When you kick off a project right, everything is much easier. When that doesn’t happen, the team pays the price. We’ve all seen projects where, part way in, a well-intentioned executive derailed the team by changing the direction. To prevent this, we want to put everyone with the power to take the project off course, on to the same course.

Tamara Adlin has developed a great technique to make that alignment happen, which she calls Ad Hoc Personas. Her method, borrowed from research-based personas, creates characters out of information the organization already has at their fingertips. They’re inexpensive and easy to create, ensuring a customer focus from the very start of the project.

Register for this seminar before February 11, and we’ll automatically send you another great webinar recording, Making Personas Work for Your Web Site, with Steve Mulder. (Look for it in your confirmation email.)

Ever had a project de-railed after you’ve already started? How do you get everyone customer-focused and on the same page before you begin? Share you stories below.

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Peter Morville is the co-presenter of one of our most popular UIE Virtual Seminars of all time, Leverage Search and Discovery Patterns. As is often the case, our audience came up with a heap of thoughtful questions, which we decided to break up into two podcasts. This is the first, and the second will feature Peter’s co-presenter Mark Burrell answering even more of your questions. Even if you did not attend, there’s a lot of great information in these podcasts.

In this episode, Jared Spool sits down with Peter to address many issues, including an interesting notion that Peter mentioned in the seminar;

“Browsing doesn’t scale.”

This came up in discussion about whether a site needs to be optimized towards search or towards browsing. Peter said that the two are all-but inseparable. The idea was that for very large sites, there comes a limit to how deep you can patiently navigate to reach the information you’re looking for. In these cases, many users would start their journey with a search, and then navigate from the results. An example of this use case can be seen with how many people use Amazon.com. Their visit to the immense site may start with a search for a particular product, author or artist, and then begin to navigate from their initial search results.

Best Result First Pattern

Another topic that proved popular was Peter’s Best Result First pattern. It may seem obvious that you want the best search result for a query to appear first in the results, but achieving that is not particularly easy. Peter suggests that it takes iterative tuning and testing while tweaking relevance algorithms, but then also pulling in other factors like popularity, date, and format data.

Advanced Search

Several attendees had questions about “advanced search.” Should it be built into sites to assist novice users sort through results better or to help sophisticated users dig more deeply? Others questioned if the notion of “advanced search” was dead altogether.

Peter replied that advanced search wasn’t dead, though many might wish it so. He observed that advanced search often causes confusion among users and many of these interfaces and options overwhelm them. He says you should design your search as if there would be no advanced search at all. One innovative way to give more control to searchers is to present search results with faceted navigation. This way advanced and novices users alike can have an understandable tool to filter through their results.

Faceted Navigation within Search Results

Not all sites work well with facets. If you have your doubts, you need to measure the use of the facets and see if they’re leading to success. However, it’s difficult to determine the success of the facets because trouble could mean either their implementation was done poorly, or that facets simply aren’t a good match for your site.

There was much more in this interview, and I invite you to tune in to get more great insight from Peter and Jared. And check back shortly for the second podcast interview for this seminar, with Mark Burrell. And don’t forget, you can still access the recording of the Leveraging Search & Discovery Patterns seminar if you haven’t yet seen it.

What challenges are you facing with search on your site?

However, those aren’t the only interesting challenges Apple’s talented designers have tackled. They’ve done an amazing job with something that wouldn’t get a lot of attention otherwise: the web site checkout forms.

In the last two issues of UIEtips, Luke Wroblewski dissects the newly redesigned Apple.com checkout process. As always, his critique is brilliant, providing a ton of great tips for anyone designing interactive forms. I know you’ll enjoy it.

Read the article – The Apple Store’s Checkout Form Redesign, Part 1
and
Read the article – The Apple Store’s Checkout Form Redesign, Part 2

Luke is a Master of web forms and that is why we asked him to be part of the UIE Web App Masters Tour taking place in 4 different cities from March – July 2010. Luke will show you how to move beyond static web forms by leveraging the best of today’s technologies and capabilities. Learn more about the Tour, Luke’s topic, and the other Masters at http://www.UIETour.com.

What do you think of Apple’s redesign? Did they do it right or would you have changed it? We’d love to know your thoughts below.

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We turn to Hagan Rivers for insight on designing challenging web applications year-after-year because she just keeps coming up with better and better ideas. When we were talking with her late last year, she mentioned she had another innovation in her web app design workflow, which sounded a bit strange at first blush: she designs the navigation as a separate application.

“How is that even possible?” we asked. Navigation is so central to the experience of the web that it frankly sounded like crazy talk. But we knew to hear Hagan out. Now we wonder how people do it any other way.

Recently, Jared sat down to talk with Hagan to discuss her somewhat radical notion, which she plans to discuss in detail at our upcoming Web App Masters Tour. Jared began by asking about the genesis of her application development strategy.

“I would be working on relatively complicated applications, and I found a lot of our design discussions would get really mired in the navigation. And the problem was, because we hadn’t fully worked out what was on each screen, we were kind of co-designing two things in parallel: how to get to the screens and what would be on the screens. And the two kind of affect one another, and so it was really hard to design these two similar objects at the same time.

And so what I started doing was just leaving this big, gray block at the top of the screen that says, “Navigation goes here. Let’s focus on the screen.” And once I did that, I found it got a lot easier to concentrate on what goes on each and every screen”

Of course, the primary application and the navigation are never truly separate apps. They’re always joined at the hip.

