In his UIE Virtual Seminar, Telling the Right Story with Data Visualizations, Noah will provide demo data to teach you how to effectively conceptualize, plan, and ultimately design powerful visualizations that tell the right story. But be advised: you’ll never look at data the same way again.

You’ll learn to:

• Decide what story to tell with your abundance of data
• Choose the best data for telling that story effectively
• Select which encodings best align with the data
• Design visualizations that clearly convey meaning

If you’ve read all the blog posts and still find yourself stumped with how to design visualizations of complex data, then this seminar is right up your alley. Get a step-by-step guide to reviewing, choosing, and designing effective data visualizations.

We’re bringing back Noah Iliinsky to follow up one of the most popular UIE Virtual Seminars of 2011—Information Visualization: Letting Data Tell the Story. Register for his February seminar with the code VISUALIZATION, and we’ll send you access to his first seminar.

You’ll Learn to:

• Play the project game in a different way
• Replace passive collaboration with active collaboration
• Integrate UI design with user stories
• Make UX planning part of the project rhythm

You already know that UX decisions touch every part of a project. But integrating them with Agile to communicate, estimate, and deliver the product is critical to winning.

After this seminar, you’ll be ready to knock it out of the park.

The Next Step Series

The Next Step Series will feature Rosenfeld Media authors covering critical user experience topics just like they do in their Rosenfeld Media books. And by teaming up with UIE, you’ll experience the great format and quality production values you’ve come to expect from our 90 minute-long live seminars.

In the next UIE Virtual Seminar, Rich Rutter gets you started with JQuery—assuming no prior knowledge—and shows you lots of examples, hints, and tricks. Just 5 minutes into this seminar, you’ll see JQuery in action and have something you can use in your own wireframes.

Employ Simple Show and Hide Techniques

The essence of JQuery is to find something and do something to it. This technique easily shows different page states so your team and test participants can “do things” to your design.

• See, step-by-step, how to put this simple, yet useful example of JQuery in action
• Use modules and plug-ins to make your design to do simple things, without worrying about the performance of production code

Toggle Wireframe Annotations

Add notes to your interactive design.

• Turn your comments on or off depending on who’s viewing your design
• Add lists, comments, or direction for developers and others who need to work with your design

Fake Simple Ajax Interactions

Without creating production level code, get your design to quickly and easily do its thing—click something and change occurs—for your developer or client.

• Replicate what happens when you click something like a “favorite button”
• Fill in all the steps of an Ajax interaction such as a slight delay or adding different page states on a single page

Get Started with JQuery UI Widgets

Rich will introduce a library with options and widgets that you can easily put in place. In many cases you’ll see how to simulate what the full interaction could be.

• Explore modal dialogues, an intrusive piece of interaction and a good example of something you want to test: Do I really need a modal, or is a link better?
• Get more examples: Prototyping calendars, lightboxes, and more.

Rich will show you the power of combining discreet interactions together with a complex interaction.

Regardless of your JavaScript experience, this seminar will be a great way to start using JQuery and take your interactive skills to the next level. JQuery gives us a clean, interactive feel, and can be the difference between a slick design and something annoying or disruptive. It brings rich interactivity to your HTML and CSS3.

Rich will incorporate complex interaction examples along with providing excellent sources of documentation and tutorials for your toolbox. The seminar will keep theory to the bare minimum and focus on getting you started with practical takeaways you can use straight away.

The real power in what you’ll learn is getting very close to a final look and feel of your intended design with just a bit of effort and without having to build the whole application. Get over the initial hurdle of the JQuery learning curve and gain momentum in your design process. Join us for JQuery for UX Designers.

Story mapping is a way of organizing Agile user stories that communicate user experience. It allows us to build the collection of stories that become the backlog. Agile expert Jeff Patton will show you how story mapping gives you a tool: a tool to both quickly think through and simply describe the user experience. This strong technique helps you put the big picture of UX and the little pictures of Agile in one place, engaging the developers and stakeholders you’re working with.

Users will always have an experience with your product. Story mapping will pull your UX focus into your organization’s process and ensure that experience is a great one.

You’ll learn:

How to build a story map—something you already use—from scratch

You’ll learn to keep the focus on what people are doing, while decomposing into the things your organization designs, and how development happens.

• Bring user experience to the project early and often, while still letting the Agile folks move forward in their process of breaking everything down into little pieces
• Explore ways of describing user experience with Agile stories, and get involved with the “what to build” part

How to overcome the Agile dogma that often starts projects off on the wrong foot

You’ve heard stories and are suspicious, or maybe even had an experience of your own.

• Make sense and avoid trouble in your projects when talking about the user experience, something seemingly antithetical to the agile process
• Story mapping gives you an intermediate structure to represent both the big business “whys” and the specific development “whats” of what the user is trying to do

Why the story mapping vocabulary can alleviate the lack of common understanding that comes with tying Agile & UX together

Between project management, developers, and the UX contingent, you can get everyone on the same page with the terms you introduce and define.

• Use language that still helps you plan and track progress, but doesn’t lose the user experience
• Succeed in working with others on your team who may not be UX-literate, using story mapping as a conversation piece and a collaborative element

You can put this process in place for projects you’re working on right now

Regardless of how far along your team is on a project, it’s never too late to put this technique in play.

• Take control of current projects. Use story mapping to ensure the user experience is an integral part of the product you deliver.
• Reap the rewards of story mapping when you’re stuck, or unsure of next steps, even several iterations into a project

A team deep in the Agile process need things at a certain time, in a certain way. That’s foreign to the traditional UX effort. Story mapping is a way to merge these two worlds. Jeff will dig into why the two approaches are different, and what user experience professionals will do in this Agile environment.

Start story mapping in your agile environment and you’ll be tightly integrated as active team members in the whole development process, and not added as an afterthought. Others will see you as a critical contributor to the process of what to build, and in framing and delivering your product. Join us on September 1.

Get Jeff’s Agile Primer:

Register before August 25 and get complimentary access to Jeff’s 2009 virtual seminar: An Agile UX Primer. Agile refers to a class of processes, and Jeff’s the guy we turn to for this aspect of the design and development world. It’s not a prerequisite, but it’ll add to your takeaways from Jeff’s seminar on Sept. 1.

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

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

Read the article: Winning a User Experience Debate

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

• Ways to tailor your UX design process to the culture of your organization
• How to conduct research with minimal time and budget
• Techniques to get useful design feedback from stakeholders
• How to make your case in organizations that don’t prioritize design

You’ll be able to put UX principles into practice in any organization, and learn how to make the case for user experience design with results, not theory.

Register with the code UNDERCOVER and add lifetime access
to the recording of this seminar for no extra cost.

The details for you:
UX Design when Time, Money, and Support is Limited with Cennydd Bowles
Thursday, July 21 at 1:30pm ET
1:30pm ET / 12:30pm CT / 11:30am MT / 10:30am PT
90 minute online seminar
Learn more about Cennydd’s seminar or save your spot now!

And one last piece of good news! Thanks to New Riders, we’re giving away copies of Cennydd’s book, UNDERCOVER User Experience Design, to random attendees. Winners will be notified within 24 hours of the live seminar. Join us!

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

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

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

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

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

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Prototyping is an iterative process. You generate design concepts. You test them. You discover what works, what needs improving, and opportunities for new ideas. Then repeat. Prototyping your design will get your team and your stakeholders to talk about it. They’ll use it, touch it, walk through it at a point in time when you can make changes inexpensively.

Last year, Todd Zaki Warfel, a recognized leader in the design-research and usability fields, joined us for a UIE Virtual Seminar: A Practitioner’s Guide to Prototyping. In it, Todd explores his Eight Guiding Principles for prototyping. These principles are the foundation for more effective prototyping, regardless of the method and tool your team uses. Also, Todd’s principles are sure to test and improve your design whether you’re a seasoned prototyper or just getting your feet wet.

Todd is a Pied Piper in the user experience design world. We’ve seen it! At conferences, everyone wants to catch up with him to see what he’s doing and what he’s thinking about. He’s loaded with charisma! Oh, and he’s a pretty good designer, too. He thinks about this technique a lot, so we’re thrilled to have Todd’s UIE Virtual Seminar as part of our UIE User Experience Training Library.

Here’s an excerpt from the podcast.

“…For us, we actually use the prototypes as our specification, for the most part. Now, there are some things that you’re not going to see or that maybe won’t be self-evident in the prototypes. Some of the business rules or back-end functionality may not really be clear in the prototype.

