Knowing how to identify and communicate the value of a User Experience project will gain you design strategy approval and support throughout the organization. Most organizations we work with understand the need for UX efforts, yet they still struggle with how to best incorporate the team into the development process.

Back in 2006, former UIE staff member, Christine Perfetti interviewed Sarah Bloomer and Susan Wolfe, two premier User Experience experts, to discuss how organizations can make their UX practices a success. I find this interview is still dead-on three years later.

One of the most frequent questions we’re asked is how do you go about setting up a UX team. What criteria should I use in the hiring processes, and how do I get executive buy-in on the UX vision?  To answer these questions, and many others, we’ve asked Sarah Bloomer to present our next UIE Virtual Seminar, Upgrading Your UX Team. We’re offering the recording of this presentation at no additional cost when you register with the promotion code MYARCHIVE.

Are you challenged with building a UX team within your organization? Is your team struggling to get support and buy-in from your organization? How have you gotten your organization onboard? Join the discussion below.

Originally recorded at the User Interface 11 Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts on October 10, 2006.

Organizations that recognize the strategic value of design know the power of design lies in communication. The design of interactive products requires effective communication with end users. Each product (via its interface design) needs to “tell” users what features it offers (its utility), how to use those features (its usability), and why they should care (its desirability).

The same communication skills that enable designers to create effective visual and interaction designs for products can also play a significant role in the development of business strategy. Unlike the equations, spreadsheets, and bullet points commonly used to express strategic direction, designers can envision and articulate a strategy through words, pictures, and motion in a way that everyone can understand.

Luke Wroblewski is a leading thinker, noted author and speaker in the field of visual design and design strategy. He is a senior principal designer at Yahoo! and principal of his own practice, Luke W Interface Designs.

In this talk, Luke will discuss how to use the principles behind visual design and narrative to create design artifacts that define and communicate strategic direction to individuals, teams, and entire organizations. In particular we’ll look at how artifacts are able to create buy-in for a product vision, provide market context, and illuminate data, processes, goals, and the impact of decisions.

Today, we present Luke’s UI11 talk entitled “Strategy with Design: Using Design to Articulate and Define Strategic Direction.” Luke touches upon:

» How is the old perception of ‘Design as decoration’ becoming ‘Design as driver of innovation?’
» How can you use design as a differentiator for your company in the market?
» Can you leverage good design to keep your company agile?
» How can you encourage communication through visual design?
» Can design create narrative for understanding, easing your customers through complexity?

If you find this presentation interesting, I encourage you to hear Luke Wroblewski at our next User Interface Conference, this November 5-8, 2007. Luke will be presenting, “Site Seeing: Communicating Successfully with Visual Design.” He’ll be sharing practical insights and strategies for boosting your site’s visual appeal. We’re sure you’ll enjoy it.

[ Click here to subscribe to our podcast via iTunes This link will launch the iTunes application. ]

Originally recorded at the User Interface 11 Conference, recorded in Cambridge Massachusetts on October 10 2006.

There’s been a lot of talk about Rich Internet Applications (RIA) over the last few years. When the topic was first raised through the release of Flash MX’s change in focus from an interactive animation development studio, to an application development environment, there was an early conversation about trying to define what a rich internet application is. Then as other players tried to enter the field a bit more ferociously, the conversation has turned towards how to make rich internet applications. Not in terms of design, but rather in terms of technology. Little care has been given to the more sensitive topic of what and why.

In this presentation, David Malouf moves beyond the usual story of patterns, code, and tips and tricks, and talk more about aesthetics, experience design, brand, and total environmental context of use. He layers those elements over a discussion around trying to define “richness” in the context of general application design and then try to apply it to a continuum of various types of computer and network based solutions.

David Malouf is a passionate spokesperson for the discipline of Interaction Design. He founded the Interaction Design Association and became its first Vice President, with a keen eye towards evangelizing interaction design in the areas of practice, research, and education.

David is now a Senior User Experience Designer at Symbol Technologies, where he designs a wide array of complex system applications as well as software to run on various types of handheld devices. (At the time of this recording, he was still working at Interlinks, doing similar work.) Over the last 7 years David has designed RIAs ranging from e-commerce sites to enterprise software platforms utilizing a range of technologies including, Java, .NET, Flash, and AJAX.

If you found this presentation interesting, I encourage you to join David live in Monterey, California this January at our UIE Web App Summit. David will co-present, along with Bill Scott from Yahoo, their full-day workshop, Designing Powerful Web Applications using AJAX and RIAs. This workshop was a hit at the UI 11 conference and we expect it to sell out quickly.