“They are obviously interweaved. […]you have to always design the navigation system with the rest of the screens deeply in mind, and you’re going to be inserting little bits and pieces here and there. But it’s still something you can design as its own freestanding thing.”

Hagan brought up the idea of momentum in design, where inspiration doesn’t just appear on demand, but when the ideas do start flowing you don’t want to hamper them. Navigation is often a decelerator of momentum. Leaving navigation until later in the process doesn’t just ease addressing the primary tasks of the application. There are other advantages to having many of the app’s screens complete, prior to having a navigation system. For example, during your usability testing of prototypes,

“Because you don’t have the navigation system in front of [your users], [they're] not being led by it. You’ve just got the raw screens. You know, sooner or later, to make a purchase order you have to collect certain information. No matter how the user got there, you know you have to collect. It’s a bunch of forms to fill in.

In what way does the user think about that? How do they get to those screens? What are they prepared with when they arrive there? What do they know? What don’t they know? Do they need to quit halfway through sometimes because they have to go look things up? All of those things will tell you what the navigation system needs to be.”

We feel that’s an powerful way to address the needs of your users with the navigation, gaining even more value from your research and testing efforts.

These are just a few tidbits from the interview. Be sure to listen to the interview to gain even more web app wisdom.

Obviously, we’re really excited that Hagan will be discussing this topic in depth at our Web App Masters Tour. Her “Escaping Navigation Hell” will be featured at all four stops on the tour, San Diego, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and Seattle. You won’t want to miss it.

When do you address navigation when building complex web applications? Would Hagan’s idea help you in your situation? Let’s discuss in the comments!

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How can we design systems that encourage the behaviors we want?

One of the bleeding edge ideas we’ll be talking about at the UIE Web App Masters Tour is adding motivation to web applications. How do you encourage user behavior through the design of your web app? It may initially sound a bit far-fetched, but there’s an industry that’s been shaping its customers’ behavior since the beginning: the gaming industry.

Stephen Anderson

Stephen Anderson is a consultant and a thought leader on the idea of motivating user behavior through design. He and Jared Spool sat down sat down for a discussion as part of our series of interviews with the Web App Masters.

Stephen’s developing a deck of cards to aid designers in brainstorming their designs, with consideration to behavioral cues. He calls them Mental Notes Stephen says,

“We focus on things like visual design, usability, or the information architecture and we forget about, ‘Oh yeah, there was that thing about gifting or curiosity or the peak-end rule.’ This is really a way to apply intention, or a way to intentionally remind people to use some of these, or try to leverage these.

These are ideas about human behavior and how humans respond to different ideas or different stimulus. So my idea is why aren’t we applying these to web design? We’re applying them to marketing, to retail, to interpersonal relationships, and to dating.

A lot of these ideas are nothing new, but I think we’re just now reaching the point where we’re thinking more consciously about how can I apply something like recognition over recall to web design?”

Stephen also gets into how we can use these persuasive or seductive ideas into shaping the initial engagement a web app has with its user.

“Attention is so scarce today that people spend 30 seconds on something, and they might not see the value or see why it could be useful to them in those 30 seconds. So my focus started shifting from the product itself to that initial engagement, that initial interaction, and how do we make that first experience a lot more seductive, so people stick around long enough to see that you really do have something worthwhile here?

Going back to real world analogies, think about if you were doing those not with a system online, but with a human. The human could be very straightforward, very to-the-point, in asking the questions, or that human could be very personable, and maybe crack a joke, or ask you how you are doing, do these things to be more personable. …why can’t these systems adopt some of those similar ideas?”

Stephen mentioned an internal corporate knowledge-sharing web app that he was involved with. The company used a lot of game-type incentives to encourage employee participation, but many of the most successful attributes are some of the most counter-intuitive. For example, to add content to some pages, employees had to “pay”. And this encouraged participation. They paid with points they accumulated doing other tasks within the system, like answering co-workers’ questions. Employees would attempt to answer the questions first so they could gain points before someone else beat them to it.

“…they described, in very qualitative ways, how you earn karma (“points” in this example) and how you get better at this game or this system. But they were not explicit with what activities you do and how many points you get for each. And I think that was very smart.”

We appear to be at the very cusp of adding psychology and a touch of gaming into web apps. From the friendly copy tone on Flickr to the full-on game strategy employed in Stephen’s example, it’s clear there’s a lot of potential here. You’ll want to listen to the entire interview and of course, you’re not going to want to miss Stephen present his talk, The Art & Science of Seductive Interactions, at our UIE Web App Masters Tour. It’s going to be impressive.

Stephen Anderson is just one of the incredible speakers we’ll be hosting during the Web App Masters Tour. Learn more about our locations dates and speakers at UIETour.com.

Are you building your web apps with an eye towards motivating specific behaviors? Let us know in the comments!

The business needs can be complex. They come from all over the enterprise, originating from initiatives (like marketing campaigns), infrastructure (like inventory constraints), and regulations (like export restrictions). Suddenly, a simple task, like paying for a product, becomes crazy-complicated.

In today’s UIEtips, I discuss how the best designers thrive within this world of wacky constraints, coming up with ingenious ways to meet the business requirements while producing a delightful user experience. If you design web apps, this should be interesting.

Read the article, Web Apps: Where Business Needs & User Needs Collide.

