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.

In this segment, I’m talking about how functionality of a customer experience creates delight, sharing examples from Proflowers, Orbitz, and Farecast.

It was a fun presentation and the audience was very responsive. I’ll be giving this presentation again, for sure. (Maybe at a keynote near you?)

Cameron works for the LDS Church and has assembled a lot of real-world examples of web design in a large organization. Cameron oversees the creation of highly flexible interfaces that can be repurposed as needed for a very diverse, multi-lingual audience around the world.

Looks like a fascinating talk.

You can find the screencast here, at Cameron’s blog.

You can check out Cameron’s tutorial description on the User Interface 12 Conference Site.

Stay tuned for a podcast interview with Cameron Moll and Jared Spool from d.Construct 2007, due out shortly.

In today’s SpoolCast, I had the good fortune to speak with Kevin Cheng. Kevin is a senior interaction designer with Yahoo! Brickhouse, an advanced development team within Yahoo!. Prior to joining the Brickhouse, he worked on the Yahoo! Maps and Local team. Kevin is the co-creator of the usability and design comic, OK/Cancel. At Yahoo!, Kevin merged his interests and introduced the use of comics for conveying new design ideas and concepts.

In the interview, we discuss the use of comics to express user experience ideas early in the brainstorming stage of a project. Comics show the team how a user will experience the design. This lightweight approach helps you iterate quickly without making major time and resource investments. You don’t need to be an artist to effectively employ comics in your UX processes. Kevin also discussed his presentation for the upcoming UI12 conference in November and gave a sneak-peak at what attendees can expect.

While we were talking, Kevin mentioned the following collection of comic-related resources on his site: Creating Concepts with Comics.

Kevin shared a lot of great information here. I think you’ll enjoy it. As always, we welcome your feedback in the comments.

New: Survey and listener drawing!
We would like to give you and your co-workers free admission to our next Virtual Seminar including full, lifetime access to the archived program! To enter, give us your feedback on your podcast listening experience by filling out the survey!. Each week we’ll choose one winner from the survey participants and send them a free admission to the next UIE Virtual Seminar and Archive, a $169.00 value! We appreciate your input!

Last week’s winner was Carolyn K. You could be next week’s winner (even if you’ve entered before). Just participate in our survey to win!

Would you like to help us out? UI12 is being held from November 5 – November 8, 2007 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the Boston Marriott Cambridge Hotel. We are currently looking for volunteers who are available to assist us the full four days of the conference. Volunteers will be asked to arrive by 2pm on Sunday, November 4th to help with initial setup.

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. The registration fee is waived for volunteers.

If you’re interested in volunteering, or if you have any questions, please send your replies directly to me at amckee@uie.com. Priority will be given to full-time students and those of you available to help out for the full event and setup from Sunday, November 4th through Thursday, November 8th.

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.

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.]

Flickr, the online photosharing web site, changed everything for web applications. For one of the first times, the developers of Flickr combined elements of Flash and AJAX in a seamless form, along with the HTML page.

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, I think you’ll really want to read Scott Berkun’s writings on the subject. Scott is the author of the new book, “The Myths of Innovation,” and an expert when it comes to the history of innovation.

In this week’s article, UIE’s Christine Perfetti sat down with Scott to talk about his new book and his research in the area of innovation. I think you’ll really enjoy it.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

How does your design team go about developing innovative designs? Join the discussion below about this week’s topic below.

[If you find this article interesting, you'll definitely want to attend this year's UI12 Conference, where Scott Berkun present his full-day seminar: The Myths of Innovation -- How to Lead Breakthrough Projects. In this seminar, you'll gain the essential skills and core concepts needed to lead innovative projects within your organization.]

 In his book, Gerry talks about the U.S. Government’s FirstGov, a site that understands its users’ wants and needs. Although many citizens perceive government as being slow and unresponsive, the government’s web site is anything but; knowing that benefits and grants are the top two things people search for, they are the first two links on the homepage. The design team is doing a good job of understanding their audience and what is important to them.

