When shooting the movie, the director doesn’t necessary film the scenes in the order they’ll appear once edited. Instead, the filmmakers shoot the pieces according to other constraints, such as the availability of actors or locations, or accommodating variability in the weather. It’s not unusual for the movie’s final climax to be among the first scenes shot.

It occurred to me, while talking with Jeff Patton last week, that the same can be true in an Agile development process. Often times, the team will start with a piece of the project that isn’t the first thing the user experiences, but instead might be at the end. For example, they may start by building the functionality to save a file in Photoshop format – technically an important, high-risk part of the project, but not much of a user interface beyond a simple “Save as PSD file” option.

Jeff mentioned that user experience designers on the Agile team end up adopting a similar role to the person who gets the credit of “Continuity” in a film. It becomes their job to make sure the final experience makes sense, even though the order of construction was not linear. This is a huge challenge and one that has come to forefront as more teams move to an Agile development method.

Jeff has been researching the new challenges that arise when teams try to merge their UX efforts in an Agile process. In his travels, he’s assembled a slew of best practices that result in the development of great experiences. In this week’s UIEtips, we’re proud to publish the first installment of a two-part article where Jeff describes 12 of his best practices.

Read Jeff’s article, 12 Best Practices for UX in an Agile Environment - Part 1.

If you’re a user experience professional working inside an Agile development team, you’ll want to check out Jeff’s full-day seminar on this topic. He’s updated it with his newest findings and it’s promising to be one of the most popular sessions at our upcoming User Interface 13 Conference in Cambridge, MA this October.

Are you working to improve the user experience in Agile development projects? What practices have you found to work (or to avoid)? Share your thoughts with us.

SpoolCast: Visual Design Misconceptions with Luke Wroblewski
Recorded: June 6th, 2008
Brian Christiansen, UIE Podcast Producer
Duration: 34m | File size: 19 MB
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 SpoolCast: Visual Design Misconceptions with Luke Wroblewski [33:34m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

“Can you make it look pretty?”
“Can you make the logo bigger?”
“Can you make this more discoverable?”
“Can you make that pop?”

Heard these before? Or said them? In this week’s show, our friend Luke Wroblewski, Senior Principal of Product Ideation and Design for Yahoo, joins me to discuss visual design on the web. Luke shares his thoughts on the concept of visual design and it’s importance in helping users accomplish core tasks and strategic business goals.

• Cues from Your Client such as “can you make this look pretty?” Do you understand why these common requests are red flags, and understand the danger in them? Visual design is more than just styling. A fresh coat of paint doesn’t solve core problems, good visual design can.
• Design is Inevitable and not a step that can be skipped or filled in. It can be good or bad, but any product will have design as a component. Luke suggests there are some core principles that can be used to prioritize the presentation of information, actions and interactivity. One recommendation is to spend time with the team to prioritize what’s important about the project and keep that content independent of the design layout.
• Visual Design is a Priority. Uncover the importance of starting with visual design. Luke’s experience shows that in successful projects the visual organization needs to be a key consideration early in the process.
• Do You Greek? When building something, such as a web page, be sure to include all the elements up front – even the text - to ensure that design will take into account every aspect. It’s important to use the visual presentation to form a hierarchy for this real information. Luke enforces the point that real elements and real constraints will help us understand if the end result will work.
• Set Context Appropriately for the team. Skip “what do you think?” and paint the picture underlying the design. Those making suggestions on fonts, colors, and layout may not be comfortable making decisions on the strategic direction for the product so they stick to these minor aspects in which everyone can have an opinion. Decisions like these made in isolation don’t always yield overall coherent design or balance.

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.

In fact, we have a special offer to pass along. Rosenfeld Media, publishers of Luke’s book would like to extend the following to SpoolCast listeners: Receive 10% off Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks when you purchase the book at their site, and use the promotional code “UIEWFD“.

[Luke is teaching a full-day workshop, “Visual Design for the Web: Communicating with Customers”, at our User Interface 13 this October in Cambridge, MA. Luke is one of our most highly rated presenters from previous events.]

Questions, comments? What experiences have you had wrangling visual design in your organization? Let us know in the comments.

SpoolCast: Followup Q&A from The Scent of a Web Page
Recorded: July 23rd, 2008.
Brian Christiansen, UIE Podcast Producer
Duration: 24m 30s | File size: 14 MB
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 SpoolCast: Followup Q&A from the Scent of a Web Page [24:30m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Brian Christiansen and I recorded a special episode comprised entirely of questions from our customers. On July 17, we held the UIE Virtual Seminar: The Scent of a Web Page—The Five Types of Navigation Pages. During the seminar, we received far more questions than time would allow answering. As is tradition, we put together this follow-up podcast to answer even more of your excellent questions.