(If you’d like to get all of the Brain Sparks Audio Library in iTunes, just paste this link into the Subscribe to Podcast feature.)

Alan has a sequel, cleverly called Animator vs. Animation II.

You can see other sites I find humorous by following the Humor tag on my Delicious bookmarks.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/ui11/

Feel free to join the group. The tag we’re using is “UI11″.

Here’s a snapshot we’ve already uploaded to the group. It’s from Jared’s keynote, which we’re listening to now. This is a shot of me and Colin Price, the Manager of Media and Technology at Harvard Health Publications. Colin took this shot with his MacBook Pro’s built-in camera, using one of the image filters in the Photobooth application. I’m jealous…I don’t have a camera on my Mac.

For more pics, check out: UI11 Flickr Group

I’m listening to Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg right now (in their session: Creating Persuasion Architecture Online), and Bryan is telling us that, like a kiss, every banner ad is a promise. When you view a banner ad, it is setting expectations about what you should find at the other end…when you click it.

But most banner ads fail to deliver on their promise. Or, rather, most landing pages fail to deliver on the promise made by the banner ads. Most are disconnected with the ad that sent people there, often changing the subject, style, or mood of the ad. This change is detrimental to success. Conversion is all about consistency, consistency, consistency in message. The Eisenberg’s preach this message rather…consistently.

The Eisenbergs (who, as brothers, seem connected at the subconcious level…they finish each other’s sentences with amazing clarity) suggest that the failure of many banner ads isn’t caused solely by the difficulty of the medium, but also because they’re created by different teams or people who don’t create a compelling, seamless experience.

Many banner ads, it seems, aren’t very good lovers. Their promises, for the most part, mean very little.

The usability affinity grid is comprised of 4 levels. Each level builds on the others, moving from business goals to usability goals. Talking about a project in terms of a usability grid helps large or dispersed teams and their stakeholders get on the same page, agreeing on the value provided by a focus on usability in the organization.

Here are the levels, and how they build on each other.

1. Business Goals
   Business goals are the goals that the business needs to reach in order to be successful. These are often very straight-forward, but difficult to achieve. One big goal of many businesses is repeat revenue, getting revenue from folks on a recurring basis. Magazine subscriptions are a great example of recurring revenue occurring on a yearly basis.
2. Issues
   Issues are the problems that arise during daily operation and directly affect business goals. In a call center, for example, the biggest issue is the hold time for incoming calls. As hold time increases, customer satisfaction goes down, and customers become frustrated and angry, making business goals more difficult to attain. We’ve all had the experience of being on hold and having a pseudo-pleasant voice promising us “Your call is important to us”. Argh!
3. Business Objectives
   Business objectives are objectives that, if reached, will solve the outstanding issues of the organization. In the call center example, the obvious business objective is to reduce customer queues. This objective doesn’t lead to revenue directly, but indirectly.
4. Usability Objectives
   If one of your business objectives is to reduce calling queues, then a usability objective might be to enhance the productivity of the call center operators. Designing to support efficiency of use of the call center operators would directly reduce the time it took to handle each call, which would directly address the issue and thus the business goals in the end.

As Sarah and Susan point out, this grid is simply a tool to help design teams within an organization. Some teams already use this sort of reasoning implicitly, without mapping out these levels explicitly. But for those teams who are still struggling with communicating the value of usability, the usability affinity grid can prove invaluable.

‘You don’t always want to write copy that exactly matches the user’s task. It’s a very special skill to write copy that speaks to the user’s task but doesn’t call it out explicitly when you don’t want to. Just imagine those folks who are looking for a hotel room at dirt-cheap prices. You probably wouldn’t write copy that says “Dirt-cheap hotel rooms”, but that might be the idea you want to communicate’.

Gerry’s heavy Irish brogue and great presentation skills makes this much more funny than I can write. But matching the person’s task (and their conception of their task) to the copy on the page is a unique and important skill. Interestingly, as Gerry points out, people do approach tasks in many domains similarly. Many people shop for cars in a similar way, for example. They perform many of the same tasks in the process of purchasing a car, no matter what kind of car they’re looking for or even what country they’re in. Some of these include:

• Choosing a model
• Research financing options
• Research safety/consumer reports ratings
• Exploring pricing options/packages

Though there are many other steps involved, these are big ones that many people buying cars go through. When creating an information architecture, you can be sure that these tasks are going to be important. When matching these tasks to the type of business you have, the actual words in your information architecture needs to reflect the values and ideas of the users you’re writing for, without resorting to saying something like “You’ll be cool with the in-dash iPod player”. Gerry calls this “framing” the web site from a small, core set of tasks, or what he calls the “Long Neck“.