Web app design is at the forefront of our minds this month. That’s because we’ve just launched our 4-city UIE Web App Masters Tour. We’re wicked excited about the program and I’m betting you’ll be too as soon as you check it out. Go see it at www.UIETour.com.

Have you bumped into business constraints in your web app designs? Have you come up with a creative way to work around them? We’d love to hear your experiences. Leave your thoughts below.

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Our audience clearly embraced Fred Beecher’s recent Virtual Seminar on prototyping, The Whys, Whats and Hows of Prototyping, because we were nearly buried under all the thoughtful questions we received. It’s clear people are looking for more effective and efficient ways of working through their design ideas. Our Adam Churchill got together with Fred after the seminar to go through the pile and deliver more answers for you.

During the podcast, Adam asked Fred to explore these questions, and more:

• Can you tell us how design differs from prototyping, and where
  elements like visual design and wireframing fit in?
• Does prototyping require organizational change? Anything you
  recommend when working with others in the organization that aren’t
  members of the design team?
• What are the best methods and tools for online testing?
• What recommendations do you have for collaboration when working with
  people in different locations, and possibly at different skill levels?
• Which prototyping tools do you recommend, and how do they differ, from low fidelity to high fidelity?

I know you’re going to enjoy this episode because I couldn’t get through editing the audio without pausing to look up some of the resources Fred suggests.

Do you still have prototyping questions? Ask them in the comments below.

When we do our jobs well, important decisions are made correctly. Designs are improved. Experiences transition from frustrating to delightful. Assuming we do our jobs well.

Doing our jobs well is very hard work. A thousand details need to line up just perfectly. If we don’t get things just right, important decisions are made wrong. Designs regress. Experiences frustrate even more.

As user experience professionals, it’s all about the assumptions we make. If we assume correctly, things go well. It’s when we make false assumptions that problems occur. How do we know when our assumptions are any good?

In this week’s article, we look back to an article originally published in 2006; Interview-Based Tasks: Learning from Leonardo DiCaprio. In the article, I address the assumption question head-on by looking at a testing technique known as interview-based tasks. This non-traditional approach to usability tests helps work around the assumptions built into standard task design, allowing teams more flexibility and insight into what users actually need from the design.

When using interview-based tasks, the art of asking the question is critical. How you prepare for the interview, build rapport with the interviewee, and how to work with varying levels of experience and expertise will determine how successful the interview-based task is completed.

That’s where Steve Portigal comes in. Our next UIE Virtual Seminar is on Deep Dive Interviewing Secrets: Making Sure You Don’t Leave Key Information Behind. This is a not-to-miss-seminar if you want to know more behind the art of the question.

Have you tried interview-based tasks? What insights did you gain from it? How else have you checked the assumptions that go into your work? Join the discussion by submitting a comment below.

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Conducting a usability test can be stressful, but you know how important this effort is. Effectively moderating a usability test is a critical part of your user research. It can put the design team on the path to success or failure in the next steps of a product’s design. With a little guidance, and some practice, you can master this art of interacting with you users and get the results your organization needs.
 
Back in October, we asked usability testing expert Beth Loring to present a UIE Virtual Seminar on how to Effectively Moderate Usability Tests. In her presentation, she talks about how to interact with participants and finding that balance between helping them feel comfortable and being too friendly. Beth covers what to do when participants get stuck, or even fail a task. There’s quite a bit of good information that will help you moderate your next usability test. As is often the case, we got lots of great questions from the live audience, but just couldn’t get to them all. I got together with Beth to record this podcast and cover some of the remaining issues. If you find yourself wanting more afterward, don’t forget you can still purchase a recording of the session for another 90 minutes of Effectively Moderating Usability Tests.
 
During the podcast, I asked Beth to explore these questions, and more:

• What is the recommended pathway for learning how to moderate usability tests?
• How much subject matter expertise should a moderator have going into a usability test?
• What’s the impact of using a participant more than once?
• How do you respond to a participant when they’re looking for feedback on how they’re doing in the test?
• What’s the reasonable maximum amount of time for a user test session?

 
Tune in to hear more about designing for facets. Still have questions? Start the discussion in our comments, below

(Oh, and by the way, our last event sold out, so you’ll want to Register your team early!)

When you spend time with your customers, it’s an opportunity to learn how to move your design forward. You don’t want to leave important information “on the table”—information that can give you a more complete understanding of how to move your vision forward. You might act on incomplete detail that creates risk when it forces you to guess what the users need. Worse, the partial insight you have may take your design team in the wrong direction.

User research is an expensive endeavor. Make sure you’re prepared to get the most out of every minute that you’re with your users. Come home with a deep insight into their thinking, their lives, and how you can change their experience for the better.

Steve Portigal will show your team the art of asking the question. You might visit the user in their office or home, have them come to you for a usability test, or even have a chance encounter at a trade show or while waiting for an airplane. Do you know what to ask? Do you know what to listen for, to extract the critical detail of what they can tell you about your design?

Steve will help you prepare your team for any opportunity, be it formal user research or less structured, ad-hoc research. He’ll also give you tips on how to work with your stakeholders and executives, who may also be meeting potential customers and users, so they know what to ask and how to listen—integrating their efforts into the research team. (Wouldn’t it be great if they understood why you’re doing what you’re doing?)

