User Interface Engineering

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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The 125 Seats are moving fast for the UX Immersion Mobile Conference. Once these remaining seats are gone, the price goes up $300. Take advantage of the lowest price and register now for UX Immersion in Seattle, WA April 22-24.

Daylong Workshops Are the Core of the Conference

We have a fantastic lineup of UX mobile experts. You’ll choose from 6 workshops all focused on improving your mobile UX design skills.

Luke Wroblewski – Designing Intuitive Mobile Inputs
Kelly Goto – Prototyping for Mobile Designs
Chris Risdon – Mapping Your Customer’s Journey
Karen McGrane – Adapting Your Content for Mobile
Cyd Harrell – Conducting Usability Research for Mobile
Jason Grigsby – When Responsive Design Meets the Real World

Save your spot today before the price goes up at UXIM.co.

In this week’s UIEtips, I share the 3 big UX lessons learned from the top tech headlines of 2012.

Here’s an excerpt from the article

On the surface, this story was about a company using the inventions of another company without permission. Apple claimed — and the jury agreed — that Samsung violated some critical patents in the design of the iPhone. Samsung should’ve either paid Apple for the rights or come up with their own inventions.

Yet, just below the surface, the trial’s key message was how desirable a great experience is and what a company will do to achieve it. Samsung might’ve come up with a great experience on their own, but borrowing from the Apple iPhone experience was too good to pass up.

How good? The jury awarded Apple $1 billion. Ok, that’s pretty good.

Read the article: 3 Big UX Lessons Ripped from 2012 Tech Headlines.

See Jared in person

Jared is keynoting at this spring’s UX Immersion Mobile Conference in Seattle, WA. Three days that delivers in-depth full-day workshops on every important topic for mobile UX designers. Get the details at UXIM.co.

Which UX related news story grabbed your attention this year? Tell us about it below.

We’re kicking off 2013 with one of our favorite presenters, Luke Wroblewski, tackling a timely and relevant topic in mobile design – Organizing Mobile Web Experiences.

From the reasons why people pull out a mobile device to how we can lay out navigation options on small screens, Luke will detail mobile design thinking and solutions that will help you organize your Web sites and apps. You’ll see how to make your design remain future friendly as Luke shows you what’s coming next.

See what the web is uniquely good at and how to adjust your site’s content accordingly. You’ll explore the best way to place navigational elements, to ensure your design has great clarity and retains your users’ focus on their tasks. Luke will explore new techniques, such as responsive web design, for handling multi-device layout.

Join us on January 10 for Organizing Mobile Web Experiences with Luke Wroblewski. Register your team, or make this part of your 10-seminar package.

Are you familiar with the 12 days of Christmas? Well we’re twisting it and offering 12 days of mobile podcasts from today’s mobile UX leaders. They’re so good you may not want to do just one a day. Play the podcast on your computer or download the files and listen at your convenience. And feel free to share them with others.

Navigating the Mobile Landscape
Luke Wroblewski

Mobile is the “hot topic” these days. It’s increasingly at the front of designers’ minds. In a world where the power and capabilities of the device in your pocket are so great, the possibilities become somewhat astounding. The mobile landscape is changing so rapidly that it makes developing a formal strategy to “figure mobile out” all but impossible. Luke discusses how taking advantage of the market as it is today and the capabilities of these devices can lead to the refinement and evolution of your product.

Listen to Luke’s podcast.

Mapping the User Experience
Chris Risdon

In the current multi-device, interconnected landscape, a user can interact with your product or service from a variety of touchpoints. At each, you must address the user’s needs at a particular place and time. Those needs will be determined by where they are in the experience.

Listen to Chris’s podcast.

Mobile-first Responsive Design
Jason Grigsby

Speed and performance are a critical aspect of mobile design. Using media queries to design your site responsively is a great way to ensure proper display on mobile devices. But just shrinking a desktop site to work on a mobile device can affect performance.

Listen to Jason’s podcast.

Designing Multi-Device User Experiences
Luke Wroblewski

Context is an important consideration in designing a mobile experience. As new devices enter the market, designers have to contend with new form factors and consider things such as ergonomics. Even things such as Apple’s retina displays affect approaches to design.

Listen to Luke’s podcast.

Content Strategy for Mobile
Karen McGrane

Your content is visible practically everywhere. Content strategists need to structure content to allow for viewing on an array of devices. What does that mean for your content management system? And what do you need to build into your content to make it flexible and adaptable?

Listen to Karen’s podcast.

Buttons are a Hack
Josh Clark

Touchscreen devices give you the ability to directly manipulate content. This allows designers to create interfaces where the content itself is the control. This lessens the need for buttons and can reduce the level of complexity within your design. The problem is making the user aware of the availability of gestures in your design. Gestures, especially multi-touch gestures, are powerful control mechanisms but useless if the users aren’t aware of them.

