When we do our jobs well, important decisions are made correctly. Designs are improved. Experiences transition from frustrating to delightful. Assuming we do our jobs well.

Doing our jobs well is very hard work. A thousand details need to line up just perfectly. If we don’t get things just right, important decisions are made wrong. Designs regress. Experiences frustrate even more.

As user experience professionals, it’s all about the assumptions we make. If we assume correctly, things go well. It’s when we make false assumptions that problems occur. How do we know when our assumptions are any good?

In this week’s article, we look back to an article originally published in 2006; Interview-Based Tasks: Learning from Leonardo DiCaprio. In the article, I address the assumption question head-on by looking at a testing technique known as interview-based tasks. This non-traditional approach to usability tests helps work around the assumptions built into standard task design, allowing teams more flexibility and insight into what users actually need from the design.

When using interview-based tasks, the art of asking the question is critical. How you prepare for the interview, build rapport with the interviewee, and how to work with varying levels of experience and expertise will determine how successful the interview-based task is completed.

That’s where Steve Portigal comes in. Our next UIE Virtual Seminar is on Deep Dive Interviewing Secrets: Making Sure You Don’t Leave Key Information Behind. This is a not-to-miss-seminar if you want to know more behind the art of the question.

Have you tried interview-based tasks? What insights did you gain from it? How else have you checked the assumptions that go into your work? Join the discussion by submitting a comment below.

Having the participants that match the design’s audience will give the team feedback on what works well and where the design needs rethinking. By learning from the participants, the team can make informed design decisions on all aspects of the user’s experience.

However, having participants that don’t match the audience can be very problematic. The team may miss learning about critical problems while they spend valuable time and resources fixing design issues that aren’t really important in real use.

In today’s UIEtips, I take you back to an interview from July 2008 with Dana Chisnell, the co-author of The Handbook of Usability Testing. We talk about what happens when teams try to use market research demographics as the basis for recruiting their participants and what the alternatives are.

Read my interview with Dana Chisnell, Avoiding Demographics When Recruiting Participants.

We have two great opportunities for you to get more out of your usability testing. On Wednesday, September 30, Dana is presenting a 90 minute UIE Virtual Seminar - Recruiting  for Usability Testing. Dana will show you the tricks to use to maximize your time and money on the right participants to get the right results.

Dana is also giving a full-day workshop, Mastering the Art of User Research, at this year’s User Interface 14 Conference in November. Learn the user research techniques of the pros. Recruit participants easily. Analyze data faster. Communicate results effectively.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can read my article here.

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

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

In a recent UIEtips article, I described eight common account sign-in mistakes that we see all the time in our usability tests. Today, in our UIEtips email newsletter, we published my latest article that continues the list with 8 more design mistakes you’ll want to avoid. If you’re designing an account system, or already have one, this serves as a good start to assess how much you may be frustrating your users.

You can read my article here.

Account Sign-in is just one of the topics we’ll discuss at the Web App Summit, March 26-28, 2008, in San Diego, CA. You’ll want to reserve your seat today. Tuesday, January 15th is the last day for the $1,799 pricing.

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

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

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

You can read my article here.

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

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

Today, we published the second part of the article where Luke shares additional design tips by taking a closer look at the Boingo and British Airway Web sites.

Read the second part of Luke Wroblewski’s article on Web Forms.

Luke is currently working on writing a book about Web form usability, visual design, and interaction design considerations, Web Form Design Best Practices. I highly suggest you take advantage of this resource once it’s available.

Also, you can still catch Luke Wroblewski at this year’s UI12 Conference in Cambridge, MA, November 5-8. Luke will present the short talk, Best Practices for Form Design and the full-day seminar, Site Seeing: Communicating Successfully with Visual Design. Sessions are selling out, so you’ll want to sign up soon.

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

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

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

Read today’s article with Kevin Cheng.

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

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

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

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

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

Read today’s UIEtips article.

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

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

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

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

Read today’s UIEtips article.

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

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

One way to improve designs is to focus on changes that will produce better quality results. If you can identify areas in your work where you could be more efficient, you will immediately see a benefit.