In this episode, we discussed:

• how we determined “failure” and “success” when we studied users
• how our research applies to college sites
• the undesirable trait of pogosticking up and down between levels of pages and why that’s a sign of navigation failure
• examples of link-rich homepages that users love
• why, contrary to popular opinion, users still don’t like to search

In the podcast, we referred to an article we wrote a little while back, called Lifestyles of Link-Rich Pages, which provides more information on long-links and our home page research.

If you missed our live seminar, a recording of the session is available for viewing. See The Scent of a Web Page for details.

Still have questions about the five types of navigation pages? Ask them in the comments below!

It’s easy for design teams to get trapped in the day-to-day grind of improving the designs they are working on. You tweak this image, clean up that text, relabel the button to make more sense — all important things to make incremental improvements.

Yet, it would be impossible to see radical, major innovations come from that approach. Instead, every so often, we need to remove ourselves from the tactical refinements and immerse ourselves into a world of strategic thinking. It’s in this world that we’ll see new approaches, find major innovations, and radically change the way we’ve done things, all to move us forward in a new way.

In this week’s issue of our email newsletter, UIEtips, we’ve asked Adaptive Path’s Brandon Schauer to share his thinking about what he calls the Long Wow, where he talks about techniques for ensuring long-term customer loyalty through systematically impressing customers again and again. We found this article really inspiring to our thinking about great design and thought you would to.

Read Brandon’s article, The Long Wow.

The Long Wow will be just one topic that Adaptive Path’s Peter Merholz and Andrew Crow will be sharing at this year’s User Interface 13 Conference, October 13-16 in Cambridge, MA. They’ll be teaching their full-day seminar, Subject to Change: Product Strategy and Planning Tools for Great User Experiences. This workshop was highly-rated at previous conferences and we know you’re going to love it.

What have you done in your design process to enhance customer loyalty? We’d love to hear your thoughts and questions.

Usability Tools Podcast: Moderating Usability Tests, Part 2
Recorded: July 3rd, 2008.
Brian Christiansen, UIE Podcast Producer
Duration: 34m | File size: 19 MB
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 Usability Tools Podcast: Moderating Usability Tests, Part 2 [34:10m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In this episode of Usability Tools, Brian Christiansen and I continue on how to moderate a usability test. As I mentioned last week, the episode got so long that we decided to break it into two parts. You can find part 1 here. This week’s show focuses upon the step-by-step tasks of running the session with a participant and your observers.

Good moderating is critically important to a successful session. Here are a few points we touched upon in the show:

• Practice and repetition improves your moderation skills. Start the session on the right foot by greeting your user on time and by laying out exactly what will happen during the session.
• Inform your user of their rights as a participant; their comfort is key. Have and follow a testing protocol which will lead you through all the information, and through all the testing steps. It should also govern your observers.
• End your session on time. Respecting the time of your participants and observers is paramount. Walk your user out, both out of politeness and because small talk may lead to critical insights.

There’s much more in the show. If you have questions about the role of the moderator, feel free to ask them in the comments. We’ll try to answer them and may even work them into a future show.

[This show is the first in a series we're going to do on the fundamentals of usability testing. In future shows, we'll cover the entire gamut of testing, from initial planning, through task design, to data analysis and beyond. We want to create a complete resource that you'll share with your entire team.]

August may mean the Dog Days of Summer, but we have another great UIE Virtual Seminar for you that we think you’ll find very cool:

Galleries: The Hardest Working Pages on Your Site
Date: August 14th, 2008 — 1pm ET / Noon CT / 11am MT / 10am PT

As we continue our series on Designing for the Scent of Information, we take a detailed look at your site’s most critical page: the gallery. Galleries are most used navigational element on any web site and many sites have hundreds of them. And yet, they are often the most difficult pages to design well.

Acting as the crossroads for your users path to their desired content, a solid gallery page tells the user what they’ll find and, just as importantly, tells them which paths will take them away from their goal. Ensuring these landmarks do their job is probably the hardest part of designing a successful website.

I will show you some of the latest design thinking from Netflix, Best Buy, Bureau of Labor Statistics, SonyEricsson, and Citibank, to name a few.

You can read the full seminar details here.

As I mentioned last week, producing a great search results page takes a ton of hard design work. There’s really no way without studying the users’ goals and needs, and watching how they interact with the results the engine generates. In almost every instance, Search is not the user’s end goal, but one tool they can choose to help achieve their objective. Without a deep understanding of their objectives, it’s really difficult to design a great tool for them.

In today’s issue of our email newsletter, UIEtips, I conclude my feature discussion on producing great search results pages. In the article, I share some of the 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.

This week’s conclusion produces several more surprising results from our research. I’m betting there will be some good discussion that follows.

Read my article, Producing Great Search Results: Harder Than It Looks, Part 2.

As I was writing this week’s article, I kept thinking about all the different skills that come into play when you try to design an effective search results page. Even though it’s just designing a single page, it requires a team with talents and experience in information architecture, user research, visual design, interaction design, analytics, and copywriting.

