Users arrive at your web site with the simple goal to find something that’s important to them. If they find it, whether they search or not, they’ll be happy. When they don’t find it, frustration follows.

Teams often turn to a sophisticated built-in Search capability to help their users find what they seek. However our research has shown that technological magic isn’t going to make the users successful. Instead, it’s a simple understanding of what the users are seeking and how they look at it. We’ve put together the next UIE Virtual Seminar to address this Search issue.

Be prepared to see how Search fits into your site in an entirely new way. Not only will you come away with solid insights from the most up-to-date research, you’ll be chomping at the bit to start making improvements right away. And you’ll be on your way to the world of User Happiness.

UIE Virtual Seminar
Search, Scent, and the Happiness of Pursuit
with Jared M. Spool
Thursday July 9, 2009, 1:30pm ET
90-minute online presentation

Read more about the Search, Scent, and the Happiness of Pursuit, or see the great preview Jared put together, to help you understand what to expect out of this seminar.

In advance of the presentation, we’d love to hear from you. What does your team struggle with when designing for Search? What type of feedback do you get from your users on how well they accomplish their goals on your site? What does a successful visit mean? We’d love to hear your thoughts, questions, and concerns. Please share your thoughts 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. 

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For our tenth show we bring you a special edition of the Userability Podcast… recorded LIVE from the Voices That Matter 2009 Conference, held in San Francisco in April.

We had two audience questions. The first question asked, are there are any applications or research best practices that Jared and Robert use to aid in persona creation?

The second audience question asked about the the usability of iPhone applications, especially considering that on-the-go, handheld, touchscreen apps are a relatively new concept.

Tune in to hear Jared and Robert duck and dive in front of a live studio audience.

Have a serious UX question? Send it in and Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr. will answer it with a healthy dose of levity. Please send your deep, vexing questions to us at userability@uie.com. We’d love to feature you on the show!

Do you have any persona tricks and tips? What’s your take on the “new” territory of iPhone apps? Is it new territory? Let us know in the comments!

PS— During the show, Robert referenced Apple’s iPhone/mobile Human Interface Guidelines, which are fully available from Apple.

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.

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This week’s episode features a compelling question from Will Evans. Usually, this is the point in the post where I say something witty, but this is a question we hear so much, I will cut right to the chase!

Will asked,

When you are creating a web application or website, and you are ready to unleash it to the world, at what point can you say that it is “Usable Enough?”

Tune in for one of the most in-depth Userability Podcasts yet, as Jared and Robert give you advice on how to find that “good enough… launch!” point.

Have a serious UX question? Send it in and Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr. will answer it with a healthy dose of levity. Please send your deep, vexing questions to us at userability@uie.com. We’d love to feature you on the show! Till then, if your’re in a situation like Will, let us know how you would handle it in the comments!

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.

Want help in developing that solid strategy? We’ve asked Sarah Bloomer, a User Experience professional who’s helped several companies set up internal UX teams, to help you do exactly that. You’ll learn 4 strategies to deal with resistance to your team’s efforts. If management has difficulty understanding how the vision and strategy are shared throughout the organization, then you’ll definitely want them to attend this UIE Virtual Seminar. And don’t forget, if you have team members that can’t attend the live date, register with the promotion code MYARCHIVE to get lifetime access to the recording. Register today!

UIE Virtual Seminar
Upgrading your UX Team
with Sarah Bloomer
Wednesday, June 17, 2009, 1:30pm ET
90-minute online presentation

Sarah put together a great preview for you, to help you understand what to expect out of this seminar.
Click here to visit the site page with the preview.

In advance of the presentation, we’d love to hear from you. As a team member or team leader, what are your biggest challenges? What sort of resistance do you meet, and how do you overcome it? What is your organization’s culture like, and what opportunities exist there? We’d love to hear your thoughts, questions, and concerns. Please share your thoughts below.

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The audio was recorded at An Event Apart Seattle 2009. The session description was as follows:

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

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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.

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This week’s episode features a shadowy UI Designer by the name of Jamis Charles, from a secretive organization located somewhere in Texas. Honestly, that’s all we know about him. Cloak and daggers aside, he brought an intriguing challenge to the show.

Jamis, if that is his real name, asked,

Should link treatments vary for different methods of displaying content to the user? For example, on a single page I have several links. The first one takes me to another page when I click. The second shows a hidden layer with more content if I click. The third shows more content if I hover.

If these links should be styled differently, should the treatments be organized by type of content, or by the user interaction method?

Tune in to see how our hosts answer this challenge while our guest and his project maintain their anonymity. And to hear Robert wax nostalgic for a steak he once ate in Texas.

Have a serious UX question? Send it in and Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr. will answer it with a healthy dose of levity. Please send your deep, vexing questions to us at userability@uie.com. We’d love to feature you on the show! Till then, if your’re in a situation like Jamis, let us know how you would handle it in the comments!

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.

Robert is thinking about this concept more than anyone we know. So much so, that we’ve asked him to present a UIE Virtual Seminar on Wednesday, May 27 — Web Anatomy: Effective Interaction Design with Frameworks .

We’d love for you to join us at the Virtual Seminar next week, but you don’t need to wait to be exposed to this concept. Earlier this year, Robert wrote a great article on frameworks. If design patterns describe cross-application behaviors, and design components are the place within an application where the behaviors and the implementation meet, then an interaction design framework is a systemic view of a specific portion of the system. An example? Let’s say you’re developing a site where users will need to log in. You know you’ll need a “username/password” login form. But, did you also remember the “Forgot Your Password?” feature? Or what you’ll need to create the user’s account? Or the functionality to change the password? Frameworks are the place where behaviors meet enterprise-wide thinking.

