design questions you can come up with. We’re calling it Userability. Seriously.

Yup. You’ll give us a question and we’ll give you an answer. We’re not sure it’ll be a good answer, but we’re promising it’ll be an entertaining one.

(Actually, like all good user experience processes, it’s not that simple. You give us a question. We pick your question for the show. We tell you what time we’re recording and make sure you’re available. We call you while we’re recording and you get to ask us “on the air” and then we give you the answer. And we have a lot of fun while doing it.)

And here’s where you come in: We need your questions. Think of a great question. Something you’d love to find out the answer to. It can even be a serious question. Send it to userability@uie.com. Brian Christiansen, our producer, will pick the best ones and tell you how to be on the program.

Don’t worry. Once the first program is ready, we’ll be sure to let you know, even if you can’t come up with a good question..

Looking forward to your questions (and our answers),

Jared Spool & Robert Hoekman, Co-hosts of Userability
Brian Christiansen, Producer of Userability (forced into it — wasn’t his choice)

userability@uie.com

This week, our long time friend, Molly Holzschlag, joins us to discuss the cutting edge of web standards as they apply to web application development. Molly is the unsinkable author of a metric ton of web development books, is a noted teacher, and an in-demand consultant in the field. There’s likely no one better to ask about web standards than Molly.

There are a number of new standards that have come out recently, HTML 5 being perhaps the most notable for web applications, because it was brought forth with applications in mind. New features, like canvas, are designed to improve dynamic interactions between the presentation layer and the behavior layer, for example, with things like ECMAScript, more commonly known as JavaScript. JavaScript’s usage has really matured and become nearly indispensable as developers have really begun to exploit its full capabilities. JavaScript’s importance to front-end developers continues to grow.

In this podcast, Molly and I discussed the impact these and other advancements are having on web application design and development, along with the tremendous benefits building with standards (or even a subset of them) brings to the lifecycle of a product.

(During the episode, Molly and I touched upon the critical security exploit that effects all versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer for Windows. Please be careful out there, folks.)

If you found this podcast interesting, you’ll be happy to know that Molly will conduct a full-day workshop for web application developers on harnessing the power of web standards in their work at our Web App Summit in April 2009. Please join us and take your work to the next level!

We’re curious to see if any of our audience is venturing into the HTML 5 waters, or using other newish standards in their work. Won’t you let us hear your story in the comments?

In design, it’s no different. Inevitably, great design is about producing both long and short term value for the organization. Something that is well designed not only delights the users but shows up positively on the income statement.

We’ve been looking closely at the practices of some great organizations and one of the common threads we see is how well they match their design goals to the priorities of the business. This is especially important in tight economic times, when the organizations are looking to cut anything that doesn’t show immediate value. The best teams have put this practice into place.

I talk about these priorities in this week’s UIEtips article, A Recession Strategy For Web Apps, and how understanding them becomes important for any designer. While the article focuses on web-based applications, it can be applied to almost any design project.

Part of succeeding in a hard economy is to ensure your team has the necessary skills to make you best of class. That’s why we’ve put together an awesome program for our upcoming UIE Web App Summit, April 19-22 in Newport Beach, CA. Register by Wednesday, January 7, 2009 to get both the lowest price available and your own Limited-Edition iPod nano.

Yesterday I attended an outstanding seminar by Joshua Porter produced by those great folks at UIE (yep shameless Ak’ing there.):) The topic was Designing for Sign-up. What struck me the most about the presentation, as a UX geek, was that the issue was not about the mechanical process of making the sign-up easier, but around the socio-psychological issues of helping users make a commitment.

Read Deb’s entire post.

We love to talk to Steve Mulder (from Molecular) and Riccardo La Rosa (from Isobar) about building out a Web 2.0 strategy and incorporating elements, such as social features and highly-interactive elements to the design.

Steve and Riccardo work with mainstream organizations, which may not be as familiar as, say, a Silicon Valley startup with what the state-of-the-art is for these types of features. In this interview, they told me about the solutions they worked on with Reebok (a sports apparel company) and HumanaOne (a direct-to-consumer health insurance company). We talked about the challenges they faced on these projects and what they needed to do to overcome them.