I’m sitting in the Designing Powerful Web Applications with AJAX and Other RIAs session given by David Malouf and Bill Scott. Right now they’re discussing AJAX-friendly application frameworks like DOJO, Ruby on Rails, and Yahoo’s User Interface Library. These guys really know their stuff…I’m finding out how little I know about the latest application technologies.

David is now talking about the importance of talking to developers, really pushing the needs of users and the importance of advocating for users during the design process. He suggests that interface designers, even if they aren’t writing code, could use a high-level overview of the important details of the frameworks their developers are using. This isn’t so that interface designers can give pointers to the developers, this is so that the team can better understand each other’s needs, which leads to better team chemistry and communication. David’s point echoes very closely something that we’ve found at UIE: the design teams that focus on users best are those that communicate most…they’re always talking with each other and learning about each other’s needs.

In general, there’s a tremendous amount of conversation here…I just hope I can remember and share 5% of it!

That’s a tough job, given that the Netflix web site is nearly a pure-play recommendation system, meaning that without the recommendations feature the site is only a shell of its former self. The recommendations system is what drives Netflix. Roughly 2/3 of all rented movies there come from recommendations.

As far as building a better system, Reed Hastings, Netflix’s CEO, admits that they’ve hit a wall: “If we knew how to do it, we’d have already done it…And we’re pretty darn good at it right now. We’ve been doing it a long time.”

To bootstrap the contest Netflix is making a huge part of its ratings database public so contestants can deal with real data and results can be judged objectively. Though they’ve taken major precautions with their data, this is a daring move after the recent AOL debacle, wherein AOL made part of their search queries database public and even casual browsers could easily figure out who the queries belonged to. That shouldn’t happen in this case, though, and even if it did the data should not be as sensitive as AOL’s.

I think this is a really good move by Netflix. They’ll get a little press out of it as well as a better recommendation system and a better service, benefitting them two-fold. I wonder what other, similar ways companies could do something like this, open-sourcing innovation?

This could have broad effects over many industries. For many of us, recommendations are how we find out about and decide to try something new (not just movies, music, and books). We might get a restaurant recommendation from a friend, or a digital camera recommendation from a geeky cousin. We do this to save ourselves time…it would be impossible to do good research on all the items we’re interested in. Recommendations are a shortcut to good information, and most of the time are well-considered. I’m really interested in them not just because I’m speaking about them at UI11, but because I think we’ll start to see a much broader adoption throughout all sorts of web applications.

However, I do wonder how one might go about improving on Netflix’s system. One way would be to have better social data. For example, right now I only have a couple Netflix “friends” in the system, simply because I haven’t bothered to ask the people I know who use it to link up. If those people are who I listen to when it comes to recommendations, then their presence as a friend in the system should definitely improve my recommendations because it better models my current habits. However, this data cannot be part of the database offered by Netflix because it would instantly identify who it belongs to. That’s a paradox of social web sites: there’s an inverse relationship between their ability to recommend things to you and the amount of information you provide. As quality recommendations go up, privacy goes down.

At any rate, Netflix is running the contest for one year. Starting today.

Attendees tell us that the proceedings are one of their most important conference take-aways. Each of our speakers takes great care designing extremely valuable materials. As a result, each booklet contains essential tools and techniques needed to tackle your design challenges.

If you’ve been thinking about ordering proceedings, don’t wait much longer. After today, Tuesday, September 26th, we can not guarantee your order. Order your proceedings today.

Contents: The electronic set of conference proceedings is a great value at just $279. In the complete set, you’ll receive a CD that includes 11 books with approximately 1,500 pages of insight and expertise. The books include:

• In-depth presentation slides for each of the 8 User Interface Conference full-day seminars. You will get insights into such topics as Advanced Usability Testing, Rich Internet Applications, Experience Design, Agile Development Processes, and Information Architecture.
• Handouts from all eight 90-minute featured talks by the conference speakers.
• 2 comprehensive presentation booklets from the UIE Showcase Seminars featuring User Interface Engineering’s most popular seminars.

To order or get more information on each session, visit the User Interface 11 Conference site or call us at (800) 588-9855 (toll free in US and Canada) or (978) 327-5561.

Not everyone agrees this is a problem. Scott Anderson, in a 2004 essay, feels Schwartz’s approach will cause us to limit choices, removing what he suggests is an erosion of our freedoms. He quotes a University of Rochester psychology professor, Dr. Edward Deci, who says,

“I am very wary about anyone who wants to take away options from others or limit other people’s opportunities for choice. It amazes me that some psychologists are arguing that we should limit human freedom.”