Are you involved in making web-based applications a key development platform? You’ll want to understand how frameworks make large-scale projects much easier. Robert’s article is a good introduction as to why that is.

Web Anatomy: Introducing Interaction Design Frameworks

By Robert Hoekman, Miskeeto
Originally published: Feb 02, 2009

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.

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This week’s episode features a surprise in-studio guest, Dana Chisnell of Usability Works. Dana is a usability consultant who pairs up with design teams on a regular basis, all around the U.S. She brought a relationship question to the show… apparently she had us confused with Loveline. (No Dr. Drew here!)

Dana asked,

When I work with design teams, there’s often a lot of competition for who on the team can spend the least amount of time working with the usability geek (me). What can I do, what do I have to do to court favor with the team to let them know that I’m not just an enforcer, but I’m on their side and that we can learn from one another? It’s usually a long-distance situation, where the design team is in one place, geographically (and perhaps spiritually, mentally, etc.), and I’m in another.

Tune in to see how our hosts answer this one without resulting to flowers and chocolate! (Though, those might not hurt anything.)

Have a serious UX question? Send it in and Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr. will answer it with a healthy dose of levity. Please send your deep, vexing questions to us at userability@uie.com. We’d love to feature you on the show! Till then, if your’re in a situation like Dana’s, let us know how you handle it in the comments!

UIE Virtual Seminar
Web Anatomy: Effective Interaction Design with Frameworks
With Robert Hoekman, Jr.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009, 1:30pm ET
90-minute online presentation

In your project, you’ll need to ensure you’ve got all the essential features along with those new, super-cool, hip capabilities that will dazzle your users. By using these interaction design frameworks, you’ll have a ready kit of necessary components so you’ll create the best possible design.

To help us understand how interaction design frameworks help us think through our designs, we’ve invited Robert Hoekman, Jr to tell us how they work. Robert’s been thinking about Interaction Design Frameworks more than anyone we know. He’ll show you how frameworks fill in the gaps left by design standards, best practices, and libraries of individual patterns. You’ll see examples from major web sites, where the frameworks helped predict missing functionality and critical design elements. Avoid these costly mistakes, and you’ll deliver a top-notch experience for your users.

Robert put together a great preview for you, to help you understand what to expect out of this seminar.
Click here to visit the site page with the preview.

If your team needs to quickly come up with designs that are both creative and usable, Robert’s seminar is a must for you. You’ll want to watch this with your entire team, so they come away knowing how interaction design frameworks will dramatically simplify your organization’s design process. Reserve your spot today!

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!]

Last week’s UIE Web App Summit was the best Web App Summit we have ever put together. The 16 outstanding speakers covered topics ranging from form design, Ajax, RIAs, design deliverables, wireframes, accessibility, design patterns, and web standards.

Highlights of the Summit included two incredible keynote presentations. Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh, inspired the attendees with an incredible talk on Building a Brand that Matters. And our own Jared Spool gave an insightful talk, Revealing Design Treasures from The Amazon. Now you have the chance to hear what Tony, Jared, and 14 other presenters said at the Web App Summit with our Proceedings CD.

We take great care working with each speaker to design extremely valuable materials. As a result, with the proceedings, you’ll have all the tools and techniques needed to tackle your biggest design challenges. Plus, these proceedings allow you to share this knowledge with your colleagues. Not only do you get to read the presentation decks, you get to hear some of the actual presentations.

Learn from world-renown experts:

• Luke Wroblewski on Parti and the Design Sandwich
• Bill DeRouchey on Designing Humanity Back Into Your Products
• Nathan Curtis on Achieving Reuse with Patterns and Components
• Joshua Porter on Designing for First-time Users
• And many others

Overall, this CD has 22 presentations from 16 presenters. And 19 hours of audio recordings of the Featured Presentations, Keynotes, and Perspective Talks from Monday and Wednesday of the Summit.

Did you attend the Web App Summit? Don’t worry, we’ll make sure you have access to the updated presentations and the audio recordings.

If you didn’t attend, this is the best way to experience the valuable information shared by our presenters. You can see all the presentations on the CD at the  Web App Summit agenda. 

Order your CD by May 8 to be guaranteed the full set of notes and audio recordings, so you too can experience the Summit.

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.

UIE Virtual Seminar
New Ways to Think about Taxonomy:
The Role of Taxonomies in Your Organization
May 7, 2009, 1:30pm ET
90-minute online presentation

We’ve asked Seth Earley and Stephanie Lemieux, experts in creating and maintaining sophisticated taxonomies, to broaden your thinking about how a taxonomy can make your life easier, whether you’re designing a public-facing web site or a large-scale intranet. In this 90-minute online session, you’ll see detailed examples of taxonomy applications and how to leverage key design principles across your organization. Stephanie and Seth will provide a better understanding of your own taxonomy and the navigation of your information. You’ll get your content management system under control and improve your search results.

To help you understand what to expect out of this seminar, Seth & Stephanie put together a great preview for you:

In late June, we’re taking this workshop on the road to:

• Seattle, WA the week of June 21st, 2009
• Denver, CO the week of June 21st, 2009
• Washington, DC the week of June 29th, 2009

We’re just finalizing the venues and dates. If you want to be notified about the exact date and venue, send us an email with the city you’re interested in, and we’ll email you the moment we finalize everything.

Seattle, WA
Denver, CO
Washington, DC

The Roadshows back in February and March were a huge successful and filled up quickly. Even though the exact date hasn’t be finalized, you can still register and reserve you seat now.