What we found, and this is actually one of the reasons why we turned to prototyping and away from an older, traditional method of wire frames with written specification documents. What we found is that, since the prototype, basically, is show and tell and allows you to see the story as well as tell the story and actually play around with the systems, it’s much more tangible. When we do prototyping, we find that actually, any specifications that have to be written are dramatically reduced.

So, for example, in my book there is a case study from a gentleman over in the UK and their old, traditional system was: do some wire frames, write a 200-page specification document and deliver it out to the development team. And they shifted over to using more of a prototyping model. And for similar systems that they used to have to write a 200-page spec document, they found themselves delivering the designs, with specifications, about three times as fast and that the specifications went down to 20 pages instead of 200.

And so they’re essentially using the prototype as the bulk of the specification and then writing some supplemental documentation to describe things that aren’t self-evident, like back-end business rules and maybe some technology-type stuff. And we’ve done a very similar approach.

So, a lot of times, what we’ll do is prototype out maybe a core flow, plus maybe some error sessions and maybe some success screens and that type of a thing. But, we won’t typically prototype out every single scenario. We’ll kind of do the 80-20 rule. So, here’s 80 percent of it prototyped out. You can pretty much see how it works. And then any additional, supplemental information that may not be self-evident in the prototype, we’ll either write some documentation, or in a lot of cases actually, our clients just take the prototype and then their internal team basically writes that spec…”

If you thought that was interesting, you’ll also hear Todd address these questions:

• If you’re prototyping only some of the functionality, how do you talk about the rest of the functionality that isn’t in the prototype such that the team knows how to fill in the gaps?
• How are you able to do usability testing when the prototypes are not refined, or they’re missing pieces?
• We often talk about how prototyping lets you reduce risks, but does it give you an opportunity to actually take risks?
• Do the prototypes have to be made with the same technology that you’re going to use in your production system, or are there actually advantages to doing them in something completely different?

If you have any questions or thoughts on prototyping, please feel free to share them in the comments section below.

Visual design problems affect an application’s success in a variety of ways. In the mildest form, they slow users down and distract them from their task. In the worst cases, they confuse users to the point of giving up or needing assistance. If the application is in the organization’s revenue stream or helps reduce costs, we’ve seen visual design issues can dramatically affect the bottom line.

For some time now, we’ve been fortunate to work with the design consulting firm, Two Rivers Consulting. UIE virtual seminars from Hagan Rivers have taught you to design better navigation and her Web App Masters talk shows you techniques for navigation in web applications. Now, we are honored to share with you the other half of this talented team, David Rivers.

On November 18, David will present a virtual seminar—Visual Design for Web Applications. He will help you improve your application’s visual appearance, while taking into account those real-world considerations we all face. David will show you how to create or update your application’s visual design to make it successful and delightful.

Join us on November 18 for David’s seminar. It’s chock full of real-world examples and insight that you won’t want to miss!

What is your toughest challenge in designing visual appearance of web applications? Got some tips to share? Let’s hear ‘em. Share your stories below.

Your site’s search engine produces all sorts of useful information. Spending time with your site’s query data—data that is semantically rich—will help you answer questions about your users’ behavior and intent. You’re likely to learn some unanticipated lessons about your site.

Why spend time with your search log’s data? It will give you more usable content, improved search engine performance, as well as better navigation and metadata. Your users will achieve more on your site. You’ll sell more, engage more, and reduce frustration.

Lou Rosenfeld, who helped establish the field of information architecture, will show you how to take advantage of your site’s query data, data that’s sitting on your server right now. He’ll show you how to set up and run simple reports and queries to get you started towards better dialogue with your customers.

Do you spend time on your site’s search analytics? Maybe you use Google analytics or some other tool? What sort of time does it require? Other resources? Share your experiences below.

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?

Web forms are the linchpin to a user’s engagement with your design. All too often these forms, the last and most important step in a user’s journey, are poorly thought out or crafted. It’s common to struggle with forms—knowing exactly how to design it so the user doesn’t abandon it.

How long should your form be? Is it best to break a form into multiple steps? What are the considerations for a two-column design? How do you handle international addresses? These are just a few examples of what countless others wrestle with in their form design.

We’re huge fans of Luke Wroblewski, our go to person on “web form design.” He’s compiled some of the most pressing challenges faced by designers, and shares his thoughts and solutions on them in our next UIE Virtual Seminar, Thursday, April 22.

What are your biggest challenges with form design?  How do you know when you’ve addressed them well?  We’d love to hear your thought’s in advance of Luke’s Seminar.

Prototyping is an iterative process. You discover what works, what needs improving, and opportunities for new ideas. The earlier you learn about a design change, the easier it is to implement, and the less costly that change will be. Prototyping allows your team to explore ideas before you invest in them.

In this seminar, Todd Zaki Warfel, a recognized leader in the design-research and usability fields, will explore his Eight Guiding Principles for prototyping. These principles are the foundation for more effective prototyping, and will improve your design process whether you’re a seasoned prototyper or just getting your feet wet.

Register before March 24 to get your free personal PDF copy of Todd’s book, Prototyping, A Practitioners Guide, and lifetime access to Fred Beecher’s seminar, The Whys, Whats, and Hows of Prototyping.

Tell us how prototyping fits into your design process. Do you have an example where something in the design was caught early and saved a bunch of money? Or one where something was identified late and cost money? What is your experience with prototyping, and how do you sell it to the rest of the team? Or your stakeholders? Share your thoughts and experiences below. We’d love to hear them!

(Oh, and by the way, our last event sold out, so you’ll want to Register your team early!)

When you spend time with your customers, it’s an opportunity to learn how to move your design forward. You don’t want to leave important information “on the table”—information that can give you a more complete understanding of how to move your vision forward. You might act on incomplete detail that creates risk when it forces you to guess what the users need. Worse, the partial insight you have may take your design team in the wrong direction.

User research is an expensive endeavor. Make sure you’re prepared to get the most out of every minute that you’re with your users. Come home with a deep insight into their thinking, their lives, and how you can change their experience for the better.

Steve Portigal will show your team the art of asking the question. You might visit the user in their office or home, have them come to you for a usability test, or even have a chance encounter at a trade show or while waiting for an airplane. Do you know what to ask? Do you know what to listen for, to extract the critical detail of what they can tell you about your design?

Steve will help you prepare your team for any opportunity, be it formal user research or less structured, ad-hoc research. He’ll also give you tips on how to work with your stakeholders and executives, who may also be meeting potential customers and users, so they know what to ask and how to listen—integrating their efforts into the research team. (Wouldn’t it be great if they understood why you’re doing what you’re doing?)

Get your team asking good questions, the right questions, with this fantastic seminar. Honing this skill will be a great addition to their Toolbox. Register your team before January 19, with the promotion code TOOLBOX, and I’ll also send you the link to a fabulous webinar Kate Gomoll did for us, Field Studies: The Ultimate Tool in Your Usability Toolbox.

Are you prepared for meeting someone who could be using your next design? How do you make sure you get into their head, learn what their life is all about, and get the information you need to build something truly innovative and delightful? We’d love to hear your ideas and about your experiences below.

Join us January 12 for our next webinar: Leveraging Search & Discovery Patterns For Great Online Experiences, with Peter Morville and Mark Burrell.

The abundance and variety of search implementations present a challenge to designers: How do we leverage the behaviors our users are developing to ensure they find the content they’re seeking? By understanding how people interact with search implementations, we can create effective designs that deliver great experiences for both searching and discovering.

We couldn’t have timed this seminar better. In just a few weeks, Peter Morville will put his new book, Search Patterns, to press. And Mark Burrell and his team at Endeca have been working hard to release their new UI Design Pattern Library for Search & Discovery. So, this is the perfect time to talk about how to leverage patterns for better search designs.

This seminar is perfect for you, if you’re working on providing the best experience with your site’s search implementation. Bring your entire team and schedule extra time to talk about what you’ve learned—you’ll want to implement Peter and Mark’s ideas right away.

This winter, Peter’s new book, Search Patterns, published by O’Reilly, will hit the stores. But you won’t have to buy it, because as soon as it comes off the press, we’ll send you a copy—just because you attended this seminar.

Thanks to Peter, Mark, and the great folks at Endeca, we can include this must-have book. We’ve seen an early draft and we’re amazed by Peter’s talent to explain these topics so clearly. The beautiful full-color illustrations and screen shots don’t hurt either.

Register your team today, and reserve your copy of Search Patterns.

Do you use design patterns? What questions do you have about them? Where do you go, or where would you go to find them? Share your thoughts and experiences below.