I guess the questions are this: Is limiting the choice of jams or digital cameras removing our freedoms? Doesn’t the person offering the choice earn some of the burden of the problem?

The average electronics ecommerce retailer offers 135 digital cameras online, with virtually no way for the purchaser to distinguish between the cameras. Doesn’t the design team of the site (including the information architects who lay out the choice mechanism, merchandisers who choose the products to sell, and content providers who describe the individual products) need to bear some of the responsibility for solving this problem?

Schwartz suggests it’s not freeing to provide so many choices. Having too many things to choose from causes a cognitive and emotional burden, putting us in the situation of always wondering if the choices we’ve made were the ones we’ve should’ve made. And the less equipped the individual is to make the choice (does someone really know why they need a 5.5 megapixel camera versus a 6.5 megapixel one?), the more that burden increases.

I don’t think Schwartz is suggesting we eliminate all choices. Only choices where the outcome probably doesn’t matter.

I think part of the responsibility of design is to ensure, when we’re providing choices, we’re giving our users everything they need to make an informed and confident selection. If we can’t guarantee that, maybe we should take Schwartz’s recommendation and start to eliminate options from the spectrum until we can.

It’s hard work: you have to help with all aspects of the conference, from setup through teardown. However, you’ll spend time getting to know our expert speakers, hang out with Christine, Josh, and all of the great UIE staff, and learn more about user interface design than you ever thought possible.

Interested? Send a note to uiconf@uie.com. We’ll get back to you right away.

For the last 20 years, a revolution has been underway in the way organizations have developed software systems. It came about from a realization that existing processes for developing large systems were just not meeting the demands of the workplace. Before the revolution, the resulting systems were late and often didn’t come close to meeting the users’ needs.

The result was a brand new set of practices, often called Agile Development processes. Instead of long development times, software is developed in short time boxes, called iterations, which typically last one to four weeks. Each iteration is handled as its own project, with small, but solid deliverables. The goal is get something in front of users as soon as possible.

Sound familiar? In parallel, there’s been a similar revolution in the field of Experience Design over the same 20 years. We started with doing all of our usability work at the end of a project, but we’ve been pushing to get teams to conduct shorter and shorter iterations, with testing and other research techniques moving as far forward into the development process as possible.

Now it’s time for these two revolutionary approaches to merge. While the basic fundamentals are the same, their independent evolutions have made it a rough match. Care needs to be taken to get them to talk to each other.

Seeing the impending collision of these two revolutions for many of our clients, we reached out to a person who has been at the forefront of this thinking, Jeff Patton. Jeff floats (shall we say agilely?) between these two worlds and is our go-to guy when it comes to how you integrate experience design in to the agile environment.

In today’s UIEtips, Joshua Porter and I had the opportunity to interview Jeff Patton about his views. The interview turned out great and I’m very pleased to share it with you today.

Is your organization involved with a move to Agile processes? How have you worked to integrate your UX practices? We want to hear your thoughts and comments. Add to the conversation in the comments below.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

If you’ve been thinking about signing up, this is the time to do it. After Tuesday, 9/12, the cost to register will go up by $300. Don’t miss this opportunity to attend 4 days filled with insights from the field’s greatest experts.

UI11 Conference Highlights: Enriching the Experience

Nowhere else will you have the chance to learn, share, and interact for full day seminars with today’s top design and usability experts.

We’ve recruited a fabulous group of speakers, ready to help you solve your biggest design problems. Luke Wroblewski, Nathan Shedroff, Rolf Molich, David (Heller) Malouf, Bill Scott, Sarah Bloomer, Susan Wolfe, Jeff Patton, Bryan Eisenberg, Jeffrey Eisenberg, and Gerry McGovern will make these in-depth seminars the real deal.

In addition, I know you won’t want to miss the 2006 Spotlight Presentation by none other than Barry Schwartz. Barry, the Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College, is best known for his seminal book, “The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less.” I’m betting his UI11 keynote will forever change how you approach your design work.

Sign Up by 9/12: Full-day Seminars with Premier Thought Leaders

If you register by Tuesday, September 12th, you can attend a full-day seminar with our experts for only $730. (Or register for all four days for $2,390, which saves you more than $1,300!)

Register today.

Eric Mattson has done another excellent podcast, in his quest to record 1000(!) of them, this time with UI11 speaker David (Heller) Malouf:

Website and interaction is on my mind and in my podcasts a lot lately. For my 95th podcast, I continued my search for insight into this field by interviewing David Malouf of Intralinks.

