Last week in part 1 of our series, I brought you 5 great podcasts covering Ajax and accessibility, patterns and components, web form design, web standards, and interactive prototyping. 

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.

Do you prototype your web app projects? Can Ajax techniques really improve accessibility? Do you wonder how components and patterns stack up to style guides and which is more efficient to use?

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:09 — 15.0MB)

Guest Brian Kalma speaks about unique lessons from Zappos.com.
Duration: 26m | 15MB
Recorded: March, 2009
Brian Christiansen, UIE Podcast Producer
[ Subscribe to our podcast via ←This link will launch the iTunes application.]
[ Subscribe with other podcast applications.]
[ Direct Link to MP3 File ]

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!]

Last week we reprinted an article discussing the 3 steps design teams take when creating an experience vision to guide the direction of design toward their users’ ideal experience. Once a design team creates that experience vision, they need to share it with everyone involved in the project to make sure everyone is on the same page as the design process progresses.

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. 

If you’re like me, (and hopefully you’re not,) you have books and magazines scattered all over your house. For reasons I can’t completely explain, I always want reading material in arms reach, so I’ve haphazardly distributed my library in every possible room. There’s even reading material in the bathroom.

(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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 44:59 — 25.3MB)

Guest Hagan Rivers answers questions about web app navigation.
Duration: 45m | 25.5 MB
Recorded: April, 2009
Brian Christiansen, UIE Podcast Producer
[ Subscribe to our podcast via ←This link will launch the iTunes application.]
[ Subscribe with other podcast applications.]
[ Direct Link to MP3 File ]

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!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:46 — 15.7MB)

Guest Robert Hoekman, Jr. speaks about design frameworks.
Duration: 28m 45s | 16MB
Recorded: December, 2008
Brian Christiansen, UIE Podcast Producer
[ Subscribe to our podcast via ←This link will launch the iTunes application.]
[ Subscribe with other podcast applications.]
[ Direct Link to MP3 File ]

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.

Today’s projects can be big and they can be fast. It’s easy to push forward, creating design documents, wireframes, prototypes, and screens, just to get through it on schedule.

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.

Right now, in a conference room somewhere, there’s a team of designers standing in front of a whiteboard, thinking about a cool new design idea. It’s highly unlikely that, as the team is standing there, everyone is silent. I’m betting that at least one member is walking through the proposed design, pointing and gesturing, helping everyone get on the same page.

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 48:07 — 27.4MB)

Duration: 48 m | 27.5 MB
Recorded: March, 2009
Brian Christiansen, UIE Podcast Producer
[ Subscribe to our podcast via ←This link will launch the iTunes application.]
[ Subscribe with other podcast applications.]
[ Direct Link to MP3 File ]

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.