Get your team asking good questions, the right questions, with this fantastic seminar. Honing this skill will be a great addition to their Toolbox. Register your team before January 19, with the promotion code TOOLBOX, and I’ll also send you the link to a fabulous webinar Kate Gomoll did for us, Field Studies: The Ultimate Tool in Your Usability Toolbox.

Are you prepared for meeting someone who could be using your next design? How do you make sure you get into their head, learn what their life is all about, and get the information you need to build something truly innovative and delightful? We’d love to hear your ideas and about your experiences below.

Presentation: Revealing Design Treasures of The Amazon

• STC NNE – Wednesday, January 13, 2010, 6pm
  The Northern New England Society for Technical Communicators Chapter
  Dion Center, Rivier College, Nashua, NH
• NYC UPA – Tuesday, January 19, 2010, 6pm
  New York City Usability Professionals Association Chapter
  Bloomberg L.P., 731 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10022
• GBCACM & Boston IEEE – Thursday, January 21, 2010, 7pm
  Greater Boston ACM Chapter & Boston IEEE Chapter
  IBM Innovation Center, Waltham, MA

Presentation: What Makes A Design Seem Intuitive?

• Interaction Design School at School of Visual Arts – Wednesday, January 20, 2010, Noon
  School of Visual Arts, New York, NY

Other Events

• UXCamp DC – Saturday, January 23, 2010
  Children’s Studio School of Art and Architecture – 1301 V Street, NW – Washington, DC 20009
• Boston Interaction Holiday Party – Wednesday, January 2010
  Red Fez, 1222 Washington Street, Boston, MA 02118

Joining the other seven presenters for our two-day deep dive into all things wonderful about Web Apps will be:

Hagan Rivers

I’ll say it: I love Hagan. She’s an amazing designer who knows her stuff. And, unlike many designers, she’s really great at explaining the why behind her design. She’s presented at our previous Web App Summit and User Interface Conference events, always delighting the crowd.

Hagan was involved in the first web-based applications, back when she worked for Netscape in ye olde early days, where she was the lead designer on versions 1.0 through 4.0. You don’t get much more in-the-trenches experience than that. Now, she’s at Two Rivers Consulting, where she’s still pushing the envelope in web app design.

Luke Wroblewski

I think of Luke as a wunderkind. Like Hagan, he started in the early days of the web, working at NCSA where the original Mosaic browser was born. He then moved on to eBay and is now Chief Design Architect for Yahoo!, where he works on designs used every day by Yahoo!’s 700 million users.

Luke’s first book, Site Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability, was what brought my attention to him. But it’s his most recent book, Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks, that I think really shows his talents. You’d think a book about Web Forms would be boring, but from the first words (“Forms suck.”), he had me. (In fact, I just noticed my copy of his book has gone missing—again! This will be the third time I’ve replaced it. Keep good track of yours as they like to walk away.)

Luke’s been speaking at our events for years and is also one of our top-rated speakers. So we’re thrilled he’ll be joining us on the tour.

Both Luke & Hagan will be at all four stops on the tour, starting in San Diego.

Get Notified As More Details Come Along

What’s that? You want to be notified on additional details and registration? No problem, just leave us your email address and we’ll send you a quick note when we have more information.

Stay tuned as the next thing is to announce the San Diego schedule and what each of our masters will be speaking on. I can’t wait to hear them!

We’ve lined up two more Masters for our UIE Web App Masters Tour. We’re thrilled to announce Bill Scott and Ken Kellogg will be joining us.

Bill Scott

First, let me say this: Bill is the nicest person on the entire planet. You’ll notice this the moment you talk to him. But that’s not why we invited him.

I wanted him on the Masters Tour because he’s brilliant, particularly when it comes to design patterns for web-based applications. Bill spoke at our Web App Summit a few years back and dazzled the audience with his presentation on Anti Patterns—things you shouldn’t do when designing.

In addition to co-authoring the book, Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions, Bill is also the Director of UI Engineering at Netflix. All of these things add up to one thing: you’re going to love his insights. Bill will be with us in all four cities.

Ken Kellogg

Managing the design of a $6.5 billion a year website is no easy challenge. Especially when that website is owned by one of the oldest, most respected brands in the world. While many of us deal with the battle of old ways against modern thinking, this is on an epic scale.

That’s why I wanted you to hear from Ken Kellogg, who sits directly in the middle of that battle, as the Director of User Research for Marriott International. Ken is currently guiding major design changes through Marriott.com and will report, first hand, what that has been like. His stories will inspire you. You can hear Ken talk about his experiences at every stop on our tour.

It’s coming together.

Bill and Ken join a great slate, including Doug Bowman, Stephen Anderson, Julie Zhuo, and Christian Crumlish. Oh, I’ll be there too (but you probably knew that).

Just a few more presenters to go and we’ll have a full program. This is getting exciting now.

Get Notified As More Details Come Along

What’s that? You want to be notified on additional details and registration? No problem, just leave us your email address and we’ll send you a quick note when we have more information.

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

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

Read the article – Spending Quality Time with Your Search Log

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

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

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

Julie Zhuo

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

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

Christian Crumlish

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

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

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

Here’s the facts:

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

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

Who are the Masters?

I can tell you about two of them today:

Doug Bowman

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

Stephen Anderson

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

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

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

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

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

• SpoolCast: Achieving Pattern and Component Reuse

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

• SpoolCast: Ajax Aids Accessibility

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

• Presentation: Revealing Design Treasures from the Amazon

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

• Userability Podcast: The Most Influential Books in UX Published

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

• SpoolCast: Visual Design for the Non-Designer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of Brian’s comments jumped out at me:

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

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

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

Read the entire interview.