Recognized industry leader, Jared Spool, will share information we’ve only made available to our biggest clients.

During the day, Jared will lead you through these sessions:

9:00 am: Designing for the Age of Experience
Jared will open the day with an overview of UIE’s research into great experience design. He’ll reveal the factors that are found in the organizations that are successful at delivering great experiences. And, he’ll show you the important criteria that you can use to measure your team’s effectiveness.

10:45 am: UX Level-Up: Taking Your Team to the Next Level
You’ll assess the critical dimensions that will pinpoint what your team needs to succeed. Jared will share how UIE measures organizations, which factors are most critical, and how to tell exactly where your group falls. From there, you’ll put together a solid action plan, describing the exact steps you need to take, to go to the next level and beyond.

1:00 pm: The Making of a UX Vision
You’ll discover the secrets behind creating a unified user experience vision that you can share with your entire organization. (Hint: it’s not nearly as hard as it sounds.) Jared will show you how, once you’ve created your vision, your team can use it to guide and focus your entire organization on a path that will yield delighted users while exceeding business objectives.

3:15 pm: Magic and Mental Models: Using Illusions to Simplify Design
In a perfect session to end the day, Jared will use professional magic effects to demonstrate the parallels between the world of magical illusions and the world of digital design. He’ll reveal the secrets from several magical illusions, and then show you how to use the same mechanisms to create delightful experiences for your users.

Read the detailed program description.

Knowing that times are tough for folks, we’ve made a special effort to make the UIE Roadshow a very affordable event. We think it’s important to get our latest research out, so we’ve priced this full-day workshop for far less than other programs. Additionally, we’re offering a $75 discount when you register with the promotion code SHOW09.

Do you have a team to send? We’re offering steep discounts. Bring your team and the price goes as low as $299 for each person.

This is guaranteed to be an eventful workshop, with a ton of detailed examples, hands-on exercises, Jared’s usual funny material, and, for the first time, live magic tricks!

We hope to see you there.

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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’s episode features a surprise guest for Jared and Robert. Actually, every guest is a surprise, but this one is a surprise and an ambush by a friend of UIE, the always entertaining Scott Berkun. Scott wanted to know, what gives?

Don Norman’s seminal, The Design of Everyday Things, is approaching it’s 20th year in print. It explained why so many basic things in life are poorly designed and hard to use, such as pull handles on doors that need to be pushed. Since the world has been aware of these design flaws for two decades, why are so many basic usability failures still around?

Listen in to hear if Robert and Jared’s answer is what you would’ve said. Would you have answered differently? Leave a comment below.

Have a serious UX question? Send it in and Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr. will answer it with a healthy dose of levity. Please send your deep, vexing questions to us at userability@uie.com. We’d love to feature you on the show! Till then, if you think you know why so many usability failures remain, let us know in the comments!

To help you understand what you can expect out of this seminar, Scott has put together a preview for you:

Don’t miss this presentation! Register with the promotion code THREEPOINTS and get both our lowest rate of $99, and lifetime access to the recording of this talk at no additional cost. Share it with others in your organization to watch whenever they want, as often as they want.

In advance of the presentation, we’d love to hear from you. How is failure perceived in your organization? When is the last time you celebrated a failure? Or do you think failure should be avoided at all costs? When failure does happen, how does your team address it, or is it the “white elephant in the room?” Share your thoughts below.

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Userability is back with another episode. Have a serious UX question? Send it in and Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr. will answer it with a healthy dose of levity. Please send your deep, vexing questions to us at userability@uie.com. We’d love you to feature you on the show!

This week, we spoke to Miles Dowsett from Cambridge, UK who is straddling the worlds of desktop and web-based applications. He wanted to know,

What do you think is the most important or significant UX deliverable/activity in a web project, and why?

Tune in to hear Jared and Robert lock horns on their different approaches on must-have UX techniques… and leave your suggestions here, in the comments!

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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 Web App Summitis just over 4 weeks away. World-class speakers like Derek Featherstone, Luke Wroblewski, Molly Holzschlg, Robert Hoekman, and others will be attending and presenting on form design, Ajax, RIAs, design deliverables, wireframes, accessibility, design patterns, and web standards. Would you like to help us out? The Web App Summit is being held from April 19-22, 2009 in Newport Beach, CA at the Marriott Newport Beach Hotel & Spa. We are currently looking for volunteers who are available to assist us throughout the full four days of the conference and with the initial set-up on Saturday.

Volunteers will be asked to arrive around 1 pm on Saturday, April 18 and stay until the end of the Summit. Throughout the main four days of the conference, volunteers will be assigned to a full-day workshop and short talks to assist conference speakers with their needs. We’ll make every effort to accommodate your preference for which sessions you’d like to attend.

Volunteers are responsible for paying for all travel and hotel accommodations, but we will provide breakfast and lunch Sunday through Wednesday of the Summit. The registration fee is waived for volunteers. If you’re interested in volunteering, or if you have any questions, please send your replies directly to Lauren Cramer at lcramer@uie.com. Priority will be given to full-time students and those of you available to help out for the full event from Sunday, April 19 through Thursday, April 22, plus initial set-up on Saturday. 

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.

To help you understand what you can expect out of this seminar, Hagan has put together a preview for you:

Don’t miss this presentation! Register with the promotion code STPADDY and get both our lowest rate of $99, and lifetime access to the recording of this talk at no additional cost. Share it with others in your organization to watch whenever they want, as often as they want.