That’s why this issue’s feature article is about the mistakes we repeatedly see when people are designing products. Cooper’s Kim Goodwin has written an excellent article discussing the common mistakes design teams make when building and designing web sites and software products. These aren’t little mistakes — they dramatically reduce the effectiveness of the design. And worse, most of the teams who are making them don’t even realize it. Read this week’s UIEtips article on The Ten Ways to Kill Good Design.

Kim Goodwin works for Cooper, a leading design firm that has really brought interaction design to the forefront of everyone’s attention. Kim has been a major force behind Cooper’s methodologies and is a wonderful mentor to learn from.

It’s also no accident that we’ve chosen to include a seminar on Interaction Design at our UI12 Conference this year. If you’re thinking your team could benefit from learning the essentials of interaction design, I highly recommend you consider coming to Kim Goodwin’s one-day seminar that’s part of the event.

What challenges to design have you experienced in your organization? How have you gone about solving these problems? Join the discussion about this week’s topic below.

As part of our research to understand what techniques truly help teams produce better designs, we’re still constantly surprised by the number of teams successfully using personas. Teams report that using personas has increased the satisfaction of their users, producing more usable designs that better match the needs of their audience. We’re also hearing that using personas can reduce development time and keep costs down.

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

Our research has surfaced obvious benefits from the technique, such as better designer agreement on important features and an in-depth understanding of the user’s motivations. But, it’s also unveiled some benefits that we still don’t see discussed very much. In today’s UIEtips, we are republishing an article I wrote discussing some of these unrecognized benefits. I hope you enjoy it.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

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

[If you're thinking your team could benefit from using personas, I highly recommend you consider attending Steve Mulder's UIE Virtual Seminar this week covering the basics of how to create and utilize personas for your designs.]

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

To help designers deliver software and web apps that successfully satisfy their users’ needs, we turned to Larry Constantine, author of
Software for Use, to share some of his insights on the subject. In this week’s UIEtips, Larry has written an excellent article describing activity modeling and usage-centered application design. Larry discusses how designers can satisfy their users’ needs by focusing on the activities users are trying to accomplish.

I’ve known Larry Constantine for more than 15 years. Larry is a recognized leader in design methodology and product usability. With Lucy Lockwood, he developed Usage-Centered Design, a model-driven process with a proven track record for delivering software and web applications that fit the genuine needs of users.

Like me, Larry comes from a computer engineering and project management background. He’s always approached design from the standpoint of what can realistically be done by teams, which makes his usage-centered approach practical and extremely successful.

It’s also no accident that we’ve chosen to include Larry’s tutorial on Usage-Centered Design at our upcoming UIE Web App Summit this January. If you’re thinking your team could benefit from this proven process, I highly recommend you consider coming to the tutorial.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

What type of information do you gather from your users? What are your thoughts on activity modeling and usage-centered design? We’d love to hear your thoughts below.

For years, we’ve been touring the world talking about designing web sites. At every presentation we’ve given, someone approaches us and asks the tough question: “Does this apply to web-based applications?”

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

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

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

In today’s UIEtips, I talk about five usability challenges that web-app designers face. While these are not unique to web apps, designers will find themselves dealing with problems and constraints they’ll rarely see other places.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

What challenges have you faced when developing web-based applications? How have you overcome these? We’d love to know. Share your thoughts with us and join the conversation in the comments below.

[Overcoming the challenges of web-based applications is exactly why we've put together the UIE Web App Summit, in Monterey, CA on January 21-23, 2007. We've assembled an amazing team of speakers, all of whom have overcome some significant challenges in some very creative ways. You don't want to miss out. See the summit website for more details.]

In our current research at UIE, we frequently observe the ongoing debate between usability and visual design. Can an application become more usable just by changing its aesthetics? Do we really need to know the underlying code of an application? There is increasing pressure to make web applications more functional, while at the same time to make those web applications pleasing to the eye.