(Hat tip: Dana Chisnell)

Join us January 12 for our next webinar: Leveraging Search & Discovery Patterns For Great Online Experiences, with Peter Morville and Mark Burrell.

The abundance and variety of search implementations present a challenge to designers: How do we leverage the behaviors our users are developing to ensure they find the content they’re seeking? By understanding how people interact with search implementations, we can create effective designs that deliver great experiences for both searching and discovering.

We couldn’t have timed this seminar better. In just a few weeks, Peter Morville will put his new book, Search Patterns, to press. And Mark Burrell and his team at Endeca have been working hard to release their new UI Design Pattern Library for Search & Discovery. So, this is the perfect time to talk about how to leverage patterns for better search designs.

This seminar is perfect for you, if you’re working on providing the best experience with your site’s search implementation. Bring your entire team and schedule extra time to talk about what you’ve learned—you’ll want to implement Peter and Mark’s ideas right away.

This winter, Peter’s new book, Search Patterns, published by O’Reilly, will hit the stores. But you won’t have to buy it, because as soon as it comes off the press, we’ll send you a copy—just because you attended this seminar.

Thanks to Peter, Mark, and the great folks at Endeca, we can include this must-have book. We’ve seen an early draft and we’re amazed by Peter’s talent to explain these topics so clearly. The beautiful full-color illustrations and screen shots don’t hurt either.

Register your team today, and reserve your copy of Search Patterns.

Do you use design patterns? What questions do you have about them? Where do you go, or where would you go to find them? Share your thoughts and experiences below.

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

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

Here are the 5 favorite articles from 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Process

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The New Name of the Web App Thingy

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

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

The Winners of the Contest

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

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

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

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

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

Your users’ experience is a fluid event that frequently starts someplace like Google and, if you’re lucky, ends with them accomplishing their objective at your site. The goal is to make that event seamless and as natural as possible. Unfortunately, few sites achieve that.

In our December 16 UIE Virtual Seminar, world-renowned SEO and web-usability expert, Shari Thurow, will show you how to tie together your team’s search engine optimization projects with your site’s usability efforts.

Shari has put together a fabulous quick preview of her presentation. You should watch it now.

It’s not an accident we turned to Shari Thurow when we wanted to talk about how to optimize a site’s usability to produce great search results. She’s the leading expert on what it takes to make a web site search-engine friendly, enhancing the user’s experience.

We love her new book, When Search Meets Web usability, which she co-wrote with Nick Musica. Want your own copy? We finagled a 35% discount off of this book (plus Free Shipping!) for the UIE audience. How cool is that? Just use the promotion code SEARCH when you purchase from the PeachPit/New Riders web site.

This webinar will help you bridge the gap between the web search engine and your site. You’ll learn techniques and tricks that will increase conversions, satisfaction, and your users’ success. Register your team today!

How do you deliver the best search experience to your site’s users? We want to hear what you’re doing. Leave us your thoughts below.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it still doesn’t have a name!

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

Here’s some of the really interesting submissions:

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

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

Supply The Best Name and Win!

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

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

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

I can’t wait to see your ideas.

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

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

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

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

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

On January 7 Peter Morville will discuss Search Design Patterns, and in the same session, Mark Burrell will tell you how to then use them.

Later in the month, on January 28, Steve Portigal will present to you his thoughts on studying your users in their own context, Ethnography.

During last year’s UIE Roadshow, our audiences couldn’t get enough on the topic of personas. So, on February 18, we’ve asked Tamara Adlin to talk about The Power of Ad-hoc Personas. Personas can be your ticket to lasting organizational clarity… and it doesn’t take a ton of costly research.

With his book, Prototyping: A Practitioner’s Guide just hitting the bookstore shelves, Todd Zaki Warfel will help you flesh out your design ideas, test your assumptions, and gather real-time feedback from users on March 29.

In the Spring, look for Kristina Halvorson to help you with your content strategy and Louis Rosenfeld to dive deep on Search Analytics. And there is much more in the works.

Until December 3, you can still sign your team up for the UIE Virtual Seminar Subscription programs . Not only is it a tremendous savings, but you get the benefit of lifetime access to each recording and the ease of registering and paying just one time.

We also plan to unveil our plan for our User Experience Training Library. Believe it or not, there is a method to our madness.

Have you ever attended a UIE Virtual Seminar? What do you like best about them? How has your team maximized what it gets out of these learning events? Share your thoughts and experiences below.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Give our Thingy a name. Win a free registration.

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

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

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

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

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

Please, help name our thingy!

Icons and images are being used more today than ever before to aid people in finding information. How can you employ these in design to maximum effect? How will you know if you’ve succeeded?

This UIE Virtual Seminar will address Patrick Hofmann’s most recent usability research and visual design projects to answer these questions.  Want to learn more, see Patrick’s preview, or register?

Why Patrick Hofmann?  We’re huge fans of Patrick and you’ll quickly see why. If you have heard Patrick present, or if you joined us for last Fall’s popular webinar on The Essentials of Visual Design, you know he has a passion for removing words from interfaces and replacing them with pictures.

If you’re wondering how to elevate your visual design, join us, as Patrick shares his findings and ideas for effective use of icons and images.

