The world of mobile design is new, and therefore, scary for many. The comforts of designing for the desktop disappear when we have to deal with these portable, tiny devices. Even the way we design – the processes and techniques we’ve honed over many years of practice – suddenly doesn’t work the same. We need to think about our work in new ways. Very scary.

Yet this scary new world also brings tremendous opportunity. Thanks to the pioneers in this space, there’s a new appreciation for the value of design. That new appreciation gives us room to rejigger the broken parts of how we’ve designed in the past. And that’s really exciting.

In this week’s UIEtips, I explore both the scary and the exciting that comes with mobile design. Join me as I look at four areas where designers will face challenges and opportunities in the coming year.

Read the article: UX & Mobile Design – 2012′s Challenges and Opportunities.

If you’re facing these mobile design challenges and opportunities, then you’re in for a real treat. We’ve just announced our new spring conference: UX Immersion 2012, which has a focus on creating great mobile designs. You’ll want to consider one or two of the in-depth, full-day workshops by Rachel Hinman, Luke Wroblewski, or James Robertson. These folks will help you overcome the challenges and take advantage of the opportunities. See the entire UX Immersion program.

How are you dealing with the challenges of mobile design? How have you taken advantage of the opportunities? Leave your thoughts below.

The latest of the obviously obvious findings we’ve come up with? That teams who don’t have a shared understanding of their design rarely succeed at producing a great product. See? It’s obvious.

Yet it surprises me that quite frequently the obvious is not what people do. Many teams that we’ve studied don’t pay attention to whether they have a shared understanding or not. They don’t create a process to ensure everyone is on the same page. Then they wonder why their results aren’t what they want.

In today’s UIEtips, I describe the two types of shared understanding we uncovered and how one of them is far more likely to end with a successful design. I’m betting this is an article that will create some interesting discussions amongst your team.

Read the article: Attaining a Collaborative Shared Understanding.

A collaborative shared understanding is a key component of successful Agile projects. Fortunately, on January 24, Anders Ramsay will be sharing his techniques for helping teams collaborate in his UIE Virtual Seminar, Designing with Agile. Bring your team and learn the best techniques.

Have you transitioned from a contractual approach to a collaborative approach to attaining shared understanding? We’d love to hear how it went (or is going). Leave us a note below.

There’s value in listening and reading everything we produced in 2011. But we know time is a factor. So in the last UIEtips for 2011, we decided to share the 5 most popular blog posts and articles.

Here they are, in no particular order, the most popular articles and blogposts published during 2011.

Why I can’t convince executives to invest in UX (and neither can you)

Blog post published June 8, 2011, by Jared M. Spool

Every few weeks, a phone call or email comes out of the blue, asking me to perform magic. The inquirer always wants the same thing: to stand up in front of a room filled with their executives, delighting them with a presentation that will make them rise to their feet cheering. This audience will then burst out of the room, demanding their subordinates to invest everything in a whole-scale, no-holds-barred user experience effort that will revolutionize the company, the products, and the world.

OK, maybe I’m exaggerating a little. But I am quite frequently asked to convince executives to invest in user experience.

And it may surprise you to learn that I refuse the offer every time.

Read more about Jared’s rationale behind, Why I can’t convince executives to invest in UX.

6 Epic Forces Battling Your Mega Menus

Published August 24, 2011, by Jared M. Spool

“This is a perfect opportunity for us to use that mega menu we wanted to try out.” That’s what I heard a few weeks ago, sitting in a client meeting.

The client was dealing with balancing a lot of navigation while keeping their home page free for the important messages they want everyone to see. A mega menu – those large multi-column layered menus that pop up when you hover over the navigation – seemed like just the ticket.

However, our research shows mega menus come at a price. In this article, I talk about the epic forces that are constantly in battle with any mega menu implementation, preventing the users from getting value.

Read the article, 6 Epic Forces Battling Your Mega Menus.

Beans and Noses

Blog post published July 8, 2011, by Jared M. Spool

Over the years, I’ve received a lot of great advice. One piece of advice I keep coming back to is about managing expectations. It came from an old friend, just a few days after I’d started my consulting practice.

He was a seasoned consultant himself and I had asked him what I should know, just starting out. He told me his First Rule of Consulting:

No matter how much you try, you can’t stop people from sticking beans up their nose.

That was it. Beans up the nose. Really.

At the time, I thought he was nuts. Now, I’ve come to realize those are words to live by.

Find out more on what Jared means regarding beans and noses.

Creating Great Design Principles: 6 Counter-intuitive Tests

Published March 1, 2011, by Jared M. Spool

The excitement in the room was electric. Everyone was waiting for the big moment. Finally,
it was here.

For six months, the team had been working on their new design principles. In closed meetings, they were hashing out what they were going to do and how it would be different. Now, the project manager was walking to the front and revealing the fruits of their labors.

Easy to use. Enjoyable. Innovative.

People were shuffling in their seats. Really? Six months for this? “But, we’ve got executive buy-in. That took a lot of work,” the project manager defended. Right, because who could argue against ‘innovative’?

We’ve seen this scenario play out way too often. Teams create principles that prove too generic to be useful in any design decisions.

Learn about the six tests that separate out generic design principles from those that really work for a team in the article, Creating Great Design Principles: 6 Counter-intuitive Tests.

Do Users Change Their Settings

Blog post published September 14, 2011, by Jared M. Spool

Back in the early days of PC computing, we were interested in how people used all those options, controls, and settings that software designers put into their applications. How much do users customize their applications?

We embarked on a little experiment. We asked a ton of people to send us their settings file for Microsoft Word. At the time, MS Word stored all the settings in a file named something like config.ini, so we asked people to locate that file on their hard disk and email it to us. Several hundred folks did just that.

We then wrote a program to analyze the files, counting up how many people had changed the 150+ settings in the applications and which settings they had changed.

What we found was really interesting.

Read more about what our research discovered.

Now I look at the basic usability test protocol like it’s a column of wet clay, ready to be molded into exactly the research instrument we need. Over the years, we’ve invented, borrowed, and stolen different variations, all to help us better understand our users and what we’re designing.

In today’s UIEtips, I talk about five of our favorite variations. You’ll see how we bend and twist basic techniques to discover new things about what we’re designing.

Read the article: Bending the Protocols – Useful Variations on Usability Tests

What are your favorite variations on usability testing? Tell us below what you’re doing.

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 when 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 today’s UIEtips, we look back at an article from December 2009. I talk about some perils we’ve seen when users clicked on sponsored links, only to be disappointed by the results. Two years later our findings are still the same.

Read the article, Three Perils with Search Landing Pages.

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

What’s really fascinating about this article is the back story. The client had hired us because they were concerned about checkout-process abandonment. Their analytics were showing a 13% drop off in sales, which, based on the average value of the abandoned shopping carts, was worth about $1.2 million a year in additional revenue.

Checkout-process abandonment is common in e-commerce sites and something that you can easily detect with your site’s usage logs. You just look at the number of people who get to the first screen and then the number of people who actually complete the transaction. Everyone who doesn’t make it is considered an abandoned cart.

When the team contacted us, they’d already pretty much decided what the problem was and how they were going to fix it, even though they had never watched any shoppers make purchases. And they were dead wrong. Not only was their fix not going to help, our research showed that it was going to increase abandonment.

Two weeks of usability testing on the live site (and on competitors’ sites), followed by two weeks of iterative paper prototype testing produced a streamlined checkout process, which, once implemented, showed a dramatic increase in revenues. It’s amazing what you’ll learn when you actually watch your users.

Today’s article talks about the bulk of that increase — how a simple change to a common screen produced $300,000,000 of additional revenue over the next year. I’m sure you’ll find it interesting.

You can also read more on the back story of the $300 Million Button on the Brain Sparks blog.

Have you seen results from changes to your forms? We’d love to hear your experiences. Share them with us below.

As our clients are moving to more rapid development processes, like Agile’s Scrum, their design teams are looking for ways to infuse their UX work into the process. My recent research shows that Lean UX is one way to get there and it’s getting lots of traction through out the UX community.

In this week’s UIEtips, I discuss what’s been happening to our design processes and why I think Lean UX has real potential to change the way we approach our work. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.

Read the article: Is There Any Meat on This Lean UX Thing?

As an extra bonus, coming up on Wednesday, December 7, we’ve invited Jeff Gothelf to talk about how he’s using it to get his company, The Ladders, out of the deliverables business. If you’re working in Agile or another fast-moving environment and want to know core essential techniques for good design, you won’t want to miss this virtual seminar. Read the details.

What’s your take on Lean UX? Is it something you’ve been working with? How has it helped you? Share your thoughts below.

As we study what makes teams successful, we realize that the successful teams aren’t doing anything new or novel. Their success is solidly based on a fundamental that many of the struggling teams have forgotten: good design decisions come from informed members of the team.

A significant difference that’s come about in this new agile world is team integration. No longer is UX design owned by the UX designers: everyone on the team now has design responsibilities. That means that everyone needs to understand what the design is trying to do.

When we talked to the teams from the successful organizations, we found a common theme: they used a framework to make sure their teammates have all the information they need. We’ve codified this framework as UX Layers, which span from the big picture of a long-term vision all the way down to the details of individual user stories for developing the next sprint.

In today’s UIEtips, we look back at an article from May of this year. We explore the UX Layers, looking at how they each fit together. Whether you’re currently doing Agile development, planning to move there, or still working in a waterfall world, I think you’ll find this framework will help ensure you’ve got all the information you need to create great designs.

Read the article, Essential UX Layers for Agile and Lean Design Teams.

Want to know more about how Lean UX contributes to working faster, smarter, and happier? Explore our next UIE Virtual Seminar on Wednesday, December 7 with Jeff Gothelf, Lean UX: Getting Out of the Deliverables Business.

Has your team tried a similar framework for ensuring every team member is making informed decisions? Let us know your thoughts and questions below.

It’s not too different in our world of design. There’s a lot of long-forgotten “old thinking” which is relevant with today’s thinking. In today’s article, I share an old model that has appeared on my radar over the last few years.

If you hang out with me, you’ve probably heard me say, “Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgments.” Today’s article describes a model that explains how that maxim actually works. The model is called The Four Stages of Competence, and has a myriad of uses in our design work.

Read the article: The Flexibility of the Four Stages of Competence.

What old thinking have you discovered lately? How do these four stages fit into your design work? We’d love to hear your thoughts below.

