Thankfully, Dan Rubin can show you the simple steps to create solid visual design. Dan is a talented designer in his own right, but has a special knack for teaching visual design for people without an artistic background. That’s why we’ve asked him to present our next UIE Virtual Seminar, Visual Design Essentials for Non-Designers, on May 13, 2010. He’ll teach you how to recognize common design mistakes and effective ways to make your site look good, whether you’re a natural artist or not.

Register with the promotion code BRAINSPARKS and get lifetime access to the recording of this seminar at no extra cost. Anyone in your organization can watch it whenever they want, as often as they want.

How do you create a visual design that matches your great ideas? When you look at a web page, and something isn’t quite right, how do you know what to do about it? We’d love to hear your thoughts on this. What tips or tricks can you share that have helped you improve your visual design?

Often, when we talk to teams about whether they think they explored enough design alternatives, they tell us they didn’t because of time, resources, or their own lack of imagination.

However, good design doesn’t have to be an expensive process, if you have the right tools and techniques in your toolkit. At last week’s User Interface 14 Conference, I had the opportunity to hear Leah Buley, Donna Spencer, and Dan Rubin share their favorite tools and techniques, showing that design exploration can be an easy tool for any team. In the article, Design-Exploring Options and Making Decision, you’ll read what they had to say.

You can also hear Leah, Donna, and Dan’s presentations, along with the other 6 presenters on the UI14 conference proceedings disc. The disc has over 12 hours of audio recordings, all the handouts from the Featured Talks, and the presentation slides to the eight full-day workshops. Listen to a sample from Leah Buley’s talk on How to be a User Experience Team of One.

Do you have your own tricks for exploring design alternatives? If so, drop us a note below. We’d love to hear from you.

If you didn’t attend the User Interface Conference this year, you may have missed the buzz over Leah Buley’s session entitled “How to be a User Experience Team of One”. Attendees loved it. Leah gave them tips and techniques used by top user experience teams that any UXer can use in a small team or an unsupportive environment.

Below are some notes I took during Leah’s session and slides from this portion of the talk. The slides here are shrunk to fit our blog, but the materials on the disc are full-sized PDFs suitable for printing.

Leah began with telling the story of her transition to a new job at Adaptive Path. Up until then, she had been a UX team of one at a financial firm. Her time was mostly spent walled up in a cubicle, headphones on, sketching and otherwise prepping wireframes on the computer, based on up-front meetings determining business requirements. After a few weeks she would emerge from her design cocoon with designs ready to be shown in a dog-and-pony show-style.

Her first day at Adaptive Path was radically different. She was handed paper and a Sharpie and, along with a couple of other designers, was asked to tackle a problem by generating several solutions, collaboratively, on the spot. She was initially flush with panic. They didn’t teach this at library school!

After a short while she warmed up to the process. To get to the quality ideas, you first must generate a lot of ideas, and be OK with many of them being subpar and others simply being tossed aside.

Now instead of jumping to the finish, as she had at her previous job, she was exploring more ideas more efficiently with techniques you can use with or without collaborating designers.

Leah used the idea of redesigning the eVite.com digital invitation and RSVP service to demonstrate some of the techniques she learned after joining Adaptive Path. (For the purposes of this blog post, we’ll be covering just the first part of the brainstorming process)

She avoided the computer. Computers can lock you into only one idea and you often get sucked down by minutia you shouldn’t be addressing at this stage.

She started with a “6-up” – a single sheet of paper with six, smallish, blank browser viewports and a pen. This allowed for 6 different ideas of how to solve one problem, say the eVite landing page. One or two ideas came easily. How do you push through to the next ideas?

[Download a PDF file of Leah's 6-up template]

Leah uses a couple of so-called “lightweight conceptual frameworks” to help push more ideas out of her head. A “Spectrum” is one such framework. A spectrum is a range from two opposing points. For example, what would the landing page at eVite.com look like if it was intended solely for a first-timer? What would it look like if it was solely for a long-time user of the service? What would pages on the spectrum in between those to points look like? What characteristic would they exhibit?