Our research has shown that the most successful teams all have something in common: they effectively communicate with each other. The key for team members to successfully communicate is to have a solid understanding of the fundamentals. Developers need to understand the essentials of graphic design, and designers need to understand the inner workings of web applications.

When everyone on the team understands the basic principles of graphic design, the importance of visual organization and visual hierarchy becomes apparent. Both play huge roles in attracting users to web sites, not to mention maintaining their interest. The interface of a web application is the first thing a user experiences, making its design critical to success.

In today’s UIEtips, we are reprinting a fascinating article written by Luke Wroblewski back in 2003. Luke is the principal of LukeW Interface Designs as well as a principal designer for Yahoo! He also recently spoke at UI11, where he received rave reviews. In this article, Luke discusses how the arrangement of visual elements in a web application can coerce users to evaluate the content and interactions you want them to see most.

If you would like to learn more about visual design, you can catch Luke Wroblewski at the UIE Web App Summit. Luke will present Best Practices for Form Design: Bridging the Gap with Your Customers, a comprehensive look at how web form design can influence user behavior on your web site. Luke will also explain how a well-structured visual hierarchy can steer users in the direction you want them to take on your web page in Web Application Page Hierarchy. I highly suggest you check them out.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

Are you struggling with the visual design of your web applications? Have you found a visual design that successfully communicates with your users? I’d love to hear about your experiences. Share your thoughts with us and join the conversation in the comments below.

[If you're working on web applications, you really want to sign up for the UIE Web App 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 successful web applications. For more information about the summit, see the summit website.]

In our work, we’ve seen an increasing demand for complex web applications that provide users with a seamless and interactive experience. As a result, development teams are growing increasingly dissatisfied with the limitations of HTML and are turning to new development tools, including Flash and Ajax.

Flash has stood out over the years as a way to create applications with sophisticated capabilities beyond what is possible with today’s HTML. We first saw Flash’s potential in the web application space when we studied iHotelier, a Flash-based hotel reservation system.

It has been over 5 years since iHotelier’s Flash-based OneScreen application launched on the Broadmoor’s web site. Since then, it has been adopted by more than 3000 hotels around the world and has processed nearly one million reservations totaling about $350 million. As one of the first Rich Internet Applications doing e-commerce, OneScreen helped demonstrate a new generation of web applications that behave more like desktop applications and abandon the old request-reply model of the first generation of web applications.

In this week’s UIEtips, we reprinted an excellent article written by UIE’s Christine Perfetti. In this article, Christine discusses Flash’s potential for creating sleek, sophisticated, and interactive web applications, using iHotelier as a real-world example. I find the issues presented in the article still prevalent today, and believe you will too.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

Are you continually frustrated by developing HTML-based applications? Have you found significant advantages to using Flash? Bring your struggles and triumphs to light by sharing your experiences with us. Join the conversation below.

[If you would like to learn more about the power of Flash, you'll really want to come hear Jim Whitney of Whiteboard Labs, at the UIE Web Application Summit this January. Jim is the designer of the original OneScreen user interface for the Broadmoor. At the Summit, he will discuss what he and his team learned from the experiences of OneScreen and other Rich Internet Applications over the past five years. (You can find out more about Jim, along with the other top speakers we've invited on the UIE Web Application Summit site.]

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.

Information spaces on the Web are becoming increasingly filled with complex interactions. Even simple transactional solutions like shopping carts and document management systems are becoming more complex with richer desktop-like interaction models. Because of this, today’s designers need access to disciplines like interaction design and software design to create powerful and successful web applications.

One of the areas that excites us the most is that we’re now seeing Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) applications suddenly give application developers a new way to approach hard problems with surprisingly effective results. Every day, we’re seeing sites such as Google, Flickr, and Del.icio.us use new interaction models to create more powerful user experiences.

In this week’s UIEtips article, UIE’s Joshua Porter has interviewed David (Heller) Malouf, a premier Interaction Designer, to discuss the issues involved when development teams are thinking about designing web applications using AJAX and RIAs.