That’s not the case when you bring Adapative Path’s CEO, Brandon Schauer into the picture. Brandon has a way of getting an entire team—executives, designers, developers, marketers all producing dozens and dozens of ideas. He does this through a group of excerises and tools you’ll find in a workshop called Good Design Faster.

In today’s article, we look at an excerpt from an interview I had with Brandon back in September. Brandon shares his methods on how to get your team producing many ideas, what makes ideas tangible, and why it’s critical to move past the first idea.

Read the article, Good Design Faster – An Interview with Brandon Schauer.

This article is just a small taste of what the Good Design Faster workshop is all about. On Wednesday, November 9, Brandon will share a lot more on Good Design Faster at an all day workshop at the User Interface 16 Conference in Boston.

How do you motivate your team to get innovative? Share you thoughts below.

We had been working on a client project, helping their team redesign their checkout process with some new user research and design techniques.

As we were watching seasoned shoppers buy products in the lab, we noticed that people were getting stuck at a screen right before the checkout process, where they had to authenticate their account. Repeat customers couldn’t remember their user ID and password combination. The site used an email address as the user ID, but many of our repeat customers had set up their accounts years before and couldn’t remember which of their email addresses was the ID.

In the lab, the customers who couldn’t authenticate would either give up or request a password reset. However, the password reset required they remember which email address was their ID, which many couldn’t do. We witnessed a remarkable number of abandonments on the password reset screen.

When the password reset was successful, the customer had to go to their email client, find the reset message (often lost in a spam folder), and click on a link in the email. In the lab, we observed that this was a complex process.

All of this led us to ask if this was only happening in the artificial environment of the lab, because we watching users in our space, not using their own machine. We set out to look at the site’s analytics to see if there were clues to this behavior happening in the real world.

The first thing we asked the analytics team was what percentage of visitors to the authentication page ended up on the reset password request screen. Turns out, they had never instrumented either page. We had to wait three weeks while they instrumented it and we collected a reasonable sample size.

We learned a substantial percentage of customers were requesting password reset, approximately 40%. Two out of every five users was getting stuck and needing their password to be reset.

We then wondered what percentage of those people actually came back to finish the transaction after the reset. Again, we discovered the analytics team hadn’t instrumented the return from the reset. That was another three week delay.

We learned that fewer than 25% of the resets were executed — the user clicked on the reset link and returned to the site. Of those who did execute it, fewer than 20% finished their purchases.

A little math and we could calculate out the amount of revenue being abandoned in the carts by all the people who couldn’t authenticate. That’s where the $300,000,000/year number came from.

Once the team implemented a guest purchase capability (which didn’t require authentication to start the checkout sequence), they saw an immediate jump in sales increase of about $6,000,000 in the first week, which remained constant. Password reset requests dropped by about 80% in that first week and remained constant too.

Authentication pages are usually owned by a different group in the company. In this case, they were owned by IT. IT didn’t have the foresight to instrument these pages.

Until we did this research and asked these questions, nobody knew how many people were dropping off at authentication. Because authentication was between the shopping-cart and the Enter-your-shipping-info pages, everyone thought they were getting a much lower percentage of users clicking the Checkout button than they really were. The site had a huge abandonment on authentication that heretofore had gone undetected.

Analytics only work when we know that they are measuring everything correctly. Working with clients, we regularly discover they aren’t capturing the entire picture, leaving out critical information.

The same can be true in an Agile development process. Often times, the team will start with a piece of the project that isn’t the first thing the user experiences, but instead might be at the end.

In this week’s UIEtips we are revisiting part one of an article we published by Jeff Patton in 2008 on his 12 Best Practices for UX in an Agile Environment. Jeff has been working with Agile teams and user experience professionals to discover the best methods to work together to create great results.

Jeff mentioned that user experience designers on the Agile team end up adopting a similar role to the person who gets the credit of “Continuity” in a film. It becomes their job to make sure the final experience makes sense, even though the order of construction was not linear. This is a huge challenge and one that has come to the forefront as more teams move to an Agile development method.

Read Jeff’s article 12 Best Practices for UX in an Agile Environment – Part 1.

Jeff is also presenting our next virtual seminar Story Mapping for UX Practitioners: Tying Agile & UX Together. If you work in an Agile environment and you’re struggling to weave UX thinking and principles into the iterative process, you’ll definitely want to attend this seminar.

In our experience, one of the most powerful ways to gather important insights about users is the field study. By making direct observations, design teams can identify opportunities they may have never discovered if they had only conducted usability tests, focus groups, or surveys.

I think it’s essential for all designers to really understand how to conduct a field study and learn how to gather critical information about users. That’s why in this week’s UIEtips we’re reprinting an article from 2007, where I discuss the unique power of field studies.

Read the article: Field Studies: The Best Tool to Discover User Needs

We are so excited about this topic that we’ve invited Steve Portigal, a world-renowned expert in ethnography and innovation, to conduct a full-day workshop at this year’s User Interface 16 Conference in Boston, November 7-9. If you’ve never done fieldwork, or want to learn the latest techniques for extracting brilliant design ideas from your customer visits, you’ll definitely want to explore Steve’s workshop at UICONF.com.

Earlier this year, Kim presented a UIE Virtual Seminar, Designing with Scenarios: Putting Your Personas to Work. There were so many awesome questions, but we ran out of time for Kim to answer them. So Kim and Adam recorded a podcast addressing the unanswered questions.

Today’s UIEtips article is based on Adam and Kim’s podcast focusing on 2 questions: Do you need data to effectively do scenarios, and what’s the difference between scenarios and storyboarding?

Read the article Designing with Scenarios: Putting Your Personas to Work.

Kim Goodwin is our go to person when it comes to personas and scenarios. If you missed her virtual seminar, in May, you can still access it. And we’re very excited to have Kim back at the User Interface 16 Conferenceto give a full-day workshop on scenarios. Her workshop was one of the highest rated at last year’s conference. Explore Kim’s workshop and the other seven workshops offered UI16.

Sure, critique should be constructive and impartial, yet it’s inevitable that you’ll occasionally disagree with the feedback you receive. Critique is a crunch moment for the undercover designer—you’re sticking your neck out and taking the lead of the design process. However, stakeholders sometimes see design as a complex, unpredictable subject that can cause havoc in the wrong hands. Who wants to let a bull loose in their china shop?

In today’s UIEtips, Cennydd Bowles shares an excerpt from Undercover User Experience Design, a book he co-wrote with James Box. Cennydd outlines his advice for winning a UX debate and explains what to do when you disagree with the feedback you receive on your design. We love this book, and think this excerpt is a great way to immerse yourself in his concept of undercover UX design.

Read the article: Winning a User Experience Debate

It just so happens that Cennydd is conducting our next virtual seminar on July 21: UX Design when Time, Money, and Support is Limited. At the end of this seminar, you’ll be able to put UX principles into practice in any organization, and learn how to make the case for user experience design with results, not theory. Learn more about this virtual seminar.

For the past few years, we’ve been researching why so many persona projects have such dismal results. We discovered there are basic factors that are critical for a project’s success, yet most teams ignored them.

In today’s UIEtips, I discuss five of these factors. We look at the role of research, who should be involved in the personas, and other essentials that differentiates between a successful persona project and a failed one. I’m sure you’ll find it helpful for planning your projects.

Read the article: Five Factors for Successful Persona Projects

While I’m on the subject of UX techniques, I’m really looking forward to Cennydd Bowles’ upcoming UIE Virtual Seminar on UX Design when Time, Money, and Support is Limited. Cennydd is a kick-ass presenter and his book, Undercover User Experience Design, is a brand new classic. Find out more about the seminar.

Have you tried to use personas in your projects? What have you found to be the keys to your project’s success (or the reason for your project’s demise)? We’d love to hear your thoughts below.

Kate Brigham and her group at PatientsLikeMe are doing amazing work when it comes to online communities. They’ve created and nurtured an environment where patients can share information and their stories through data visualization. Below is part of the transcript from my interview with Kate earlier this year. After you read the article, you’ll definitely want to hear the rest of the podcast and encourage anyone you know with a chronic or life changing illness to explore PatientsLikeMe.com.

Read the article, Building a Community through Stories and Data or listen to the podcast.

And you can hear Kate in person at our last stop of the Web App Masters Tour
in Minneapolis on June 27-28. Get all the details of her talk and the 8 other masters at www.UIETour.com.

If you haven’t explored the UIE podcast library (hopefully you knew of its existence), it’s time you did. Many of our upcoming UIE Virtual Seminar presenters, like Dan Brown and Dan Rubin (our June webinars) have podcasts. It’s a good way to hear their expertise and see why we think they’re so great. Explore the podcast library.

Now the team learned from usability studies that the site wasn’t resonating with the users. They couldn’t understand why. The team incorporated all the ideas and information that the marketing team gave them. Turns out, that was the main problem.

Instead of actually conducting ethnographic interviews with users and building a design around a set of personas, the team developed a design around non-existent research and what the marketing department and executives desired. Ah, if only they created some personas first.

In today’s UIEtips, we look back at an article that Kim Goodwin wrote in 2005. It’s a classic. Everything about it still holds true to this day. Kim discusses how personas affect design and the type of goals to think about when creating personas. If you’re new to personas, this is a must read. And if you’ve been doing personas for a while, it’s a great refresher.

Read the article: Perfecting Your Personas.

Personas are just part of building better designs. The next step is to incorporate personas into scenarios. Luckily, Kim Goodwin is giving our next virtual seminar on just that – Designing with Scenarios: Putting Personas to Work. Learn more about today’s virtual seminar. (We record the seminar so if you can’t make it today, you can listen to it another
time).

Does your team create personas? How have they helped your design? Let us know your thoughts and questions below.

As we’ve been studying what works and what doesn’t work, we’ve realized that the successful teams aren’t doing anything new or novel. Their success is solidly based on a fundamental that many of the struggling teams have forgotten: good design decisions come from informed members of the team.

The big difference that’s arisen in this new agile world is how integrated the team is. No longer is UX design owned by the UX designers: everyone on the team now has design responsibilities. That means that everyone needs to be informed about what the design is trying to do.

When we talked to the teams from the successful organizations, we found a common theme: they used a framework to make sure their teammates have all the information they need. We’ve codified this framework as UX Layers, which span from the big picture of a long-term vision all the way down to the details of individual user stories for developing the next sprint.

In today’s UIEtips, we explore the UX Layers, looking at how they each fit together. Whether you’re currently doing Agile development, planning to move there, or still working in a waterfall world, I think you’ll find this framework will help ensure you’ve got all the information you need to create great designs.