David and I talked about rich websites, his design philosophy, the mistakes companies make, and more.

David Malouf of Intralinks – MarketingMonger Podcast #95

(Josh was interviewed in podcast #26 and I was interviewed in #71, in case you missed them.)

“Many articles have been written on what is probably the single most ubiquitous interface element within Web applications today: the form. Forms justifiably get a lot of attention because their design is critical to successfully gathering input from users. Registration forms are the gatekeepers to community membership. Checkout forms are how eCommerce vendors close deals. But what goes in must eventually come out, and the information users provide to Web applications often makes its way back to users in the form of tabular data.”

Read the full article.

Mike captures what the Eisenbergs call the Conversion Funnel, the funnel of user activity on your web app, in this graphic:

The first key to the conversion funnel is to get real stats on each level. For each level, can you be sure that the number you’re using is accurate? Once you can be sure you’re getting relatively accurate numbers, it’s simply a matter focusing on the leaky levels to improve the situation.

One of the benefits of putting conversion percentages into this funnel diagram is that it gets rid of the more visitors/more revenue tendency. We often see a tendency to focus on getting more folks using an app knowing that revenue will increase as well. That works, but it doesn’t help with efficiency, or making the most out of the users you’ve got. What would be better? Having 1,000 paying users and 1,000 visitors per day or 500 paying users and 10,000 visitors per day? While adding users is desirable, improving efficiency is better.

For in-depth talk on the Conversion Funnel and other ways to improve the success of your web app, check out Bryan and Jeffrey’s full-day presentation at UI11: Creating Persuasion Architecture Online.

Interestingly, we noticed the sites with the fewest choices seemed to make the shoppers the happiest. We thought taking away choice would upset them, but it had the opposite effect.

Our experience watching the shoppers matches exactly what Barry Schwartz wrote in his landmark book, “The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less.” His research, as the Dorwin Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College, has shown that choice overload is a real problem. He’s shown how more choices can be detrimental to our psychological and emotional well-being.

As designers, we really need to understand how choice affects our users. We can make designs that give users all the options, or we can create designs that limit choices and guide users to success. What will work best for our users?

We think choice overload is so important, we’ve invited Barry to be the User Interface 11 Conference Spotlight Presenter. We’re thrilled he’ll be sharing his work at our conference and I think it’s going to be enlightening to everyone.

Recently, I had the opportunity to talk to Barry about his work. He and I talked about his research techniques, the experience of choice overload, and what designers can do about it.

Read the transcript of my conversation with Barry.
Listen to the podcast.

In 2004, Barry Schwartz, a professor at Swarthmore College, wrote The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, a book that has quickly become a classic in the fields of economics, psychology, and now design. The premise of his work is simple: the more choices you give someone, the less likely they’ll want to make a choice, and they are less likely to be happy with the choices do they make. Limit the number of choices and you make people happier.

This line of thinking has huge implications on how we make design decisions. Where we traditionally wanted to give our users as many options as possible, Barry’s work on choice overload suggests we should consider doing otherwise: limiting the options and making choices for the users.

Recently, I had a chance to discuss these issues with Barry, in preparation for Barry’s keynote at the upcoming User Interface 11 conference. We recorded the discussion and have added it to the UIE Brain Sparks Audio Library for your listening pleasure.

Would you like to join us? We are holding User Interface 11 from October 8 – October 12, 2006. We are still currently looking for volunteers who are available to assist us throughout the full five days of the conference. Volunteers will be asked to arrive in the afternoon on Sunday, October 8th and stay until the end of the conference.

Throughout the main four days of the conference, volunteers will be assigned to full-day seminars and short talks to assist conference speakers with their needs. Volunteers are responsible for paying for all travel and hotel accommodations but we will provide breakfast and lunch Monday through Thursday of the conference.

If you’re interested in volunteering, or if you have any questions, please send your replies directly to uiconf@uie.com. I’ll give priority to full-time students and those of you available to help out for the full conference, from Sunday, October 8th through Thursday, October 12th.

Every week we get calls from people who are looking for help with a redesign of their site. They are rethinking the entire design and hoping their new concept will get them what they want.

The sad thing is they are very likely to fail. We’ve been studying web site design for more than ten years and, if we’ve learned anything, it’s that redesigns rarely improve a site. At best, it just rearranges the elements. At worst, it frustrates the existing, loyal users without bringing anything valuable to all those new users the site is trying to attract.

