User Interface Engineering

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Shared understanding is important to any team working towards a common goal. Ensuring every member of the team is on the same page can be difficult. Sketching is a quick, lightweight method for communicating design ideas or interactions. Starting with sketching early in the design process lets everyone share the same vision.

Nathan Curtis employs sketching throughout his work at EightShapes. Whether they’re sharing sketches while sitting next to each other or remotely using an IPEVO camera, the EightShapes team makes sketching a large part of their process. Nathan offered up some great insights in his virtual seminar, Sketching for Understanding. Nathan joins Adam Churchill to tackle some of the questions there wasn’t time for in this podcast.

• How do you get people who are uncomfortable with sketching involved in the process?
• Can you use sketching to solve problems other than design problems?
• How do you compile and track sketches?
• Can you go straight from sketches to comp, skipping the prototyping phase?
• What scenarios should you start with?
• Where does visual design fit into the design process?
• How can you adapt a design studio to a smaller group of designers?
• Is the iPad an effective sketching tool?

Recorded: March, 2013
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In this week’s UIEtips, I discuss how APIs are making it increasingly easier to integrate complex features into your designs, such as photo manipulation, credit card processing and other automated tasks.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

APIs give designers a much richer toolbox than they’ve ever had before. We can now take advantage of capabilities on our devices, the wealth of knowledge stored in databases, and pull together resources to provide a richer experience for our users.

APIs provide us LEGO-like building blocks, each with unique capabilities, that we can plug together to extend our abilities. Just a few years ago, if you wanted to integrate SMS into your app, your development team would have to learn the ins-and-outs of connecting to the carrier’s interfaces (which weren’t standardized) and constantly deal with a shifting landscape of technology. The costs were unacceptably high for most organizations, so only the richest could afford to develop and maintain it, with low returns on that investment.

Now, rigorously built APIs, like those provided by Twilio and its ilk, bring those development and maintenance costs down significantly. The lower bar of entry means more competition, which lowers costs even more. This makes incorporating these capabilities easier than ever.

Read the article: APIs: The Future Is Now.

How are you using APIs to bring more value to your users? Share your stories below.

Join us on April 18, as Richard Rutter tackles a long awaited virtual seminar topic – typography.

When you’re dealing with different screen sizes and devices, you need to consider how web typography works fit in. In Typography in Responsive Web Design, Richard will explain why typography is like a visual hierarchy. He’ll show you what to watch out for with OpenType and how features on the edge of CSS can make (or break) user experiences. Whether you’re a designer or UX specialist, you’ll leave with tools and practical techniques that you can start applying today.

And for a few more days, you can still take advantage of a special offer. Register by Friday, April 5 and you’ll receive a free bonus virtual seminar, The How and Why of Responsive Web Design with Ethan Marcotte.

In this week’s UIEtips, I discuss how great designers use sketching for notetaking, to convey their ideas in meetings, to record their conversations with their co-workers, and to support their design research.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Words are powerful, but sometimes they don’t cut it. We can try to describe what we’re imagining, but a diagram often gets us to a common ground quicker.

As our team has been studying the skills of great designers, we’ve seen sketching emerge as a theme. All of the best designers we’ve met sketch. They are comfortable picking up a pen or pencil and putting it to paper (or, in many cases, whiteboard).

Read the article: Why We Sketch.

Do you have a success story about how sketching helped you or your team achieve a goal? Share your success story below.

Director of Marketing at User Interface Engineering

Fast Forward One Year:

We want to thank you for crafting and executing a marketing strategy for User Interface Engineering. Here’s what happened under your leadership:

1. You increased our revenues beyond our wildest dreams because of your ingenious unified approach that clearly tied all of our products and services together.
2. Your laser-like focus on the marketing messages and launch phases for our new webinar library made it successful right out of the gate.
3. You crafted a brand new corporate event service that’s got half the Fortune 500 begging for priority access.
4. Your work with our social media, email marketing, conference sponsorships, speaking opportunities, and web site has quadrupled our reach and brought awareness to a much larger audience.
5. You’ve successfully convinced us to stop using alliteration in our headlines.

Everyone at UIE thanks you for your dedication. We can’t wait until next year.

Now Back to Today:

If you’d like this to be your story, send us your resume with a half-page write-up of your most significant marketing strategy accomplishment. While we’re less concerned with your education and qualifications, we won’t compromise on your ability to deliver team results. We’ll be back to you in 24 hours if you have what it takes to achieve something special.

You might even want to check out our web sites — www.uie.com, www.uxim.co, and www.uiconf.com — for some insight into what we’re doing. We think you’ll be excited by where we are today and the challenge to get us where we’re going.