Read the article, Essential UX Layers for Agile and Lean Design Teams.

Want to know more about designing for UX in an agile world? Then you don’t want to miss Julie Zhuo and Aviva Rosenstein’s talks about the amazing techniques that Facebook and Salesforce.com’s teams are using. They are both part of the upcoming UIE Web App Masters Tour. See their sessions and the entire awesome program at UIEtour.com

Searching on the web is a pretty simple task and most often gets us what we need. Yet when we add another channel into the equation, like going to the store for the product you’re researching, or reaching out to the call center with questions, the search experience can quickly turn poor, becoming frustrating and unproductive.

In today’s UIEtips, Pete Bell breaks down search into 2 basic types: fact finding and discovery. He discusses how these two methods of search affect users’ expectations and experiences and how multi-channels compound the issues. This article is an excerpt from Greg Nudelman’s new book, Designing Search: UX Strategies for eCommerce Success.

Read Pete’s article: Search as a Multi-channel Experience.

Besides reading Pete’s article, you can learn more on how to improve search as a multi-channel experience at our next UIE Virtual Seminar with Pete on Thursday, April 28. And when you register for the webinar, you’ll get a copy of Greg Nudleman’s new book, Designing Search: UX Strategies for eCommerce. Get the details about Pete’s webinar.

We thought we had finally mastered building great applications on the desktop, only to realize that we now have to challenges of the mobile platform to deal with. We now discover that people want to have new insights into the massive amounts of data available. And our design process now needs to be faster than ever.

In building great applications, we have to overcome challenges we’ve never faced before. However, what we’re discovering is that with each new solution, we see happier users and better business results.

In today’s UIEtips, we look at some of these challenges and what they entail. We also see the rewards that come from them and how they delight our users, improve our business, and make the world that much better. I know you’ll enjoy the article.

Read the article Mobile Strategy, Data Visualization, and Design Process: Big Challenges, Big Rewards.

Mobile strategy, data visualization, and the application design process are a big deal. That’s why we’ve decided to tackle them head on in this year’s UIE Web App Master Tour. Join us in Seattle and Minneapolis as experts like Luke Wroblewski, Noah Iliinsky, and Stephen Anderson guide us through the latest thinking and newest approaches to tackling these critical challenges. For more information, see UIETour.com.

Register by May 6 and get the 2010 Web App Masters Tour recordings. Think of it as an appetizer to this year’s Tour.

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, we look back on an article from January 2010 where I discuss how the best designers thrive within this world of wacky constraints, coming up with ingenious ways to meet the business requirements while ensuring a delightful user experience. If you design web apps, this should be interesting.

Read the article, Web Apps – Where Business Needs and User Needs Collide.

Web app design is at the forefront of our minds this month. We just finished our Philadelphia tour stop, and it was a huge success. Our next stop is Seattle on May 23-24 and then Minneapolis on June 27-28. 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 http://www.UIETour.com

Hear the Masters’ Insights on mobile design, data visualization, and design process. Visit UIETour.com

In today’s UIEtips, Steve Portigal 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.

Back in 2010, we asked Steve to present a UIE Virtual Seminar on how to make sure we’re not leaving any important information behind. We’re bringing him back on April 7 for another seminar on User Research Analysis. If you’ve had a pile of notes from the latest round of usability testing and weren’t sure what your next step was, this seminar is for you. Learn more about this important topic.

We’ve spent some quality time with Stephen Anderson. Steve makes it his business to explore how serious applications can be fun and engaging. The more we talk to him, the more examples we see of fascinating and novel approaches to entice people to use our designs.

In today’s UIEtips, we revisit an article we wrote a year ago. In the article, we explore some of Stephen’s thinking with a fresh look at how the elements of game play can serve our business requirements. We look at examples from four businesses to see different approaches to integrating the elements of play into great user experiences. I’m sure you’ll find it interesting.

Read the article, Designing with the Elements of Play

At last year’s Web App Masters Tour, Stephen’s talk was a big hit, so much so we’re bringing him back for this year’s tour. Stephen will show how to change people’s behaviors and improve their lives by tapping into their emotions. Don’t miss him (or the other great Web App Masters) at our upcoming stops in Philadelphia,
Seattle or Minneapolis.

Have you experimented with game play in your applications? We’d love to hear your experiences. Share them below.

Register with the promotion code BLOG by March 20, 2011 for any of the Tour cities and get $100 off.

Mishaps do happen with mobile devices, but there are ways that design can protect against those accidental occurrences or even undue the mistakes. The Apple iPhone is a great example of incorporating design that prevents these unwanted mistakes.

In this week’s UIETips article, we’re reprinting an article that Josh Clark, author of Tapworthy, wrote back in October. Josh does a great job explaining different design interfaces that Apple used in their iPhone to prevent you from deleting important items or doing unwanted actions with your phone.

Read Josh’s article, iPhone App Design – When an Awkward Interface Makes Sense.

If you’re looking for more on mobile design techniques, we have 2 opportunities for you. First is Josh Clark’s upcoming UIE Virtual Seminar on March 17—Designing Tapworthy Mobile Apps.

Your second opportunity is the Web App Masters Tour in Philadelphia, Seattle, or Minneapolis. At the tour, Josh will guide us through the decision making process of whether to build native mobile apps or web-based interfaces. Learn more about Josh’s session. If you’re planning on registering for the tour in Philadelphia, use the promotion code WAMT300 and get a $200 discount.

For six months, the team had been working on their new design principles. In closed meetings, they were hashing out what they were going to do and how it would be different. Now, the project manager was walking to the front and revealing the fruits of their labors.

Easy to use. Enjoyable. Innovative.

People were shuffling in their seats. Really? Six months for this? “But, we’ve got executive buy-in. That took a lot of work,” the project manager defended. Right, because who could argue against ‘innovative’?

We’ve seen this scenario play out way too often. Teams create principles that prove too generic to be useful in any design decisions. They get put on a plaque next to the corporate mission, never to be referred to again.

Yet our research, while studying teams that create great user experiences, found teams were using design principles that weren’t generic. These principles were specific to the project, based on research, and constantly being tested by the team. These principles pushed their design to new levels and the results showed in delighted customers.

In today’s UIEtips, I reveal six tests that separate out generic design principles from those that really work for a team. If you have principles, you can test them and see how they do. If you don’t, you can use these tests to create some that will drive your design decisions.

Read the article: Creating Great Design Principles – 6 Counter-intuitive Tests.

I’ll be talking about our research into design principles at the UIE Web App Masters Tour. I’ll show how to create these principles and the different ways teams get the most out of them. It’s the first time we’re talking about this ground-breaking research. You don’t want to miss it. Learn about the tour at UIETour.com.

Last week we featured an excerpt from Noah Iliinsky’s book Beautiful Visualization. The article explained how we achieve beauty in information design, and the distinction between visuals designed to show what the designer already knows, versus visuals intended to explain a new concept or idea.

In today’s UIEtips, we feature the rest of Noah’s excerpt. Noah explores the importance of making visualizations more efficient, and tips to reduce visual noise and the quantity of text.

Read the article, Beautiful Visualization: How To Make it Efficient.

This Thursday, February 24, Noah continues to explore using information visualization to explain data in a virtual seminar. He’ll discuss the types of visualizations in common use, why and when they are useful, what types to use in different situations, how to think about different types, and who’s doing good work. Learn more about this virtual seminar.

And you’ll also have an opportunity to see Noah in person at one of the Web App Master Tour stops. The first stop kicks off on March 21 in Philadelphia. Read about the Web App Masters Tour.

How do you make your visualizations more efficient? Do you have specific methods for cutting out the quantity of text? Share your thoughts with us below.

On Monday, we published part 1 of an article by Kevin Hoffman, Kick Ass Kickoff Meetings. In the article, Kevin explains the advance work that should take place prior to the kickoff meeting, and the type of questions you should ask your stakeholders. You may want to read part 1 before reading part 2.

In part 2, Kevin dives deep into a plethora of exercises to use in kickoff meetings including a design studio activity. He also gives a list of suggestions on how a virtual participant can feel more present at the meeting.

Read the conclusion of Kick Ass Kickoff Meetings.

After reading part 1 and 2, you’re well on your way to producing kick ass kickoff meetings. But there’s one more resource that can help you. Kevin will be delivering our next virtual seminar on this very topic. He’ll share lots of great examples and the lessons the team at Happy Cog learned from one too many expensive and unproductive kickoffs. Learn more about Kevin’s seminar.

What do you do to jump-start the kickoff meetings and prevent them from being a ho-hum meetings? Share your thoughts with us below.

He invited all the key players from various departments. As they started filing into the room he started hearing murmurs of, “Here we go again, a useless kickoff meeting.” Eyes were rolling before the meeting even started, and half the attendees were checking their email, working on something else, or tweeting.

If only Joe had done his homework and read Kevin Hoffman’s article, Kick Ass Kickoff Meetings. Everything would have started differently.

Our good friend, Kevin Hoffman, contends that too many kickoff meetings squander the busiest, most expensive people’s time reiterating what everyone already knows. His challenge is that if every meeting is an opportunity, why waste your first, most important one?

In today’s UIEtips, were sharing an article Kevin wrote that caught our attention. We split the article into 2 parts. In part 1, Kevin explains the advance work that should take place prior to the kickoff meeting, and the type of questions you should ask your stakeholders. This article will start you down the path to better kickoff meetings.

Read the article, Kick Ass Kickoff Meetings.

It just so happens Kevin will be delivering our next virtual seminar on this very topic. He’ll share lots of great examples and the lessons the team at Happy Cog learned from one too many expensive and unproductive kickoffs. Learn more about Kevin’s seminar.

How do you prepare for kickoff meetings? What techniques do you employ to be sure team members leave those meetings full of ideas to explore? Share your thoughts with us below.

This was news to her. But it wasn’t news to me. That’s because “getting the basics right” is a basic tenet (no pun intended) of the Kano Model. Had the product manager known about this model and how it works, she wouldn’t have been so surprised by her customer’s reactions to new features.

In this UIEtips, we’ll closely inspect the Kano Model and see what it can bring us.

Read the article: Understanding The Kano Model – A Tool for Sophisticated Designers

Does the Kano Model explain things you’ve learned about your designs and your users? We’d love to hear about your experiences. Share them with us below.

Ethan Marcotte coined a term called Responsive Web Design. A technique that will help your design scale with the ever-growing array of devices and browsers, and it allows us to take a more universal approach to designing for the web.