It’s no coincidence that we’ve assembled world-renowned experts on these topics at our upcoming User Interface 13 Conference, scheduled for October 13-16, 2008 in Cambridge, MA. Make sure to check out the full program at the User Interface 13 Conference.

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. Share your thoughts with us below.

On his Biznology blog, search expert Mike Moran (author of the great book Do It Wrong Quickly), commented on my recent article about how people search, Producing Great Search Results: Harder than It Looks - Part 1.

In his post, Mike makes some excellent points, including pointing to the seminal work by Andrei Broder, A Taxonomy of Web Search (PDF), which talks about three types of searches: navigational, informational, and transactional. He suggests that my theory that users just want a single result, not a set of choices, is flawed. He wrote:

In my work at ibm.com, I noticed that the most preliminary searches often were informational ones. Someone might search for “e-mail archiving case studies”—they don’t want to get just one. Now, sure, if you have a page on your site that lists every blessed e-mail archiving case study, that would be a great #1 result, but you usually don’t have that kind of aggregation page for every possible query.

Searchers would not want your “Content Management Case Studies” page as #1, even if that list included every e-mail archiving case study, because it also includes too many other irrelevant case studies. Instead, searchers would love a list of case studies that match the query. They could scan through that list and click several results, drinking in that practical information they crave.

I think Mike is correct, if you look from the myopic viewpoint of the query itself. Starting with “e-mail archiving case studies,” the fact that it’s a plural, implies that the user wants a listing. But, that’s assuming that the user really wants to see e-mail archiving case studies.

I suggest that we start earlier in the user’s day. It’s likely that the user didn’t bolt out of bed first thing in the morning saying, “I need to type ‘e-mail archiving case studies’ into IBM.com and see what I get!” There’s some line of thinking and behavior that started this process.

Why does a user want to see the case studies? Are they looking to see that others had gone down the archiving road before them? Are they looking to compare vendors? Are they looking to solve a specific archiving problem (such as regulatory compliance in the pharmaceutical industry), but don’t know how to describe that for a successful query?

In any case, I’m betting that the user would be much happier with a single link that answers their specific need than a selection of links for them to choose between.

Developers trying to make a great On-site Search experience have the problem that they just have a list of queries and a corpus of content. They have to create matches between the query list and the available content.

But when you step back to the original goal of the user and ask what they need to accomplish that goal, you come up a different set of content altogether. The problem with Search is that we force the user to specify their goal in terms of the phrase they think will most likely produce a reasonable result.

Mike is right that the results need to be relevant. (I’ll talk about relevancy in part 2 of the article.) That’s the problem with the Content Management Case Studies result — it’s not really relevant.

But I think he’s wrong when he says that users are sometimes looking for a list of content, if you look at it from the holistic viewpoint of the user’s goal. They may settle for a selection list because of the poor state of what today’s Search experience delivers, but I think that isn’t what they really want.

When you study how designs get made as much as we have, you start to notice something: good design is directly related to effort. Good design takes a lot of work. Bad design, as the bumper sticker says, “it just happens.”

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 issue of our email newsletter, UIEtips, we present the first of a two-part article on producing great search results. 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.

Search results pages are just part of a site’s information architecture. If you want to ensure your users get to the content they seek, you’ll want to attend Donna (Maurer) Spencer’s full-day, in-depth seminar, Information Architecture Essentials: Best Practices for Organizing Your Site’s Content. This is just one of excellent seminars we’re offering at this year’s User Interface 13 Conference.

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.

Usability Tools Podcast: Moderating Usability Tests, Part 1
Recorded: July 3rd, 2008.
Brian Christiansen, UIE Podcast Producer
Duration: 33m | File size: 19 MB
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[ Show Notes ]

 

 Usability Tools Podcast: Moderating Usability Tests, Part One [33:22m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In this episode of Usability Tools, Brian Christiansen and I talk about how to moderate a usability test. Turns out, the episode got so long that we decided to break it into two parts. This week’s show focuses upon the different roles a single moderator needs to take on during the session.

The usability test moderator has a lot of influence on the success of the test. Moderating isn’t rocket science, but you’ll need to understand the basics before you sit down with your users.

In this week’s show, I talk about the three roles a moderator needs to play during the test.

First is the scientist. The scientist makes sure your tasks get done, notes get taken, and keeps the show on track.

Then we have the sportscaster. The sportscaster gives play-by-play so the design team members don’t miss anything the user does.

Lastly, there’s the role of the flight attendant. This is the most important role. Keeping your test participant happy and comfortable is your number one job.

Tune in to learn the specifics of each role and how they affect one another.

If you have questions about the role of the moderator, feel free to ask them in the comments. We’ll try to answer them and may even work them into a future show. Stay tuned for the second part of the Moderating show next week.

[This show is the first in a series we're going to do on the fundamentals of usability testing. In future shows, we'll cover the entire gamut of testing, from initial planning, through task design, to data analysis and beyond. We want to create a complete resource that you'll share with your entire team.]

Update: Part 2 is now posted.