 Unfortunately, many design teams don’t have such a close relationship with their customers and don’t always focus on their customers’ carewords. For example, McGovern notes a trend among airline sites to use the words “low fares” in place of “cheap” because of the negative connotation associated with “cheap.” However, how many people do you know search for “low fares” when booking a vacation? When customers want a cheap flight, they will search for just that.

 Do you think about what words will best drive users to action on your site? Have you tested your users for the carewords that matter to them?

The daily grind of the designer and information architect can become very focused and repetitive. Project after project, client after client, iteration after iteration, we work through the motions of wireframes, card sorts, hierarchies and task flows ad nauseum. How do we break away from this cycle and step away far enough that we can truly explore, innovate and define strategy?

The pair also talk about the challenges and difficulties they faced, the lessons they learned, and the successes they experienced by creating a project that defined product strategy, instead of just diving head-first into product design with no direction or vision in mind for the product’s intended user experience.

You can find the slides and audio from the presentation up on the IA Summit site here.

Jared has also been talking a lot about creating an experience vision and building an envisionment to keep the design team on the right track throughout the entire design process, and the needs of the users at the forefront of design.

How are you guiding your design direction towards your users’ ideal experiences?

Question: How does usage-centred design help designers and developers focus on what is important?

Answer: The whole nature of usage centred design is all advised to focus on those relatively few things that have the greatest impact on getting a good user interface design. The fact that it starts out as the user role means that you have already narrowed your focus from users in the broader sense to the relationship with the system.

The task modelling using task cases keeps your attention on what it is your users are attempting to do from their perspective. If you do this modelling process it leads you straight forward from nowhere to a design that will work well for your users.

Question: How do developers go about learning good user interface design?

Answer: I think there are lots of different ways and it depends on the developer. I think its good to get hands on training from a university or one of the commercial organisations but then you have to practice. That means ultimately doing designs that see the light of day and getting them tested and deployed to real users. Doing exercises is good for a start.

Not everybody is cut out for visual interaction design, just like not everyone is cut out to code in C#. People who are good at visualising things and visual problem solving have a head start on doing user interface design.

You can read the full interview here: Developer Interview — Larry Constantine

Web-based applications are quickly becoming critical components of the strategy of many organizations. In our research at UIE, we’ve seen that creating usable forms is essential to the success of these applications.

Forms are crucial for users to complete many online transactions, ranging from sign-up forms introducing new customers to your site to checkout forms finalizing your users’ purchases. However, until recently, the knowledge and skills to design a great form was still only available as scattered lore.

In this week’s UIEtips, we’re publishing an article written by Luke Wroblewski, a Principal Designer at Yahoo!, where he discusses how form layout and visual elements can have a real impact on users’ success with your web applications.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

Do you have any best practices for designing forms? What usability problems have you encounted with your web forms? As always, I’d love to hear what you’re doing. Join the discussion below.

[If you find this article interesting, you'll definitely want to attend the User Interface 12 Conference this November 5-8, where Luke Wroblewski will present Site Seeing: Communicating Successfully with Visual Design. This in-depth seminar will provide you with practical insights and strategies for boosting your site's visual appeal and delighting your users.]

Q: Although there are established design and usability best practices and standards, there are also varying standards within companies’ definitions of good design and usability and the role design should play in the product development process. Some companies value form as well as function whereas others appear to value function only. Is form still a valuable element in usability?

A: There are two strongly interconnected ways to utilize form: personality & visual organization.

Personality–or visceral design if you prefer-is defined by the subjective reaction people have when viewing a product. It’s the combination of fonts, colors, images, shapes, and patterns that tells you which laundry detergent is tough on stains and which one provides a delicate touch. Though this aspect of form predominantly enforces a brand message for products it can also have an influence on usability. To substantiate that point, Don Norman has recently exposed research that indicates “attractive things work better”. To quote “When you wash and wax a car, it drives better, doesn’t it? Or at least feels like it does.” So there’s a corollary between aesthetics and ease of use.