In today’s UIEtips, Ethan shares an article he originally wrote for the fine people at A List Apart, Responsive Web Design. It outlines and explains his concept. Ethan gives you some of the steps you’ll need to start building your own flexible designs. We love the article, and think it’s a great way to immerse yourself in the concept.

Read Ethan’s article, Responsive Web Design.

As it turns out, Ethan is also giving our first virtual seminar of 2011: The How and Why of Responsive Web Design. At the end of this Thursday’s seminar, you’ll understand why you should adopt a responsive approach to your design, learn how you can start with flexible designs, and how you can manage different kinds of fixed-width media in a flexible layout. Learn more about this virtual seminar.

Did you know about responsive web design? What do you do now to adapt your workflow to better accommodate a responsive product? Share your thoughts with us below.

Today, we’ll take a look back at:

• How to Create a UX Design Library. Nathan Curtis of EightShapes walks us through the process of creating a library. He’s broken it down into four doable steps (and even has a fabulous poster-grade visualization of the process).
• Five Indispensable Skills for UX Mastery. Here I explain five essential skills a UX designer needs to be really excellent at what they do.
• Why We Sketch. In this article, I discuss how great designers use sketching for note taking, to convey their ideas in meetings, to record their conversations with their co-workers, and to support their design research.

We have big things planned for you in 2011. We’re working on some awesome new podcasts, articles, events, and virtual seminars to share with you throughout the year. Tell us how you’ll make design decisions in 2011. Share your thoughts with us below.

Our deliverables need good design. They perform a function, just like the work they’re describing. They either do their job well, or they miss the boat. Nobody wants to have their great ideas submerged into obscurity because the deliverables didn’t do their job.

In this week’s UIEtips, our good friend Dan Brown shares some wisdom about well-designed deliverables: they have to tell a story. Theme, journey, conflict, and characters — pieces that keep us riveted to that page turner — are all essential in great deliverables. I’m sure you’ll find several great ideas on how to make your own deliverables that much better.

Read the article, What Makes a Good Deliverable.

By the way, did you know we’ve teamed up with Dan’s company, EightShapes, to bring you a fabulous series of virtual seminars this winter. The first one, 5 Simple Principles to Improve Your Information Architecture, is next week and I’m really looking forward to it. Dan’s packed some great wisdom into it — stuff you shouldn’t miss. Read all the details.

How have you integrated story elements into your deliverables? We’d love to hear what’s worked and what hasn’t. Leave your thoughts below.

As we often do, we delved into our research to see if we could answer what’s new about these terms. We found, while people talk frequently about designing experiences, they rarely discuss what that actually means. We also found that designing for experiences is very different than designing for other results.

In this UIEtips, we’ll look at the differences among these terms and how you design for great experiences. If you’ve been calling yourself a user experience designer, I’m sure you’ll find our research helpful to explain what you do and what it takes.

Read the article, Designing Great Experiences – The Gap Between Activities.

While we’re on the subject of designing User Experiences, Leah Buley, who just rocked the UI15 conference, is our next UIE Virtual Seminar presenter. Her December 9 presentation, Lean Methods for the UX Team of One, is not to be missed.

Have you tried to explain experience design to your co-workers? What’s worked for you? We’d love to hear your thoughts below.

It’s a tough question because the answer often is Yes and No. Yes, good design practice is good design practice and it applies no matter what you’re designing. You need to know who your users are, what they are trying to do, and how they expect to do it. You need to watch the users work with the designs you create, so you can learn where the designs are working for them and where they are failing.

But No. Designing for web apps is a different type of animal. It lives in a browser, it has complicated activities and edge conditions, and little things can have big implications, especially when they go awry. You need to know different things when designing for web apps than when designing for any other type of interaction.

Then again, that’s what makes design interesting. Understanding the problems and fitting them into the constraints is the fun part of design.

In today’s UIEtips, we look back at an article from November 2006 that still rings true today. I talk about five usability challenges that web-app designers face. While these are not unique to web apps, designers will find themselves dealing with problems and constraints they’ll rarely see other places.

Read the article: Five Usability Challenges of Web-Based Applications

Part of the challenge in web applications is the visual design of a web application. David Rivers tackles this challenge in our next UIE Virtual Seminar: Visual Design for Web Applications, tomorrow, November 18. David shares real-world examples and insights that you won’t want to miss. Learn more about the virtual seminar.

What challenges have you faced when developing web-based applications? How have you overcome these? We’d love to know. Leave your thoughts in the discussion below.

The grocer is definitely manipulating me, getting me to try, and subsequently buy, products I hadn’t otherwise intended to get. Yet I’m quite happy being the target of their manipulative practices. Plus it keeps me coming back to the market.

The food demo isn’t the only manipulative practice my grocery store uses. In fact, the store is a fully-stocked laboratory in persuasive psychology. All of those same techniques are things we can use online, and like the food demo, have our users love us for it.

This week’s UIEtips, Stephen Anderson concludes his two-part article on just one of the techniques we can use online: scarcity. The first part of the article had awesome examples of scarcity in action. (Didn’t see it? You’ll find part 1 here). In the second part, Stephen explains how scarcity works. I’m sure you’ll find it as fascinating as I did.

Read part 2 of Playing Hard to Get – Using Scarcity to Influence Behavior.

You can learn about many of the other techniques in Stephen’s upcoming UIE Virtual Seminar, Leveraging Seductive Interaction Design. During this Thursday’s 90-minute seminar, he’ll walk your team through some great examples of how you can open up your design’s value and functionality to your users. Don’t miss it.
Get the details on Stephen’s webinar.

What techniques for persuasion do you love about the sites you visit? What have you tried in your own designs? Share your thoughts below.

The thinking is that once the heavy snows cut off the roads, fresh shipments of dairy and bakery products won’t get through. This thinking sends everybody rushing to the market to buy the remaining inventories, with some of the more nefarious market owners raising prices in response. All it takes is the whisper of a storm to create instant scarcity of these critical items.

While we don’t have an online equivalent of a French Toast Alert System, designers can use scarcity to encourage their users to take advantage of offers and functionality. In today’s UIEtips, we discuss what happens when we promote scarcity in our designs in the first of a two-part article written by Stephen P. Anderson. Stephen has been studying sites that use scarcity to their advantage, in turn making the sites more fun to use and more compelling to interact with. I’m sure you’ll find his examples as fascinating as I do.

Read the article: Playing Hard to Get – Using Scarcity to Influence Behavior – Part 1

Scarcity is just one technique we can use to take advantage of people’s desire for playfulness and their natural curiosity. Stephen is exploring several of these techniques in his upcoming online UIE Virtual Seminar, Leveraging Seductive Interaction Design on Thursday, November 4. We always find Stephen’s ideas to be
inspirational and thought provoking, giving us new ways to put fun into our designs. You won’t want to miss Stephen’s seminar.

Have you encountered designs that use scarcity? How about different ways to encourage users to act and participate? We’d love to see your examples. Share them below.

What we don’t often discuss are the connections between visual design and creative writing. The tools and tricks of the creative writer are just as applicable to visual design as that of the graphic artist.

In this UIEtips, we explore some of the relationships between visual design and a particular type of creative writing: the joke. Jokes have a basic set of patterns and the best comedy writers know how to take advantage of them, just the way good designers take advantage of visual design patterns. We’ll look at how writers construct a joke and what we can learn from their process.

Read the article: Rabbis, Tropes, and Visually Consistent Designs.

Good color, grid, and typographic systems are powerful tools for creating great visual designs. In his full-day UI15 workshop, Visual Design Essentials for Non-Designers, Dan Rubin will share his tricks for creating and using these systems. If you’re charged with the visual design of your site, you don’t want to miss this workshop. Watch his preview to see what he’s covering in the workshop.

Where have you taken your visual design influences from? We’d love to hear your thoughts. Share them below.

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.

Read the article: What Goes into a Well-Done Critique.

Improving your critiquing skills is just one of the topics Dan Rubin will cover at the User Interface 15 Conference in November. His full-day workshop, Visual Design Essentials for Non-Designers, will show you techniques for creating an integrated visual design system that will simplify your job, while providing easy tools for selecting the right colors, fonts, and layouts. Learn more about his workshop and the 7 others at the UI15 conference site.

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 a comment on our Brain Sparks blog below.

Explore Dan’s workshop at this year’s conference. Register for UI15 by October 22 with promotion code BLOGPOST and get $400 off.

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, we revisit an article from 2009. In the article, I discuss the interplay that happens in-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 it.

Read the article, Information Interplay: Visual Design, Information Architecture, and Content.

By the way, if you’re looking to advance your skill set, you should attend this November’s User Interface Conference. Some of the full-day workshops include visual design, designing with scenarios, and content strategy. Review the all the workshops at UICONF.com.

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

Explore the 8 workshops offered at this year’s conference . Register for UI15 by October 8 with promotion code BLOGPOST and get $400 off.

I find it an interesting discussion because it shows that, as a professional discipline, we’re not good at understanding what makes us good at what we do. User experience design is a learned and practiced craft—the more you learn and practice, the better you get. But exactly what is it we’re supposed to learn and practice?

In our ongoing research on what makes great teams, we’ve been meeting some seriously awesome user experience professionals. While these folks are from all over the UX spectrum, they share the common trait of being excellent at their jobs and responsible for producing great designs. They are perfect targets of our research.

In today’s UIEtips, I share five skills that were highly developed across all of these “UX masters” as we’ve come to call them. These aren’t your normal UX skills, like wireframing, prototyping, or controlled-vocabulary information architecture. You’ll want to read the article, 5 Indispensable Skills for UX Mastery, to see what these skills are and how you too can master your craft. I’m sure you’ll find it fascinating.

Do you think it’s a coincidence that our next UIE Virtual Seminar on August 5 is Whitney Quesenbery talking about Storytelling in UX? Whether it is or isn’t, you definitely want to sign up for her seminar. She’ll rock your world with her fabulous approach that makes telling engaging, enlightening stories seem so simple, yet effective. Get the details.

Do you know folks who have mastered these skills? What are you doing to improve your own skills? We’d love to hear your stories and experiences below.

When teams use personas well, every member of the team really does seem to be on the same page about who the users are and what design will work best for them. We haven’t seen any other technique come close to getting this kind of result.