Your users’ experience is a fluid event that frequently starts someplace like Google and, if you’re lucky, ends with them accomplishing their objective at your site. The goal is to make that event seamless and as natural as possible. Unfortunately, few sites achieve that.

In our December 16 UIE Virtual Seminar, world-renowned SEO and web-usability expert, Shari Thurow, will show you how to tie together your team’s search engine optimization projects with your site’s usability efforts.

Shari has put together a fabulous quick preview of her presentation. You should watch it now.

It’s not an accident we turned to Shari Thurow when we wanted to talk about how to optimize a site’s usability to produce great search results. She’s the leading expert on what it takes to make a web site search-engine friendly, enhancing the user’s experience.

We love her new book, When Search Meets Web usability, which she co-wrote with Nick Musica. Want your own copy? We finagled a 35% discount off of this book (plus Free Shipping!) for the UIE audience. How cool is that? Just use the promotion code SEARCH when you purchase from the PeachPit/New Riders web site.

This webinar will help you bridge the gap between the web search engine and your site. You’ll learn techniques and tricks that will increase conversions, satisfaction, and your users’ success. Register your team today!

How do you deliver the best search experience to your site’s users? We want to hear what you’re doing. Leave us your thoughts below.

On January 7 Peter Morville will discuss Search Design Patterns, and in the same session, Mark Burrell will tell you how to then use them.

Later in the month, on January 28, Steve Portigal will present to you his thoughts on studying your users in their own context, Ethnography.

During last year’s UIE Roadshow, our audiences couldn’t get enough on the topic of personas. So, on February 18, we’ve asked Tamara Adlin to talk about The Power of Ad-hoc Personas. Personas can be your ticket to lasting organizational clarity… and it doesn’t take a ton of costly research.

With his book, Prototyping: A Practitioner’s Guide just hitting the bookstore shelves, Todd Zaki Warfel will help you flesh out your design ideas, test your assumptions, and gather real-time feedback from users on March 29.

In the Spring, look for Kristina Halvorson to help you with your content strategy and Louis Rosenfeld to dive deep on Search Analytics. And there is much more in the works.

Until December 3, you can still sign your team up for the UIE Virtual Seminar Subscription programs . Not only is it a tremendous savings, but you get the benefit of lifetime access to each recording and the ease of registering and paying just one time.

We also plan to unveil our plan for our User Experience Training Library. Believe it or not, there is a method to our madness.

Have you ever attended a UIE Virtual Seminar? What do you like best about them? How has your team maximized what it gets out of these learning events? Share your thoughts and experiences below.

Conducting a usability test can be stressful, but you know how
important this effort is. Effectively moderating a usability test is
a critical part of your user research. It can put the design team on
the path to success or failure in the next steps of a product’s
design. Relax, you can do this. With a little guidance, and some
practice, you can master this art of interacting with you users and
get the results your organization needs.

Want to learn more, see Beth’s preview, or register?.

Beth will answer your questions and offer some strategies to
consider. Whether you’ve conducted hundreds of usability tests or
about to do your first one, this seminar is sure to give you
valuable tips to use right away. Sign up today, and learn from one
of the experts in moderating usability tests!

If you have yet to moderate a usability test, but will at some
point, what concerns do you have? If you’ve done them, what tricks
and tips do you have to pass along? Share your thoughts, questions,
and concerns below.

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A few weeks back we held a UIE Virtual Seminar with Pete Bell and Daniel Tunkelang of Endeca. These guys are the experts we go to when talking about designing for facets.  As always, we had a number of excellent questions from the live audience that we couldn’t attend to during the seminar, so I got together with Pete and Daniel to record this podcast and cover a number of those remaining questions.

If you didn’t attend the live seminar, and are interested in how to make the jump from a standard on-site search to faceted search, then you’ll still enjoy this podcast. If you find yourself wanting more afterward, don’t forget you can still purchase a recording of the session for another 90 minutes of Faceted Search.

During the podcast, Adam asked Pete and Daniel to dig into these questions:

• Should we show counts for each facet? What about when using multiple selection?
• Can you elaborate on the mixing and matching of precision and recall results to construct facets?
• Is there a best practice for deselecting facets?
• Most search interfaces assume a flat list of results. What happens when you mix up different types of results, and how would you distribute them across a page?

Tune in to hear more about designing for facets. Still have questions? Start the discussion in our comments, below.

User experience research lives or dies by the appropriateness of the participants in the study.

UX researchers just don’t talk about actively recruiting, do they?  Many researchers ignore it, throwing it over the wall to an agency. It’s complicated, time consuming, and nerve-wracking. In this UIE Virtual Seminar, you’ll learn four strategic steps to make recruiting a fun, useful, and interesting benefit to user research.

If you are involved with user research projects and spend any amount of time worrying about getting the right people in the room, then this UIE Virtual Seminar is for you.

Find out more about Dana’s seminar and register?

Or learn more about our usability testing bundle which includes two seminars and the UIE report, “Recruiting Without Fear.”

Tell us how you source and screen participants? What concerns do you have about the recruiting process? Share your thoughts, questions, and concerns below.

Interaction with a product is more than how it’s used or how it behaves. It’s about a connection between two sides. One side is the customer, but the other side is much more than a product or service. To many people, the character and essence of a product and its company are identical. So, what is the essence of your product?

When your product behaves like a machine, your company is perceived to be a machine. It’s just another company – rigid, mechanical, and cold. Yet when your product displays a bit of humanity, your company gains a face and becomes another human.

In this webinar, you’ll see examples of how humanity exists in the design of products and services through humor, personality, and emotion. You’ll explore how just a little extra design effort and thought beyond functional needs can enrich the experience, reveal the company behind the product, and forge enduring connections with customers.

This presentation generated quite a buzz at Web App 2009. It’s a talk that’s sure to get you thinking
about your products, and how you foster the connection between your products and your customers.

In advance of the presentation, we’d love to hear from you. How do you gain an edge with your products? How does your organization show its humanity? Share your thoughts, questions, and concerns below.

People come to your site to get the information they need, by exploring, discovering, and making comparisons. You want them to successfully sift through all of your content, quickly and effectively. Faceted search delivers on that promise, in spades, but not without good planning and a great strategy.

Pete and Daniel will show you before-and-after looks at e-commerce, media, corporate, and intranets sites. They will teach you the essentials you need to launch your own faceted search system and
discuss the pitfalls you’ll want to prepare for.

Faceted Search: Designing Your Content, Navigation, and User Interface
with Pete Bell & Daniel Tunkelang of Endeca
Thursday August 20, 2009, 1:30pm ET
90-minute online presentation
Register to join us on August 20, watch Pete’s preview, or learn more details here.

Special Offer – Be one of the first to get Daniel Tunkelang’s new book, Faceted Search (published by Morgan and Claypool) for free when you register for this UIE Virtual Seminar. Choose from book or PDF version. Details to follow once you register for the UIE Virtual Seminar. Read an excerpt from the book here.

If you’re knee-deep in implementation, or working with folks who are designing for facets, be sure to set time aside for this presentation. And remember to look out for your free book after the presentation!

In advance of the presentation, we’d love to hear from you. Is your organization considering the move to faceted search? What will you do differently? We’d love to hear your thoughts, questions, and concerns. Please share your thoughts below.

In this popular presentation, Ethan Marcotte teaches about the collaborative process through four detailed case studies. The case studies demonstrate important before and after detail of the lesson to be learned. They also happen to be major sites you know of and can visit today: The Today Show, The 2008 Sundance Film Festival, W3C, and New York Magazine.

If you’re a designer, a developer, or manage a team, you’ll want to see this presentation. Ethan will show you ways to be successful in critical project transitions. There’s no better person to see both sides of the designer/developer relationship than Ethan Marcotte. Many in our industry greatly respect him and consider him to be someone who does groundbreaking work. Ethan has worked with New York Magazine, Harvard University, Disney, and State Street Bank, just to name a few.

UIE Virtual Seminar
Comps vs. Code: Case Studies on Collaboration Between Site Designers & Developers
with Ethan Marcotte
Thursday July 30, 2009, 1:30pm ET
90-minute online presentation

Read more about Comps vs. Code, or see the 3-minute preview Ethan put together, to help you understand what to expect out of this seminar.

Users arrive at your web site with the simple goal to find something that’s important to them. If they find it, whether they search or not, they’ll be happy. When they don’t find it, frustration follows.