For many people, the role of visual design ends there as they only consider form for “making things pretty”. As a result, they overlook the crucial role of visual organization.

Visual organization is the deliberate prioritization of meaning within a visual design. It’s the process of applying the principles behind perception–how we make sense of what we see- to illuminate relationships between content and actions. Through applications of visual contrast, designers can communicate the steps required to complete a task, the relationships between information, or the hierarchy between interface elements. Since the majority of people are only able to interact with a Web application through its presentation layer, visual organization is a key component for successful interface designs. It essentially tells people how to use things. Personality, on the other hand, tends to focus on why.

You can read the entire interview here: Interview with Luke Wroblewski, Senior Principal Designer,Yahoo! Inc.

In just the past couple of years, we’ve seen more and more designs that allow users to collaborate and share what they’re doing with others. Web sites and applications such as MySpace, Flickr, and Craigslist, are becoming increasingly popular.

One of the underlying reasons for their popularity is because they all focus on Social Design, an area of design that deals with the activities, behaviors, and motivations of people who work and play together through software interfaces. Each of these social applications connect users in new and exciting ways.

In this week’s UIEtips, we’ve republished Joshua Porter’s recent Brain Sparks blog post discussing how organizations can benefit from incorporating social features into their designs. I’ve decided to share the post with all of our UIEtips readers because I think Josh’s commentary on the importance of Social Design is just too important to miss.

As always, please share your thoughts with us. Have you ever wondered why sites such as MySpace and Flickr are so popular? Have you considered incorporating social features into your design? Leave your thoughts and join the discussion below.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

[If you find this article interesting, you'll definitely want to attend the User Interface 12 Conference this November 5-8, where Joshua Porter will present at UIE's Showcase Seminar, Usability 2007: The Latest Perspectives. In this seminar, Josh will share his latest research on Social Design practices.]

In our research, we’re seeing more and more evidence that a web site’s success depends on its ability to help users find the information they want quickly and efficiently. Yet, we still commonly see chaotic sites where users find it impossible to find the content they want.

Why are these content and information architecture problems still so prevalent? This week’s UIEtips article, written by our good friend Gerry McGovern, deals with tackling this question. Gerry explains how many organizations fail to focus on what’s most important to a site’s success: the site’s ability to help users complete key tasks. I think you’ll really enjoy it.

As always, I want to hear your thoughts on this topic. What content management approaches do you use in your organization? How do you manage the common tasks your customers want to complete? How has it affected your design process? Leave your thoughts and join the discussion below.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

[If you find Gerry's article interesting, you'll really want to check out his full-day seminar on Creating a Task-Based Information Architecture at UI12. 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. You can read more about Gerry’s session here: Creating a Task-Based Information Architecture .

Gerry McGovern just wrote a piece examining Don’s argument, where he gives various reasons for using complexity to appeal to customers when designing physical products.

…we love to show off. Complexity is like the peacock’s feathers. It is brash and impossible to miss. Complexity lets other people know how clever we are and how rich, because we can afford such complexity…

This is definitely something everyone can relate to. I’ll admit I bought a Motorola Razr the second it came out because it was flashy, laden with features, and made people “oo” and “ah”. Now two years on, I’ve found I don’t use anything on the phone besides talk and the camera. Whether I planned to use the Razr to its full extent or not is irrelevant. I wanted a reaction from my peers.

Everyone is different though. Some people are very minimalist, some people are very high tech, but most people are just caught up in the latest fads. This leads me to wonder if people really care about whether a product is simple or complex, or if people just care that a product is new, trendy, and in high-demand. Apple’s iPod is a simple device, yet it’s the most popular media player in the entire world. Microsoft’s Zune, which has more features than the iPod, isn’t doing so hot. What gives? Is it our ego that drives what we look for in a product? To steal a line from Jared, when someone asks me if I want to see their iPod, I automatically say, “Yes!”, but when someone asks me if I want to see their Sandisk Sansa e280, I give them a weird look.

Moving away from the design of physical products, Gerry asserts that simplicity is king when designing for web sites.