During the podcast, we discussed how to determine what features to build, how to tell if the features are working as expected, and how results changed over time. We talked about how starting small and iterating is most successful, but not an easy sell in many situations. You’ll want to listen to hear how they overcame this challenge and other Web 2.0 adventures they had.

Enjoy the podcast? Well, you can join Steve and Riccardo for their UIE Web App Summit full-day workshop, Web 2.0 Strategy and Design, and learn how to apply the elements of social media, openness, rich interfaces, and emerging digital interactions to your designs.

On January 23, the Boston CHI chapter will host six full-day seminars on a variety of great user experience topics. There sessions range from UI nuts & bolts to online health care to usability tools and techniques.

You can find out details here about the sessions, instructors, and the very reasonable price for access to all this great information. This is a great opportunity to really boost your UX knowledge and skills.

Boston CHI Workshops

Over at Semantic Foundry, designer extraordinaire, Will Evans, has a wonderful essay explaining how he uses wireframing as both a problem setting and a problem solving approach.

I pick my primary audience and the one activity which allows them to solve one goal quickly, effortlessly, elegantly. In this case, the primary audience wants to easily find the best cruise, at the right time, for the right price. I don’t even look at the requirements document or competitive analysis until after I have sketched a couple of ideas either on paper or using Omnigraffle, which explores the primary goal. I’m not looking for solutions at this point because the first round of wireframes provide a space to engage in a dialogue with other designers, stakeholders, and the wireframes themselves.

It’s a great description of how Will tackles a design and he’s provided his work products for you to download.

Read Will’s essay: Shades of Gray: Wireframes as Thinking Device

[Plug: At the upcoming UIE Web App Summit, we have two sessions dealing with wireframing. Dan Brown will talk about how wireframes are an essential part of your overall design deliverable strategy in his full-day workshop, Communicating Design: Essential Deliverables for Highly Effective Design Teams. James Box and Richard Rutter will spend half of their full-day seminar, Wireframing and Prototyping for Highly Interactive Web Apps, demonstrating how to use wireframes when building Ajax and social networking tools.]

Originally, you got a dialog that looked like this:

This looks like an error because that’s how UPS treats it. While the e-commerce vendor has assigned a tracking number, it’s not in the tracking system yet, so it gives a not found error, asserting the user has typed it in wrong. (Interestingly, most of the time, the user hadn’t typed anything—the e-commerce vendor tapped into UPS’s API and automatically generated the error.)

But, UPS has learned. Today, you get this dialog instead:

It’s better, since it doesn’t treat the tracking number like a mistyped error. The UPS system acknowledges that they know a package exists and they even report important details, such as the destination and ship date.

Yet, from the perspective of the e-commerce customer, there’s still a hole in the experience. Stating that the status is “Billing Information Received” still requires the recipient understand UPS’s internal workflow structures. They have to understand that billing information is automatically transmitted through the UPS software that the e-commerce vendor uses to generate the package delivery request. They have to understand that they, the package recipient, isn’t being billed—the e-commerce vendor is.

Anyone want to take a stab at redesigning this to better communicate to the package tracking user what’s really going on?

Several weeks later, I submitted Is IT Ready for Experience Design? I wrote this essay for IT managers and CIOs looking to understand what it means to create great experiences for customers.

Now, as a holiday gift, Cutter is letting me give our friends (that includes you) a complimentary PDF of the entire special journal issue, IT Usability: Bridging the Gap Between Machines and People. If you’d like to get it, just go to this page on the Cutter site and follow the instructions.

Warning: The Cutter folks ask for information before you download. I don’t know what they do with this, but I’m betting they use it for the forces of good and not to support the axis of evil. Proceed at your own risk. (It’s ok with me if Bill Gates downloads a bunch of copies. Not that I’m suggesting you falsify information. Wink. Wink.)

When people disagree, it’s often because they think I’m suggesting that we stop putting breadcrumbs in our designs. I’m not suggesting this at all.

I’ve defined a design cop-out as something that happens when the designers focus on treating a symptom instead of addressing the root problem. A cop-out is a red flag that should be raised in the design process, to ask the question, “is there a better way to solve the problem?”

At doteduguru.com, blogger Michael Fienen wrote a thoughtful rebuttal to my article with many of the questions I often get when I start talking about my thoughts on Breadcrumbs. Responding to Michael’s points makes for a nice way to talk about these issues, so I thought I’d take some time to do that.