We’ve been so impressed with David’s commentaries on thr topic of RIAs, we’ve asked him to co-present a full-day seminar with Bill Scott at User Interface 11. David and Bill will teach a full-day seminar exploring some of the most important issues surrounding the web’s most sophisticated applications.

Are you currently building web-based applications? Are you tasked with adding more interactivity to your web apps? Join the discussion below.

Design teams frequently need to organize thousands and sometimes millions of pages of content. With so much content, how can these teams go about creating an information architecture that is workable, extensible, and meaningful for the site’s users?

One strategy is tagging. Just ask users to free associate words and phrases with every piece of content you have. Soon you have a site organization that’s completely user-driven, making it easy to find everything in a heartbeat. Tagging lets users decide the categorization of the content on the site. Sounds straightforward, but does it work?

Sites like Del.icio.us and Flickr have pioneered the use of tags, demonstrating their usefulness in several different settings. Even established players, like Amazon and Google, are using them. This style of community tagging, commonly referred to as a Folksonomy, allows a site to create an alternative categorization scheme, created by the users of that site. But, can they be useful in your design?

In this week’s UIEtips, we’ve re-published an article where Josh Porter discusses tagging and folksonomies. We believe folksonomies, while not yet a proven design tool, show great promise in helping design teams manage large amounts of content.

If you find this article interesting, you’ll also want to check out our latest UIE Virtual Seminar on July 27th, Is Tagging Right for Your Site?, Josh will show examples from dozens of web sites and talk about uses of tags in all industries.

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

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

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

Read the article here.

Enjoy your holiday weekend!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the article here.

In the letter for yesterday’s UIEtips, I wrote the following analogy:

“There are few things more frustrating in life than trying to get a drinking glass in someone else’s kitchen. You have to open every cabinet door to figure out where they put the empty glasses. For a few moments, we feel like we’re invading a very private space, searching for something innocuous by opening every nook and cranny.

“It’s an interesting phenomena, since, in our own house, we have a cabinet with glasses. Chances are the glasses are in a cabinet near the kitchen sink. Yet, when we’re in unfamiliar territory, we’re on a search and rescue mission of immense proportions.

“In the 21st century, innovation has finally arrived. Cabinet manufacturers have come up with an amazing invention: windows. Yes, they now put windows in the cabinets so you see the glasses without opening every door. Simply brilliant. I wish I’d thought of it.”

to which I got a response from Steve (male):

“What a great analogy!

“I’d take it one step further — when you start redesigning a site, it’s like moving in with someone. ‘What do you mean the glasses go in THAT cabinet. They should go in THIS one!’”

and this response from Robin (female):

Very bad analogy.

• At least 3/4 of women would not search all over. We would look around the kitchen and say “I would put the glasses near the fridge” (if there is a water dispenser on the fridge) or “I would put the glasses between the sink and the dishwasher”. and lo and behold, most of the time we are right. So I don’t think of myself doing this. I gather this doesn’t come naturally for the male of the species.
• Windows aren’t a new invention, you just discovered them I can show you pictures of 50s kitchens that have them. They are rare because they have a lot of downsides. Ignoring what happens in the earthquake (oh, you didn’t think of that….), they expose one’s internal messiness and they are a bitch to keep clean. I’d trade off getting rid of those problems against my guests doing a bit more hunting any day (and I don’t need the glass door to find the glasses, though I’ll bet my husband would still benefit from them

Next time, feel free to run your domestic metaphors by me.

Feels like gender perspectives to me. (Having two data points gives me 100% correlation on this inference.)

My old friend, Barbara, added her two cents:

Hmmm, my glasses are never in the cabinet near the sink–well maybe a few. Then, there’s a couple in my office, a couple in my bedroom, one on the living room table, a few in the dishwasher and some more in the sink. Oh, you meant clean glasses. I wouldn’t know where to find them….

I don’t know if all this attention to the analogy means the message is getting through or it’s getting lost.

There are few things more frustrating in life than trying to get a drinking glass in someone else’s kitchen. You have to open every cabinet door to figure out where they put the empty glasses. For a few moments, we feel like we’re invading a very private space, searching for something innocuous by opening every nook and cranny.