In advance of the presentation, we’d love to hear from you. What challenges do you face with your web application’s navigation system? What advice can you pass along to others? Are you planning to be at the Web App Summit in Newport Beach this April? Share your 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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Userability is the show that answers your vexing UX questions with irreverence and useful advice. Remember, Userability is 100% Soylent, which means it’s made of people—Err—people’s questions. Please send your deep thoughts to us at userability@uie.com.

This week we continue the international flare with a call from Shanghai, China. Daniel Szuc, of ApogeeHK had a question that stopped Jared and Robert in their tracks,

If there was ONE thing you would want an organization to take on board immediately to help UX in that organization, what would it be and why?

Tune in to hear what Robert and Jared would tell your executives if pressed. How would you have answered? Let us know in the comments!

In this presentation, Jeff Patton will discuss the essentials of Agile Development, the distinct culture and value system that Agile brings, and the common Agile process you’re likely to see. You’ll hear about the myths of Agile and common pitfalls organizations tend to encounter. Armed with the foundations, you’ll explore some emerging UX practices and how to thrive within an agile process.

As an added incentive to attend, use the Promotion Code MYARCHIVE to receive free lifetime access to the recorded presentation. You or anyone in your organization can watch it whenever you want, as often as you want!

In advance of the presentation, we’d love to hear from you.  What are the scary stories you’ve heard about Agile?  Do you have success stories to tell about iterative development?  What hurdles would you face bringing such a discipline into the culture of your organization? Share your thoughts 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.]

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This week’s episode demonstrates the lengths that people will go to be a part of the Userability Podcast. Or, at least how far their Skype connection will go; a bit over 10,000 miles (16,400km) in this case! We were joined by Keith Lang, co-founder of Plasq, makers of Skitch all the way from Canberra, Australia. He blogs at UI&us.

Keith offered this question,

All of us UI designers spend a lot of time with computers and become blind to certain problems. What would you say are the most common UIs, or processes, that confuse or impede the average computer-user?

For example, I notice many people having problems paying attention to dialogue boxes, and recalling what they said. They just click OK, even on ones with brief text–sometimes with bad results.

Tune in to hear what Jared and Robert thought.

We’re always looking for guests to stump Jared and Robert. Send us an email at userability@uie.com with your burning design-related questions.

What do you have to add to Robert and Jared’s list? What do you see confusing users? Let us know in the comments!

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.

Determine if this seminar is right for you and your team by reviewing Ginny’s ’s preview, just press the green “play” arrow.

As an added incentive to attend, use the Promotion Code MYARCHIVE to receive free lifetime access to the recorded presentation. You or anyone in your organization can watch it whenever you want, as often as you want!

In advance of the presentation, we’d love to hear from you. Have you ever struggled with writing something for your site? How do you know you got it right? What rules do you follow for creating effective copy? And what are your thought on how to handle those “marketing moments”? Share your thoughts below.

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We’re back again this week with more savvy and silliness from the world of Userability. But first we’d like to thank you for making our first show such a success, we’ve had a ton of downloads. Have you told your friends about the show yet?

This week the guys spoke with Jon Hartmann of Morgantown, West Virginia. Jon asked Jared and Robert,

I’m a web developer (programming), not a web designer (graphics), but I love analytics and designing user interfaces. How do I make the career jump from coding to interface design and usability?

Tune in to find out if Jared and Robert can help Jon make the jump. As a free bonus, you’ll also learn where to find coffee in West Virginia.

We’re always looking for guests to stump Jared and Robert. Send us an email at userability@uie.com with your burning design-related questions.

What’s your two cents on the advice Robert and Jared gave today? Let us know in the comments!

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.

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Friends, I’d like to introduce you to our newest creation, the Userability Podcast. No, I didn’t mistype that. As we’ve mentioned previously, each week I’ll pick a caller to ask a UX question of experts Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr., who will do their best to find a good answer. The catch is, I’m not telling Robert and Jared what to expect… they have to answer you on the spot.

Today we’re releasing our pilot episode, with guest Rob Fay, who called in from Washington, D.C. with a great question. Rob asked,

I work for an e-learning company. We have a grading feature in our product that gives teachers the ability to grade an assignment by applying a grade to a gradebook. When we designed this, because of time constraints, we only focused on a few “grading” use cases and we only came up with a few design ideas. I wish we had brainstormed more. How can I influence my team’s culture to value design exploration, even within our current constraints?

Tune in to see if Robert and Jared can answer coherently! That’s the format of our little show: one caller, one question, a handful of useful takeaways, and hopefully some fun through out.

We need your questions. Submit your real-life design conundrums at userability@uie.com.

Give it a listen, and let us know what you think of the new show in the comments!

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.

Scott Berkun is the best selling author of Making Things Happen and The Myths of Innovation. He worked at Microsoft from 1994-2003, as a usability engineer, design evangelist, and program manager, and worked on Internet Explorer v1.0 to 5.0. Since 2003 he works as an independent author and lecturer. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wired magazine and on National Public Radio, and he blogs on management and creative thinking at www.scottberkun.com/blog.

Scott is a treat to listen to and it’s not a surprise that he’s looking for information on your challenges to ensure you benefit from our April Virtual Seminar . 

You can post your nomination here, or find more information about Scott by visiting The Berkun Blog.

Thanks for your input.

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.

UIE is excited to announce our new UIE Roadshow: Secrets Behind Designing Great User Experiences, a full-day workshop, based on 10 years of UIE’s extensive research, that will deliver new insights and inspire your team to create the best user experiences. 