How do you decide where and when to use icons and images?  What stories do you have to share, successes or struggles?  Get the conversation started by adding your experiences below.

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

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

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

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

If you didn’t attend the User Interface Conference this year, you may have missed the buzz over Leah Buley’s session entitled “How to be a User Experience Team of One”. Attendees loved it. Leah gave them tips and techniques used by top user experience teams that any UXer can use in a small team or an unsupportive environment.

Below are some notes I took during Leah’s session and slides from this portion of the talk. The slides here are shrunk to fit our blog, but the materials on the disc are full-sized PDFs suitable for printing.

Leah began with telling the story of her transition to a new job at Adaptive Path. Up until then, she had been a UX team of one at a financial firm. Her time was mostly spent walled up in a cubicle, headphones on, sketching and otherwise prepping wireframes on the computer, based on up-front meetings determining business requirements. After a few weeks she would emerge from her design cocoon with designs ready to be shown in a dog-and-pony show-style.

Her first day at Adaptive Path was radically different. She was handed paper and a Sharpie and, along with a couple of other designers, was asked to tackle a problem by generating several solutions, collaboratively, on the spot. She was initially flush with panic. They didn’t teach this at library school!

After a short while she warmed up to the process. To get to the quality ideas, you first must generate a lot of ideas, and be OK with many of them being subpar and others simply being tossed aside.

Now instead of jumping to the finish, as she had at her previous job, she was exploring more ideas more efficiently with techniques you can use with or without collaborating designers.

Leah used the idea of redesigning the eVite.com digital invitation and RSVP service to demonstrate some of the techniques she learned after joining Adaptive Path. (For the purposes of this blog post, we’ll be covering just the first part of the brainstorming process)

She avoided the computer. Computers can lock you into only one idea and you often get sucked down by minutia you shouldn’t be addressing at this stage.

She started with a “6-up” – a single sheet of paper with six, smallish, blank browser viewports and a pen. This allowed for 6 different ideas of how to solve one problem, say the eVite landing page. One or two ideas came easily. How do you push through to the next ideas?

[Download a PDF file of Leah's 6-up template]

Leah uses a couple of so-called “lightweight conceptual frameworks” to help push more ideas out of her head. A “Spectrum” is one such framework. A spectrum is a range from two opposing points. For example, what would the landing page at eVite.com look like if it was intended solely for a first-timer? What would it look like if it was solely for a long-time user of the service? What would pages on the spectrum in between those to points look like? What characteristic would they exhibit?

None of the sketches you make on the spectrum may be the right solution. But that’s OK, because we’re not drawing solutions. We’re drawing ideas. This framework gets you to try ideas you might have avoided before. Now you have a pile of ideas to pick from. Perhaps the best design features aspects from several of these thumbnail sketches.

You can hear the rest of Leah’s talk plus the other seven speakers and Jared Spool’s keynote presentation on the UI14 proceedings disc. The disc is loaded with over 12 hours of audio recordings, all the handouts from the Featured Talks and the presentation slides from the 8 full-day workshops. Order the proceedings disc by November 20, 2009 to guarantee your set and get the lowest price.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once they made it to the page with their content, they still struggled. The navigation links and categories were so unclearly written that users weren’t at all sure where to click. They had to work very hard just to figure out what content was available to them on the site.

The content was disorganized, confusing, and lethargic. Fortunately, we knew exactly who to turn to discuss and solve these types of problems, world renowned information architect, Donna Spencer.

Back in August 2008, I interviewed Donna. In our conversation, Donna and I discuss how the best information architects successfully tackle specific content challenges. Donna shares the essential skills separating the best information architects from the rest of the pack. I think you’ll really enjoy her insights.

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

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

How have you tackled your site content challenges? In your experience, what skills do the best information architects possess? Share your thoughts and experiences below.

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

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

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

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

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

Conducting a usability test can be stressful, but you know how
important this effort is. Effectively moderating a usability test is
a critical part of your user research. It can put the design team on
the path to success or failure in the next steps of a product’s
design. Relax, you can do this. With a little guidance, and some
practice, you can master this art of interacting with you users and
get the results your organization needs.

Want to learn more, see Beth’s preview, or register?.

Beth will answer your questions and offer some strategies to
consider. Whether you’ve conducted hundreds of usability tests or
about to do your first one, this seminar is sure to give you
valuable tips to use right away. Sign up today, and learn from one
of the experts in moderating usability tests!

If you have yet to moderate a usability test, but will at some
point, what concerns do you have? If you’ve done them, what tricks
and tips do you have to pass along? Share your thoughts, questions,
and concerns below.

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What can a non-designer do to harness the power of visual design without calling professional help? Quite a lot, says internationally-regarded visual designer Dan Rubin. We called Dan to talk about what design techniques are accessible to mere mortals. He also gave us a preview of his day-long workshop for non-designers at our User Interface 14 Conference, this November.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read Ginny’s article.

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

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

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A few weeks back we held a UIE Virtual Seminar with Pete Bell and Daniel Tunkelang of Endeca. These guys are the experts we go to when talking about designing for facets.  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 Pete and Daniel to record this podcast and cover a number of those remaining questions.

If you didn’t attend the live seminar, and are interested in how to make the jump from a standard on-site search to faceted search, then you’ll still enjoy this podcast. If you find yourself wanting more afterward, don’t forget you can still purchase a recording of the session for another 90 minutes of Faceted Search.