It’s an interesting phenomena, since, in our own house, we have a cabinet with glasses. Chances are the glasses are in a cabinet near the kitchen sink. Yet, when we’re in unfamiliar territory, we’re on a search and rescue mission of immense proportions.

In the 21st century, innovation has finally arrived. Cabinet manufacturers have come up with an amazing invention: windows. Yes, they now put windows in the cabinets so you see the glasses without opening every door. Simply brilliant. I wish I’d thought of it.

Searching for something on a web site isn’t too far distant from the glass-in-the-kitchen hunt. Except, instead of opening cabinet doors, users click on links and pogostick their way through the site. Yet, it’s just as frustrating as the kitchen experience.

In this UIEtips issue, I talk about the web site equivalent to putting windows in the cabinet doors: creating link-rich home pages. This emerging approach to home page design lets users see more of what is inside the site without having to click on every link. It’s changing the way we think about successful home pages.

Is your organization moving towards link-rich designs? What have your experiences been? We’d love to hear from you. Post your thoughts below.

[Link-rich home pages are just one of the topics I'm covering in June 29th's UIE Virtual Seminar: Initial Scent - The Latest Thinking on Home Page Design. This 90-minute session is packed with UIE's latest research on designing quality home pages. Registrations are coming in much faster than we expected, so you'll want to sign up soon. Details here.]

Read the article here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the article here.

The spring conference season is upon us and, by coincidence, I’ve recently found myself at several conferences where many of the participants were executives from organizations such as GE, The World Bank, Bloomberg, Intuit, Microsoft, and Best Buy. Hanging out with these folks has given me a chance to hear the challenges they are currently facing.

Executives, for the most part, now face the same challenges as they always have: the need to increase revenue and customers, decrease costs, and enhance shareholder value. However, I’ve noticed a real shift in their strategies. Many are now turning to innovation as the mantra for tackling the hurdles they see.

This shift to innovation is a good thing for us, the design practitioners. We thrive on being innovative and love the opportunity to show what we can do. Now we can get attention for our talents all the way to the corner office.

The more we understand what executives are seeking, the more support we can generate for those things we love doing. This can only be a good thing, since innovation thrives in both growing and shrinking economies. This thrust will serve to cement our value to the organization as time goes forward.

This week’s featured article, Innovation is the New Black, talks about this new executive attention on innovation. In the article, I explain how the designers at Apple and Netflix have made a profound impression on executives everywhere giving experience design a new focus.

Have you noticed an increased focus on innovation in your organization? What are you doing to respond to it? Share your thoughts below.

Read the article here.

[Since experience design is an essential skill set for innovative companies, we've made the theme for this year's User Interface Conference be "Enriching the Experience." If you haven't registered yet, you'll want to look at the conference program, as we've packed it full of valuable expertise on all aspects of creating innovative designs. Details about the conference are here.]

Update: Apparently, the @issue conference isn’t the first place Bruce Nussbaum talked about innovation being the new black, as Michael Bierut points out.

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

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

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

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

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

Read the article here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the article here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the article here.

First thank you for your newsletter which I really appreciate, but why do you persist on using tinyURLs? That can’t be user-friendly.

Yes, they might be shorter, but they really don’t make sense. It’s like buying a pig in a poke.

TinyURLs are a service provided by the great folks at Gilby Productions. When you give the TinyURL system a long URL, it comes back with an abbreviated one, like this: http://tinyurl.com/cxsml

We use tinyURLs because the larger URLs often are too long for a single line, requiring many of our readers to go through gymnastics when clicking on the links. When the URL is naturally short ( such as http://www.uieroadshow.com), we skip the tinyURL.

We’ve talked about building our own version of TinyURL (after all, it’s just a simple matter of PHP programming) that could use more mnemonic abbreviations, but so far the priority hasn’t popped to the top of our to-do list.

Of course, if we could count on everyone having the same email reader, then we’d have much better luck matching our newsletter to their needs.