…we can’t wear a Web site, drive around in it or show it off at a party. Browsing a site is essentially private behavior. When we go to Google we are usually alone. We search for cheap flights, but we certainly don’t go around advertising that we’re cheap.

We may still end up buying complex products on the Web, but our Web behavior will remain relentlessly simple and hugely impatient…

Do we just want an effortless way to acquire products that make us feel superior? What do you think?

You can read Gerry’s full article here: Why Simplicity is Essential
to Web Design.

[Joshua Porter also wrote an in-depth article addressing this topic. You can read Josh's article here: Simplicity: The Ultimate Sophistication.]

What’s the difference between science and art? Is usability testing more of a science, that produces predictable, repeatable results? Or is it more of an art form, where the skill and talents of the people involved will have tremendous influence on the outcome? These are critically important questions, as we try to bring techniques like usability testing into the mainstream.

In 1999, Rolf Molich challenged the usability world with the CUE-2 study. In this landmark experiment, he had 9 separate usability teams each evaluate the same interface: Microsoft’s Hotmail.

If usability testing is a science, we would expect that every team would produce essentially the same results by finding the same problems and reporting them essentially the same way. Certainly, as with any scientific process, we could expect that the teams would generally agree on the most serious usability problems and rate problems with similar scales.

But that isn’t what Rolf found. Instead, each team essentially had their own methods and, surprisingly, found their own set of problems. 75% of the problems reported were only found by a single team — many of them very serious problems with the interface.

When everybody does something differently, it means we’re closer to art than to science. And being close to art, it means that the people involved have more impact than the process or methods chosen.

Is this bad? Not really. However, I do think there is something good about moving our craft to be more scientific. And it’s research like the CUE studies that will help us do just that.

In this week’s UIEtips, we’re re-printing an article I wrote back in 2005 about how Rolf’s work can help us learn about usability testing best practices and hone our own capabilities.

As always, I’m interested in your views on this. How do you learn to do your work better? Have you come up with ways to learn new techniques and tricks? I’m always interested to hear what you’re doing to improve your results. Leave your thoughts and join the discussion below.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

[If you want the opportunity to compare your work to practitioners taking part in Rolf's CUE projects, then you should seriously consider attending his full-day seminar at UI12, Advanced Methods for Usability Testing. Under Rolf's careful direction, you'll walk through all aspects of conducting a usability test, from test scenario creation to reporting, to see what some of the best practitioners have done. You can read more about Rolf's session here: Advanced Methods for Usability Testing]

If airports were built like most modern websites, finding your way around would be a nightmare. In order to extract the most money from visitors, the airport would be littered with signs for shops and restaurants. These would take priority over less revenue generating signs for gates or toilets, which would be placed wherever there was space. The marketing department would insist on huge banners advertising their latest offers, and the maintenance men would hang them wherever it was easiest to reach, often covering up existing signage.

The problem is, this type of thinking is very short sighted. Travellers would start missing connections or get frustrated that they couldn’t find the bathroom after a long flight. People would start spending less time at the airports, or if the option was available. switch airports altogether. So by trying to increase revenue in the short term, you end up frustrating your users and potentially damaging future profitability.

Thankfully airports take a much more user-centerd approach in their design…

You can read Andy’s full article here: Airport User Experience

You can find out more about contextual inquiry and customer-centered design by reading Christine Perfetti’s Driving Innovation and Creativity through Customer Data.

Here’s a simple computer game: It asks you to enter your name, tells you, “You’re Right!” and declares you the winner. Simple? Yes. Fun? Probably not.

To be fun, games need a fair amount of complexity to them. That’s what makes them challenging. Yet, it has to be the right kind of complexity. Make it too difficult, or make the mechanics of game play too awkward, and the game loses its appeal to even the most hardcore player.

Balancing simplicity with making something useful is one of the biggest challenges designers face. For years, the K.I.S.S. mantra has been the cry of the community, yet we keep building things with more and more features.