This winter, we’re taking this workshop on the road to:

• Portland, OR on Tuesday, February 17, 2009 
• Minneapolis, MN on Thursday, February 19, 2009 
• Atlanta, GA on Monday, March 2, 2009

Recognized industry leader, Jared Spool, will share information that previously we’ve only made available to our biggest clients. 

During the day, Jared will lead you through these sessions:

9:00 am: Designing for the Age of Experience

Jared will open the day with an overview of UIE’s research into great experience design. He’ll reveal the factors that are found in the organizations that are successful at delivering great experiences. And, he’ll show you the important criteria that you can use to measure your team’s effectiveness.


10:45 am: UX Level-Up: Taking Your Team to the Next Level


You’ll assess the critical dimensions that will pinpoint what your team needs to succeed. Jared will share how UIE measures organizations, which factors are most critical, and how to tell exactly where your group falls. From there, you’ll put together a solid action plan, describing the exact steps you need to take, to go to the next level and beyond.


1:00 pm: The Making of a UX Vision

You’ll discover the secrets behind creating a unified user experience vision that you can share with your entire organization. (Hint: it’s not nearly as hard as it sounds.) Jared will show you how, once you’ve created your vision, your team can use it to guide and focus your entire organization on a path that will yield delighted users while exceeding business objectives. 


3:15 pm: Magic and Mental Models: Using Illusions to Simplify Design

In a perfect session to end the day, Jared will use professional magic effects to demonstrate the parallels between the world of magical illusions and the world of digital design. He’ll reveal the secrets from several magical illusions, and then show you how to use the same mechanisms to create delightful experiences for your users.

Read the detailed program description.

Knowing that times are tough for folks, we’ve made a special effort to make the UIE Roadshow a very affordable event. We think it’s important to get our latest research out, so we’ve priced this full-day workshop for far less than other programs. Additionally, we’re offering a $75 discount when you register with the promotion code SHOW09. 

Do you have a team to send? We’re offering steep discounts. Bring your team and the price goes as low as $299 for each person.

This is guaranteed to be an eventful workshop, with a ton of detailed examples, hands-on exercises, Jared’s usual funny material, and, for the first time, live magic tricks! 

We hope to see you there.

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.

Determine if this seminar is right for you and your team by reviewing  Jared’s preview, just press the green “play” arrow.

As an added incentive to attend, use the Promotion Code MYARCHIVE to receive free lifetime access to the recorded presentation. You or anyone in your organization can watch it whenever you want, as often as you want!

Register Today!

In advance of the presentation, we’d love to hear from you. How does your team currently come to consensus, and how can you be sure the right decision has been made?  What criteria is used for your decision making?  How do you get everyone on board, and how do you overcome objections?  Share your thoughts below.

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.

Out of the 29 articles that we published this year, we’ve decided on five that we think had the most 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. You can access the top 5 in the article Top Articles of 2008.

We also 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. In the December 29 article, Top Podcasts of 2008, we’ve outlined what each podcast is about and a link to access them.

So, join us as we look back at the best articles and podcasts of 2008 and help us start to think about what we’ll need in 2009. If you have topics you’d like to hear about or challenges you’d like help facing, please pop us a note below or send a twitter message.

We’ve got great plans for our articles, podcast, virtual seminars, and live events — and we want to help you. So, as my Yiddish grandmother would always say, “Don’t be such a stranger.”

Thank you for encouraging our behavior throughout 2008. We wish you a successful and productive 2009.

Naturally, our clients’ teams start by focusing on their direct audience. They look to make the best experience for these folks, to make creations come to life quickly and effectively.

It doesn’t take long, once they start researching how their direct users are taking advantage of these tools, to see that not every creation represents the tool well. Quickly, the goal of the team becomes to expand the scope to enhance the lives of what we call the downstream users.

In moving the design focus from the direct audience to the downstream users, we’ve found having robust personas and scenarios helps tremendously. The field research behind the personas involves both the direct users and the downstream users. Scenarios are often interconnected between personas, since the stories describe the direct user’s relationship with their downstream users.

The most successful of our clients in this endeavor have had great luck when they’ve put together a solid vision of what key downstream users experience, then talk about the idealized vision for the direct customers’ development process to reach that experience. The combination of the two viewpoints becomes very powerful.

At the beginning of this month, we had Joshua Porter in the office to present his Design for Sign-up talk. Designing for sign-up should be simple, yet it’s often the most challenging area of your design. Josh had some great ideas on how to increase the ease of sign-up and how to motivate your users to want to.

We got back together with Josh to follow-up on the seminar so we could answer a number of viewer’s questions that we didn’t have time for in the seminar.

In this podcast, we discussed,

• Best practices for web form design
• Suggestions for user testing sign-up during the design phase
• Placement and design for sign-in forms
• The role of immediate engagement, delaying sign-up till after the user is engaged
• The 9× effect and it’s application and implications for sign-up
• Writing copy that encourages sign-up

There’s a lot of great stuff in this show. Even if you missed the live seminar, we think you’ll get a lot out of this interview with Josh.

In the podcast, Josh recommended reading this Harvard Business Review article, Eager Sellers and Stony Buyers by John T. Gourville

We’re interested in hearing your comments on sign up, feel free to discuss in the comments!

In what year (YYYY) did you graduate from high school?

But, what if the user didn’t graduate high school? (Little known fact: I didn’t graduate high school, so I’m a little sensitive to this question.)

Should the user enter the date they would’ve graduated high school? Should they make up a date? How will they remember something that didn’t actually happen?