Listen to Josh’s podcast.

Adapting Your Designs with Progressive Enhancement
Aaron Gustafson

It’s difficult to predict how users will access your designs and your content. More and more, people are connecting to the internet through some sort of mobile device. Using the latest advances in HTML and CSS can leave aspects of your site incompatible with some browsers. How do you ensure that you’re providing a good experience to your users over a broad spectrum of scenarios?

Listen to Aaron’s podcast.

Innovative Mobile Intranet Design
James Robertson

With mobile, you simply can’t have as much content on your pages as you do on the desktop. Intranet access within enterprises is crucial and accessing it with mobile devices is beneficial. However, the vast amount of pages and content is cumbersome and impractical for a mobile setting. James Robertson asks, what are the few essential things users need while they are away from their desks?

Listen to Jeff’s podcast.

Creating Great Mobile User Experiences
Rachel Hinman

Mobile is greatly influencing the user experience community. It’s challenging traditional approaches to design, but also bringing with it a host of new opportunities. Being a user experience practitioner in this changing environment is a bit scary. Yet coupling existing skill sets with the constraints of designing in the mobile space makes for an exciting world full of possibility.

Listen to Rachel’s podcast.

Examining Mobile User Input
Luke Wroblewski

Touch screen devices are commonplace. It’s now expected that your mobile experience work as well as, if not better than, your desktop experience. With faster connection speeds, cameras, GPS, gyroscopes, and accelerometers, we can deliver information to users in new ways. But we can also receive information from them as well.

Listen to Luke’s podcast.

Discoverability in Designing for Touch
Josh Clark

While the traditional “mouse and cursor” interfaces are still in use, many of us are becoming familiar with touch-based interactions. The power and capabilities of mobile and tablet devices is growing. Often, these devices are the more convenient alternative for users to access your content. But beyond accessing your information, how are they interacting with your design?

Listen to Josh’s podcast.

Beyond Channels: Context Is King – A 2012 IA Summit Podcast
Emily Wengert

When smartphones and tablets first emerged, designers focused on channel differences like screen size in order to understand the basics in this new area. It’s time to set aside channel-centric planning and think of a user’s context first.

Listen to Emily’s podcast.

Looking to enhance your mobile UX design skill set?

Choose from six daylong mobile design workshops. You also attend a day of 90-minute talks. All at the UX Immersion Mobile Conference in Seattle, WA, April 22-24. Explore the conference topics at UXIM.co.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:58 — 15.5MB)

[ Transcript Available ]

With so many teams and divisions within organizations, falling into a pattern of designing within your own silo is incredibly easy. Mobile teams are focused on the mobile products. Desktop teams are concerned with the desktop experience. But customers interact with your product or service from an increasing variety of touchpoints. They expect a seamless experience across channels and devices. This often is not the case.

Chris Risdon, Adaptive Path’s Lead Experience Designer, emphasizes that a customer’s journey is about their relationship with an organization, not these disparate experiences. Designing in silos creates an amnesiatic environment. Oftentimes, the different parts of an organization aren’t talking to each other, subjecting a user to redundant experiences. For example, when a customer repeats account or service information to a call center representative after having already entered it into an automated system.

Getting a diverse group involved to map the customer’s journey will lead to greater design collaboration. Chris says that the process of mapping the journey is ultimately more important than the artifact it creates. The process allows you to see how you fit into your customer’s life. You identify more about the context of use and how to effectively tell the story of the customer’s journey.

Chris is presenting one of the daylong workshops at the UX Immersion conference, April 22-24, 2013 in Seattle. This year’s conference features 6 experts covering various aspects of mobile design. For more information on Chris’ 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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[ Subscribe with other podcast applications.]

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During 2012, we published 37 articles in a variety of areas in user experience. Sure, we’d love you to read all the articles, but we realize it’s difficult to find the time. So we’ve put together a list of the more popular articles. Some of these articles are by guest writers, others are based on the research we d

Use the insights you learn from these articles to enhance your designs in 2013. Now, without any further ado and in no particular order here are the 6 article excerpts and their links.

The Magical Short-Form Creative Brief
Jared M. Spool

Something this simple shouldn’t have such wide–spread, long–term effects on the quality of a team’s work. Yet surprisingly, it does.

We first saw it with one of our clients. It was this weird ritual at the start of every meeting that discussed one of their designs.

One of the team members, always a different person, would read the exact same document out loud, word for word. The document, about three–quarters of a printed page, contained a tiny creative brief about the design they were working on. Reading it out loud was how they started every design meeting, whether it was a brainstorming meeting or a design review.

Typically, this little pledge–of–allegiance–like ritual took about two minutes to complete. Not much really. However, it completely changed the tenor of the meeting.

Read the rest of Jared’s article.