Our research has surfaced obvious benefits from the technique, such as better designer agreement on important features and an in-depth understanding of the user’s motivations. But, it’s also unveiled some benefits that we still don’t see discussed very much. Today’s UIEtips focuses on a past article we’re republishing, Three Important Benefits of Personas. In the article, I discuss some of these unrecognized benefits.

A section of this article discusses the age-old tradition of storytelling and how it ties in to learning and creating personas. Our next UIE Virtual Seminar, on Thursday, August 5, with Whitney Quesenbery is all about storytelling. Whitney will teach you how to craft and tell your own unique stories to improve your designs. Learn more about this webinar, Storytelling for UX.

And if you want a deep dive into creating and using personas, you’ll definitely want to attend this year’s User Interface Conference on November 8-10 in Boston. Both Kim Goodwin and Tamara Adlin’s full-day workshop incorporate persona development and use to enhance your designs.

As always, please share your thoughts with us. Has your design team created personas? What benefits have you seen? Join the discussion about this week’s topic below.

What I love about these pictures is how he’s slowed down time. Once it’s slower, we can see details we couldn’t see before.

Turns out we need to slow down time when we’re designing sophisticated interactions. There’s a ton of things happening when we drag an object on the screen or scroll through text. If we want to ensure these interactions feel natural, we have to first slow down time so we can talk about what’s happening.

In today’s UIEtips, I talk about a technique that Bill Scott showed me for slowing down time. It’s called the Interesting Moments Grid and it’s a living deliverable that teams can use to describe what happens in the microseconds of an interaction’s lifetime. If you design interactions, I know you’ll find this fascinating.

Read the article, Capturing the Interesting Moments.

Bill Scott will share his technique and many of his Harold Edgerton-esque observations of on-screen interactions in his Web App Masters Tour presentation in Seattle, July 12-13. Bill’s been a favorite on the tour and you don’t want to miss his talk. Learn about his talk and the other 8 masters.

How do you slow down time when designing your interactions? We’d love to hear your experiences. Share your ideas with us below.

Our last Tour stop is in Seattle, July 12-13. Register by July 8 and get $200 off when you use the promotion code TOURBLOG. www.UIETour.com

Interestingly, many web-based applications use an identical method to entice users to sign up. Every user who shows up on the site gets an instant SIGN UP NOW! form, the web app version of MARRY ME! And, guess what? It doesn’t work any better.

Recently, we’ve been seeing different approaches to the sign up challenge. These introduce the user more gradually to the application’s benefits before asking them to sign up. Because the user experiences the benefits directly, they are more likely to follow through on the sign up process.

In today’s UIEtips, our good friend Luke Wroblewski shares his analysis of the gradual engagement process that Twitter’s been experimenting with. The results are amazing (29% pickup) and Luke’s analysis is fascinating.

Read the article, Gradual Engagement Boosts Twitter Sign-Up by 29%.

By the way, Doug Bowman, Twitter’s Creative Director, is sharing his perspective on these results at the Seattle UIE Web App Masters Tour, July 12 & 13. There are still seats to catch Luke and Doug, plus the other great Masters at this last stop on the tour.

Have you tried an approach of gradual engagement on your site? What’s been your experience with its success? We’d love to hear your experiences. Share them with us below.

Until July 8, register for Seattle and get $200 off when you use the promotion code TOURBLOG. Learn more about the tour at www.UIETour.com

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 go back to an article we published in January of this year. 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 Wednesday, June 23, Lou Rosenfeld will do a deep dive with search logs when he delivers the next UIE Virtual Seminar, Site Search Analytics. Lou will show you how to take advantage of your site’s query data to improve your users’ experience.

This is a must-attend seminar if you’re trying to get more from your site’s query data. Learn more about Lou’s Virtual Seminar.

Have you peered into your search log? We’d love to hear what you found. Join the discussion below.

The article quickly became one of the most popular articles we’ve ever published. People love the fact that a small design change could be linked to a huge increase in revenues. It’s the ultimate ROI story.

Yet in our research at User Interface Engineering, we see these kinds of increases all the time. And $300 million isn’t anywhere close to the biggest.

In today’s UIEtips article, we look back at another article from 2009. Here, I talk about a design element whose income contribution is possibly 10 times larger. It’s a simple question on the Amazon site—one you’ve probably seen a thousand times—yet it is critical to the success of the business.

Unlike the previous story, where we worked on the project, this story comes from our research of Amazon, independent of any projects we’ve done for them. Therefore, our revenue projections are estimates this time. But even if we’re off by an order of magnitude, it’s still an impressive number that tells us how a well thought-out design can make a big difference.

Read today’s article, The Magic Behind Amazon’s 2.7 Billion Dollar Question.

Increasing the effectiveness of a design is exactly what we’re talking about at the UIE Web App Masters Tour. We still have stops in Philadelphia and Seattle. Learn more about the 9 Masters presenting in each city at www.UIETour.com.

Have you had any design changes that had a big impact on your organization’s bottom line? We’d love to hear your stories. Share your thoughts below.

Until May 21, register for Philadelphia or Seattle and get $100 off when you use the promotion code TOURBLOG. Learn more about the tour at www.UIETour.com

Forms are crucial for users to complete many online transactions, ranging from sign-up forms for introducing new customers to your site, to checkout forms for finalizing your users’ purchases.

In this week’s UIEtips, we’re republishing part 1 of an article written by Luke Wroblewski. He’s one of our favorite experts on web form design. Luke discusses tips for improving web forms and impacting user success. Stay tuned next week for Part II.

Read Luke’s article: Web Form Design in the Wild, Part 1

Web forms are one of the most challenging design problems. In our next UIE Virtual Seminar, Luke shares his thoughts and solutions on 6 important aspects of web form design gleaned from hundreds of questions and issues designers presented to him. Learn more about Luke’s webinar, Answered! Your Top Questions on Web Form Design.

Do you have any best practices for designing forms? What usability problems have you encountered with your web forms? I’d love to hear about your experiences. Share your thoughts with us and join the conversation below.

Recently, we’ve been hanging out with Stephen Anderson. Stephen makes it his business to explore how serious applications can be fun and engaging. The more we talk to him, the more examples we see of fascinating and novel approaches to entice people to use our designs.

In today’s UIEtips, we explore some of Stephen’s thinking with a fresh look at how the elements of game play can serve our business requirements. We look at examples from four businesses to see different approaches to integrating the elements of play into great user experiences. I’m sure you’ll find it interesting.

Read Stephen’s article, Designing with the Elements of Play.

Stephen’s discussion of Serious Play was one of the highlights of the recent San Diego stop on the UIE Web App Masters Tour. Today’s article is just the tip of the iceberg — he has way more insights than we can fit here. Don’t miss them (or the other great Web App Masters) in our upcoming stops in Minneapolis, Philadelphia, or Seattle. Details at UIETour.com.

Have you experimented with game play in your applications? We’d love to hear your experiences? Share them below.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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. 

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.

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.

The article quickly became one of the most popular articles we’ve ever published. People love the fact that a small design change could be linked to a huge increase in revenues. It’s the ultimate ROI story.

Yet in our research at User Interface Engineering, we see these kinds of increases all the time. And $300 million isn’t anywhere close to the biggest.

In today’s article, The Magic Behind Amazon’s 2.7 Billion Dollar Question, I talk about a design element whose income contribution is possibly 10 times larger. It’s a simple question on the Amazon site – one you’ve probably seen a thousand times – yet it is critical to the success of the business.

Unlike the previous story, where we worked on the project, this story comes from our research of Amazon, independent of any projects we’ve done for them. Therefore, our revenue projections are estimates this time. But even if we’re off by an order of magnitude, it’s still an impressive number that tells us how a well-thought-out design can make a big difference.

Increasing the effectiveness of a design is exactly what we’re talking about at the UIE Web App Summit, in Newport Beach, CA, April 19-22. Not signed up yet? Register now!

Have you had any design changes that had a big impact on your organization’s bottom line? We’d love to hear your stories. Share you thoughts below.

One of the challenges of being part of a bigger solution is the need to scale the development process. And in that, we’ve seen changes in two directions: moving towards the micro level with component libraries and moving towards the macro level with frameworks.

A few weeks ago, we published an article by Nathan Curtis on the differences between patterns and components. Nathan asserted (and we agree) that patterns describe cross-application behaviors, while components are the place within an application where the behaviors and the implementation meet.

Today, we’re taking a look in the other direction. Robert Hoekman talks about the differences between patterns and frameworks. He describes how a framework is a systemic view of a specific portion of the system. To contrast with Nathan’s components, frameworks are the place where behaviors meet enterprise-wide thinking.

If you’re involved in making web-based applications a key development platform, then you’ll want to understand how frameworks will make large-scale projects that much easier. Today’s article, Web Anatomy: Introducing Interaction Design Frameworks, is a good introduction as to why that is.

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. If you want to know more about frameworks, you’ll want to attend Robert’s full-day seminar, Web App Anatomy: Effective Interaction Design with Frameworks, at the UIE Web App Summit in April. And you’ll love combining it with Nathan Curtis’s seminar on patterns and components. More details on both at http://webappsummit.com

Have you started to put together frameworks? Is this something you’re exploring? Share your thoughts and comments below.

During his session, Jason walked us through his thought process for several interesting design elements. He talked about the initial approaches, the problems they were trying to solve, and the path his thinking took to get to the final result. It was clear, from listening to him, that the design of these products isn’t accidental. It’s very deliberate and considered, relying on Jason’s (and the rest of his team’s) expertise and experience.

Jason admits they do very little user testing or field research. They don’t create personas to help validate their idea. Instead, they rely on the information they already have and their detail-oriented
approach to making the thousands of design decisions that go into every project.

Does this mean that every team could succeed without the traditional research techniques, relying on their own expertise and experience? That’s a question we’ve been researching for a few years now and finally have an answer: It depends.

In today’s UIEtips, “5 Design Decision Styles. What’s Yours?” I’ll walk you through the five different styles we’ve found teams use to make design decisions. I’ve outlined what each style is, the effort it takes, and how to decide when that style will work for your team.

Understanding how your team makes design decisions is critical. That’s why we’ve included it as just one piece of our new full-day Roadshow, Secrets Behind Designing Great User Experiences. This event brings together more than ten years of research into great design management. If you found today’s article interesting, you certainly want to attend one of the Roadshow workshops.

What design decision styles does your team employ? How do you decide which ones to use for any given project? Let us know your experiences below.

The client had hired us because they were concerned about checkout-process abandonment. Their analytics were showing a 13% drop off in sales, which, based on the average value of the abandoned shopping carts, was worth about $1.2 million a year in additional revenue.