It’s surprising how many security challenge questions are unanswerable like this. I doubt it leaves the user with a positive feeling about the experience.

Update: This is from the Vanguard web site:

Where did you and your spouse meet for the first time? (Enter the full name of CITY only)

What about multiple marriages? Widows?

To add insult to injury, the design replaces every letter the user types with a dot, so they can’t see if they’re typing the city correctly. (Again, I grew up in a city named Schenectady. Not something I’d want to type in the dark.)

(Of course, the flow charting portion of Dan Brown’s Communicating Design: Essential Deliverables for Highly Effective Design Teams session at the UIE Web App Summit will have a lot more depth to it.)

If we want to see how brand engagement works, we don’t have to look any further than the Cuisinart Popcorn Maker.

Williams-Sonoma is featuring this intriguingly designed popper on their site. It’s received 3.6 stars from the 25 reviewers. Only 9 (36%) of those reviewers gave it one, two, or three stars.

Amazon is selling the exact same popper. Yet their reviewers have a very different take:

In the case of Amazon’s site, 18 out of 27 (67%) reviewers rated the device with one or two stars.

Why did twice as many people rate the product positively on Williams-Sonoma’s site than on Amazon’s? The answer is clear from these two reviews:

On the Williams-Sonoma site, this reviewer had a bad experience, yet gave it three stars:

makes great popcorn when it works

I got this as a Christmas gift and my whole family all fell in love with it. We used it several times a week. After a few months the hot plate stopped heating. So back to the store it went with no questions asked and I brought another one home and it too broke after the 3rd use. Back to the store I went for an exchange. This popcorn popper is so good I don’t mind exchanging it for a new one. The customer service is so awesome at Williams-Sonoma!

On the Amazon site, this customer gave the device only one star, having had essentially the same experience:

Makes good (not great) popcorn - but I’ve been through 2 now and Customer Support STINKS

I gave this unit 1 star because in the course of a few of months I’ve had two now that have broken. Here’s how it works when it breaks: you call customer support, they give you attitude, grill you as if you’ve done something wrong, they charge you $10 to ship the replacement unit and then you have to ship the broken unit back - so ~$20 to get a replacement for something under warranty. What breaks? There are 3 main pieces to the unit: the plug-in base, the heating element, and the bowl. The heating element detaches from the base, a very nice feature, but after about a month on the first unit the handles and clip that attach to the base broke. After another couple of months on the replacement the heating element stopped heating.

That’s two people reporting essentially the same experience. Yet one felt is was substantially better than the other, because of the customer support of Williams-Sonoma.

From the folks at Gallup, we learn that one of the key components of brand engagement is integrity. Does the brand always treat me fairly? If a problem arises, can I count on the brand to reach a fair and satisfactory resolution?

In this case, the first customer felt that Williams-Sonoma took care of them and the Amazon customer felt that Cuisinart was doing a crappy job by charging $20 to get a replacement and having a poorly constructed unit.

When there’s high brand engagement, customers are willing to overlook problems and still feel good about the product or service. Williams-Sonoma takes good care of their customers, even the product is defectively designed, leading to higher engagement and the customer’s willingness to overlook problems.

I think the 2009 UIE Web App Summit (April 19-22, Newport Beach, CA) has one of the best line ups of speakers we’ve ever had. We’ve spent the past six months hand-crafting this excellent program that’s all about planning, designing, and building web-based applications. We’re very excited about it and you should be too.

In this podcast, Brian and I discuss the Summit program details. You’ll hear about all four days of the conference — the great topics and why we chose this set of experts. You’ll get a great overview of the sessions and see, first hand, why we think it’s so exciting.

We’d love to see you in Newport Beach, CA this April. Listen and let us know what you think.

We recently had our friend Patrick Hofmann a designer with Google Australia in for a Virtual Seminar covering the Essentials of Effective Visual Design. His wealth of knowledge from his years of design and usability research into visual design provided an incredibly interesting and popular seminar.

As usual, we received many more excellent questions that we could deal with during the seminar, so we recorded this podcast.

In this episode, we discussed:

• A short summary of the main points of the seminar
• International issues regarding graphics and colors for different cultures
• The color and styling of hyperlinks
• Above the fold… is this important? How does it relate to the rule of thirds?
• How to deal with images that are too big to fit your page template
• What questions are most effective to ask a user after testing your images?
• How do you handle getting graphics approved across your organizations departments?
• Thoughts on images used for beauty’s sakes vs purely content images

In the podcast, we referenced a T-Shirt site that had an interesting technique to display larger images in line in galleries, the name of the site escaped us, but check out the technique at Zazzle.com.

If you missed our live seminar, a recording of Essentials of Effective Visual Design is available for viewing.

Are you doing anything to improve the impact and usability of your visual design? Share your experiences in the comments!

Our goal with account registration and sign-in features is to enhance the user’s experience, yet often we end up creating user experience problems. With all the experience designers have, it’s still difficult to create a good sign-in and registration process.

We try to setup a process that’s user friendly for our customers and users but unusable for the people that want to steal our identities and disrupt our environment. It’s difficult to create a design geared for one subset of users and not geared for everyone.

This week, we’re revisiting an article I first published a year ago, Account Sign-up: 8 Mistakes to Avoid. If you’re designing an account system, or already have one, this should serve as a good start to assess how much you may be frustrating your users.

Has your design suffered from these mistakes? What have you done to avoid them? Join the conversation below:

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 I interviewed Dan Brown for this week’s SpoolCast. 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 explored the documents that help make large design projects go smoothly. We discussed 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!