During the podcast, Adam asked Pete and Daniel to dig into these questions:

• Should we show counts for each facet? What about when using multiple selection?
• Can you elaborate on the mixing and matching of precision and recall results to construct facets?
• Is there a best practice for deselecting facets?
• Most search interfaces assume a flat list of results. What happens when you mix up different types of results, and how would you distribute them across a page?

Tune in to hear more about designing for facets. Still have questions? Start the discussion in our comments, below.

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

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

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

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

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

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

User experience research lives or dies by the appropriateness of the participants in the study.

UX researchers just don’t talk about actively recruiting, do they?  Many researchers ignore it, throwing it over the wall to an agency. It’s complicated, time consuming, and nerve-wracking. In this UIE Virtual Seminar, you’ll learn four strategic steps to make recruiting a fun, useful, and interesting benefit to user research.

If you are involved with user research projects and spend any amount of time worrying about getting the right people in the room, then this UIE Virtual Seminar is for you.

Find out more about Dana’s seminar and register?

Or learn more about our usability testing bundle which includes two seminars and the UIE report, “Recruiting Without Fear.”

Tell us how you source and screen participants? What concerns do you have about the recruiting process? Share your thoughts, questions, and concerns below.

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

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

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

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

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

Executive Summary: Things may be a little out of sync around the blog, especially regarding our podcasts, for the next day or so.

The Full Story:
Perhaps you heard that over the weekend there was a string of malicious attacks against WordPress installs that weren’t the absolutely newest version. Ours was out of date because we used a podcasting plug-in that was discontinued during a previous version of WordPress. Long story short, we had to hasten our upgrade to the new version and transition to a new podcasting package at the same time today, and sooner than we were prepared for. Not surprisingly, this has lead to a number of things breaking. I’m working on re-wiring everything as fast as possible.

If you see something pop up, like a PHP error, you’re welcome to let me know by commenting on this post. As I write this, about half of the podcasts are “miswired” and I’m manually fixing them one by one. If a podcast doesn’t play for you, it hopefully will soon.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interaction with a product is more than how it’s used or how it behaves. It’s about a connection between two sides. One side is the customer, but the other side is much more than a product or service. To many people, the character and essence of a product and its company are identical. So, what is the essence of your product?

When your product behaves like a machine, your company is perceived to be a machine. It’s just another company – rigid, mechanical, and cold. Yet when your product displays a bit of humanity, your company gains a face and becomes another human.

In this webinar, you’ll see examples of how humanity exists in the design of products and services through humor, personality, and emotion. You’ll explore how just a little extra design effort and thought beyond functional needs can enrich the experience, reveal the company behind the product, and forge enduring connections with customers.

This presentation generated quite a buzz at Web App 2009. It’s a talk that’s sure to get you thinking
about your products, and how you foster the connection between your products and your customers.

In advance of the presentation, we’d love to hear from you. How do you gain an edge with your products? How does your organization show its humanity? Share your thoughts, questions, and concerns below.

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This week we have our longest, and certainly one of our most interesting episodes to date. Jared and Robert met Joshua Muskovitz on the IxDA discussion list when Josh posted an innocent-enough question to the list: what do you call someone who sits squarely on the fence between interaction design and implementation? How do I market myself while job hunting when I have been in the industry so long that I have a really broad range of skills?

Josh certainly does claim a wide range of skills, from interaction design and usability to front-end development, back-end programming, and business development. That brought up the question an employer might also have when reading his resume… “Is this guy for real? Can he really do all of this stuff well?”

As with most debates that Jared and Robert delve into, this one got messy, fast. But it also became very interesting. I knew I had to find Josh and invite him on Userability. I’m glad I did, as it made for a great podcast. Tune in to hear the debate, and if you have an opening for a man like Josh, won’t you let him know?

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!

We want to hear your take on this debate. Can someone do all the things that Josh can, really well? Can he fit into a corporate structure, or does he need to find a small operation who can really put all his tools to work? Get the debate started again in the comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creating great design is now more important than ever. In difficult times, we all have to do more with less. We have to be innovative in both the designs we create and the way we create them.

This year’s User Interface 14 Conference in Boston, MA, from November 1-3, is just the ticket. The UI14 sneak preview web site is up and we think the conference agenda is our best yet. Our team of experts will set your imagination on fire, powering up your creative juices so you can dazzle and delight, whether you’re a member of a large team or a UX-Team-Of-One.

The Content is What Makes UI14 Unique

Today’s conferences focus on the 60-90 minute presentation format. Enough time to pique your interest, but not enough time to seriously dive in deep and leave you with the skills needed to make a significant difference in the world of user experience.

At UI14, you get 2 days of in-depth, full-day workshops. There are 8 full-day workshops. Here is a peak of two of them.

Good Design Faster: New Techniques for Creative Ideas

When we have great ideas, we struggle to present them. We hear, “Are those really the fonts?” when what we’re looking for is deeper analysis. The best designers focus their critique on the most important decisions they’re facing.

Creating innovative designs requires an innovative process. That’s why we’re excited to bring in experience designer Leah Buley. Leah’s  known for her rapid, low budget techniques for team creativity and idea generation. She’ll share her ground-breaking, proven techniques for Design Sprints and Sketchboarding in her full-day workshop, Good Designs Faster.