Teams often turn to a sophisticated built-in Search capability to help their users find what they seek. However our research has shown that technological magic isn’t going to make the users successful. Instead, it’s a simple understanding of what the users are seeking and how they look at it. We’ve put together the next UIE Virtual Seminar to address this Search issue.

Be prepared to see how Search fits into your site in an entirely new way. Not only will you come away with solid insights from the most up-to-date research, you’ll be chomping at the bit to start making improvements right away. And you’ll be on your way to the world of User Happiness.

UIE Virtual Seminar
Search, Scent, and the Happiness of Pursuit
with Jared M. Spool
Thursday July 9, 2009, 1:30pm ET
90-minute online presentation

Read more about the Search, Scent, and the Happiness of Pursuit, or see the great preview Jared put together, to help you understand what to expect out of this seminar.

In advance of the presentation, we’d love to hear from you. What does your team struggle with when designing for Search? What type of feedback do you get from your users on how well they accomplish their goals on your site? What does a successful visit mean? We’d love to hear your thoughts, questions, and concerns. Please share your thoughts below.

Want help in developing that solid strategy? We’ve asked Sarah Bloomer, a User Experience professional who’s helped several companies set up internal UX teams, to help you do exactly that. You’ll learn 4 strategies to deal with resistance to your team’s efforts. If management has difficulty understanding how the vision and strategy are shared throughout the organization, then you’ll definitely want them to attend this UIE Virtual Seminar. And don’t forget, if you have team members that can’t attend the live date, register with the promotion code MYARCHIVE to get lifetime access to the recording. Register today!

UIE Virtual Seminar
Upgrading your UX Team
with Sarah Bloomer
Wednesday, June 17, 2009, 1:30pm ET
90-minute online presentation

Sarah put together a great preview for you, to help you understand what to expect out of this seminar.
Click here to visit the site page with the preview.

In advance of the presentation, we’d love to hear from you. As a team member or team leader, what are your biggest challenges? What sort of resistance do you meet, and how do you overcome it? What is your organization’s culture like, and what opportunities exist there? We’d love to hear your thoughts, questions, and concerns. Please share your thoughts below.

Robert is thinking about this concept more than anyone we know. So much so, that we’ve asked him to present a UIE Virtual Seminar on Wednesday, May 27 — Web Anatomy: Effective Interaction Design with Frameworks .

We’d love for you to join us at the Virtual Seminar next week, but you don’t need to wait to be exposed to this concept. Earlier this year, Robert wrote a great article on frameworks. If design patterns describe cross-application behaviors, and design components are the place within an application where the behaviors and the implementation meet, then an interaction design framework is a systemic view of a specific portion of the system. An example? Let’s say you’re developing a site where users will need to log in. You know you’ll need a “username/password” login form. But, did you also remember the “Forgot Your Password?” feature? Or what you’ll need to create the user’s account? Or the functionality to change the password? Frameworks are the place where behaviors meet enterprise-wide thinking.

Are you involved in making web-based applications a key development platform? You’ll want to understand how frameworks make large-scale projects much easier. Robert’s article is a good introduction as to why that is.

Web Anatomy: Introducing Interaction Design Frameworks

By Robert Hoekman, Miskeeto
Originally published: Feb 02, 2009

UIE Virtual Seminar
Web Anatomy: Effective Interaction Design with Frameworks
With Robert Hoekman, Jr.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009, 1:30pm ET
90-minute online presentation

In your project, you’ll need to ensure you’ve got all the essential features along with those new, super-cool, hip capabilities that will dazzle your users. By using these interaction design frameworks, you’ll have a ready kit of necessary components so you’ll create the best possible design.

To help us understand how interaction design frameworks help us think through our designs, we’ve invited Robert Hoekman, Jr to tell us how they work. Robert’s been thinking about Interaction Design Frameworks more than anyone we know. He’ll show you how frameworks fill in the gaps left by design standards, best practices, and libraries of individual patterns. You’ll see examples from major web sites, where the frameworks helped predict missing functionality and critical design elements. Avoid these costly mistakes, and you’ll deliver a top-notch experience for your users.

Robert put together a great preview for you, to help you understand what to expect out of this seminar.
Click here to visit the site page with the preview.

If your team needs to quickly come up with designs that are both creative and usable, Robert’s seminar is a must for you. You’ll want to watch this with your entire team, so they come away knowing how interaction design frameworks will dramatically simplify your organization’s design process. Reserve your spot today!

UIE Virtual Seminar
New Ways to Think about Taxonomy:
The Role of Taxonomies in Your Organization
May 7, 2009, 1:30pm ET
90-minute online presentation

We’ve asked Seth Earley and Stephanie Lemieux, experts in creating and maintaining sophisticated taxonomies, to broaden your thinking about how a taxonomy can make your life easier, whether you’re designing a public-facing web site or a large-scale intranet. In this 90-minute online session, you’ll see detailed examples of taxonomy applications and how to leverage key design principles across your organization. Stephanie and Seth will provide a better understanding of your own taxonomy and the navigation of your information. You’ll get your content management system under control and improve your search results.

To help you understand what to expect out of this seminar, Seth & Stephanie put together a great preview for you:

To help you understand what you can expect out of this seminar, Scott has put together a preview for you:

Don’t miss this presentation! Register with the promotion code THREEPOINTS and get both our lowest rate of $99, and lifetime access to the recording of this talk at no additional cost. Share it with others in your organization to watch whenever they want, as often as they want.

In advance of the presentation, we’d love to hear from you. How is failure perceived in your organization? When is the last time you celebrated a failure? Or do you think failure should be avoided at all costs? When failure does happen, how does your team address it, or is it the “white elephant in the room?” Share your thoughts below.

In this presentation, Jeff Patton will discuss the essentials of Agile Development, the distinct culture and value system that Agile brings, and the common Agile process you’re likely to see. You’ll hear about the myths of Agile and common pitfalls organizations tend to encounter. Armed with the foundations, you’ll explore some emerging UX practices and how to thrive within an agile process.

As an added incentive to attend, use the Promotion Code MYARCHIVE to receive free lifetime access to the recorded presentation. You or anyone in your organization can watch it whenever you want, as often as you want!

In advance of the presentation, we’d love to hear from you.  What are the scary stories you’ve heard about Agile?  Do you have success stories to tell about iterative development?  What hurdles would you face bringing such a discipline into the culture of your organization? Share your thoughts below.

Determine if this seminar is right for you and your team by reviewing Ginny’s ’s preview, just press the green “play” arrow.

As an added incentive to attend, use the Promotion Code MYARCHIVE to receive free lifetime access to the recorded presentation. You or anyone in your organization can watch it whenever you want, as often as you want!

In advance of the presentation, we’d love to hear from you. Have you ever struggled with writing something for your site? How do you know you got it right? What rules do you follow for creating effective copy? And what are your thought on how to handle those “marketing moments”? Share your thoughts below.

Scott Berkun is the best selling author of Making Things Happen and The Myths of Innovation. He worked at Microsoft from 1994-2003, as a usability engineer, design evangelist, and program manager, and worked on Internet Explorer v1.0 to 5.0. Since 2003 he works as an independent author and lecturer. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wired magazine and on National Public Radio, and he blogs on management and creative thinking at www.scottberkun.com/blog.

Scott is a treat to listen to and it’s not a surprise that he’s looking for information on your challenges to ensure you benefit from our April Virtual Seminar . 

You can post your nomination here, or find more information about Scott by visiting The Berkun Blog.

Thanks for your input.

Yesterday I attended an outstanding seminar by Joshua Porter produced by those great folks at UIE (yep shameless Ak’ing there.):) The topic was Designing for Sign-up. What struck me the most about the presentation, as a UX geek, was that the issue was not about the mechanical process of making the sign-up easier, but around the socio-psychological issues of helping users make a commitment.

Read Deb’s entire post.

Our friends at Bookpool are passing along a special discount to the UIE audience.   You will find Josh’s book Designing for the Social Web, at bookpool.com.  For a limited time they’re offering a 38% discount in conjunction with the promotion of Josh’s December 11 online presentation Designing for Sign-up.  If your job responsibility, or interests even remotely touch the social web, you’ll need this book close at hand.

Don’t forget, there’s still time to register for our upcoming UIE Virtual Seminar, Designing for Sign-up.

You have the Visual Design skills to do a good job, but what tools or tricks can you add to your toolbox? Does you team have a complete understanding that Visual design can dramatically improve the experience with your products, and when they’re stuck, how do you help them? How do you deal with line spacing and text size in body text, notes, flowcharts and diagrams that will be good for your users regardless of age? What questions and comments do you have about Visual Design, we’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences.