Finally, heavy-weights, such as Don Norman and Joel Spolsky feel compelled to add their inputs: Maybe simplicity isn’t all that it cracks up to be? Maybe we need some level of complexity to make the users happy?

When we think about experience design, we need to think about the entire experience of our customers and users, not just the isolated instance of a single task. In a recent Harvard Business Review, the article, Feature Bloat: The Product Manager’s Dilemma, suggested consumers will likely choose a more feature-rich product over one that appears simpler, but they’ll be less likely to make future purchases from the same vendor if it’s not usable.

In this week’s UIEtips, Joshua Porter talks about the debate around simplicity and how this will affect each of us as we balance new functionality requests.

Have you found yourself facing the trade-off of simplicity over new features? What have you done to make your users happy? We’d love to
hear your thoughts. Add to the conversation in the comments below.

Josh and I will be speaking at the User Interface 12 Conference, November 5-8, in Cambridge, MA. We’ve just announced the program and it’s very exciting. A ton of folks have already signed up, so I bet it will sell out.

You’ll also want to check out Josh’s upcoming UIE Virtual Seminar on Wednesday. He’s been studying how sites are integrating social features and has put together some neat insights.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

Karl Long recently posted a short article where he discusses the effect of organizational culture on experience design through Conway’s Law.

Essentially the law states that systems (especially software) will reflect the organizational structure that created them. Going beyond the obvious aspect of organization of features, information architecture etc. it goes on to state that the software/system will reflect the disfunction of the organization that created it.

Karl also poses some interesting questions that will get you thinking about innovating your traditional approaches to product creation.

You can read Karl’s full post here: Conway’s Law – Software/Systems Reflect The Organizational Structure That Created It

We’ve seen that Agile development methods are becoming more and more popular with organizations. Our clients are quickly starting to see the benefits of working together on short product iterations, including faster development lifecycles, improved product quality, and the reduction of “feature creep.”

Is your organization considering a migration to agile development processes? I would love to hear what you’re doing.

You can also see Lisa’s slideshow here: Waterfall Bad, Washing Machine Good

We’re holding the conference in Cambridge, MA on November 5 – 8, 2007. We’ve got a great line-up of presenters, including Scott Berkun, Kevin Cheng, Kim Goodwin, Cameron Moll, Luke Wroblewski, Rolf Molich, Gerry McGovern, and Larry Constantine. Christine, Josh, and I will also be presenting our latest work.

We’re always amazed at how well this conference is received, but this year it seems especially popular. We don’t really know why.

It could be because each of these incredible speakers is giving a full-day, in-depth seminar on some of the most important topics designers face today. It could be because the caliber of attendees we attract are the best and the brightest (and it’s always fun to hang out with super bright people). Or it could be because we’re giving everyone who signs up before April 24 a brand new, limited edition UI12 30GB iPod video.

Of course, I know you want to come to this conference (and get your own iPod video). Everything you need to register is at the conference site. Don’t delay — there might not be seats available.

Livia Labate, over at I think, therefore IA, wrote a post on her experience creating a comic strip to demonstrate the core elements of a movie plot to other people. She got the idea for the exercise from Scott McCloud’s book, Making Comics, and thought she could use the technique in her information architecture practice.

I bought Scott McCloud’s Making Comics as soon as it was published and dug in right away. It’s always a joy to read his stuff, but this volume in particular struck a cord since it’s exclusively about storytelling and using comics format and techniques to convey a story. I love comics and graphic novels, and have long been interested in how I could use comics’ storytelling techniques in the information architecture practice.

You can read Livia’s entire post here.

If you have any experience using comics in your work, I’d love to hear about them.

User Interface 12 Conference
November 5-8, 2007
Cambridge, MA

We’re just putting the finishing touches on the program. I think you’re gonna love it.

Plus, UIEtips customers will get access to the sneak preview site, which will include a really sweet early-bird registration bonus. You won’t want to miss that, so sign up here. (Hint: Last year’s bonus was a limited edition UI11 iPod Nano. This year’s will be even better!)

Keep an eye on this spot for more information!