User Interface Engineering

In this week’s UIEtips, I discuss some practices to help prepare your design to be adaptive for multiple device sizes.

Here’s an excerpt from the article

This year, it will be hard to find an organization that doesn’t prioritize making their web site responsive. Yet, as we talk to organizations moving in this direction, we’re finding they haven’t nailed down their strategy for getting there yet.

The Core Tactics

Almost everything you read about responsive web design starts with what I call the core tactics — the basic elements that make responsive sites be responsive. You can’t ignore these, they form the basis of the overall strategy.

The first core tactic is discovering the breakpoints. These are the page widths that will cause design elements to re-order. In between breakpoints, items will change their size or flow, but at the breakpoints, you’ll see a sudden change in configurations.

Read the article: Devising a Strategy for Responsive Design.

Moving to Responsive Design?

The UX Immersion Mobile conference, April 22–24, in Seattle WA, has full-day workshops to make sure you get your strategy right. Jason Grigsby will show you everything you need to ensure you’ve got your core tactics in place. Karen McGrane will dive deep into creating a content strategy specifically for mobile. See the full program at UXIM.co.

What are your strategies for preparing a responsive design? Tell us about it below.

Dive into advanced design processes, flexible team-based techniques, and innovative multi-device solutions with recordings from our sold out User Interface 17 Conference.

UI17 OnDemand brings you the skills you need to keep up with the latest tools, techniques, and processes to deliver the best user experience possible.

You’ll hear from these UX experts:

Luke Wroblewski – First Person User Interfaces
Remove distractions from UI’s and create immersive experiences.

Kevin Hoffman – Designing Stellar Meetings
Run meetings that result in better insights and bring teams together.

Kim Goodwin – Your Toughest Design Challenge
Use specific strategies to become a masterful change agent.

Aaron Gustafson – Building Adaptive Designs Now
Learn techniques to design adaptive, multi-device experiences effectively.

Dana Chisnell – Three Levels of Happy Design
Shift your thinking to start designing for emotion.

Nathan Curtis – Fearless Prototyping for Skeptics
Use HTML to prototype or sketch out your ideas.

Adam Connor and Aaron Irizarry – Discussing Design
Improve how you collect, deliver, and receive critiques.

Karen McGrane – Adapting Ourselves to Adaptive Content
Create a more flexible content workflow.

Purchase the recordings for $189 until February 21. After the 21st the price goes up $50.

In this week’s UIEtips, Steph Hay discusses how trust inspires confidence, which in turn compels
decision-making.

Here’s an excerpt from the article

Our best chance for establishing trust with our users is to be honest. After all, trust inspires confidence. And it’s confidence—not just a knowledge of differences—that compels decision-making.

Perhaps we should stop fixating on what makes us different and, instead, acknowledge the real aspects of who we are, what we do, and why people choose us.

How can we start getting real?

Read the article: Being Real Builds Trust.

Build Trust With Your Users

On February 14, in her seminar Building Trust with Your Users through Messaging & Copy, Stephanie Hay is going to show you how to take cues from online and offline interactions to write candid content, craft helpful user experiences, and maintain users’ confidence even when you “fail.”

How does your copy install trust and inspire confidence with your users? Tell us about it below.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:46 — 13.4MB)

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Mobile changes everything about how we conduct usability research. Not only has the way we design and build websites and apps had to adapt, how we study them has to as well. Traditional research methods won’t translate to a mobile environment.

Cyd Harrell, formerly of Bolt | Peters, has been conducting mobile usability tests. The problem with traditional usability testing labs for mobile is that the users aren’t in their normal context of use. There’s this awkward interaction of holding the device in the right position, or operating while it’s attached to a sled or rig. Observing this unnatural interaction won’t give you the greatest results.

The context of use paradigm is only one important aspect. If you and your designers are all iPhone users, for instance, thinking of things in terms of iOS is natural. With the variety of operating systems on these devices, testing your app in the right context as far as both the user and device are concerned can be a challenge.

Cyd is presenting one of the daylong workshops at the UX Immersion Mobile conference April 22-24 in Seattle. For more information about Cyd’s and the other workshops, visit uxim.co.

Recorded: December, 2012
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In this week’s UIEtips, Nathan Curtis shares 6 tips on storing and organizing sketches.

Here’s an excerpt from the article

Sketches enable us to quickly depict and share ideas with each other, but are also considered disposable. Sketches represent an intermittent state leading to something better, more refined. As artifacts, they are fleeting renditions of the concept, a point in time idea dismissed into the (ideally recyclable) waste baskets of sketching sessions and desktop brainstorming.