Scent applies to intranets in that it’s a necessary component of how users (in this case, the organization’s employees) seek content in large information spaces, and there are few information spaces larger than today’s corporate intranets. So, everything we know about scent applies nicely to the structure of the intranet.

However, it’s not quite the same way that scent applies to Internet web sites. That’s because intranets have a page type rarely found on the Internet: the portal page. Portal pages, which launch the employee off to various internal sites on the intranet, are a different beast from home pages, store page, department pages, and the other types of pages we typically find on a web site. So, designing scent for these pages has its own special challenges.

In this issue’s UIEtips, I described some of what we’ve found when we apply scent to some intranet portals we’ve worked on recently. While the portal presents special challenges, understanding the basic attributes of scent can dramatically reduce the effort it takes for designers to create a wildly successful page.

Have you been involved in an intranet portal design? If so, what did you do to ensure you provided good scent? We’d love to hear from you. Post a comment below.

[If you want to know more about scent and techniques for making both intranets and internet web sites more usable, you'll probably want to come to our upcoming six-city UIE RoadShow: Web Design Foundations. Christine Perfetti and I will dive deep in the notion of scent, with a ton of examples and techniques for ensuring you create the most satisfying designs possible. More information available on the roadshow site.]

Greetings,

At User Interface Engineering, we focus a great deal of time researching the most promising design tools and materials available to development teams.

In the past year, it seems like everyone is talking about migrating to web standards like XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). ESPN.com and Wired.com are just two web sites that have moved to CSS implementations. We’ve done so too with our conference site.

What’s the big deal about these standards? And why should web teams invest the effort to learn new coding techniques and convert over to CSS and standards-compliant sites? In today’s issue of UIEtips, we’ve asked our good friend David Poteet, President of New City Media, to talk with Eric Meyer, who (quite literally) wrote the book on Cascading Style Sheets.

At User Interface 10, Eric and Molly Holzschlag will be teaching an entire day demonstrating how structured markup and CSS can work for you and members of your web team. We’re really excited about this seminar — it’s been one of our most popular sessions for years.

Have you migrated over to a standards oriented design? Are you thinking about it? I’m really interested in your thoughts. Leave me a message in the comments below.

Enjoy this issue of UIEtips,

Jared M. Spool
Editor, UIEtips

p.s. If you’re thinking about Eric and Molly’s seminar (or any of the other great sessions at UI10), you definitely want to sign up by September 13th to take advantage of the great pricing we now have. See the conference site for more details.

Read: Why eBay needs Standards-Oriented Design: An Interview with Eric A Meyer

After all, we never really got excited about mobile computing.
Or, ubiquitous technology.
Or, speech technology.
Or, rich media.
Or, tablet computers.

None of these things excited us enough to really pay attention. When clients would come to us and say, “What are you thinking about designing for handhelds?”, we’d just say, “That’s not our area of expertise. We haven’t looked at it yet.”

NASA’s a client and they have a saying about the technology they use: “It has to be old enough for the Space Program.” NASA likes proven technology for their spaceships and I guess we’re very similar. We don’t like to look at something until it’s been around and proven to be something more than hype or a fad.

So, why are we so excited about Web 2.0? After all, it’s really new. So new that nobody can really explain what it is. And, for something you can’t buy or touch, it’s getting a lot of attention — hype, some might even call it.

The thing that excites us the most is what people are doing with it. We’re seeing interesting new applications appearing out of nowhere, all because of this new platform and its capabilities.

It could be that we’ve drunk the Kool-Aid on this Web 2.0 stuff. It could be that we’re falling victim to yet another rush into the unknown. But, from where we stand, it looks like, as they say in the biz, this thing has legs.

Time will tell though. And we’ve been tricked before. We thought Flash was going to be a much bigger player in web interfaces than it currently is. It’s still strong, but not the dominant force in the marketplace.

In the meantime, I think it makes sense to really understand what this Web 2.0 thing is and what it could mean, if it were to catch on. It looks like it can give real advantages to people needing to get sophisticated applications running in a hurry. And that’s always a good thing.