Checkout-process abandonment is common in e-commerce sites and something that you can easily detect with your site’s usage logs. You just look at the number of people who get to the first screen and then the number of people who actually complete the transaction. Everyone who doesn’t make it is an abandonment.

When the team contacted us, they’d already pretty much decided what the problem was and how they were going to fix it, even though they had never watched any shoppers make purchases. And they were dead wrong. Not only was their fix not going to help, our research showed that it was going to increase abandonment.

Two weeks of usability testing on the live site (and on competitors’ sites), followed by two weeks of iterative paper prototype testing produced a streamlined checkout process, which, once implemented, showed a dramatic increase in revenues. It’s amazing what you’ll learn when you actually watch your users.

Today’s article, The $300 Million Button, talks about the bulk of that increase — how a simple change to a common screen produced $300,000,000 of additional revenue over the next year. I’m sure you’ll find it interesting.

Improving forms, like a checkout process, can show immediate results in your design’s user experience. We’re fortunate that at this year’s UIE Web App Summit, we have Luke Wroblewski repeating last year’s top-rated Web Application Form Design full-day seminar. If your site has forms (and what site doesn’t these days), this is a must-take course!

Have you seen results from changes to your forms? We’d love to hear your experiences. Share them with us below.

Without the mind-meld thing, we have to resort to more primitive approaches to get everyone on the same page. In the past, we’ve tried templates, guidelines, and style guides. However, these have not proven to be very effective and end up frustrating teams more than helping the design process.

A few years back, we started seeing the emergence of pattern libraries as a solution to this problem. However, recently our research has shown us that pattern libraries only get you so far. For the rest of the solution, a component library can fill the gaps.

That’s why we’re thrilled that Nathan Curtis is presenting at this year’s Web App Summit, to help us navigate the pattern and component library world. And, for today’s UIEtips, he’s got a great article on Components Versus Patterns that explains the differences between the two (and why you may need both).

If you’re thinking a pattern or component library can help your team be more efficient and create better designs, then you’ll want to check out Nathan’s full-day seminar: Achieving Reuse with Patterns and Components. We’re excited about this brand new seminar and think it’s perfect for teams looking to get uniformity and increase development speed, without sacrificing creativity.

Have you considered using a pattern or component library for your project? What moves have you made in that direction? We want to hear you stories below.

In design, it’s no different. Inevitably, great design is about producing both long and short term value for the organization. Something that is well designed not only delights the users but shows up positively on the income statement.

We’ve been looking closely at the practices of some great organizations and one of the common threads we see is how well they match their design goals to the priorities of the business. This is especially important in tight economic times, when the organizations are looking to cut anything that doesn’t show immediate value. The best teams have put this practice into place.

I talk about these priorities in this week’s UIEtips article, A Recession Strategy For Web Apps, and how understanding them becomes important for any designer. While the article focuses on web-based applications, it can be applied to almost any design project.

Part of succeeding in a hard economy is to ensure your team has the necessary skills to make you best of class. That’s why we’ve put together an awesome program for our upcoming UIE Web App Summit, April 19-22 in Newport Beach, CA. Register by Wednesday, January 7, 2009 to get both the lowest price available and your own Limited-Edition iPod nano.

Out of the 29 articles that we published this year, we’ve decided on five that we think had the most 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. You can access the top 5 in the article Top Articles of 2008.

We also 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. In the December 29 article, Top Podcasts of 2008, we’ve outlined what each podcast is about and a link to access them.

So, join us as we look back at the best articles and podcasts of 2008 and help us start to think about what we’ll need in 2009. If you have topics you’d like to hear about or challenges you’d like help facing, please pop us a note below or send a twitter message.

We’ve got great plans for our articles, podcast, virtual seminars, and live events — and we want to help you. So, as my Yiddish grandmother would always say, “Don’t be such a stranger.”

Thank you for encouraging our behavior throughout 2008. We wish you a successful and productive 2009.

Our goal with account registration and sign-in features is to enhance the user’s experience, yet often we end up creating user experience problems. With all the experience designers have, it’s still difficult to create a good sign-in and registration process.

We try to setup a process that’s user friendly for our customers and users but unusable for the people that want to steal our identities and disrupt our environment. It’s difficult to create a design geared for one subset of users and not geared for everyone.

This week, we’re revisiting an article I first published a year ago, Account Sign-up: 8 Mistakes to Avoid. If you’re designing an account system, or already have one, this should serve as a good start to assess how much you may be frustrating your users.

Has your design suffered from these mistakes? What have you done to avoid them? Join the conversation below:

In the “old” waterfall method of development, there are explicit milestones: first you develop requirements, then you create a design that meets those requirements, then you lay out the functionality that will implement that design, and so on. You can see when things are moving forward and you know where you are in the development process. (Of course, it never actually works this way, which is why so many are moving to an Agile process, away from the waterfall.)

From a user experience perspective, it’s clear what you need to do in a waterfall process. You need to gather any research that will affect the requirements, before the requirements are done. You need to test your designs before the designs are signed off. You need to evaluate the functionality as it’s being built. And so on. Every step has clear contributions and expectations.

In Agile, these contributions and expectations aren’t nearly as clear. Waterfall gave us nice “hooks” to hang our UX work on, but Agile doesn’t do that. The team breaks up work into small chunks and just starts chipping away at it. There’s no clear point when requirements are done (they are gathered in parallel with trying out the designs). There’s no clear point when design is done (it evolves over the duration versus being declared up front). It doesn’t seem that there are any clear hooks in an Agile process.

Interestingly, if you dig deeper, the hooks are there. In this issue of UIEtips, Jeff Patton concludes his two part article on his best practices for integrating user experience work into an Agile development environment. He talks about how teams he’s worked with have found the hooks and made it work.

Read Jeff’s article, 12 Best Practices for UX in an Agile Environment – Part 2.

Jeff will be sharing his wisdom on integrating UX into an Agile process at the upcoming User Interface 13 Conference in Cambridge MA this October. His is just one of the great full-day seminars we have at the conference. If you’re looking to create great designs, I suggest you check out the program.

How have you integrated your user experience methods into an Agile process. What struggles have you encountered? We’d love to hear your experiences.

It occurred to me, while talking with Jeff Patton last week, that the same can be true in an Agile development process. Often times, the team will start with a piece of the project that isn’t the first thing the user experiences, but instead might be at the end. For example, they may start by building the functionality to save a file in Photoshop format – technically an important, high-risk part of the project, but not much of a user interface beyond a simple “Save as PSD file” option.

Jeff mentioned that user experience designers on the Agile team end up adopting a similar role to the person who gets the credit of “Continuity” in a film. It becomes their job to make sure the final experience makes sense, even though the order of construction was not linear. This is a huge challenge and one that has come to forefront as more teams move to an Agile development method.

Jeff has been researching the new challenges that arise when teams try to merge their UX efforts in an Agile process. In his travels, he’s assembled a slew of best practices that result in the development of great experiences. In this week’s UIEtips, we’re proud to publish the first installment of a two-part article where Jeff describes 12 of his best practices.

Read Jeff’s article, 12 Best Practices for UX in an Agile Environment – Part 1.

If you’re a user experience professional working inside an Agile development team, you’ll want to check out Jeff’s full-day seminar on this topic. He’s updated it with his newest findings and it’s promising to be one of the most popular sessions at our upcoming User Interface 13 Conference in Cambridge, MA this October.

Are you working to improve the user experience in Agile development projects? What practices have you found to work (or to avoid)? Share your thoughts with us.

Yet, it would be impossible to see radical, major innovations come from that approach. Instead, every so often, we need to remove ourselves from the tactical refinements and immerse ourselves into a world of strategic thinking. It’s in this world that we’ll see new approaches, find major innovations, and radically change the way we’ve done things, all to move us forward in a new way.

In this week’s issue of our email newsletter, UIEtips, we’ve asked Adaptive Path’s Brandon Schauer to share his thinking about what he calls the Long Wow, where he talks about techniques for ensuring long-term customer loyalty through systematically impressing customers again and again. We found this article really inspiring to our thinking about great design and thought you would to.

Read Brandon’s article, The Long Wow.

The Long Wow will be just one topic that Adaptive Path’s Peter Merholz and Andrew Crow will be sharing at this year’s User Interface 13 Conference, October 13-16 in Cambridge, MA. They’ll be teaching their full-day seminar, Subject to Change: Product Strategy and Planning Tools for Great User Experiences. This workshop was highly-rated at previous conferences and we know you’re going to love it.

What have you done in your design process to enhance customer loyalty? We’d love to hear your thoughts and questions.

It wasn’t that the chef used a different recipe or better ingredients. What made the difference was that he knew some real subtleties to the preparation process.

He knew how thin to slice the peppers to get just the right amount of spice. He knew how long to cook the scallops, so they were the right amount of firmness on the outside, yet still juicy on the inside. He knew how slowly to whisk the mousse, so that it was light and fluffy in the bowl.

Subtleties are just that: subtle. They are things you wouldn’t normally notice or think of. Yet, they can be the difference between good and great.

In this week’s issue of our email newsletter, UIEtips, we look at similar subtleties in the design of online applications. We’ll explore three different instances when a subtle approach made a huge difference to the resulting design.

Read my article, Interaction Design: It’s All About the Subtleties, here.

If you find discussions about Interaction Design fascinating like I do, then you’re really going to enjoy Kim Goodwin’s full-day seminar, The Essentials of Interaction Design, at the upcoming UI13 conference. This has been one of our most popular sessions — something you probably shouldn’t miss. More details about Kim’s session and other great seminars at http://www.uiconf.com

Have you discovered some subtleties that have made your designs go from good to great? If so, we’d love to hear about them below.

JavaScript is an essential component of Ajax, so when it’s missing, it’s a big deal. Does that mean that you can’t use Ajax in your design if there’s a possibility some of your users may not have this necessary capability?

To answer this question, we’ve turned to Jeremy Keith. Jeremy has written *the* book on designing with Ajax (appropriately called “Bulletproof Ajax”). In today’s issue of our email newsletter, UIEtips, Jeremy has shared his strategy for creating applications with Ajax that do the right thing when JavaScript isn’t available. He calls his strategy, Hijax.

Read Jeremy’s article, Hijax: Progressive Enhancement with Ajax

Jeremy will be sharing the details of Hijax and other techniques for creating successful applications using Ajax in his full-day seminar, Bulletproof Ajax: Designing Interactive and Usable Ajax Solutions, at the User Interface 13 Conference in this coming October. If you enjoy Jeremy’s article, you’re really going to enjoy his seminar.