For several years, we’ve recommended our clients take a strategy of incremental change. Pick one small piece of the site to change and focus on that. You’ll have less stakeholders to cater to, fewer personas to integrate, and you’ll keep the risk down to something manageable, all the while you’ll be learning about your users and what they need.

Back in 2003, I wrote an article entitled the Quiet Death of the Major Re-Launch. This article is just a relevant today as it was back then. That’s why we decided to republish it in this week’s UIEtips.

Is your organization thinking about a major re-launch? Have you come up with a strategy that reduces the risk? We’d like to hear from you. Join the discussion in the comments below.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

[This is one of the many design strategies we'll be covering in our sessions at the User Interface 11 Conference, October 9-12, in Cambridge, MA. You'll want to check out the impressive array of speakers and topics at the conference site.]

Have no fear! We’re currently arranging other blocks of rooms at nearby hotels and will have something to announce shortly.

If you’re the paranoid type (or just diligent), you might want to book a reservation at either the Residence Inn Boston Cambridge or the more funky Kendall Hotel, both of which are right next to the conference hotel. These are two of the hotels we’re talking to right now, so if we end up getting a better deal, you can cancel your reservation and use one in our block. In the meantime, you can sleep soundly, knowing you have a room all set.

If you haven’t signed up for the conference yet, you might consider doing it by next Tuesday, when the rates go up.

Last week, we sent out the first part of our interview with Luke Wroblewski, author of Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability and UI11 speaker, on the topic of where usability meets visual design. (You can read the first part of the interview here. ) This week, we continued the conversation with Luke.

Are you seeing benefits when you combine visual design with usability in your designs? What challenges are you facing trying to make that happen? Join the discussion below.

Luke Wroblewski will be presenting his full-day seminar, Site Seeing: Communicating Successfully with Visual Design, at the upcoming User Interface 11 Conference in Cambridge, MA on October 11. You can read about Luke’s session, along with the other great full-day seminars, here.

Read the article here.

Enjoy your holiday weekend!

Somewhere along the line, usability professionals became branded as people who don’t “get” visual design. Their reputation has become one of only thinking about the functional, usage-oriented aspects of design, without considering how something looks.

Maybe it’s because many usability people don’t have training in visual arts and design. Heck, the only thing I can draw is blood. A quick survey of usability web sites shows many of them are not at the high-end of the artistic scale. (Of course, too many of them aren’t very usable, either.)

Similarly, within the usability community there’s a similar perception that many visual designers don’t understand how things are used. There are those who believe the visual designers know how to make things pretty, but at the expense of usability.

From these perceptions comes the belief that the two communities are in contention with each other. That you have to “find a balance” between usability and visual design to produce a great design.

But is this belief correct? Is it about finding a balance between two opposites? Or is it about finding the synergies between two disparate skillsets? Could it be a combination of usability and visual design would produce an effect better than either can do on their own?

UIE’s Josh Porter interviewed Luke Wroblewski, author of Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability and UI11 speaker, on the topic of where usability meets visual design. Luke’s answers were so thorough, we had to break the interview into two sections. In this issue of UIEtips, we present Part I of the interview.

Are you seeing benefits when you combine visual design with usability in your designs? What challenges are you facing trying to make that happen? Join the discussion below.

Luke Wroblewski will be presenting his full-day seminar, Site Seeing: Communicating Successfully with Visual Design, at the upcoming User Interface 11 Conference in Cambridge, MA on October 11. You can read about Luke’s session, along with the other great full-day seminars, here.

Read the article here.

In recent usability tests for a client, I watched as every user struggled with the web site. Users couldn’t find the site’s most valuable content. Every user knew exactly what they wanted, they just had no idea how to find it.

Even worse, for those users who actually made it to the page with their content, they still struggled. The content was written so poorly that they weren’t even sure they were on the right page. This site was disorganized and confusing for all of the users we tested.

I would like to say that the problems I saw were unique and novel, but they weren’t. This client’s content management problems were identical to those we’re seeing on many sites.

In this week’s UIEtips article, Christine Perfetti has conducted an excellent interview with Gerry McGovern, one of the world’s most renowned experts on delivering successful content. In the interview, Gerry shares how the most successful organizations avoid the types of content problems we’ve been seeing in testing.

If you’re thinking about Gerry’s seminar (or any of the other great sessions at User Interface 11), you definitely want to sign up by June 20th to take advantage of the great pricing we now have — plus receive a free set of the conference proceedings.

How have you gone about managing your site’s content? We’d love to know.

Read the article here.

Is your web site chaos? Do users have trouble finding their content? We often hear from designers that they have hundreds or thousands of pages, completely without organization or structure. Putting the customer at the very heart of the design process is easy to talk about but incredibly difficult to do well.