Have you looked at the Web 2.0 platform yet? Are you doing anything with it? Does it intrigue you? Scare you? Bore you? I’d really be interested in your thoughts. Pop me an email at mailbag@uie.com. (Sometimes we publish these messages in UIEtips or on the Brain Sparks blog. Mention if you don’t want your name published, on the off chance we pick yours.)

Joshua Porter will be talking about Web 2.0 and why we need to pay attention to it as part of his presentation at the User Interface 10 Conference. This session is almost full, so you should sign up soon if you want to hear what he has to say. (I’ll be co-presenting with him. Details here.)

Read this week’s UIEtips: Web 2.0: The Power Behind the Hype

Joshua Porter, UIE’s Director of Web Development, has been investigating how sites such as Google, Flickr, and Del.icio.us are using new interaction models to create more powerful user experiences.

In this week’s article, Josh has collaborated with Richard MacManus, a full-time freelancer and author of the blog ReadWriteWeb to write an article describing trends in what people are calling “Web 2.0″.

Web 1.0 was about creating a web site with designer-supplied content, navigation, and HTML functionality. Web 2.0 is a new way to think about the web, where content moves beyond sites, interaction is no longer limited to HTML, and users start to control how data is categorized and manipulated.

While some aspects of the new Web are still in the realm of science fiction, many pieces are quickly becoming a reality. New approaches and technologies, such as Ajax, Folksonomies, and RSS, are becoming commonplace tools. In this week’s UIEtips article, Richard and Josh discuss how these techniques are starting to change the way designers think about their sites.

Have you thought about how these new trends such as Ajax, Folksonomies, and RSS will affect your work? Leave a comment. I’d love to know what you think on this topic.

Enjoy this week’s article and, as always, thanks for encouraging our behavior.

Read: Web 2.0 for Designers

Part of the complexity comes from our 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.

It’s hard to take the time to see what others have done. That’s why we were very excited when Hagan Rivers told us about her latest project: She’s been studying hundreds of web applications, carefully cataloging and deconstructing them, to see what works and what doesn’t.

In today’s UIEtips, Hagan shares with UIE’s Christine Perfetti some of the lessons she’s picked up. I found it a fascinating read and I’m betting you will too.

If you’re working on web applications, you really want to sign up for Hagan’s full-day seminar at the User Interface 10 Conference. This is the second year she’s presenting it, with updated information, and last year it was definitely a high point of the conference. I sat in on her session, just riveted by the amazing detail she gleaned from every site she’s studied. The 300+ pages of notes are amazing in themselves. (You can see more information about her session here.)

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. Just add a comment below.

Before I send you off to read Hagan’s interview, I have a couple of things to tell you:

First, I’ll be in the DC area on 8/23 and have time to make some client visits. If you’d like me to visit your offices and meet with your group, pop me an email. I probably can’t meet with everyone, but I’ll try to squeeze in as many folks as I can. (If there’s a real demand, I’ll see about extending my trip.)

Second, we’ve been busy working on our latest venture, our new blog: UIE’s Brain Sparks. Every week, we generate a ton of interesting findings in our research. We’ve put them into an easy-to-access daily blog format, which you can see here.

Finally, if you’re in the Boston area, I hope you’ll come to our first Brain Sparks Live event. We’re planning to do one of these every few months, first in Boston, then expanding to other cities. It’s a great way to catch up on our latest research and meet the other brains who are here in the Boston area. We’ve already had a huge number of people sign up and space is limited, so you want to sign up here.

The first time I learned about paper prototyping was in April of 1989. I remember it clearly, as if it was just last week. (Ironically, the things I actually did last week are a little hazy — the result of a little too much traveling and too many good meals!)

I was sitting in the (then) Austin Stouffers Hotel ballroom, listening to a great panel on involving users in design when Laurie Vertelney, then with Apple, talked about the tools they used to create early mockups of designs. During her 20-minute presentation, she went into exquisite detail, showing how Apple was using innovative improvisational techniques to put design ideas in front of users.