Surfacing the Content

In the original article, I said:

The idea behind how breadcrumbs should be used is simple: the user ignores them until they get to a page that isn’t quite what they wanted. They discover the trail of links and click on the one most likely to contain the correct path to what they were originally seeking.

To which Michael responded:

I think [this idea] is patently incorrect. A user doesn’t necessarily click on a bread crumb because they think it will take them somewhere better or put them on a correct path, nor is there any reason to believe they are used only by lost visitors in the first place. They click them so that they can surface up in a web site and potentially begin navigating anew.

Micahael’s not the first to suggest this. Many information architects I’ve talked to hold this, as we see it, common misconception: breadcrumbs are not only a loss-recovery mechanism—they also serve as a tool for “surfacing the content” of the site.

What’s interesting is when we’ve studied users, both in the lab and in the wild, we almost never saw them interested in “surfacing the content” or learning more about the site. Sure, they want to find the content they desire. If the target content is on more than one page, then they need to get to the subsequent pages. But beyond the user’s explicit target content, we never see them show any interest in the other available content on the site.

Since our early studies on the web, more than 12 years ago, we noticed that users are always on specific missions when they come to sites. With only one exception, users never visit a site “just to see what it has.” (The one exception? Web designers.) They always have a mission:

• Buy a new winter coat and accessories
• Find out what my portfolio is worth
• See if my favorite blogger has posted anything new
• Figure out a nice gift for my niece even though I have no idea what 15-year-olds want these days

Even the last one, where the user can’t describe the outcome, is not about the site. It’s about their niece’s gift. That user (like every other user) would want to surface all the content related to their goal, but will show no interest in content that’s unrelated. Only designers are interested in seeing what’s on a site.

In our studies, almost 94% of quests on web sites have a single objective. When the user reaches the target page, they’ve accomplished their goal. (Or, at least the “finding” portion of the goal. There still may be transactional component, such as purchasing.)

So, in 94% of the tasks, if the user turns to the breadcrumbs, it’s likely because they couldn’t find their target page and are lost. That leaves at most 6% where the user completes their initial objective and needs to start on a subsequent objective: “Ok, I’ve bought the down jacket. Now I’d like a matching hat, scarf, and gloves to complete the outfit.”

Michael’s argument is even if multi-objective quests happen infrequently, the breadcrumbs still serve a useful purpose, revealing the rest of the content to the user:

Assuming you have taken the slightest modicum of care with building bread crumbs, users will recognize them as a reflection of the hierarchy of your site’s information architecture, making them a tool that users have no reason to ignore if they are viewed as an aid to going where they want to go.

But that’s the point: users don’t care about the hierarchy of the site. The thousands of users we’ve observed for the last 12+ years clearly tell us that users don’t care how the site is constructed. Users only care how to get from they page they are current at to the page containing the content they seek. Even with repeated use, they’d prefer that each site visit just have clear scent. Memorizing the nooks and crannies of an information architecture is not their desired outcome.

Secondary Navigation

Michael agrees with this statement from my original article:

We’re recommending that when teams see users needing breadcrumbs, they look for other holistic design solutions. They’ll need to watch users and see the circumstances leading up to how the need arises. In almost all cases, they’ll find a better way to solve the problem than traditional breadcrumbs.

He goes on to say:

The key to successful bread crumbs is that they should be a secondary navigational tool. But, I would argue that people don’t use them because they need them, they use them because they see them as a means to get to where they want to go. As far as the user is concerned, that might be a quick link, an A to Z index, a menu, or a bread crumb (and all of these, minus menus, are generally secondary tools). The thing is most users neither know these terms nor care about them. All they care about is “I click here and go where I want.”

Michael is correct that users don’t distinguish between what he calls secondary navigation and the other types. The idea he proposes, “I click here and go where I want,” is a basic notion behind thescent of information theory: if the target content gives off good scent, users will click on it.

Let’s return to our down-jacket purchaser, now looking for matching accessories. If that user’s trigger words (such as “scarf” or “hat”) appear in the quick link, A-to-Z index, or breadcrumbs (Michael’s secondary navigation tools), then all is well.