None of the sketches you make on the spectrum may be the right solution. But that’s OK, because we’re not drawing solutions. We’re drawing ideas. This framework gets you to try ideas you might have avoided before. Now you have a pile of ideas to pick from. Perhaps the best design features aspects from several of these thumbnail sketches.

You can hear the rest of Leah’s talk plus the other seven speakers and Jared Spool’s keynote presentation on the UI14 proceedings disc. The disc is loaded with over 12 hours of audio recordings, all the handouts from the Featured Talks and the presentation slides from the 8 full-day workshops. Order the proceedings disc by November 20, 2009 to guarantee your set and get the lowest price.

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How many IBM or General Electric television ads do we need to see before we are groaning at the mention of the word “innovation”? It’s too late for me, personally. But that doesn’t mean real innovation is dead. Steve Jobs has been quoted saying Apple will innovate their way through tight times. This past week Apple announced record revenues for the past quarter on impressive sales of premium products that aren’t supposed to sell well during down times. How are they flourishing while their competition is not?

How can you bring real innovation into your projects? That’s what I asked Scott Berkun when we spoke earlier this month. Scott is one of our favorite speakers on the topic of innovation and project management. He tells us you have to be opportunistic and start small. High-priority challenges may be a tempting place to start, but he suggested to first look at low-hanging fruit. You can build momentum for positive change by racking up a number of small wins that together move the project in the right direction. Having these small successes under your belt gives you more influence when attempting larger changes later on.

True innovation starts with you allowing yourself to be creative and recording your ideas religiously in a safe place like a notebook or sketchpad. Don’t self-censor, either. Initial precision and “getting it right” are the antithesis of creativity. It’s essential to let the ideas flow, and your ideas will improve as you continue to record them. Your journal is an incubator of ideas. Not every idea will be a success, and some will be terrible! But Scott says that’s OK. When an opportunity for change arises, you’ll have a treasure trove of ideas to pick though.

Once you have an idea, you need to involve other people to make it happen. The key differentiator in successful, innovative environments is group trust. People need to feel they are safe to share ideas with their team. If you work in an environment where you’re fearful of this, find one person on your team who is the most enthusiastic and try sharing with them. Once you have other people on board with your idea, you’ll have an easier time sharing it with others.

A common difficulty is honest and constructive critique among teams and individuals. This is an area where the most successful teams have excelled. Good critiques take practice and trust within your team. This usually requires time and commitment.

What experiences have you had trying to introduce new ideas? Politics and “we’ve tried that before” getting in the way? Let us hear about it in the comments.

Once they made it to the page with their content, they still struggled. The navigation links and categories were so unclearly written that users weren’t at all sure where to click. They had to work very hard just to figure out what content was available to them on the site.

The content was disorganized, confusing, and lethargic. Fortunately, we knew exactly who to turn to discuss and solve these types of problems, world renowned information architect, Donna Spencer.

Back in August 2008, I interviewed Donna. In our conversation, Donna and I discuss how the best information architects successfully tackle specific content challenges. Donna shares the essential skills separating the best information architects from the rest of the pack. I think you’ll really enjoy her insights.

Read the article – Four Essential Skills for Information Architects: An Interview with Donna Spencer

Last year, Donna presented an outstanding workshop at the User Interface Conference, Information Architecture Essentials. It was ranked so highly, we decided to bring it back for the User Interface 14 conference. It’s a great place to learn what it takes to become a great information architect and I highly suggest you check out the session.

How have you tackled your site content challenges? In your experience, what skills do the best information architects possess? Share your thoughts and experiences below.

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What can a non-designer do to harness the power of visual design without calling professional help? Quite a lot, says internationally-regarded visual designer Dan Rubin. We called Dan to talk about what design techniques are accessible to mere mortals. He also gave us a preview of his day-long workshop for non-designers at our User Interface 14 Conference, this November.

Call it low hanging fruit, Dan says, but there are a lot of small, seemingly simple things that combine to have a strong, positive effect upon your site’s impact. If you’ve built with web standards, especially using CSS for style, these small changes can be trivial to execute across your site. Start with the spacing between elements. Consistency with the white space and alignment bring an important sense of order to your pages.