Have you developed a strategy to deal with creating successful applications when working with browsers and assistive devices that don’t have JavaScript enabled? If so, we’d love to hear your thoughts below.

Asking for their expectations makes sense: if we know what they are already preconditioned to look for, and we design to that, then they’ll know where to find things in our designs. It seems very simple.

Unfortunately, we quickly find out that expectations don’t drive how users interact with our designs. They look elsewhere, to the visual clues and a well-designed flow, to ensure they have the delightful experience we’re hoping for.

In this week’s issue of our email newsletter, UIEtips, I look at some of our recent research to see how the users’ expectations played a role in the effectiveness of the design of sign-in functionality. We watched users take advantage of their frequent flyer programs as they traveled and looked to see if the variety of site designs had an impact on their behavior. I think you’ll find it interesting.

Read my article, The Wheres and Whens of Users’ Expectations, here.

How have you integrated the users’ expectations into your design process? Have you ignored them? Or, do you take stock to ensure you’re doing exactly what they expect? Please share your experiences below.

Both visual and interaction design are key skills for designing effective systems. At this year’s User Interface 13 Conference, October 13-16, in Cambridge MA, we’ve asked world-renowned experts, Luke Wroblewski and Kim Goodwin, to each conduct full-day seminars on these topics.

It was a brilliant idea, if only Blockbuster had thought of it first. Five years earlier, a little west coast startup named Netflix came up with the idea of home-delivered DVDs. The little startup slayed the established consumer giant by delivering a new and innovative product.

Our clients regularly discuss Netflix’s story. They ask us how they can make their company’s products and services just as successful. Among our recommendations, we always tell these folks to read Scott
Berkun’s research on innovation. Scott, the author of the popular book, the Myths of Innovation, is the expert we recommend clients talk to when they’re struggling to develop innovative designs.

In this week’s issue of our email newsletter, UIEtips, we’ve asked Scott to share an excellent article he’s written on innovation. In his article, Scott offers practical secrets to help you build new and innovative products. I think you’ll really enjoy it.

Read Scott’s article: How to Innovate Right Now.

Are you challenged with creating new products that recreate and capture the market? Is your team struggling to develop innovative designs? Share your thoughts below.

Scott’s research on innovation has led him down the path of studying failure. In particular, why designers fail. You shouldn’t miss his upcoming UIE Virtual Seminar on Why Designers Fail and What to Do About It on April 14, 2009. Learn why you should celebrate failure.

What many people don’t know is that Flickr wasn’t originally a site for sharing photos. It was originally conceived as an online game, “The Game Neverending.” But when the design team started facing business obstacles with the game, they quickly shifted their priorities and recognized the value of the photosharing application. As a result, Flickr fundamentally changed the way we look at web applications.

At UIE, we hear all the time from clients working to build products and sites that capture the market, hoping to duplicate the success of sites such as Flickr. If you’re challenged with creating innovative designs, you’ll really want to read Scott Berkun’s writings on the subject. Scott is the author of the book, “The Myths of Innovation,” and an expert when it comes to the history of innovation.

Also, in this week’s article for our email newsletter, we’re republishing a great interview UIE’s Christine Perfetti conducted with Scott last year about his research in the area of innovation. This is one of our most popular articles. If you missed it, I think you’ll really enjoy it.

You can check out Christine’s interview with Scott here.

How does your design team go about developing innovative designs? Please share your thoughts below.

This is not easy to do. You really have to know something about the users, what they are trying to do, and how they go about doing it. Just having that information will likely push the team to add more features, not less, so you then need a solid vision of how simplicity will make it better. Finally, you have to be ruthless and stubborn, cutting all the unnecessary bits out and sticking to your guns about keeping to the essentials.

The designers of a new video camera, the Flip Video, have cleverly done just this. As a result, the camera is stealing market share from the big players and garnering great reviews in the press mainstream press. (Oprah even featured it on her show.)

In this week’s article for our email newsletter, I look at four ways the Flip has simplified the act of filming and sharing movies, while keeping the value in the design. These are lessons I think we all can learn from.

You can read my article here.

By the way, we think the Flip Ultra Camera is so remarkable that we’re giving one away to everyone who registers by May 20th for our User Interface 13 Conference. We thought a product with a great design was the right way to start out a great conference.

Have you been working to make your designs simpler? What lessons have you learned in the process?

You can read my article here.

At UIE, a big part of our research agenda focuses on how to create web applications that delight users. In the upcoming months, we’ll share our tips and techniques in our weekly Usability Tools podcast.

What are some of the challenges you’ve had to address when building web-based applications?

What really struck me about his experience was how much we can now do within a browser. Once folks figured out ways to eliminate page refreshes, a world opened up to allow for truly immersive experiences.

In this week’s article for our email newsletter, UIEtips, I explore some of these experiences and what they can bring to a business environment. A few weeks ago, I looked at what the New York Times did for delivering news in an interactive format. In this article, we’ll explore what other companies can do for their customers.

You can read my article here.

Are you using highly interactive designs to create an immersive experience for your users? If so, what challenges have you run into?

Steve Mulder, Jeremy Keith, Andrew DeVigal, and Steve Duenes will be presenting their experiences with developing highly interactive experiences as part of our UIE Web App Summit. I highly suggest you check out the program and consider joining us. (I just got back from visiting Coronado, where the event will take place. What an amazing resort! It’s going to be great fun.)

Mistake #13: Not Explaining If It’s The Username or Password They Got Wrong

Returning to an electronics site they hadn’t used since last holiday season, the user entered what they thought was their email address and password, but it didn’t work. The error message was a simple, “Invalid Login. Please Try Again.” Was the password wrong or did they register with a different email address? (After all, they have had several over the years.)

The user tried several different combinations of email addresses and passwords, but none worked. Eventually, they left the shopping cart with a $500 purchase. They went from a very excited customer to a very frustrated one in a matter of moments.

Several folks wrote to tell me I’d gotten this wrong — that, in fact, this is intentional to throw off hackers.

It’s true that if you give an error message helping users know which they’ve gotten wrong, you are also giving prospective hackers information that makes it easier to violate the security of the site.

However, I’m wondering if all sites need the same security rigor. A site where a hacker could get at personal information and steal your identity requires great security.

But, does every site have the same restrictions? For example, an online forum where I can talk about my interest in magic tricks doesn’t need the same rigorous security restrictions as my mortgage account at my bank.

There are those in the security world who suggest that any breach in security is a bad thing and therefore every possible breach should be rigorously protected. Yet, maybe there’s another approach where we can decide, based on the information and functions we’re protecting, to err on the side of an easier experience some of the time.

Today, in our UIEtips email newsletter, we published my latest article talking about engaging experiences found in an unlikely place: a newspaper web site. Yet, this isn’t just any newspaper web site, it’s the New York Times. The engaging experiences are interactive calculators, maps, and data visualization tools.

I’ll admit it right up front: This article is probably the most difficult one I’ve had to write in a long time. Not because the subject matter was hard to come up with. Nor was it because I was at a loss for words.

No, the reason it was so difficult to write was because of the examples. They were just so much fun to play with. I’d bring one up to quickly note a detail and then I’d realize I’ve spent 30 minutes just playing with it.

In this week’s article, I explore some key principles that are the common thread in the NYTimes interactive graphics. Of course, I provide links to the examples, which you’ll really want to play with. You were warned!

You can read my article here.

I am extremely excited that we have two key members from the New York Times, Andrew DeVigal and Steve Duenes, joining us for the UIE Web App Summit in San Diego, CA on March 26-28. They are going to share their process and inspiration for their engaging interactive designs. You don’t want to miss this session.

Have you come up with some interesting methods of making your data engaging?

The ironic thing is, while we add account registration and sign-in features to enhance the user’s experience, in doing so, we create all manner of user experience problems. Despite its prevalence, one of the most difficult things to get right is a good sign-in and registration process.

The challenge is one of creating selective usability. We want the process to be completely usable for our customers and users. We also want it to be unusable for the bad people who want to steal our identities and disrupt our environment. Creating a design that is usable to a subset of users seems to be much harder than creating one that is usable for everyone.

Today, in our UIEtips email newsletter, we published my latest article that describes eight common account sign-in mistakes we see all the time in our usability tests. If you’re designing an account system, or already have one, this should serve as a good start to assess how much you may be frustrating your users.

You can read my article here.

Account Sign-in is just one topic we’ll discuss at the UIE Web App Summit, March 26-28, 2008, in San Diego, CA. You’ll want to reserve your seat today, as we’re filling up quickly.

Has your design suffered from these mistakes? What have you done to improve it?

That’s exactly the situation that our friend and second-time Web App Summit presenter, Sean Kane, now finds himself in. Sean recently left Netflix to be the founder of a new company, GetListed, where he is constructing his UX team from the ground up.

At Netflix, Sean had resources most of us could only dream of: a top-notch team, a wealth of user data, and a management team that truly understands how UX can play an important role. Under his watch, the site grew 14-fold, so he knows what he’s doing.

Yet, as many of us know, there are challenges to being in a small organization with limited resources and only a sliver of real data about who the users will be. So, we’re watching closely as Sean brings his talents, skills, and experience to his new venture.

In this issue of UIEtips, Sean shares with us his initial efforts to bootstrapping his user experience team. He talks about how he’s building the GetListed team and his initial strategy for creating a world-class design, much like he did at Netflix.

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.

[Sean will be updating us on his adventure at the Web App Summit 2008, in San Diego, CA, March 26-28. We've already started to fill up, but there's a few seats left. You'll want to register soon because this event will sell out.You can see the entire program, and find out how to get your free limited-edition red iPod nano by registering by December 18th, by visiting the the Summit site.]

The question has turned into a bit of a conundrum, with the answer being yes and the answer being no. While good design practice is good design practice and it applies no matter what you’re designing, you need to know who your users are, what they are trying to do, and how they expect to do it. You need to watch the users work with the designs you create, so you can learn where the designs are working for them and where they are failing.

However, designing for web apps is different than just designing a web site. It lives in a browser, it has complicated activities and edge conditions, and little things can have big implications, especially when they go awry. You need to know different things when designing for web apps than when designing for any other type of interaction.

In today’s UIEtips, we’re reprinting an article I wrote last year detailing five of the greatest usability challenges that web-app designers face. The problems and constraints designers are still dealing with today make this article just as pertinent as ever.