You will work in our North Andover offices. (Sorry, we don’t hire remote employees.) We’ll provide all the resources you need to bring out the best in your talents and skills.

Send your resume and write-up to: MarketingDirectorJob@uie.com

Or

Jared M. Spool, CEO
User Interface Engineering
510 Turnpike Street, Suite 102
North Andover, MA 01845

In this week’s UIEtips Jared M. Spool discusses three radical redesign approach strategies.

Here’s an excerpt from the article

It’s your most loyal customers who will hate your flip-the-switch redesign the most. Designers are quick to declare, “Users hate change.” But that’s not it at all.

Your loyal users have invested a lot over the years mastering your current design, to the point where they are fast and efficient with everything they need to do. When you change it, even with something you want to label “new and improved,” all of that investment is flushed down the drain.

Read the article: Extraordinarily Radical Redesign Strategies.

What strategy have you put in place when planning a redesign? Tell us about it below.

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A beautiful design means little if it’s not useful. Content is the key to making it useful. From the outset of the design process, you must consider the content for the site. Members of the design and development teams should work alongside the content strategist to ensure the right content is delivered with the right message.

Kristina Halvorson, founder and president of Brain Traffic, is the author of Content Strategy for the Web. In her virtual seminar, A Content Strategy Roadmap, she laid out necessary tools and processes so that your audience is met with timely, appropriate content. During the live seminar, the audience asked a lot of questions of Kristina. She joins Adam Churchill to answer some of those in this podcast.

• For a content audit of a large site, is it ok to audit just a sample of pages?
• How can you convince stakeholders which content is truly valuable?
• Are there ways to deal with highly resistant stakeholders?
• When making a sample set of a content audit, how do you make sure you don’t lose long term maintenance of the pages?
• What tools are available for creating editorial calendars?

Recorded: February, 2013
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In this week’s UIEtips Kevin Cheng discusses how to communicate ideas using comics and sketches.

Here’s an excerpt from the article

Having everybody reading the requirements document before a project starts isn’t just bureaucratic nonsense; it also ensures there are no surprises at the end. The problem is that requirements documents use words like “community,” “leverage,” “user-generated content,” or other buzzwords du jour that seem meaningful but are rife with ambiguities.

Each person develops his or her own interpretation of what these words and phrases mean and thinks everyone else’s interpretation is the same as his or her own. “These requirements look good,” thinks the marketer. “Yep, looks about right to me,” agrees the product manager. “Alright, I’ll go build it according to this document then,” says the engineer.

If instead, a comic illustrating the story of how someone may potentially use the product were shared among the team, it would be much easier to determine if everyone were on the same page.

Read the article: Applying Comics.

Have you used comics or drawing to communicate your design ideas? Tell us about it below.

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The proliferation of mobile devices has made it necessary to rethink your web experiences. The mobile phone and tablet, along with retina displays, have substantially changed how a user experiences your design. Responsive web design has emerged as a solution in some cases, but even though connection speeds on mobile networks are increasing, performance remains an issue.

Luke Wroblewski has a wealth of experience with the mobile web. He suggests that the definition of “mobile” itself is blurring as devices continue to evolve. Rather than designing for device specifications, Luke says it’s more important to think about the context in which these devices are being used.

During his virtual seminar, Organizing Mobile Web Experiences, the audience asked some great questions. Luke joins Adam Churchill to cover some of those questions in this podcast.

• When you talk about “mobile”, does that include both phone and tablet?
• Is it better to use responsive web design than a separate mobile site?
• What are the benefits of native mobile applications vs. responsive UIs?
• How do account for different use cases when employing responsive web design?
• Does quality become an issue with the code base increasing to make sites adaptive?
• Should you make decisions on breakpoints based on content or device?
• Should you design differently for small screens and small windows?

Recorded: February, 2013
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In this week’s UIEtips, Jared discusses the cost effectiveness of responsive design vs. creating a separate mobile version of a web site.

Here’s an excerpt from the article

Which is more expensive: a responsive design web site or creating a separate mobile version? This is a constant debate among many organizations. We can answer it with some simple design accounting.

For the most part, you don’t hear anyone saying that responsive web design is the wrong way to go. It’s motherhood-and-apple-pie to have a single design that works everywhere. Everyone seems to agree this, in the long run when all the planets align, is the best alternative.

The argument I keep hearing against responsive web design has to do with cost. Creating a site that dynamically adjusts to size, resolution, and bandwidth is an expensive proposition. It often demands a rethinking and retooling of the entire process.

Read the article: Conducting Usability Research for Mobile.

Have you proposed or defended the value of a mobile content strategy? Tell us about it below.