“Humans love patterns and order,” Dan tells us. Patterns and rules are tools pro designers use to organize page elements. Arbitrary placement leave sites looking cluttered and out of sorts. Creating rules — for example, the amount of space between certain elements — is something non-pros can do to bring order to a page. Choose a spacing and alignment scheme and stick to it. The earlier you set these rules and patterns, the easier it is to wrangle your page elements. Once rules are in place, you’re left with fewer arbitrary decisions to make. Arbitrary decisions are often the cause of disorder.

Massive gains can be made by addressing typographical issues. Proper typography establishes the hierarchy of information, guiding your visitors through your site content. Create a visual identity for a kind of content, and then use it consistently. Dan says most pro designers limit the number of typefaces (fonts) in a design to one or two; often one serifed face (Georgia is an example), and one sans-serif (Verdana is an example). From there, Dan advocates restraint, by making the smallest effective change to call attention to differences. Don’t combine large text, bold, italics, and color on one element where bold alone would have sufficed.

Color is a challenging topic. Many feel color choices are subjective, but there are considerations to consider. Using a color palette, like kuler.adobe.com, will help you pick colors that naturally work together… but if you already have brand colors, you should try to stick with them as much as practical. Remember, you can use black, white, and the spectrum of grays to accomplish a lot of your design’s heavy lifting. Be sure, when you do interject colors, to remember that they often have cultural, meanings. Dan used the example of red, in many cultures, representing a warning. Be wary of red in a context where it might lead a user to think they’re being warned when they are not. Try to work with these cultural perceptions instead of against them. Be sure to understand audience; those with color blindness and those from different cultures may literally view your colors differently.

Dan wanted everyone to remember that, in design, “We’re solving problems… but not for ourselves.” He also had another bit of advice, “When you design something right, no one will pat you on the back, because now it works like it’s supposed to.” That might be hard to accept initially, but it means you can make small changes without startling people. An adjustment to the line-height of your text might not be noticed by a regular reader, but they’ll find themselves more comfortably reading the content.

Dan has gathered all this advice and much more into his full-day User Interface 14 workshop, Visual Design Essentials for Non-Designers: Effortless Skills for High-quality Designs. It’s so full of enough valuable content, you’ll keep you tweaking your site for months to come.

Are you responsible for the visual design on your site, without pro-design resources? What effective steps have you found to improve your site? Let us know in the comments.

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Donna Spencer is our long-time, go-to expert on the topic of Information Architecture. We’re happy to bring her stateside again for the upcoming User Interface 14 conference. Recently, I spoke with her, all the way from Australia, in advance of her trip to Boston.

I asked Donna, what happens when, one day, you’re asked into the boss’s office and they drop “the web site” and “information architecture” into your lap? Regardless of your experience, where do you begin? Donna says your first question should be, “Why do we bother to have a web site in the first place?” “What’s its purpose?” She says if you don’t get this out of the way first, you’ll run up against it when you’re further along the trail and it won’t be easy to deal with.

One strategy Donna likes is to work backwards. Start with what should not be on the site. Sometimes pruning your unnecessary or no longer timely content is an effective way of honing the site. You should ask, “What’s the value of this content? Is this still relevant?” Before you can answer this for certain, you need to research your users’ needs thoroughly. Along with establishing the site’s purpose, knowing your users is the most important step to begin with. These two items will work hand in hand.

I asked Donna, once you have these established, should we just dive right into the homepage and start making changes? Generally, the answer is no. A few initial homepage tweaks aren’t always bad, especially if you can get some quick wins there. Hopefully your research has revealed the site sections in most need of assistance. Starting there will often be productive. You should most likely start with the content pages, where more people enter your site and where they spend most of their time. Be sure that your content pages work for their specific content, as all your content will not likely be all cookie-cutter. Generally, Donna shies away from using Lorem Ipsum text for content page designs. Also, if you know your customers don’t generally begin on the homepage, don’t create your navigation by starting with the homepage.

Your goal should be to get something informed in front of people quickly. At some point you’ll need to take what you know and create a first draft. You’ll have to make some of it up. Don’t expect it to be 100% right. Check it against your research, show it to people within the organization, and tweak. Show it to users and see if it functions well. The good and bad should become apparent once you put it through these paces.