We may find ourselves amid the next hour’s design studio summation. Or the day’s prototyping. Or the next week’s task scoping. Or the next quarter’s project proposal. But the sketch’s value extends beyond the initial presentation and discussion.

As such, we’ve adopted techniques for organizing our sketches for future reference, even into the annals of antiquity!

Read the article: 6 Tips for Organizing Sketched Artifacts.

Learn More

Want to learn more about how to capitalize on the productive power of sketching? Join us on January 17, when Nathan presents Sketching for Understanding. Nathan will lead you through the processes, people, and purposes behind different types of sketches.

How have you organized your archive of sketches? Tell us about it below.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:21 — 15.3MB)

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The ultimate goal for user experience is that users enjoy using your product or service. Many companies use satisfaction as a metric for measuring their success. But satisfaction is really just the lack of frustration. You should be focused on what you can do to delight your users.

In his virtual seminar, Jared presents the Kano Model. The Kano Model helps you gauge your users’ expectations. When you approach delight from a perspective of pleasure, flow, and meaning, you can then determine which features meet these objectives.

The audience asked a bunch of great questions during the live seminar. In this podcast, Jared joins Adam Churchill to revisit some of those questions, as well as tackle ones we weren’t able to get to.

• Is consistency in design a bad thing?
• What research methods are there to unearth customer expectations?
• How can you meet customer expectations on a new product?
• Do you plot different audience segments in the same model?
• What if the people selecting the product are not the users?

Recorded: November, 2012
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With collaborative sketching techniques to orient and unify teams, it’s no surprise that you are embracing sketches to explore design ideas earlier in a creative process. But what are your goals for sketching, and how do they translate to your organization or team? And what are some great techniques you can start using right now?

In Sketching for Understanding, Nathan Curtis of EightShapes will lead you through the processes, people, and purposes behind different types of sketches. Whether you’re trying to sell your ideas, crystallize disparate discussions, or engage remote teams in UX decision-making, you’ll be glad you’ve got Nathan—and loads of new sketching exercises—on your side.

In the seminar, you’ll learn to:

• Sketch with purpose
• Sketch within large teams
• Sketch with remote teams

So if you’re just learning about sketches or looking to capitalize on more of their productive power, this seminar should be on your calendar.

During the first half of 2013, you’ll hear the latest thinking from the best speakers in the user experience design community. Get your team into all the live seminars from January-June, plus their recordings at the lowest price. You’ll save over 25% off the regular pricing.

Sign-up Once. Pay Once. All live seminars January through June, 2013.

All 10 live seminars, plus their recording links – $1,149

We have some great presenters and topics lined up for you. With these educational events on your team’s calendar, you’re sure to maximize your core knowledge and skills.

In this week’s UIEtips, Nathan Curtis will share how he shifted the design direction of a large project with just 5 index cards.

Here’s an excerpt from the article

The concept was a dramatic shift from anything prototyped, discussed, or even sketched during the studio. It was safe to say: the client had never seen this before. To introduce this idea at this stage risked shaking things up and requiring yet another presentation that convened the stakeholders.

As the flourish concluded, we had to make a decision: do we share this idea, risk the implications that we start prototyping again from scratch, and have to “re-sell” an idea, again? Or, do we play it safe, stick with concepts everyone already knew?

With sketching, we could propose both.

Read the article: The Power of Sketches: How We Sold a Huge Project Shift with 5 Index Cards.

Learn More

Want to learn more about how to capitalize on the productive power of sketching? Join us on January 17, when Nathan presents Sketching for Understanding. Nathan will lead you through the processes, people, and purposes behind different types of sketches.

How have you used sketches and prototypes to sell your concepts? Tell us about it below.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:38 — 16.1MB)

[ Transcript Available ]

Responsive web design allows the notion of “one web” to be a reality. Designers are increasingly able to sell to their organization the idea of delivering content to multiple platforms. Putting it into practice is another story.

Jason Grigsby, co-founder of Cloud Four, says that it is easier to sell the idea of responsive web design than to do it well. Simply shifting the layout of your design to fit different screen widths is only half of the battle. Page weight is another consideration.

A huge part of mobile experience is performance. Though connectivity speeds are increasing on mobile, shrinking your desktop site to fit on a mobile screen isn’t the best option. Jason says that this is an often overlooked aspect of responsive design. Most of the concern is around how a site renders on various devices, but the importance should fall on the entire experience.

Jason is presenting one of the daylong workshops at the UX Immersion conference, April 22-24 in Seattle. This year’s conference features 6 experts covering various aspects of mobile design. For more information on Jason’s and the other 5 workshops, visit uxim.co.

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

Recorded: December, 2012
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