Device Experience and Responsive Design
Luke Wroblewski

While the task of designing Web applications and sites for multiple devices can be daunting, two techniques can make the process more manageable: classifying device experiences and designing/building responsively. Here’s how these two approaches can work together to optimize interface designs across a wide range of connected devices.

Read the rest of Luke’s article.

Unleashing the Power of a UX KPI
Jared M. Spool

The Eight-Minute # Field

It took the customer-service representative what seemed like forever to explain this one field. In fact, it was just eight minutes – we timed it. He explained what the field did, how it worked, but most importantly, that the customer should never, ever, under any circumstances, change the value of this field in his customer profile to any value other than what it was currently set to. The field’s label was a very uninformative pound sign (‘#’) and the value that should never change was 1.

The customer on the other end of the phone will never get those eight minutes back. Nor will the customer-service representative. Nor will the three developers watching the recording.

But that eight-minute description of the # field and its never-to-change value was critical to the success of the product. It helped the team identify something that could easily be fixed and have ripple effects through the entire product.

Read the rest of Jared’s article.

Designing What’s Never Been Done Before
Jared M. Spool

For today’s designer, much of the work we do focuses on improving designs that already exist. Whether what we’re working on is something we’ve built or we’re improving on a competitor’s idea, we can look to what users do today to figure out where we can make the design better. We understand how to identify the improvements by using time-proven methods and processes.

However, with greater frequency than ever before, we now get opportunities to work on design solutions that don’t have existing models to work from. We’re working in the world of the “never been done before.”

Maybe we’re integrating a new technology into a workflow that’s never had something like that before, much like what’s been happening with handheld devices in medicine? Maybe we’re providing new data and insights to people because we can now combine data in a way we never could before, like what’s happening in the world of big data? Or maybe we have a way for users to take advantage of each other’s experience and knowledge, like some of the emerging crowd-sourcing applications?

Read the rest of Jared’s article.

In Defense of Lorem Ipsum
Karen McGrane

Lorem Ipsum is one of those things like silicone breast implants or orange spray cheese in a can that just seems wrong. It’s fake. It’s unabashedly fake. It calls attention to itself by being so fake, making you look at it in wonder, asking: “What is that? Can that be real?”

We don’t like fake, right? We like organic cheeses, and, well, organic breasts, and we’re 100% in favor of real content in our designs.

What you put in your mouth or have surgically inserted into your body is your business. What you put in your wireframes or your design comps? Well, that’s a heated public debate. With respected thought leaders asking us to pinky-swear that we’ll never, ever use Lorem Ipsum ever again, I want to say a few words in support of greek text.

Read the rest of Karen’s article.

Prototyping’s Resurgence: Communicating the Designer’s Intent
Jared M. Spool

Interaction design is facing a paradox because of two seemingly conflicting truths. The first truth, “Great design is done in the designer’s head.” Design is a thoughtful activity. We sit and consider what we’re designing very carefully. If we don’t have time and a place to think, the odds are we’ll arrive at a poor design.

However, that seems to be in direct conflict with another truth: “Design is a team sport.” Today’s interaction design is so involved, so complex, that it can’t be done by one person alone. Great designs come from teams of designers working together.

Yet we can’t shove the entire team into our head (or even part of the team, for that matter). So how do we reconcile these two truths? How can we do the design in our head while working as a team?

This is why prototyping is seeing a resurgence amongst interaction designers. I say resurgence because for the last ten or so years, prototyping hasn’t been a popular design activity.

Read the rest of Jared’s article.

See these authors in person

All three authors will be presenting at next spring’s UX Immersion Mobile Conference in Seattle, WA. Three days that delivers in-depth full-day workshops on every important topic for mobile UX designers.

Which articles did you find most valuable, or share with others this year? Tell us about it.

We’re looking for an amazing Business Intern for a paid, 4-month internship.

Fast Forward Four Months…

We’d like to thank you for doing a fantastic job as our 2013 Winter/Spring Business Intern. You started with a thorough analysis of the purchasing patterns in our UIE Virtual Seminar series, as compared to registrations for our live events. You also helped us get our breakthrough All You Can Learn subscription program off the ground.

You put together a marvelous weekly social media outreach strategy. Once you started executing it, we saw a real lift in the conversations we’ve had with our customers, which has had a direct affect on our bottom line.

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To top it off, you’ve even helped us document our business development process to make life easier for future interns.

Thanks for your energy and enthusiasm during your internship. We know you’ll succeed at your future ventures.

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 business accomplishment. While we’re less concerned with your skills and qualifications, we won’t compromise on your ability to deliver team results. We’ll be back to you in 48 hours if you have what it takes to achieve something special.

You might even want to check out our web site—www.uie.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 equipment you need, including Apple hardware and Mac software to bring out the best in your talents and skills.

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