These points are of course just a few of the highlights from our conversation. Please join us for the complete discussion in the podcast. If you found this useful, you’ll likely also be interested in Donna’s full-day workshop at UI14, Information Architecture Essentials, Best Practices for Organizing Your Site’s Content, which was UI13′s highest-rated workshop, newly revised and updated. You won’t want to miss it.

Have you had the task of redesigning your site’s IA just dropped in your lap out of the blue? Where would or did you start? Let us know in the comments!

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Todd Zaki Warfel has just finished two years of research into the tools and processes used in prototyping web sites. His findings will be published in a book due out this fall and we’ve asked him to give a full-day workshop on the topic at UI14. Did you know some people are actually building prototypes in Microsoft Excel? It’s true. “People are using what they have at their disposal and what they are comfortable with,” Todd tells me.

In the podcast, we discussed a number of the more popular tools that are being used today, from Adobe Fireworks, to Axure RP, to good old PowerPoint. Todd doesn’t think your choice of tool is important if you are able to communicate your ideas effectively to your audience. He thinks it is worth knowing the capabilities of a few other tools in the event you need to do something in the future that your current tool can’t handle.

I got Todd to reveal the process his own shop, Messagefirst, is using to prototype. It may surprise you that they start with rough, black and white sketches which they share with their clients both early and often. Whereas some design shops may work hard on a prototype for three months before first showing it to their client, Todd thinks that’s a bad idea. There’s nothing worse than diving deep into a design direction only to have it unilaterally shot down in the first review.

Instead, you need to get your client to give you lots of feedback very early in the process, starting with basic and rough sketches. It will save both sides a lot of time, effort and frustration. Once the design direction is solidified, Todd and his team move their prototypes into color and interactivity. The Messagefirst crew is now often jumping straight to HTML, CSS and JavaScript for the higher fidelity mockups.

Todd tells us that someone with basic HTML skills can (and have) learned to create high fidelity prototypes in just a couple weeks of effort. The secret is the availability modular tools, for example, CSS frameworks like the 960 Grid System and JavaScript libraries like jQuery. This move to code earlier in the process is becoming more and more popular around the web.

Todd and I talked more about his two years’ worth of findings and he gave us a preview of his UI14 full-day workshop. Tune in to the show for more on prototyping.

We’d love to know what process and tools you’re using in your own designs. Have you incorporated feedback early into your process? Let us know in the comments!

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One of the most popular speakers in the history of our User Interface Conference is Gerry McGovern. Certainly most of that popularity is thanks to Gerry’s no-nonsense, customer-centric approach to content management strategy. Perhaps a small portion is due to his dulcet Irish brogue. Gerry coined the term “customer care words”, which are distinct words and phrases that visitors are looking for that lead them to success and satisfaction. This is complimentary to a concept we at UIE call “trigger words”, but not quite the same. Trigger words are content-related and navigational–words that help lead you along the path to what you seek. Care words are task-related not content-related; they are the words that visitors need to see to complete the task they are on your site for. These words are not always found in your search logs or in keywords that have led people from Google to your site. But, through polling, testing and observation, care words can be discovered.

Customer care words are both a concept and a eponymous technique that Gerry uses with his clients. When enough participants take part in his processes, his technique both shows top words people are attracted to and, perhaps more importantly, reveals the top tasks the customers are visiting the site to accomplish.

Top task management, quite simply, is what Gerry thinks your site’s whole design should revolve around. Most site owners view their sites as places that house information, but your visitors are on your site to accomplish a task. You should optimize your site, mostly through language, so that it excels in helping visitors accomplish their most common tasks. Traditional site management concentrates on technology, like search engines, and content. But all site projects should ultimately be judged by the satisfaction and success of the users… not by whether your new CMS transition went technically well.

Once the content management system is in place, many organizations write and publish copy without knowing how it will be used. Optimizing your content for top tasks can produce increases in customer satisfaction and task completion. Gerry has seen this with many of his own clients, some of whom were skeptical at first. The biggest objection to optimizing for top tasks is the fear that your customers look to do many things on your site, not just these top tasks. However, if customers have trouble with their common tasks, why would they trust your site to dive into the other ones? In some cases, the top tasks weren’t the most obvious ones to site owners, underlining the importance of both talking to your customers and observing users on your site regularly.