Dan covers many types of documents in his book: content inventories, usability testing planning, usability testing results, and wireframes, just to name a few. In the podcast, we spent some time with two of the 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.

You can join Dan for his Web App Summit Full-day Workshop, “Communicating Design: Essential Deliverables for Highly Effective Design Teams” and learn to conquer the documents and deliverables which are critical to bringing your designs to life.

How are you using various documentation to keep your projects on track? Let’s hear your documentation questions in the comments. (Dan will monitor your comments and will use them to steer his Web App Summit workshop!)

We’re planning on launching the full site in January, but we wanted you to have a sneak peak at the great program we’ve put together. This year’s Summit is really exceptional and we think you’ll want to be there.

UIE Web App Summit 2009

At the UIE Web App Summit, you’ll meet the innovators and world-class designers behind today’s most successful web apps. 

We’ve carefully crafted this four-day Summit to include two days of intensive full-day workshops on form design, Ajax, RIAs, design deliverables, wireframes, accessibility, design patterns, and web standards. Our world-class presenters will be talking about:

* How to implement a Web 2.0 strategy and design
* Creating highly-effective design deliverables
* Using design patterns and components to achieve reuse
* How to create wireframes and prototype for Ajax

We round out the conference with two more days of featured presentations from world-renown experts, to give you fresh perspectives and new insights on today’s web app design challenges. 

Last year’s Summit attendees told us they returned to their teams empowered to make an immediate impact, all fired up and ready to go. You’ll come away inspired to create amazing applications that will delight your users.

Register by January 7 for a Limited-Edition Web App Summit iPod nano

By registering early, you’ll receive a very cool gift: the latest Apple iPod nano.

This limited-edition Web App Summit 2009 iPod nano can store 2,000 songs, 7,000 photos, or 8 hours of video on an internal 8GB hard drive. Plus, it will sport the slick Web App Summit 2009 logo on the back. 

We’re sending an iPod nano to every person who registers before January 7. This is not a raffle or drawing — by signing up you are guaranteed to receive your iPod nano.

We hope to see you in Newport Beach!

Our friends at Bookpool are passing along a special discount to the UIE audience.   You will find Josh’s book Designing for the Social Web, at bookpool.com.  For a limited time they’re offering a 38% discount in conjunction with the promotion of Josh’s December 11 online presentation Designing for Sign-up.  If your job responsibility, or interests even remotely touch the social web, you’ll need this book close at hand.

Don’t forget, there’s still time to register for our upcoming UIE Virtual Seminar, Designing for Sign-up.

Is sign-up part of your design? How do you engage users long enough to motivate them to take that precarious step of giving you information? What methods do you use to assure them that signing up on your site will provide them true value? And is that enough?

Next week, we’ll explore the issues of sign-up and user motivation with Joshua Porter. In the December 11 UIE Virtual seminar, Designing for Sign-up, Josh will describe the steps you can use to create the motivation for them to care about your product, using techniques employed by successful sites, such as Netflix, TripIt, and BlinkSale.

You’ll want to attend this critically important seminar if your team struggles with enticing your users to take the next step in long-term engagement, whether it’s subscribing , purchasing , or joining your offering. If your organization needs to implement a strategy that overcomes the customer’s natural resistance and engages them with your products and services, you won’t want to miss this presentation.

If you’re interested in attending, you’ll want to register soon, it’s filling up fast. As an added incentive to attend, use the Promotion Code MYARCHIVE to receive free lifetime access to the recorded event. You or anyone in your organization can watch it whenever you want, as often as you want!

Register today at http://www.uie.com/events/virtual_seminars/Designing_Sign_Up_Seminar/

In advance of the presentation, we’d love to hear from you. What tips and tricks can you share to make sign-up a successful aspect of others’ sites? What challenges has your team faced and what did you do to overcome them? We’d love to hear from you.

Back in October we had the good fortune to host Dana Chisnell’s popular Virtual Seminar, The Quick, the Cheap, and the Insightful: Conducting Usability Tests in the Wild, where she told us you don’t have to run usability tests by the book to get great value out of them. Quite a statement considering she co-wrote the book: The Handbook of Usability Testing, Second Edition.

[If you missed the live seminar, you can purchase lifetime access, for you and your team, to the recording here.]

As happens frequently, seminar viewers sent in more excellent questions than we could answer during the session, so we sat down with Dana afterwards for a quick follow-up.

In the interview, Dana gave me great answers to these viewer questions:

• Is there a middle ground between “classic” testing and “quick and dirty” techniques?
• How many people do you need in these “wild” tests to create enough valuable data?
• How should you screen subjects?
• Should designers observe “wild” tests?
• How do you answer critics who claim quick and dirty testing is not scientific?
• What ethical issues are there with recording test subjects?
• Once you get this quick data, what are the next steps?

During the podcast, Dana & I talked about ways to analyze results and we mentioned the KJ Technique. This is a great way to get a team on the same page about the top priorities that emerge from testing. You can find more about the technique in this article.

Are you going rogue and conducting usability tests that aren’t “by the book”? Tell us your trials and tribulations in the comments!

While the successful team needs all of these disciplines, there are more of them than most teams have members. This creates a challenge as teams need to spread the experience, knowledge, and skills across multiple team members, turning them from specialists into generalists.

In today’s UIEtips article, I share some of our recent findings in how teams make the call: when should they hire a specialist and when will a generalist work better? Whether you’re a team manager or someone looking to direct their career choices, I think our findings will interest you.

Read the article - Ideal UX Team Makeup: Specialists, Generalists, or Compartmentalists.