UIE will put these and other questions to one of the best experts in visualizing information we know, Patrick Hofmann, and we’re excited that he’s agreed to do our next UIE Virtual Seminar – Essentials of Effective Visual Design

In this entertaining 90-minute presentation, Patrick will help you make your products easier to use by applying surprising, memorable design techniques. Patrick, an expert in visual instruction and wordless communication, has worked with usability professionals like you to improve the design of digital, online, and hard copy information.

If you’re interested in attending, you’ll want to register soon, it’s filling up fast. As an added incentive to attend, use the Promotion Code MYARCHIVE to receive free lifetime access to the recorded event. You or anyone in your organization can watch it whenever you want, as often as you want!

Register today at http://www.uie.com/events/virtual_seminars/Visual_PH/

What visual design concepts do you hope to hear explored? What questions are you looking to have answered? What ideas do you have to share? Please tell us your thoughts.

It’s not clear when “quick and dirty” became a dirty phrase in the usability world. There are those that believe that testing must be scientific, and that takes time and money — luxuries not often available to many development projects.

Usability testing expert Dana Chisnell knows what it means to work by-the-book – she co-wrote “the book” (The Handbook of Usability Testing, 2nd ed.) with Jeff Rubin. In this seminar, Dana will break down the process of collecting user research data, exploring the must-haves, the nice-to-haves, and the certainly-can-do-withouts. You’ll learn how you can answer your essential design questions using methods that would make MacGyver proud.

This presentation is perfect if you have yet to conduct your first usability test. If you’re experienced with testing, Dana will show you some new ways to inject user research into those tight-on-resources projects that keep cropping up.

Register today at http://www.uie.com/events/virtual_seminars/wild/

What questions do you have about Usability Testing in the Wild? What tools or tricks have you used to maximize the resources available, and still deliver quality results? We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences.

Testing Your Critiquing Skills: Site Navigation
Date: Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
Time: 1pm ET / Noon CT / 11am MT / 10am PT

When looking over someone else’s design, how do you ensure you’re delivering valuable insights that bring new perspectives to the table?

The best critique not only delivers value to the original designer, but to everyone involved, because it raises the discourse to the underlying fundamentals and goals, not just the specifics of color and font size. Learning to critique well is like many other skills: the more you practice, the better you get.

You’ll know you’ve delivered a great critique when:

* The designer is receptive and engaged in the discussion, instead of being defensive and argumentative
* The designer becomes introspective and talks about how they want to revisit some of the underlying precepts of the design
* Other team members use the critique to look at other on-going work

You can read the full seminar details here.

Brian Christiansen and I recorded a special episode comprised entirely of questions from our customers. On July 17, we held the UIE Virtual Seminar: The Scent of a Web Page—The Five Types of Navigation Pages. During the seminar, we received far more questions than time would allow answering. As is tradition, we put together this follow-up podcast to answer even more of your excellent questions.

In this episode, we discussed:

• how we determined “failure” and “success” when we studied users
• how our research applies to college sites
• the undesirable trait of pogosticking up and down between levels of pages and why that’s a sign of navigation failure
• examples of link-rich homepages that users love
• why, contrary to popular opinion, users still don’t like to search

In the podcast, we referred to an article we wrote a little while back, called Lifestyles of Link-Rich Pages, which provides more information on long-links and our home page research.

If you missed our live seminar, a recording of the session is available for viewing. See The Scent of a Web Page for details.

Still have questions about the five types of navigation pages? Ask them in the comments below!

Galleries: The Hardest Working Pages on Your Site
Date: August 14th, 2008 — 1pm ET / Noon CT / 11am MT / 10am PT

As we continue our series on Designing for the Scent of Information, we take a detailed look at your site’s most critical page: the gallery. Galleries are most used navigational element on any web site and many sites have hundreds of them. And yet, they are often the most difficult pages to design well.

Acting as the crossroads for your users path to their desired content, a solid gallery page tells the user what they’ll find and, just as importantly, tells them which paths will take them away from their goal. Ensuring these landmarks do their job is probably the hardest part of designing a successful website.

I will show you some of the latest design thinking from Netflix, Best Buy, Bureau of Labor Statistics, SonyEricsson, and Citibank, to name a few.

You can read the full seminar details here.

The Scent of a Web Page: The Five Types of Navigation Pages
Date: July 17th, 2008 — 1pm ET / Noon CT / 11am MT / 10am PT

You work hard providing top-notch content on your site. Will your users find it? If they don’t find it, all that effort is for nothing. What can you do to guarantee that users find the content they’ve come
looking for?

In July’s UIE Virtual Seminar, I’ll present our most up-to-the-minute research on how users navigate sites. You will learn best practices for designing the different types of navigation pages, including the Home Page and Content Pages.

You’ll come away from this seminar understanding why trigger words are critical to users successfully finding their content, why the best sites prevent users from using Search, how exposing a site’s hierarchy can increase the success of the user, and how designing longer pages helps users find what they seek.

You can read the full seminar details here.

Brian Christiansen and I recorded a special episode comprised entirely of questions from our customers. Last week, we held the UIE Virtual Seminar: The Scent of Information: Getting Users to Their Content. During the seminar, we received far more questions than time would allow answering. As is tradition, we put together this follow-up podcast to answer even more of your excellent questions.

In this episode, we discussed where you can find your users’ trigger words, talked about our 7-12 word link recommendation, discussed if you should replace your home page with your site map, and shared some examples of sites that handle long links well. Tune in to hear these and the answers to other questions from our seminar attendees.

If you missed our live seminar, a recording of the session is available for viewing. See The Scent of Information: Getting Users to Their Content for details.

Still have questions about our research into the Scent of Information? Ask them in the comments below!

In this 90-minute online presentation, I’ll share the results of years of research examining how the best sites navigate users to their content. I’ll introduce you to the concept of the Scent of Information, the biggest secret to successfully getting users to the content they’re looking for on your site.

You’ll learn:

• How the successful sites provide a strong scent and what happens when they don’t
• How users follow a scent trail and the different ways your design could be blocking scent
• How the quality of links, page length, page density, and graphics affect whether users find their content

There’s still room to sign up for the live event. You can gather your team around a computer and watch it together! (If you can’t see it live today, we’ll make a recorded version available in a few days.)

More details about today’s UIE Virtual Seminar.

Many of the interviewees have strong opinions about car brands. And it’s rarely the craftsmanship or engineering of the car that gave them the strong opinion. Instead, it’s something the dealer did or didn’t do. In fact, in many cases, the car could have a problem and, if handled well by the dealer, the customer would come away with a positive opinion of the overall brand.

Many of our clients are working on improving their brand, yet they often overlook what can happen when a problem arises. If the experience in handling the problem is positive, that could strengthen that customer’s engagement with the brand. However, if they somehow make the customer feel worse, then the brand suffers.

In this week’s article for our email newsletter, UIEtips, I talk about how teams from FindTape.com, Netflix, and BestBuy.com designed for problems that arise. In each case, their design helped customers end up with an improved experience and a stronger brand.

You can read my article here.

Have you tried to anticipate your user’s problems in your design? What experiences have you had with your designs? Leave your thoughts and comments below.

[On the subject of how designers can strengthen their brands, this is the subject of our next UIE Virtual Seminar. On May 14, I'll be presenting "Strike Up the Brand: How Smart Design Can Strengthen Your Brand."]

We need someone who has the insight and right touch to take this program and make it sing. This person is going to know the design community, what they need, and how to craft a great online educational product for them.

If you know such a person, forward them this ad and have them contact us right away. We’d really appreciate it.

Joshua Porter (formerly of UIE, but now doing great work on his own at Bokardo Design) recently described much of the latest online debate about the need to develop personas when designing. Josh got a lot of things right, but he got one thing very, very wrong. And, unfortunately, he bases a lot of his argument on that one thing.

Josh said this:

Definition, please?

But while all of this arguing is going on, nobody is really defining what personas are. This, of course, is a big part of the problem. What most definitions don’t say is that personas are a document. They might be a poster, a word file, or a PDF. But they are a document that represents an archetypical person that is passed around design teams. Ok, just wanted to make that clear.

Personas are not a document. Persona descriptions can be a document (or a movie or any other practical rendering). But, those are just renderings of what happened during the persona creation process.

Here’s the way to think of it:

Personas are to Persona Descriptions as Vacations are to Souvenir Picture Albums.

While people who didn’t go on the vacation can look through the album and think, “Boy, that must’ve been fun,” they’ll never get the full experience of what the actual vacation experience was. The album is just a remnant.