Measuring your customers’ success rate, time-to-completion and their disaster rate–when they think they’ve successfully completed their task, but actually have not–will show you whether or not your changes are beneficial. What’s key is to measure and to revisit these areas until we have them right. Too often, Gerry says, there’s a culture of “launch and leave” with sites: build it and then never revise. Constant, incremental improvement is a better culture to work towards. Gerry has seen seen customer satisfaction rates “sky-rocket” after such changes.

There’s so much more Gerry and I discussed. Please listen to him in his own words on the podcast; your customers will thank you.

How are you ensuring your customers are completing their top tasks successfully on your site? Discuss your methods in the comments below.

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I had the pleasure of chatting with Leah Buley recently, in advance of her appearance at our User Interface Conference. She’ll be speaking about getting to a Good Design Faster with new techniques to getting at your creative ideas. She’s done some wonderful research on early-project design stages that you really need to hear. There’s a ton of great content in this podcast, and I can only share so much with you here, so please tune in for more of her insights.

When Leah told me that wireframes are really holding back the design process, she grabbed my attention. Designers sit down with some rough ideas and start trying to fit them into one or two pages. Next they start sliding design elements around until things feel good, and then they show it to someone for feedback. That someone or group then sees a design that’s pretty far along, and looks pretty concrete. If some of the ideas in the wireframe are not developed as much as they should be, it’s difficult to stop the forward momentum and reassess.

How can we explore a range of solutions before diving into a single solution? Wireframes are very useful to the process, but instead, we should consider delaying them. Before wireframes, Leah suggests a very open, cross-team exploratory stage. Invite people from across your organization and even collaborate with those who might not normally be within the core design group.

Leah suggests a week-long ‘design sprint’ that begins with a group brainstorming meeting in the morning with lots of people… and everyone’s opinions count. Then that afternoon, the group sketches out a large number of low-fidelity sketches further exploring the experience they’re looking to design, based on the morning’s activities. Sketching many iterations based on different perspectives like, ‘how would we optimize this for a first-time user?’ ‘how about for a power-user?’ ‘how about for this demographic?’

Then the week-long process continues. Grouping the different approaches together, sort the best from the bunch, mixing and matching the best ideas and build upon them (Leah calls this ‘sketch-boarding’). Next, take the sketches and flows with the most potential, and make those the first round of wireframes, which you present to a group critique. At the end of the week, take the feedback from the group critique to improve the wireframes.

The end result is a wireframe that has a tremendous amount of collaborative thought behind it. Instead of surprising many stakeholders at this point, their good ideas are already baked inside. You can now share these fire-tested ideas with the next groups that need to see them. This is clearly different from the way many groups and designers are using wireframes today, and I think it’s a really powerful proposition.

Leah and I also talked about ways to become an effective sketcher, how to run productive group critique sessions and much more. You really need to listen in, this could really help your teams process. After our conversation, I’m even more excited to see her full-day workshop on this topic this November at UI14 in Boston. I hope to see you there, as well.

Till then, what are your experiences with the early rounds of design? What are you doing in advance of your wireframing? Can you see implementing this process in your organization? Let us know in the comments!

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One of my favorite people to speak with about the state of content on the web is Ginny Redish. She’s one of those people who cuts to the point so decisively that you’re left asking yourself… “why didn’t I think of that?”

Ginny has made her career by helping organizations engage their users with captivating content. I had a chance to speak with her regarding what she’s up to and what she plans to talk about at our upcoming User Interface Conference and I was not disappointed.

Ginny is using a new analogy in her workshops. Navigation and search, design, and technology are the three legs of a stool. In the stool sits the content: what your visitors are coming for. Why do we spend all of our time building the stool, then all-but ignore what the stool is built to support? It’s like putting a beautiful front door on your house, and having nothing inside!

Another analogy Ginny shared was “the web as a telephone.” You’ve put all this stuff up on the web so people won’t have to call you and ask for information. But if you don’t give it to them in that conversational, informative manner… they’re going to call you up anyhow! People come to your web site to answer the questions they have about your organization or your products. Have a conversation with your customers though your web site’s content just as you would have through the telephone.