This week’s UIEtips article, written by Gerry McGovern, deals with creating a web navigation that successfully helps users move forward through your site. In the article, Gerry discusses how your site’s navigation should focus on keeping users going in the direction they have chosen.

We’re also very excited that Gerry will once again be presenting at the User Interface 11 Conference this October. Gerry is the expert we turn to about content management issues. He has spent the last ten years consulting exclusively on issues pertaining to information architecture and content management systems. Gerry’s seminar is always one of our highest rated sessions, so I highly recommend you check it out.

If you’re thinking about Gerry’s seminar (or any of the other great sessions at User Interface 11), you definitely want to sign up by June 20th to take advantage of the great pricing we now have — plus receive a free set of the conference proceedings.

What navigation approaches do you use in your organization? We’d love to know.

Read the article here.

‘As analysts and representatives of end user requirements, designers are in a perfect place to reposition a “problem” (or market opportunity -if you prefer) to reflect the perspective of the customer. So instead of describing the problem from the standpoint of business goals, designers articulate it by outlining what it means for the end user of a product: the customer.’

(from the post Defining the Problem)

We’re seeing the role of designers evolve toward this as well, moving away from a strict layout-and-build routine to a much deeper integrated level. They’re becoming a support system for users, articulating their concerns and desires back to an organization who may not be aware of what’s going on at ground level. As Luke says, designers are in a great position to be the enabler of communication between an organization and its users.

Also, as you may know, Luke is speaking this year at UI11. We think he’s got a great message to share, and of course we recommend reading his Functioning Form blog.

Several years ago, we came to the realization that there are eight distinct types of navigation pages that users encounter as they work through a web site trying to locate their target content. Since then, our research has consistently shown that the most successful design teams are those that understand these different page types and prioritize their design resources accordingly.

As we’ve researched further, it’s become clear to us that, out of the eight types of pages, the least important navigation page is the Home Page. But all too often, clients tell us they spend the majority of their time focusing on the design of the home page.

In this issue of UIEtips, Joshua Porter has written an excellent article suggesting that other parts of your site might be far more worthy of attention than the home page. Josh discusses how design teams may be better served taking a “Long Tail” approach to design, focusing on their site’s less accessed pages instead of the home page.

Does your home page get too much attention from the design team? What pages does your design time focus the most energy on? We’d love to hear what you’ve been doing. Share your thoughts in the comments below.

If the article interests you, Joshua Porter and I will be discussing UIE’s latest research at the upcoming User Interface 11 Conference this October. In our full-day seminar, Web Site Usability 2006: The Latest Research, Joshua and I will share UIE’s outlook on the latest topics in web design, such as The Long Tail.

I can tell you our session is going to fill up quickly so, if you are interested, you’ll need to register right away. (Plus, we’re giving away iPod nanos if you sign up by April 25th! )

Read the article here.

( You can see more details about the conference program here.)

For our eleventh annual conference, we scoured the earth for the coolest gift to give away. And, what’s a cooler gift than a black, 4GB iPod nano engraved with the sleek UI11 logo? If you register by April 25th, you’ll receive this fantastic gift.

Since we put together the first User Interface conference in 1996, the heart and soul of this extraordinary event is the full-day seminars. Today’s most important design topics, from experts like Luke Wroblewski, Nathan Shedroff, Rolf Molich, David Heller, Sarah Bloomer, Susan Wolfe, Jeff Patton, Bryan Eisenberg, Jeffrey Eisenberg, and Gerry McGovern, make these in-depth seminars the real deal.

In addition, I know you won’t want to miss the 2006 Spotlight Presentation by none other than Barry Schwartz. Barry, the Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College, is best known for his seminal book, “The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less.” I’m betting his UI11 keynote will forever change how you approach your design work.

Now you can see why I’m excited:

• Amazing speakers
• Fabulous program
• Cool Limited-Edition UI11 iPod nano
• Barry Schwartz, the best-selling author of “The Paradox of Choice”

Register by April 25th for Limited Edition UI11 iPod Nano

Everyone who registers right away can get in at the low price of $1,799 – a savings of more than $1,900 off the final walk-in registration price. Plus, if you register by April 25th, you will receive the limited-edition UI11 iPod nano and a complimentary set of conference proceedings.

This special Sneak Preview offer is only available until April 25th, so sign up today.

I look forward to seeing you in October!

Usability testing is a powerful tool. It guides the design of our products. It informs us on the behaviors and expectations of our users. It gives teams a way to measure how close they are to achieving their goals.