Yet, on many sites, it’s dumb luck if the site designers have included the trigger words in those tools. In most cases, the designer hasn’t researched the specific trigger words users will want. Instead, they produce a set of generic terms (“accessories” or “outerwear”, for example) that may or may not resonate with the user.

So, I’d go further to say that all the secondary tools that Michael mentions are also cop-outs: fixing symptoms (in this case, providing a standardized navigation element) instead of the users specific problem (getting match accessories). (I wrote how sitemaps, which are parent to A-to-Z indexes, are also cop-outs in another article.) If I asked any designer worth their weight in salt to design a way for someone who just picked the down jacket to find the desired matching products, I’m betting, of all the design alternatives, Michael’s list would be the last choices.

Michael continues,

I agree with Jared that given perfect IA, smart menus, and intelligent visitors, bread crumbs are a waste of time. In reality, few people run sites that function in such a static bubble that one person has control over every facet of how information is disseminated. [...] It’s like saying “In a perfect country, we wouldn’t need laws to punish robbers, because no one would steal from each other.” The reality is, people do steal. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive to stop them, and shouldn’t minimize the problem, but you still must address the issue. So what do we do? We create a ton of secondary navigational elements, build them nicely into our layout, and let the user decide how they want to combine them to go where they need.

In the stealing analogy, it would make sense to look at the economic conditions driving people to stealing. Solve those and the robberies diminish. Focus only on punishment and you end up spending your resources building more prisons indefinitely.

I’d say the same is true for breadcrumbs. Users don’t want choices in their navigational tools. They want clear scent to the content. It’s the designer’s responsibility to provide that. Anything else is just a cop-out.

Breadcrumbs are Simple to Implement

One of the most common objections to my argument is “breadcrumbs are so simple to implement that there is no harm to just doing it.”

Unfortunately, this isn’t true. On a site of any decent size (greater than 500 pages), breadcrumbs become very difficult to implement well.

Often, in an attempt to make life easier, the designers use the category hierarchy as the breadcrumb links. On the surface, this sounds like a good idea. After all, if the categories are well thought out, then they should work in breadcrumbs as well as anywhere else.

Alas, that isn’t the case. Breadcrumbs stand by themselves as solo links. The categories are usually created to be shown as a collection. A category may have a clear meaning when shown alongside its siblings, but is often baffling when shown alone.

Take this example from Michael’s post – the breadcrumbs from NewEgg.com:

It’s not clear what the siblings are. I’m betting most folks would be surprised to find “Networking”, “PCs & Laptops”, and “Apple” to be listed as siblings to “Computer Hardware”, for example. Arriving at links that would describe the entire category well are difficult and usually require more than one or two words. That’s where it becomes difficult to implement breadcrumbs.

Throwing the Baby Out

As I’ve said before, I’m not suggesting that designers stop implementing them. I’m just trying to prevent the knee-jerk reaction of always including them under some misguided notion that they always improve the site.

In the best case scenario, they take no effort (as in automatically compiled by the CMS) and are ignored by users—thus are no harm done. But, that’s rare and unlikely for most situations.

Good design understands why every pixel is in the design. The designer knows how every element is directly serving the user in each instance. Automatic design (“every page needs breadcrumbs at the top, whether we have evidence it helps or not”) rarely accomplishes this.

But, here’s the rub: In the end, it doesn’t matter what I say. It only matters what happens with your users on your site. If Michael’s observations of his users shows that breadcrumbs are the most useful way for them to achieve their objectives, then I think his site should have breadcrumbs—cop-out or not. (And I’d like to learn more about his situation, because I’m always interested in proving my theories wrong.)

Does your site need breadcrumbs? The only way to know is to watch users. It’s simple, really. When we see someone click on one, we stop them and ask what they’re hoping to accomplish. That gives us a use case to work with. If the use cases point to a breadcrumb element being the best solution, then we go ahead and make that work.

Some find my labeling specific elements (like breadcrumbs) as cop-outs is harsh. But, that’s the point. Had I said, “breadcrumbs might not help as much as you think”, you probably wouldn’t have given this topic as much thought.

My purpose is to get you to think twice about using them. If I’ve made you seriously question your usage of them, then I’ll sleep well.