You can create significant savings for your organization by writing your content as a conversation. Ginny regularly travels the country to work with organizations and their content. After one of her clients re-wrote their site’s content following the techniques in her book, her client told her they were able to reduce the number of people staffing the phones by three full-time positions!

One way to avoid success is through FAQs. Ginny says if you have FAQs on your site, that’s a sure-fire sign that the site content covering that topic has failed. If you’re receiving questions frequently, that means it’s time to update your site content because either the content is missing or isn’t findable by your customers. Remember, each topic should be a complete conversation with your customer.

Ginny has found that writing toward personas can help produce this successful form of content creation. Of course the next step after writing is to test the content with your customers to see if it indeed answers their questions. But there’s an important next step, especially if you’re a larger organization. You must work cross-silos to make sure different departments are not having contradictory conversations with the same customers. You also have to ensure that all the information on your site is current. If one department updates data, they all must still agree!

There was so much more in our conversation, so please tune in to the podcast for more inspirational ideas to get your site’s content fully tuned up.

Ginny will be presenting Planning & Writing Web Content that Works, Content as Conversations at the User Interface 14 Conference this fall in Boston. Clearly, it’s not one to miss.

What stumbling blocks are you hitting with your organization’s content? Let’s discuss in the comments.

Creating great design is now more important than ever. In difficult times, we all have to do more with less. We have to be innovative in both the designs we create and the way we create them.

This year’s User Interface 14 Conference in Boston, MA, from November 1-3, is just the ticket. The UI14 sneak preview web site is up and we think the conference agenda is our best yet. Our team of experts will set your imagination on fire, powering up your creative juices so you can dazzle and delight, whether you’re a member of a large team or a UX-Team-Of-One.

The Content is What Makes UI14 Unique

Today’s conferences focus on the 60-90 minute presentation format. Enough time to pique your interest, but not enough time to seriously dive in deep and leave you with the skills needed to make a significant difference in the world of user experience.

At UI14, you get 2 days of in-depth, full-day workshops. There are 8 full-day workshops. Here is a peak of two of them.

Good Design Faster: New Techniques for Creative Ideas

When we have great ideas, we struggle to present them. We hear, “Are those really the fonts?” when what we’re looking for is deeper analysis. The best designers focus their critique on the most important decisions they’re facing.

Creating innovative designs requires an innovative process. That’s why we’re excited to bring in experience designer Leah Buley. Leah’s  known for her rapid, low budget techniques for team creativity and idea generation. She’ll share her ground-breaking, proven techniques for Design Sprints and Sketchboarding in her full-day workshop, Good Designs Faster.

You’ll learn Leah’s secrets for quickly exploring a range of design alternatives, moving from back-of-the-napkin sketching to mapping out your design’s interaction, flow, and form. She’ll demonstrate several exercises that get a team’s creative juices flowing, while staying focused on the needs of the users.

Fast Prototyping Made Easy

Prototyping—building a mockup of the design to validate its direction—has never been easier. Designers today have a plethora of tools for every development process stage. New techniques make it fast and easy to get a design working.

To guide us through the landscape of prototyping, we’ve invited Todd Zaki Warfel, a brilliant tactician and author of Prototyping: A Practitioner’s Guide. Todd’s put together an amazing workshop, chock-full of the latest techniques and tools. You’ll see the full gamut of prototyping techniques, from paper to JavaScript and everything in between.

You’ll learn how to avoid the common headaches and mistakes that first-timers consistently run into. You’ll create paper prototypes of some interactive forms, Ajax simulations, and complex interfaces, like a sliding photo gallery. Todd will show you how easy it is to create prototypes of mobile applications in a tool like Fireworks. You’ll get a good introduction to the power of JavaScript libraries, such as Prototype and jQuery.

These are just 2 of 8 topics the full-day workshops focus on. During the next few weeks, watch for blog posts highlighting the other 6 full-day workshops and speakers. Or visit UI14 sneak preview site now to learn about these additional amazing speakers and sessions.

The sneak preview site also has the best pricing option available. Register by August 28 to guarantee your spot in the workshops you want and get the lowest conference price.

We hope to see you in Boston!