You’ll learn Leah’s secrets for quickly exploring a range of design alternatives, moving from back-of-the-napkin sketching to mapping out your design’s interaction, flow, and form. She’ll demonstrate several exercises that get a team’s creative juices flowing, while staying focused on the needs of the users.

Fast Prototyping Made Easy

Prototyping—building a mockup of the design to validate its direction—has never been easier. Designers today have a plethora of tools for every development process stage. New techniques make it fast and easy to get a design working.

To guide us through the landscape of prototyping, we’ve invited Todd Zaki Warfel, a brilliant tactician and author of Prototyping: A Practitioner’s Guide. Todd’s put together an amazing workshop, chock-full of the latest techniques and tools. You’ll see the full gamut of prototyping techniques, from paper to JavaScript and everything in between.

You’ll learn how to avoid the common headaches and mistakes that first-timers consistently run into. You’ll create paper prototypes of some interactive forms, Ajax simulations, and complex interfaces, like a sliding photo gallery. Todd will show you how easy it is to create prototypes of mobile applications in a tool like Fireworks. You’ll get a good introduction to the power of JavaScript libraries, such as Prototype and jQuery.

These are just 2 of 8 topics the full-day workshops focus on. During the next few weeks, watch for blog posts highlighting the other 6 full-day workshops and speakers. Or visit UI14 sneak preview site now to learn about these additional amazing speakers and sessions.

The sneak preview site also has the best pricing option available. Register by August 28 to guarantee your spot in the workshops you want and get the lowest conference price.

We hope to see you in Boston!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

During the podcast, I dig into these questions:

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

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

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

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

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

People come to your site to get the information they need, by exploring, discovering, and making comparisons. You want them to successfully sift through all of your content, quickly and effectively. Faceted search delivers on that promise, in spades, but not without good planning and a great strategy.

Pete and Daniel will show you before-and-after looks at e-commerce, media, corporate, and intranets sites. They will teach you the essentials you need to launch your own faceted search system and
discuss the pitfalls you’ll want to prepare for.

Faceted Search: Designing Your Content, Navigation, and User Interface
with Pete Bell & Daniel Tunkelang of Endeca
Thursday August 20, 2009, 1:30pm ET
90-minute online presentation
Register to join us on August 20, watch Pete’s preview, or learn more details here.

Special Offer – Be one of the first to get Daniel Tunkelang’s new book, Faceted Search (published by Morgan and Claypool) for free when you register for this UIE Virtual Seminar. Choose from book or PDF version. Details to follow once you register for the UIE Virtual Seminar. Read an excerpt from the book here.

If you’re knee-deep in implementation, or working with folks who are designing for facets, be sure to set time aside for this presentation. And remember to look out for your free book after the presentation!

In advance of the presentation, we’d love to hear from you. Is your organization considering the move to faceted search? What will you do differently? We’d love to hear your thoughts, questions, and concerns. Please share your thoughts below.

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

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

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

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

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

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This week we receive a call for help from Louisiana, where the gumbo isn’t the only thing that’s hot. Ms. Tatum Dutile had this to ask the panel…

Is it good to have multiple links to the same destination on one page, for instance, a link in the text, in the navigation bar, and on the right side of the page?  Or do too many redundant links make the page harder to use because people have to scan through more things to get to what they’re looking for?

Tune in for a detailed discussion of the desert climate of Arizona compared to the oppressive humidity of the deep south… or tune in to gain some insights on where your users expect to find certain links within your designs. (We cater to many audiences.)

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!

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

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

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

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

In this popular presentation, Ethan Marcotte teaches about the collaborative process through four detailed case studies. The case studies demonstrate important before and after detail of the lesson to be learned. They also happen to be major sites you know of and can visit today: The Today Show, The 2008 Sundance Film Festival, W3C, and New York Magazine.

If you’re a designer, a developer, or manage a team, you’ll want to see this presentation. Ethan will show you ways to be successful in critical project transitions. There’s no better person to see both sides of the designer/developer relationship than Ethan Marcotte. Many in our industry greatly respect him and consider him to be someone who does groundbreaking work. Ethan has worked with New York Magazine, Harvard University, Disney, and State Street Bank, just to name a few.

UIE Virtual Seminar
Comps vs. Code: Case Studies on Collaboration Between Site Designers & Developers
with Ethan Marcotte
Thursday July 30, 2009, 1:30pm ET
90-minute online presentation

Read more about Comps vs. Code, or see the 3-minute preview Ethan put together, to help you understand what to expect out of this seminar.

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This week a question from one of the world’s most well-read cities fittingly enquires about the must-read books in design.

Damon Dimmock of Cambridge, MA, asked,

If you had to recommend just three books on user experience (classic, new, fundamental, etc.), which ones would they be?

How will Robert hold off from recommending his own books? You’ll have to tune in to see!

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!

Here are links to each of the books Robert and Jared recommended:

Robert:

• The Inmates Are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper
• A Project Guide to UX Design by Russ Unger and Carolyn Chandler
• Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug

Jared:

• Designing for People by Henry Dreyfuss
• Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge
• User and Task Analysis for Interface Design by JoAnn Hackos and Janice Redish

What are the most influential books you’ve read in the field? Share them with us in the comments!

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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Earlier this week we released a “slidecast” of Jared’s popular Revealing Design Treasures from the Amazon presentation, which features the audio of the talk synced with the slides. It’s almost like being there, except you can pause it. Since then, we’ve had a (metric) ton of requests for a version in audio-only/podcast format. Here you go.

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!