Yet, there isn’t a single way to conduct a usability test. Every team we talk to has their own variations. They have their own tricks for creating tasks, recruiting users, facilitating the tests, and writing the reports.

In today’s UIEtips, we bring back an interview Christine Perfetti conducted with Rolf Molich back in 2003, where they discuss the amazing work that Rolf has done with his Comparative Usability Evaluation (CUE) studies.

The CUE studies pit usability experts against each other, allowing us to compare the practices and results. This type of research is amazingly informative — we learn so much when we compare our own methods against our peers.

In the interview, Christine asks Rolf about CUE-2 and some of his thoughts about the state of usability testing. I think you’ll agree that it’s a fascinating view on where we are today and where we’re going.

Have you been comparing your usability testing practices to others? If so, what have you learned? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Rolf has now conducted five CUE studies. In fact, CUE-5 was conducted last year at our very own User Interface 10 Conference!

Speaking of the conference, the best place to get the latest on all these studies will be in Rolf’s seminar at User Interface 11 this October. I can tell you that Rolf’s session is going to fill up quickly — it always does — so, if you are interested, you’ll need to register right away. (Plus, we’re giving away iPod nanos to everyone who signs up by April 25th! )

I’m also thrilled to announce that Rolf will conduct CUE-6 at UI11. You’ll have the chance to participate in the CUE if you sign up for Rolf’s UI11 Master Workshop: Assessing Your Usability Skills. (You can find preliminary workshop details here. In June, we will provide more details with information on how to sign up for the Master Workshop.)

Read the article here.

I can understand why.

We’ve put together our best program yet, with amazing experts such as Gerry McGovern, Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, Rolf Molich, Luke Wroblewski, David Heller, Jeff Patton, Sarah Bloomer, Susan Wolfe, and Nathan Shedroff. We’re covering the full gamut of user experience design topics, from information architecture to visual design to usability testing to AJAX and RIAs to building successful teams.

We’re also thrilled to have Barry Schwartz as our Spotlight Presenter. He’s going to talk about some of the amazing research from his book, The Paradox of Choice. He’s a great speaker and this is a must-hear topic for anyone making design decisions.

And, this year, we’re giving away an Limited-Edition UI11 iPod Nanos to everyone who registers by April 25th. Last year, we gave away dozens of UI10 iPod Minis. This year we’ve upgraded to a slick 4GB Nano to make it even better.

I think this is going to be our best conference yet!

Read about the program here.

For those of you beginning to make plans, we intend to have our “sneak preview” site up in a few weeks. This will let you see the preliminary program and register at an exceptionally low price. If you’re on our UIEtips newsletter list, you’ll hear about it before anyone else.

Last year, several of the sessions sold out. The way things have been going, we expect that to be even more likely this year. In fact, it’s possible the entire event could sell out by late summer.

So, for those of you who need a long time to get approval, now is the time to start laying the groundwork.

I’m looking forward at everything we have planned for 2006 and I can tell you I’m very excited.

The 2006 UIE Roadshow is shaping up to be quite popular. (We’ve already exceeded our initial goals and are investigating expanding the program a bit.)

We’ve been working on the program for The User Interface 11 Conference (October 9-12, 2006 in Cambridge MA) and I think we’re going to out-do ourselves. (And UI10 really rocked!)

We’ve got a couple of other programs in the works that we’re excited about. Can’t say much about it, except you are going to wish you had more in your conference budget for this year.

Also, we’ve been busy working on some new reports. I just saw a draft of Christine’s upcoming publication and I think it’s fantastic. (More details in a few weeks.) You’ll see some great titles in the next few months, all at an affordable price. We expect to add new reports to our library throughout the year.

Our first two audio recordings were a tremendous hit, so you can expect a lot more of those. And our Brain Sparks Live programs proved very popular, so we’ll be looking at expanding that program for 2006.

Plus, we’ll be speaking at CHI 2006 in Montreal, the IA Summit in Vancouver, WebVisions 2006 in Portland, Web Design World in San Francisco, and a variety of regional events.

For the last few months, our phones have been ringing off the hook with people inviting us to speak to their organization. We love doing these visits because they allow us to really get to spend time really delving into the hard problems our clients are facing. (Would you like us to come visit your group? Give us a yell!)

Along with all this, we’ll be looking at blasting through our research agenda: creating a new understanding of design in today’s business context. Which will give us even more to talk about with everyone.

Wow! When I list everything going on, it’s quite exhausting! 2006 is going to be so busy that we might just have to take 2007 off!

Stay tuned for more details…