In the UX community, many folks are now saying, “I’ve looked at these documents and they just don’t do anything for me. I don’t think personas are valuable.” Unfortunately, they are judging the value of creating and using robust personas based on the quality of the paper deliverable. If the vacation pictures aren’t compelling, did the vacation itself suck?

To be fair, I think there could be a lot of improvement in the ways people document their personas. Todd Zaki Warfel, over at MessageFirst has some interesting diagrams, though he admits they take a bit of explanation.

Todd Zaki Warfel’s persona description with his Persona DNA chart

Stuart Karten is also doing interesting stuff with his ModeMapping work.

Stuart Karten’s ModeMapping deliverables

However, these are just the final souvenirs, after the team has gained the real value. That value comes when the team visits and observes their target audience, absorbs and discusses their observations, and reduces the chaos into patterns, which then become the personas.

What’s in the team’s head, as they are designing, is what will make a difference in the final design. The persona descriptions are just there to remind everyone what happened.

If you’re amongst those who insist on judging the value of personas on their descriptions, I suggest you cancel your next vacation and just order one of these gift boxes. I’m sure you’ll find it just as valuable as the vacation itself.

A while back I wrote a piece about personas where I talked it about why it’s a bad idea to base your personas on a single real individual. Using a real person as a substitute persona might seem like a good idea since you know that everything about that user is for real. The problem, though, is that one individual comes with quirks that may not be representative of the market as a whole. If you interview enough people, you can eliminate their biographical peculiarities by focusing your personas on the characteristics common to the group.

Thanks, Bruce!

Larry is co-founder of Constantine & Lockwood, the pioneer of usage-centered design, and author of the landmark book, Software for Use.

September 27th UIE Virtual Seminar: Don’t Panic — Design and Usability Under Impossible Pressure ($129—includes handout)

[Larry is also going to present the full-day seminar, Interaction Design in an Agile World, at this year's UI12 Conference. You'll learn how to use the agile development process to implement a shorter lifecycle and encourage team collaboration.]

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.]

I particularly took away the idea of the Elastic User. This is where stakeholders make statements about what ‘users’ want, what ‘users’ do, what ‘users’ prefer, and because the ‘user’ in that context is so undefined and broad, they are able to say almost anything they like and there is no real way to contradict that opinion.

The creation of personas means that user groups are much more defined, so broad sweeping statements about what users want can actually be tested against something. Rather than having a free pass to do anything to the requirements or design by just using the word ‘user’, these assertions can now be tested and validated against more closely defined user characteristics and goals.

You can read Leisa’s full article here: Yes, you should be using personas.

Steve’s book, The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web, is a must have on your design bookshelf.

If your team is considering personas or would like to know how to make them better, you’ll want to gather everyone around for Steve’s seminar on the 24th. It’s a cost-effective way to get a good discussion going.

May 24th UIE Virtual Seminar: The User is Always Right: Making Personas Work for Your Website ($129—includes handout)

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.

Baecker, R. and Buxton, W. Readings in Human-Computer Interaction: A Multidisciplinary Approach. Los Altos, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, 1987.

Bauersfeld, P. Software by Design: Creating People Friendly Software. New York, NY: M&T Books, 1994.

Carroll, J. (Ed.) Scenario-Based Design: Envisioning Work and Technology in System Development. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 1995.

CHI Conference Proceedings. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. (Proceedings published annually since 1983 by ACM’s SIGCHI.)

Hackos, J. and Redish, J. User and Task Analysis for Interface Design. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 1998.

Holtzblatt, K. and Beyer, H., (Eds.) Communications of the ACM. May 1995, Vol. 38, No. 5. (Theme of the issue is “Requirements Gathering: The Human Factor.”)

Gardiner, M. and Christie, B. Applying Cognitive Psychology to User-Interface Design. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 1987.

Gomoll, K. “Some Techniques for Observing Users” from The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design, Brenda Laurel, editor. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1990.

Greenbaum, J. and Kyng, M., (Eds.) Design at Work. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates, 1991.

Laurel, Brenda, (Ed.) The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1990.

Muller, M. and Kuhn, S., (Eds.) Communications of the ACM. June 1993, Vol. 36, No. 4. (Theme of the issue is participatory design.)

Norman, D. Design of Everyday Things (formerly Psychology of Everyday Things). New York: Basic Books, Inc. Publishers, 1988.

Stone, D., Jarrett, C., Woodroffe, M., and Minocha, S. User Interface Design and Evaluation. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, The Open University, 2005.

Schuler, D. and Namioka, A., (Eds.) Participatory Design: Principles and Practices. Hillsdale, NJ. Lawrence Earlbaum Associates, 1993.

Wixon, D. and Ramey, J. Field Methods Casebook for Software Design. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 1996.

To improve the designs we’re creating today, we know that teams do best when they have all of the essential information about their users to make informed decisions.

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

I think it’s essential for all designers to really understand how to conduct a field study and learn how to gather critical information about users. That’s why in this week’s UIEtips we’re reprinting an article I wrote back in 2003, where I discuss the unique power of field studies.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

Has your design team conducted field studies? How have they worked for you? I’d love to hear what you’re doing. Leave a comment and join the discussion below.

[We are so excited about this topic that we've invited Kate Gomoll, a recognized Field Research and User Experience expert, to present UIE's next Virtual Seminar on March 20th. If you haven't had a chance to hear Kate describe the process of conducting a field study, I highly suggest you and your team attend. Space is limited so sign up today]

We’ve invited Kate Gomoll, one of my most favorite people in the entire world, to talk on a topic she knows tons about: conducting field studies.

The virtual seminars have been a great way to get your team introduced to important topics and this is no exception. Kate will talk about the field studies process and its effectiveness for all types of projects. You’ll have a chance to ask her your most pressing questions. All at a very reasonable price (especially since it is the same price when you bring your entire team to listen to her)!

The session is filling up fast, so I highly recommend you plan on registering soon.

Details are here.

If you’ve been looking for a way to get fellow team members up to speed on how quick and easy it is to conduct valuable and informative tests, this seminar is going to be a great way to bootstrap the process.

More details (including registration info) on the seminar here.

[If you can't make this Friday's live seminar, we'll have the archives available next week. Stay tuned!]

Even though paper prototyping surfaced back in the days when I was admiring Members Only jackets and leg warmers, only over the past several years has it come into “high fashion,” adopted in most successful organizations. But once its benefits were realized, paper prototyping was well on its way to becoming one of the most attractive usability testing methods.

Just as fashion designers repeatedly sketch out and model their ideas for a new clothing line, design teams create multiple prototypes of their products before beginning mass production. Getting a design right the first time is only possible if you are Coco Chanel, and since her time has come and gone, design teams are forced to iterate, iterate, iterate.

That’s why paper prototypes are so valuable. Design teams can build interfaces using basic office supplies and gather valuable feedback from users with minimal effort very early on in the design process.

While no usability testing technique is perfect (did you see Cameron Diaz’s Valentino dress at the 2007 Golden Globes?), the amount of time, money, and frustration paper prototyping saves makes it one of our favorite tools for gaining quick insights. Paper prototyping is only going to continue to grow in popularity as its methods are proven valuable time and time again.

In this issue of UIEtips, UIE’s Ashley McKee sat down with Carolyn Snyder, author of Paper Prototyping, and founder of Snyder Consulting, to get answers to some of the most pervasive questions surrounding paper prototyping. I believe Carolyn’s responses to these questions are invaluable to any design team considering paper prototyping, and hope you do too.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

Is your organization currently using paper prototypes? Did you experience any major benefits or drawbacks? Are you considering the technique? Is there anything holding you back? Tell us your thoughts. Leave a comment and join the discussion below.

[If you enjoy today's UIEtips article, you'll definitely want to check out Carolyn Snyder's upcoming Virtual Seminar, Paper Prototyping: Streamlining the User-Centered Design Process, on February 6th. Space is limited so sign up today ]

Few things present a bigger challenge to today’s designers than building a web-based application. The constraints of HTML, the complex requirements of the business, the restrictions of the thin-client model, the demands on the back-end, and the intricacies of the domain all come together making George Clooney’s job in the Perfect Storm look simple and carefree.

Part of the complexity comes from the industry’s inexperience at building these types of applications. Every project feels like it is breaking new ground, bringing us into unchartered territory.

However, we’re not alone. There are hundreds of projects like ours going on at the same time. And hundreds that have already been completed. Learning from what has come before us is a key part of growth. What obstacles am I going to run into? What are my design options? These questions get easier with experience — from our work and from the work of others doing similar things.

