Probably more used than any other tool in the toolbox, the critique is the lost orphan of the user experience world. There are books written about usability testing, endless debates on the validity of heuristic evaluations, and hours of lectures on persona development. But, when it comes to developing the essential skills for a good critique, the UX world falls silent.

Yet how often do we hear, “Could you give me some feedback on this design I’ve been working on?” It’s likely to be the most requested activity, but we do little to get better at it. Good critique skills are to be revered, but many of us haven’t learned what it takes, putting our projects at risk and driving walls between team members.

Recently, I’ve been discussing critique skills with some clients and it reminded me of an article we published back in September 2008, What Goes into a Well-Done Critique. It’s an important topic that doesn’t get a lot of attention. So I thought it was worth a second look. After studying the practices of design teams, we noticed that there are specific elements always present in a well-performed critique. Today’s article describes what we’ve seen in our travels.

And, as it turns out, this Thursday’s UIE Virtual Seminar given by Adam Connor is Discussing Design: The Art of Critique. Adam will describe how to give, receive, and act upon feedback while confidently guiding your projects through beneficial feedback loops. Learn more about Adam’s seminar here.

Read the article, What Goes into a Well-Done Critique?

What elements do you think make a great critique? How has your team incorporated them into regular practice? We’d love to hear your stories and thoughts. Leave us your thoughts below

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[ Transcript Available ]

Content is everywhere. With the amount of content users are confronted with everyday it can be challenging to garner their attention. Compounding this problem is the fact that designers and developers are often tasked with writing content that end users see. This can be an intimidating prospect if you’re unaccustomed to crafting copy.

Luckily, Steph Hay, Co-Founder of FastCustomer comes to the rescue in her virtual seminar, Writing Content for Usability, full of her tips for writing compelling content. She explains that choosing the right words and tone are essential to getting users to take action. The audience asked a bunch of great questions during the live seminar and Steph joins Adam Churchill to address the ones that we didn’t have time for in the podcast.

Here’s an excerpt from the podcast.

“…focusing on a very specific audience is really the first step of writing compelling content. Then really considering that medium that you’re going to be using to communicate with that audience is the second step. How are you going to communicate on a homepage or a website or on Twitter or on a blog?

And then, how can you also use additional media, email for example, to help tell a story and compliment your message, which really takes some of the pressure off of you having to write everything you could possibly write for that audience in that one little spot that you’re probably writing content for.

Then, finally, when it came to focus, considering that network of folks around you who are going to help influence your message really needs to be a part of your defining focus, but at the very start before you write a single word on content. That first step of focus then leads into the compelling content. Compelling content that has these four characteristics really actually helps a user make the decision to take an action…”

Tune in to the podcast to hear Steph answer these questions:

• Is there a difference between Marketing Content and Usable Content?
• When should content be considered?
• Are there tools or activities that you recommend that help copywriters and designers work together in creating design and copy?
• If you take a task based approach, is it more about what the site visitor wants to accomplish than who they are?
• How do you avoid redundant content if you’re tailoring for more than one audience?
• Are there tips for those who design government websites?
• What type of voice should be used when trying to get users to complete a transaction?

As always, we love to hear what you’re thinking. Share your thoughts with us in our comments section.

Recorded: March, 2012
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The research is clear: The most valuable activity a team can do is collect user research on their design. Seeing the design through their users’ eyes will pinpoint areas of improvement, which will help with every business metric for the product or service.

Choosing that first user research project is critical. If you choose right, you’re the hero that changed the path of things forever. If you choose the wrong thing, then all that selling you’ve done is branded with being ineffectual (or worse, damaging).

In today’s UIEtips, we talk about the different techniques available for starting user research. I share what our favorites are and which ones we avoid.

Read the article, Starting Your User Research.

What techniques did you start your user research with? How did that work for getting people on board and inspired to create change? Leave us your thoughts below.

Recently, I’ve been talking about having your portfolio tell the story of your best work. One part of any story is the main character, who, in this case, would be you.

After all, a project is like an adventure. You start out heading in one direction, then things happen, and you end up growing your knowledge, your skills, and producing something that is brilliant.

It would be interesting to see how someone could create a portfolio that did a fantastic job of telling that adventure story.

What were the obstacles that you encountered? How did they force you to change your plans? What made them particularly gnarly? What piece of brilliance did you bring to the table to overcome them? What lessons did you learn in the process?

Who joined you on your adventure? How did you take advantage of their powers and special abilities? How did you compensate for their weaknesses? How did you resolve conflicts? How did you join forces to bring out something better than you could’ve if you had worked alone?

Where did you get surprised? What was it like to see your vision realized? What are your regrets? What are you particularly proud of?

Talking in terms of a main character that undergoes a change is a great way to approach a portfolio project description. It takes the focus away from the artwork and puts it on what you did to actually realize a design.

It nicely brings out what your special powers and talents are and shows how you compensate for your weaknesses. (After all, we all have weaknesses. Why not talk about them honestly and earnestly?)

Go ahead, tell your story. Show us what you can do.

After listening to my interview with UX Immersion speaker, Jeff Gothelf, Ziv posed this this question:

I was wondering about the viability of integrating this methodology into a design agency that basically ends it’s work with a recommendations document with no real access to the development teams. It sounds like major shifts in people’s understanding of the process are needed to accommodate that.

I sent the question off to Jeff, who supplied this awesome answer:

In an agency context, especially with existing clients, making Lean UX work requires the proper expectation setting up front. From the beginning of the engagement, even before the pitch, start setting the expectation with you client that this engagement will be different. There will be frequent check-ins, reviews, requests for access to customers and no clear, defined scope at the beginning of the engagement. Instead, establish a time box (a period of time for which the agency will be engaged) and agree on a problem statement the agency is being hired to solve. The other key thing to articulate and agree upon with your client is how you will measure success. What metrics will you use to determine that you’ve built the right solution to the problem statement? Once that is agreed upon, the iterative Lean UX process can begin. As you iterate note how your design hypotheses are measuring up against your goals.