Read today’s article.

What challenges have you faced when developing web-based applications? How have you overcome these? We’d love to hear from you. Leave your thoughts below.

[Overcoming the challenges of web-based applications is just part of what we'll be talking about at the upcoming Web App Summit, March 26-28, 2008 in San Diego, CA. You can be part of that event and receive your limited edition Web App Summit iPod nano by registering before 12/11. More details here.]

As designs and product visions become more complex, there is an increasing need to find ways that effectively convey just how people will use the product and integrate it into their lives. Recently, more and more organizations and design teams have turned to comics to communicate difficult product and design concepts to large and diverse audiences.

Yesterday, we published a podcast recording of a wonderful chat I had with Yahoo!’s Kevin Cheng. I think Kevin’s work integrating tools like comics into the development process is remarkable. I highly suggest you check out our podcast. In this week’s issue of our email newsletter, UIEtips, we’re publishing an excerpt of my conversation with Kevin. Kevin shared a lot of great information with me and I think you’ll find the conversation enlightening.

Read today’s article with Kevin Cheng.

Is your organization considering the use of comics to convey product concepts? What techniques are you using in your organization to communicate how users interact with your designs? Share your thoughts below.

Time and time again in usability testing, I watch users struggle with web sites. I’d like to say that the problems I see in testing are always unique and novel, but they aren’t. We’ve been seeing very similar problems with all of the sites we’ve tested.

What problems did the designs have? Well, first, users couldn’t find the most valuable content on the site. Every user knew exactly what they wanted and all of the information they were looking for was available – they just had no idea how to find it.

Second, once users make it to the page with their content, they still often struggle. One main reason for user failure is because the content was written so poorly that users weren’t even sure they were on the right page. They had to work very hard just to identify the critical portions of the descriptions, let alone understand what they were trying to say.

Many of the sites we test are disorganized and confusing. Fortunately, we know exactly who to turn to fix these content challenges. In this week’s issue of our email newsletter, UIEtips, Gerry McGovern, one of the world’s experts on delivering successful content, wrote an excellent article dealing with how to develop a systematic formula for publishing content successfully.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

Also, to help our clients tackle their content issues, we’ve asked Gerry to present at the User Interface 12 Conference this November. We’re really excited about Gerry’s seminar. Gerry is the expert we turn to about content management issues. In just one day, Gerry will show you how to simplify your site’s organization.

What content management approaches do you use in your organization? How has it affected your design process? I would love to hear
about your adventures. Join the discussion below.

It’s hard enough creating usable designs when there is ample time and plenty of resources, but what do you do when that’s just not an option for your design team? One of the most common reasons designs fail users is because the design team didn’t have the time or resources to focus on user research or conduct usability testing. That’s why one of our main goals at User Interface Engineering is to disseminate some of the quick-and-dirty techniques available to designers and usability professionals.

One of our most valuable techniques is the 5-Second Test. This technique turns out to be a quick, flexible testing method that gives teams fascinating insights about the design. In this week’s issue of our email newsletter, UIEtips, we re-printed an excellent article that describes the 5-Second Test technique and discusses its advantages and disadvantages for measuring the effectiveness of web site content pages. I think you’ll enjoy it.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

Christine Perfetti and I also recently discussed the topic in our Usability Tools Podcast Series. If you would like to learn more about the techniques, I highly suggest you give it a listen.

Also, if you’re struggling to come up with the time or resources to conduct user research, you’ll really want to take advantage of the latest live presentation in UIE’s Virtual Seminar Series. On September 27th, my good friend, Larry Constantine, will present the online seminar, Don’t Panic: Design and Usability Under Impossible Pressure, sharing a wide range of field-proven techniques for conquering design and usability problems while in crunch mode. You really shouldn’t miss it.

A few weeks back, I had the chance to talk with Gerry McGovern, author of Killer Web Content and UI12 Speaker Extraordinaire. We talked about a variety of aspects of designing web sites, but one theme we kept coming back to was about how prepared the team was for the long haul.

During the talk, I realized people who have experience building brochures and marketing materials might come to the web design process with a misleading perspective. With a brochure, you carefully construct the design and messaging, put it into production, and then never see it again. Rarely do you get to see anyone interact with the brochure. That information never informs the design of future brochures.

Gerry made the great point that web design is very different. It’s an iterative process where you’re receiving constant information after the design. This information allows you to tweak and enhance the design, often in small ways, to make continual improvements. Most of the work happens after the initial production, not before, as in a brochure.

In this week’s UIEtips, I’ve described the findings from recent research on web site redesigns. In this article, I talk about seven strategies we see employed by the organizations best at redesigns.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

Have you employed these strategies? Are you finding hurdles from thinking too much in the short term? We’d love to hear your thoughts on the challenges when redesigning web sites. Join the discussion below about this week’s topic.

Want to learn more? At this year’s User Interface 12 Conference, Gerry McGovern will present How to Design a Task-Based Information Architecture, to give you a solid grounding in IA that will enable you to create designs that help your users find what they want.

At User Interface Engineering, we’ve spent two decades researching the usability and design techniques employed by both successful and unsuccessful development teams. We’ve focused our research agenda on identifying the key techniques successful teams utilize to consistently produce usable products on time and within budget.

Because we think these techniques are essential tools for all designers and usability professionals, we teach them to everyone who attends UIE’s most popular course, Product Usability Survival Techniques. I think these techniques are crucial for every development team’s success.

In this week’s article, one of our most popular instructors, Christine Perfetti, describes several of the techniques we share with design teams in our courses and consulting work. I think you’ll really enjoy her insights.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

What usability techniques do you utilize in your own work? At what stage of development does you team begin usability testing? Do you take advantage of paper mockups? I’d love to hear what you’re doing. Join the discussion below about this week’s topic.

Want to learn more about the five survival techniques for creating usable products? At this year’s User Interface 12 Conference, Christine Perfetti will teach the half-day UIE Showcase Seminar: Product Usability Survival Techniques.

The most valuable asset of a successful design team is the information they have about users’ goals and behaviors. When teams have the right information, the job of designing a powerful, intuitive, easy-to-use interface becomes tremendously easier. When they don’t, every little design decision becomes a struggle.

One of the most effective solutions to uncover user needs and translate those needs into a design is Cooper’s interaction design methodology, The Goal-Directed Method. ( http://www.cooper.com/about/process/ ) With Cooper’s method, features of the design are directly related to user research through the use of personas and scenarios.

In this week’s feature article, we’re publishing an excellent interview UIE’s Christine Perfetti recently conducted with Kim Goodwin, the General Manager and Vice President of Cooper. In the interview, Kim gives an overview of Goal-Directed Design and discusses Cooper’s user research techniques. I think you’ll really enjoy it.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

How does your team incorporate user research into design? I’d love to hear what you’re doing. Join the discussion below about this week’s topic below.

Want to learn more about Interaction Design? If you’re interested in learning more about how to develop and refine your interaction skills, you’ll definitely want to attend Kim Goodwin’s full-day seminar, The Essentials of Interaction Design, at User Interface 12.

Over the past few years, the world of web application development has seen the emergence of a new set of approaches such as APIs, RSS, and Folksonomies that have come to be known collectively as Web 2.0. These new approaches allow developers to easily create innovative applications at a rapid pace from common elements found lying around the Web.

The speed and ease at which these new applications were built is what is keeping us very excited about the continued success of the Web 2.0 world. With a little skill and motivation, people can create new applications in almost no time at all. As the skill requirements for building these applications decreases, it opens a whole new world of possibilities for development teams.

With new sites and services popping up, such as Flickr, Del.icio.us, Digg, and Twitter, it’s easy to see how we’ve entered a new era of social networking, and we’ll continue to see the Web evolve as we realize its full potential to create optimal user experiences.

In this week’s UIEtips, we’re reprinting an article I wrote in 2005 where I examine how design teams and individual developers alike can harness the power of APIs, RSS technologies, Folksonomies, and Social Networking to approach hard problems in new and effective ways. I think you’ll really enjoy it.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

Do your applications take advantage of APIs, RSS, Folksonomies, and Social Networking? Does it intrigue you? Scare you? Bore you? I’d really be interested in your thoughts. Join the discussion below about this week’s topic below.

[Want to learn more about Web 2.0? Check out the UIE Virtual Seminar, Web 2.0: The Power Behind the Hype. In this 90-minute presentation, Jared M. Spool will outline how Web 2.0 works, and discuss how APIs, RSS, Folksonomies, and Social Networking can help designers expand and improve the user experience.]

This week, UIE turns 19 years old. Over the years, we’ve seen technology come and go, features grow and shrink, and interaction styles dramatically change.

What used to be just a person interacting with a screen has become something more — people interacting with other people, using the computer as a moderator. This has enhanced e-commerce (as seen by Amazon’s reviews), brought families and communities together (with tools like Flickr’s photo sharing and commenting), and enabled new ways to keep in touch with people important to us (as with Facebook and MySpace.)

As with the development of any system, it’s easy to focus on the mechanics of making the technology work. Just allowing people to add reviews or establish connections is the first step.

Yet, perfecting the mechanics won’t get you a service that delights the users. That has to come from something more. Something that takes into account how people interact with each other and how businesses can thrive on that interaction.

In today’s UIEtips, Josh Porter gives us the continuation of his analysis of the common pitfalls of building social web applications. Josh has done a fabulous job looking at what it takes to survive in this new world.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

Are you implementing social web applications into your designs? Have you encountered any of these pitfalls? If so, what you have you done to avoid them? Join the discussion below about this week’s topic below.

This is Josh’s last article as a member of User Interface Engineering, as he has recently left the team to start his own business, Bokardo Design. Over the last 5 years, Josh has contributed tons to our thinking on Search, e-commerce, web apps, and developing social applications. He’s been responsible for our site design, the e-commerce application that funds our research and events, and our blog. Most importantly, he’s been part of the life-blood of what makes UIE what it is. We won’t be the same without him.

Just because Josh is leaving our offices doesn’t mean he’s leaving our life. UIE will be one of his first clients, as he continues to help us with the design of our site. However, he now has the opportunity to help other organizations with their sites. (You can contact him at porter@bokardo.com if you’d like to see if he could help your organization.) He’ll also be presenting at the upcoming UI12 conference and as part of our upcoming podcasts. It’s likely you’ll hear more of his thoughts in UIE Virtual Seminars and articles. Of course, you can follow his thinking on his blog, Bokardo.