That’s why we’ve been so excited about Hagan Rivers’s work. She’s studied hundreds of web applications, carefully cataloging and deconstructing them, to see what works and what doesn’t. In today’s UIEtips, we are reprinting an interview UIE’s Christine Perfetti conducted with Hagan last year. I found it a fascinating read and I’m betting you will too.

Are you working on web applications? How have you found the transition from the previous work you’ve done? I’d love to hear what challenges you’ve faced and how you’ve overcome them. Add to the conversation in the comments below.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

If you’re working on web applications, you really want to sign up for the UIE Web Application Summit we’re holding in Monterey, CA this January. At this 3-day event, you’ll meet the pioneers and world-class designers behind today’s most successful web apps.

Also, if you would like to hear more from Hagan Rivers, we’ve invited her to present our next UIE Virtual Seminar on November 1st. In this seminar, Hagan will take a closer look at the visual design of web applications. She will cover key strategies for creating both usable and aesthetically pleasing web applications for your customers. I highly suggest you check it out.

In this Virtual Seminar, Hagan Rivers, a pioneer web application developer, will cover strategies for creating both usable and aesthetically pleasing web applications for your customers. (You can find the virtual seminar details here. )

Instead of traveling to a training course, you and your colleagues can hear these latest insights right from your office. (UIEtips subscribers get a discount to the seminar. If you’re a subscriber, you should receive an email today. If not, you can sign up here.)

Featured Seminar: The Visual Design of Web Applications: Creating Usable and Beautiful Designs

Date: November 1, 2006 — 1pm ET / Noon CT / 11am MT / 10am PT

Many development teams are neglecting a critical part of web application design: the Visual Design. The visual design of web applications is not just the “fluffy stuff” or something that teams can delay until the end of the development process.

When development teams focus their efforts on the visual design of their applications, they create web applications that are usable, visually pleasing, and influence how users feel about the design and the organization behind it.

In this seminar, you will learn about:

Emotional Response: influencing how people feel about your application through the visual design. Hagan will discuss how to craft the intended emotional response from your users. You’ll find out why beauty in web applications is important.

Common Design Mistakes: Hagan will show you where designs typically go wrong in the presentation of tables, forms, and other types of information in web applications.

Visualizations: Hagan will show examples of ways that visual designs can improve and enhance usability by giving users a new way to think about solving problems and a tool for getting there more quickly.

Dynamic Queries: Hagan will show you how development teams can take advantage of Dynamic Queries as their data sets grow larger.

Hagan will share her experience with these issues, provide practical, useful tips that you can start using right away, and get you thinking about the future of visual design, too. The 90-minute seminar will include an extended Q&A where you’ll have the opportunity to ask Hagan about your specific challenges.

A week before the presentation, you’ll receive instructions on attending the seminar and the seminar materials.

We’re expecting this seminar to sell out and space is limited. Sign up today.

Carolyn Snyder’s Paper Prototyping Book

This is a must-have book for anyone thinking about conducting testing. Carolyn’s done a great job talking about how to conduct usability tests, both with and without paper prototypes. She also walks through the steps to create a paper prototype, which we think is the best way to start any design project.

More details on the book here.

Other Paper Prototyping Resources

Using Paper prototypes to Manage Risk: An article by Carolyn Snyder about the steps to prototyping.

Five Paper Prototyping Tips: Quick tips about making prototypes out of paper.

Looking Back on 16 Years of Paper Prototyping: An article I wrote talking about our history with the technique and why we still think it’s a great way to do design.

Workshop: Product Usability Survival Technique: Christine’s very popular one-day workshop where you actually build and test a full working prototype. The team that has the most usable interface wins fabulous prizes!

5-Second Tests

5-Second Tests: Measuring your Site’s Content Pages: An excellent article Christine wrote on how to conduct a 5-second test.

Inherent Value Testing

Inherent Value Testing: An article I wrote describing the benefits of this technique.

Conducting Inherent Value Testing: Apparently, I got long-winded when I originally wrote the article above, so we broke it into two parts. This part walks, step-by-step, through the process of conducting an inherent value test.

Field Studies

Field Studies: The Best Tool to Discover User Needs: An article I wrote discussing the value of conducting field studies.

Designing Products That Work the Way People Work: This is a great interview that Christine did with Kate Gomoll a few years back, talking about how they use field studies in their work.

Book: User and Task Analysis for Interface Design: A great book by JoAnn Hackos and Ginny Redish (both former UI Conference speakers) about conducting field studies to determine who your users are and what they do with your design.

Book: Contextual Design: Karen Holtzblatt and Hugh Beyer’s (also both former UI Conference speakers) landmark book about contextual inquiry — a more formal field study methodology.

Book: Rapid Contextual Design: Karen’s follow-on book. (I haven’t read it yet, but several people have told me it’s excellent.)

Category Agreement Analysis (CAA)

The CAA: A Wicked Good Design Technique: A quick summary of what a CAA is.

Personas

Personas: Matching a Design to the Users’ Goals: Christine’s first article on how to design with personas.

Three Important Benefits of Personas: An article I wrote talking about some oft-ignored benefits that personas bring to the organization.

Getting from Research to Personas: Harnessing the Power of Data: An article by Kim Goodwin describing how to take research data and use it to build personas.

Book: The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design: An excellent book by Tamara Adlin and John Pruitt describing the process of building personas and utilizing them in the design process.

Recruiting Participants for Studies

Report: Recruiting without Fear: A report we wrote last year to help you manage the recruitment process.

One last book:

Observing the User Experience: Ex-Adaptive Pather, Mike Kuniavsky, has done an excellent job of compiling many of the most important techniques into a single volume. Another must-have for the bookshelf.

Christine also mentioned during the presentation that we like to use Techsmith’s Morae. It’s not the only way to record a usability test, but it’s a darn good solution.

Our good friend, Andy Bourland, kindly made the video and put it up on Google Videos for us, but you can watch it here.

Unfortunately, the sound quality isn’t as good as the podcast MP3s, unless you love that talking-through-a-kazoo sound. But it does have the advantage of seeing me and Josh wiggle about as we make the recording and you get to see how incredibly messy my office is.

Listen to Part 2 of the Followup Discussion to Users as Information Architects: Is Tagging Right for Your Site? (30.5 mb)

(You can subscribe to our Podcast feed by copying this link into your aggregator or iTunes: http://www.uie.com/podcast/.)

Have thoughts about this discussion? Leave us a comment here.

However, the survey also told us we didn’t do a good job of answering everyone’s questions. We knew this. As people were listening, they were sending us a ton of questions. Josh and Christine did a good job answering as many as time permitted, but, according to the survey, it wasn’t enough.

So, in the spirit of learning about people’s requirements as we go, Josh and I sat down yesterday and recorded a podcast where we discussed many of the unanswered questions. We’ve broken the recording into two half-hour segments, to make listening a little more digestible.

Among the questions Josh and I discuss:

• What is the difference between a category, a tag, and a keyword?
• How many people participating do you need to bootstrap your tagging process?
• Do tagging systems work for intranets?
• Is a tag cloud a necessary component?

Listen to Part 1 of the Followup Discussion to Users as Information Architects: Is Tagging Right for Your Site? (25.8 mb)

(You can subscribe to our Podcast feed by copying this link into your aggregator or iTunes: http://www.uie.com/podcast/.)

Have thoughts about this discussion? Leave us a comment below.

But, I’m paid to notice these things and I did notice their new home page. I think it’s a great step in the right direction.

Click to see the new VeritasIdeas.com home page.

The new page brings more of the site out to the surface. They’ve done a nice job of letting users know they can create their own samples without having to talk to a salesperson.

In fact, I think it’s a huge improvement over their old home page:

Click to see the old VeritasIdeas.com home page.

The new page retains the old page’s classy design aesthetic, while making more of the content on the site available.

But, I’m wondering if the designers went far enough. After all, if we look at the site map, we can plainly see the site has a lot more to offer.

Click to see the VeritasIdeas.com site map.

For example, the user still has to know there are featured designers highlighted on the site or that they can create special orders with their own interlayer material and resin properties. This is important content on the site, but users are unaware it’s available without clicking through everything.

Of course, to make this happen, the designers would have to add more links to the home page. And more links might take away from the aesthetic classiness of the site.

In fact, I got this exact question when I talked about the old VeritasIdeas.com home page design during my UIE Virtual Seminar a few weeks ago:

How do you balance providing lots of links and style? The Veritas page is sexy but the site map is boring. How do you balance the two?