At the end of the time box the client gets the best possible solution your team could come up with in that time frame. It will be a better solution than the one you would have scoped out in the traditional up-front heavy planning approach because you will be several iterations into it and have some level of validation to your designs.

What do you think?

A great portfolio is a collection of the stories that describe your best work.

As the demand for UX professionals increases, there’s been a renewed discussion on the importance of having a portfolio. There are even some, like Whitney Hess in a recent SxSW panel, who assert that because UX isn’t really about the deliverables, UX pros shouldn’t have a portfolio.

I think quite the opposite. I think that a UX portfolio is an important part of representing what we can do. It’s far more important than a résumé, which is usually just a history of our employment with a few bullets that talk about major accomplishments.

The résumé shows our journey, just like how a map of the world shows the path Magellan took to circumnavigate the globe. But that map doesn’t tell of Magellan’s skill in taking on challenges and overcoming obstacles. That’s what a great portfolio does.

Recently someone showed me some UX designer’s nicely-designed portfolio. It had a beautiful layout and highlighted several deliverables, such as wireframes, sketches, and personas. It even went so far as to explain what a wireframe was and how personas are helpful in the UX process, in case the hiring manager didn’t know those things.

However, what this nicely-designed portfolio failed to do was tell me about the designer’s accomplishments. He didn’t talk about the projects he created the wireframe for. He didn’t say how he developed the personas or how they were used. He didn’t talk about places where the project got complicated and he worked through it, producing an elegant outcome given the constraints.

These are things that smart hiring managers look for. They want to see what you do when faced with challenge, such as a short delivery time, a difficult co-worker, hardware constraints that reduce the design options, or all three at the same time. They want to see the thinking that got you from the idea through to the final design. They want to see what really tested your skills and experience in ways you’ve never been tested before, and how you produced something even you didn’t think you were capable of.

Go ahead. Build an awesome portfolio of your story. Talk about the accomplishments you’re most proud of and don’t leave out any detail that shows what you can do when the world decides to test you. That’s the portfolio of a great designer.

[To be fair to Whitney, she wrote a wonderful article that says all this and more for UX Matters. You should read it.]

Even the best of plans can go awry. We role play in our head how a usability test will proceed, understand the objectives at hand, and do a rigorous job of screening the participants. But what do you do when something totally unexpected occurs? Life circumstances among the participants can throw a curveball at our testing plan. What you do with the curveball can make all the difference in how you move forward with delivering your products and services.

In today’s UIEtips, we look back at an article from Steve Portigal. Steve takes a look at how some past participants took him outside of the business questions at hand, and how their life circumstances impacted his client’s business strategy. Each of the four cases Steve describes in the article made a profound affect on how he moved forward during the session and what his client came away with.

Read Steve’s article: What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting It .

On April 17, Steve presents a UIE Virtual Seminar, Championing Contextual Research in Your Organization. He’ll describe the techniques, processes, and discussion points to make sure your design best fits the problem you’re trying to solve.

At this year’s SxSW conference, a panel with the Daily Show With Jon Stewart’s executive producer Rory Albanese revealed insight into a use for accessibility technology we’d never thought of.

If you go to enough discussions on accessibility, you’ll hear about this old chestnut: Cuts in the sidewalk curbs, put in for wheelchair access, is also used by people without disabilities, like folks with baby strollers and shopping carts. The idea being that accessibility aids add value to everyone’s experience, when designed well.

Well, in a panel about the secrets of comedy writing, Rory revealed one of the tricks they use for finding all those old pieces of footage that show politicians saying things they probably now regret. It turns out it’s an accessibility aid that’s come to the rescue.

The Daily Show’s staff takes advantage of a software application that searches the text from closed captioning of CSPAN and news programs to find keywords and phrases. The closed captioning, originally designed for the deaf and those with hearing issues, is now used by the staff’s team to provide us with some of the best comedy (and, frankly, investigative journalism) on television.

Who would’ve thought?

In this seminar you’ll get a reality check on critiques from Adam Connor. He’ll describe how to give, receive, and act upon feedback while confidently guiding your projects through beneficial feedback loops. With the right approach to critique and collaboration, your designs will be stronger than ever.

In Adam’s seminar you’ll learn to:

• Structure projects to include more feedback loops
• Listen to stakeholder comments with increased objectivity
• Separate problem solving from critical thinking
• Give and receive critiques differently, and for the better

Watch Adam’s 3-minute preview or register today!

Discussing Design: The Art of Critique
with Adam Connor
Thursday, April 26, at 1:30pm ET
1:30pm ET / 12:30pm CT / 11:30am MT / 10:30am PT
90 minute online seminar
Register Now!

To the delight of UX designers everywhere, organizations today increasingly conduct user-centered research methods like surveys, focus groups, and usability testing.

In this Next Step seminar, Steve Portigal will give you the talking points to make it happen in your organization. And once you find out how to quell cultural, budgetary, and process resistance to fieldwork, then you can create more analytical designs that make users jump for joy.

You’ll learn to:

• See field research as strong UX design tool
• Advocate for the adoption of contextual research
• Maximize the organizational impact of any research you do
• Engage the rest of the organization in contextual research

See Steve’s 2-minute preview or save your spot.

Championing Contextual Research in Your Organization
with Steve Portigal
We’re creating this seminar in cooperation with Rosenfeld Media
Tuesday, April 17, at 1:30pm ET
1:30pm ET / 12:30pm CT / 11:30am MT / 10:30am PT
90 minute online seminar
Register Now!