What does your organization do to embrace its failures? We’d love to hear from you. Share your thoughts below.

You have the Visual Design skills to do a good job, but what tools or tricks can you add to your toolbox? Does you team have a complete understanding that Visual design can dramatically improve the experience with your products, and when they’re stuck, how do you help them? How do you deal with line spacing and text size in body text, notes, flowcharts and diagrams that will be good for your users regardless of age? What questions and comments do you have about Visual Design, we’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences.

UIE will put these and other questions to one of the best experts in visualizing information we know, Patrick Hofmann, and we’re excited that he’s agreed to do our next UIE Virtual Seminar - Essentials of Effective Visual Design

In this entertaining 90-minute presentation, Patrick will help you make your products easier to use by applying surprising, memorable design techniques. Patrick, an expert in visual instruction and wordless communication, has worked with usability professionals like you to improve the design of digital, online, and hard copy information.

If you’re interested in attending, you’ll want to register soon, it’s filling up fast. As an added incentive to attend, use the Promotion Code MYARCHIVE to receive free lifetime access to the recorded event. You or anyone in your organization can watch it whenever you want, as often as you want!

Register today at http://www.uie.com/events/virtual_seminars/Visual_PH/

What visual design concepts do you hope to hear explored? What questions are you looking to have answered? What ideas do you have to share? Please tell us your thoughts.

Interestingly, the theme of how to learn from failure was pervasive throughout the conference. Dana Chisnell talked about how to extract takeaways from usability tests. Jeff Patton discussed techniques for learning during the iterations of an Agile development process. Peter Merholz presented his challenges for organizations. And I discussed how teams need to celebrate failures, so teams have a chance to savor the rich insights that come from them.

It turns out that it’s no accident people are talking about failure these days. Over the last few years, our research has shown that the organizations that embrace the mistakes they make are more likely to show growth and improvement in their designs. That’s the great paradox: failure is strategically important to success.

In this week’s UIEtips, I describe how one nameless client got themselves into big trouble, how Amazon.com minimizes the risk from major design changes, and eight common mistakes preventing organizations from getting the most from their failures. I think you’ll enjoy it.

Read the article - Failure Is Not an Option — It’s a Requirement.

What does your organization do to embrace its failures? We’d love to hear from you. Share your thoughts below.

That’s why Dana Chisnell’s session on quick-and-dirty usability testing resonated with so many of the attendees. They realized they could get a research effort off the ground without having to beg for a huge investment. In many cases, they could do it quickly and inexpensively, under the radar, yielding enough valuable information to make substantial improvements to their design.

In this week’s UIEtips, Dana shares how teams are using quick-and-dirty techniques and getting tremendous insights. I’m betting, after you read her article, you’ll see how you don’t need to follow “the book” to learn things that will improve your designs.

Read the article - Quick & Dirty Usability Testing: Step Away from the Book

Have you tried any quick-and-dirty user research techniques? How did they work for you? We’d love to hear about your experiences below.

What should the user do with this little tidbit of information?

An “Invalid State Error” sounds like someone entered the wrong US state abbreviation, but the system a minute ago confirmed the reservation. Someone who doesn’t understand how a digital state machine (like a web server) works probably won’t recognize that error message.

The conditions for the problem are also not very informative, since they are all wrong. In this instance, the user had been interacting with the system without any breaks that took more than a minute, there were no multiple browser windows open, the back button hadn’t been used, and there was no use of bookmarked pages. Not one of these conditions is actually true.

And what does “Please start over.” mean? Is the reservation lost? (Turns out: no.) Were the seat assignment changes lost? (Turns out: no.)

There is no button to start over. Our user wondered if they needed to make a second reservation (that would’ve been a disaster). Fortunately, they were a savvy enough traveler to check out the “Existing Reservations” link hidden deep in AA.com’s menus and found the reservation was there, intact, and all set.

This user didn’t leave the site with a lot of confidence in American Airlines or the site.

How many messages like this does your site have embedded deep in their code? What happens when a user hits one? What kind of experience do they have?

This year, we thought we give our attendees a special UI13 advice podcast. The show covers getting to the conference, a brief overview of the conference agenda, and lots of tips for getting around the Boston metro.

If you’ve never been to the Boston-Cambridge area, it’s a wonderful place to visit. Plenty of history, sites to see and fun to be had. If you’re like me and light on traveling experience, I asked Jared for a bit of basic traveling advice. If you’re a road warrior like Jared, we have advice on getting around for you, as well. Plus, you’ll know where to eat drink and make merry.

If you’re a regular listener to our podcasts, you’ll notice we didn’t put this in our regular feed. We didn’t want non-attendees to become confused, perhaps think we’ve become a travel company or something.

Below you can listen to the podcast in the player (press the grey play button), or download and take it with you.

The UI13 Attendees Podcast — Direct Link to MP3 File

What I think makes these questions magical is their diagnostic quality. From their answer, the team often know what they have to do next. So, the questions not only help us tell whether we’ll succeed or not, they help us understand where we can improve.

What are these magical questions? They deal with three important factors: vision, feedback, and culture. For a more detailed description, you’ll need to read today’s UIEtips article. There you can discover first hand whether their magic can work for you.

Read the article - The 3 Qs for Great Experience Design

How is your team dealing with the vision, feedback, and culture factors? We’d love to hear!

Robert Nyman does just that with the Nokia and SonyEricsson UK sites and finds some surprising results. It’s quite a good write up.

Very much worth a read followed by the obvious next step: checking your own site out the same way.

[Hat tip to NortyPig]