I also was sent these questions during the seminar, so this is a common thought people have:

How do you balance providing enough content with creating a clean and attractive design?

What are some techniques to determine how to strike a balance between link rich home pages and a visually appealing site? How do you determine which links should be on the home page and which should be left off?

and this particularly interesting one:

Some people walked out of this session saying that link richness simply ruins design. One said our home page design provides a sense of place and welcome that an unwieldy bunch of links simply can’t convey. Do you have any suggestions for how to get folks to consider the value of link rich home pages (without drop down menus)?

The question becomes, is an “unwieldy bunch of links” the only way to move all that value onto the home page? Certainly, it’s an option, but is it the only one? I think that both the Analog Devices home page and the New York Times home page have a large number of links (close to 200 each) without being unwieldy.

Of course, it takes more work and probably more talent to make a link rich design look good than it takes to make a link-poor design look classy. I wonder if the people walking out of the room are just afraid of the challenge.

I don’t think there needs to be a tension between making a page contain all the useful information it needs to contain and having that page be aesthetically delightful. On the contrary, I think that’s the ideal goal to achieve.

During the session, I hammered home (beat a dead horse?) about the idea of link-rich home pages, making the recommendation that designers strongly consider populating their home pages with dozens, if not hundreds, of useful links, making the site contents as visible from the home page as possible. I pointed to many of the examples in the recent UIEtips article, Lifestyles of the Link-Rich Home Pages, such as McMaster-Carr and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

During the seminar, several participants asked about graphics on these link-rich pages. “Do you see a role for graphics in this link-rich world?” was a common question.

To answer this question, we have to discuss what we mean by graphics. As we talked about in our report, Designing for the Scent of Information, you can categorize graphics into three types:

• Navigation Graphics: which provide scent to the user in a graphical form.
• Content Graphics: which communicate information directly to the user.
• Decorative Graphics: which designers use to help with the mood, show professionalism, organize the page, help strengthen the brand engagements, and other nefarious purposes.

In a recent investigation we did of various police department sites, we found examples of all of these. For example, on the Atlanta Police Department home page, they have a navigation graphic constituents can use to find out information about the Atlanta Police Zone they are interested in:

Assuming a user knows which zone they want, this graphic is very helpful and gives off good scent. (Of course, if you don’t know the Atlanta area extremely well, these zones lose their scent very quickly. We wonder if this could’ve been improved by using a layer of landmarks, such as the airport, the downtown area, and the Buckhead region to help people figure out which zone they’re part of.)

Over at the New York City Police Department home page, we see some content graphics in the form of open police case images:

Again, one can argue whether these are effective content graphics or not, but someone coming to the page wondering if it’s their best friend who robbed the bank would know instantly. At least, that’s the idea.

So, what is it that we find on the Beverly Hills Police Department home page? (Yup, that Beverly Hills–the 90210 folks!)

Or how about the Dallas Police Force? (To use a city from another TV show.)

From these images, we can see deduce the Dallas Police Force is very proud of their toys, whereas the Beverly Hills folks line up nicely in rows. But do these images help the user in any way? They don’t seem to provide scent, nor do they communicate content beyond “Yes, your tax dollars do pay for stuff.”

How about this image from the California Highway Patrol (ok, another TV reference)?

Looking beyond the 1970′s-style vaguely-creepy-looking-cop-glaring-at-the-pretty-dispatcher imagery, it’s not clear the graphic is necessary to encourage people to come work with the likes of Poncherello and Baker.

Police sites are notorious in their use of graphics on their home page. Take a gander at the entire CHiPs home page:

Click to see the California Highway Patrol home page. (Click at your own risk.)

Whereas we’ve been advocating link-rich pages, they’ve opted for a graphics-rich page. They weren’t the worst we saw. Take a look at the Virginia State Police Department (not related to any TV show I’m aware of):

Click to see the Virginia State Police Department home page.

The Virginians (Ok, this is a long-shot, but what the hell… I do have to admit I miss James Drury!) are really into their graphics.

In general, we believe graphics have a place. When they effectively communicate scent or communicate content, they are valuable to the users experience. There’s no evidence to suggest designers couldn’t create link-rich pages with effective graphics.

But, we still have trouble justifying decorative graphics in many cases. The Now Hiring image from the CHiPs page is more decorative than navigation. A set of effective links, like on the Richmond PD site might be better:

Richmond’s approach gives more scent and options in half the pixels of the CHiPs version. If you’re trying to get as much scent on the home page as possible, looking for those types of solutions are what we recommend.

Let’s look at some examples. The folks over at BLS.gov have decided to underline all of their links:

Whereas the folks over at John Deere decided to display them without underlines:

Are users less likely to find what they are looking for at Deere.com, just because the links aren’t underlined? Probably not. People are pretty adaptable and figure things out fairly fast.

But users are trained to click on underlined things. (Did you move your mouse over the underlined text in the previous sentence to see if it was a link? Don’t be concerned — so did I and I knew it wasn’t a link.)

Many people who use the web for a long time start to become conditioned to look for underlines. If you watch them with an eye tracker, you can see their focus dart from underlined-text to underlined-text when they first see a page.

In the case of the Deere page, where virtually nothing is underlined, the users would adapt quickly and find the links, often by waving their mouse around the screen, looking to see where the browser gives them “the finger.”

But what happens when you mix the visual style of links with text that isn’t a link.

This is what happened over at Analog.com:

Here some of the text is a link, but the headers are not. Users were a bit baffled by this, especially since headers in a very similar style elsewhere on the page are links. This puts the burden on the user to seek out every possible link with their mouse, adding more to their cognitive workload for no particular reason.

We can see this more clearly over at the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center home page. Here, all on the same page, we have a set of links with underlines:

Some without underlines:

And:

Resulting in some users wondering if the bullet text are or are not links:

When the designers switch back and forth, between having some links underlined but others not be underlined, that makes even more work for users. Work that doesn’t add any real value. We think the visual design element of the underline is not required, but it is cruel to make users work extra hard because you can’t decide.

Several people asked about where trigger words come from. One asked, “So, using the appropriate trigger words on the home page very much depends on knowing the user’s intention?”

Absolutely.

Trigger words are the words or phrases on a web page that trigger the user into acting. If you don’t know your users’ trigger words, you might still make an easy-to-use page, but it will be by chance. Knowing your users’ trigger words is the only way to ensure a great page every time.

To discern the trigger words, you need to know why users are coming to the page in the first place. When talking about a site’s home page, that means you need to know why they are coming to the site and what they hope to accomplish.

We learned a long time ago the days of visiting a web site to “see what’s there” are long gone. Nobody says, “I’ve got 15 minutes to kill, I’m going to go check out the GE web site.” If they are going to a site, it’s because there’s something they intend to accomplish. You need to know what that something is.

The only way I know to determine why people visit a web site is to talk to them. Sometimes you can guess, like when Ralph Lauren advertised their new line of furniture in a 2-page spread in the New York Times Sunday Magazine with the only words in the entire ad being “Ralph Lauren Furniture – www.polo.com.” It wouldn’t be hard to guess that many users came to the site to see more about the new furniture. (Interestingly enough, they didn’t bother to include any information about the new line of furniture on the site, confusing users immensely.)

But, mostly, you need to talk with users. Why do people go to a university web site, like Olin College? Are they a high school student, thinking about attending? Are they a parent wondering about tuition and financial aid? Are they an existing student? A faculty member? An alumni? Probably all of the above.

But for each person, you could start to identify their intentions for visiting the site. What does a parent need to know? What words will they use to find that information? “Tuition,” “Costs,” “Scholarships,” and “Financial Aid” are probably some of the trigger words required.

The ADMISSION menu on the Olin College Home Page uses Costs and Financial Aid as trigger words.

Starting with a good set of Personas and the scenarios that bring those personas to the page in question will tell you a lot about trigger words you need. If you’ve done a good job of creating your personas, you will find it easy to generate a list of trigger words.

If you haven’t, you can find a copy of them here.

If you’re not registered, there is still room. You can get all the information here.

There’s still room if you want to register. Many folks are telling us they are getting one feed (just $99) and collecting everybody in a conference room and sharing the presentation that way. (The University of Utah is so far winning with 50 people in an auditorium. Are you going to have more?)

We’ve heard from many people (especially those in Australia, where the presentation will be bright and early at 3am) who are interested in downloading and listening to a recording. It’s something we’re told the service we’re using is capable of. We’re looking into what it takes to make it available. Stay tuned.

Hope to see you there.