Leading up to that moment, I had spent the previous 10 years building interfaces and conducting usability work at a variety of companies. While we had done extensive usability testing to get users reactions to designs, it had always been after the design was implemented and running. If the design had inherent design problems, we couldn’t do anything until the next major release, often years away. The impact we were having on the design process was minimal — and all that was about to change.

Looking back on it today, Laurie’s presentation was straightforward: take an idea for a design, cobble together a pretend interface out of paper, put it in front of users, and see what happens. If she gave it today, nobody would think twice about it. Yet, in a world where everything took months (or years) to build before you got the first real user impressions, this was remarkable.

To say that presentation changed the way I worked would be a dramatic understatement. I rushed home from the conference and immediately went forward to build my first paper prototype for my current client, the Harvard Business School. Within a week, we had tested designs with a dozen or so students (who happened to be corporate CEOs in a special management-training program) and the results were stunning: we learned that the design, which we thought was downright clever, was, in fact, completely unusable. Several quick changes and an even better design emerged to everyone’s delight.

Paper prototyping quickly became a favorite tool of ours. Within a year, I had started training a dozen or so clients on the technique. A little while later, Carolyn Snyder joined UIE and, together, over the next few years, we trained more than 3,000 interface designers and developers on the intricacies of creating the prototypes. (Carolyn has subsequently written *the* book on the subject, cleverly named Paper Prototyping. I highly recommend it. Buy it here.)

Since that presentation in 1989, we’ve put together countless paper prototypes on an amazing range of designs: video conferencing systems, network performance monitors, e-commerce web sites, medical diagnostic systems, government resource libraries, and molecular modeling tools. What we’ve learned is that the tool, beyond anything else, gives us significantly more confidence about the designs we’re embarking on.

16 years hasn’t changed much. We continue to turn to the tool, time and time again. Just yesterday, I found myself recommending it to a client to solve their current design problems. It would be a safe bet that I’ll recommend it a dozen more times before the year is out. I’ve always wondered if Laurie knew that she had that much impact on someone’s career.

In today’s UIEtips issue, I talk about some of the lessons we’ve learned from practicing this technique for 16 years. What’s new and what’s still the same? I found looking back on our experience to be fun and I think you’ll enjoy the article.

Have you tried using paper prototypes? How has it affected your design process? Did you find it successful? I’d love to know. Pop me a message at mailbag@uie.com. (If you don’t want us to share your message in a future UIEtips, just mention that in the email.)

We continue to train people today on creating paper prototypes with a wonderful course: Product Usability: Survival Techniques. If you haven’t had a chance to take this class, there’s still a little room left for Christine Perfetti’s session at the User Interface 10 conference. The session is great fun: you actually work with classmates to build a fully working prototype that you test with real users. The team who builds the most usable interface wins fabulous prizes. It’s a great chance to learn the technique hands-on, under Christine’s expert guidance.

p.s. If you’re thinking about Christine’s class (or any of the other great sessions at UI10), you definitely want to sign up by August 2, to take advantage of the great pricing we now have. See the conference site for more details.

She had traditionally used oils and acrylics in her work, but was now experimenting with pastels and charcoal. To really understand how these new tools work, she embarked on an ambitious project to see what was easy and what was hard. She chose a vase of flowers and proceeded to draw them over and over again, each time varying little things, like how she held the charcoal or how much pressure she applied when drawing.

It was this act of “testing the materials” that made her comfortable to take on more adventurous stuff. Without this period of experimentation, she could not have produced work she would be happy with, just because she didn’t have the experience of using the new materials.

As user interface designers, we do exactly the same thing when we’re faced with a new technology. The first thing we need to do is test the boundaries of our abilities and see what the tools can do. However, we have to make sure that, through all this testing, we’re still giving our users interfaces that meet their needs and minimize frustration.

For example, when the Flash development environment became available, designers needed to experiment and really understand what could be done. They produced all sorts of interfaces, some good and some bad. As time went on, we began to understand what made a good one work well and what made the bad ones work poorly. (For those of you who are interested in this, Christine Perfetti and Matthew Klee wrote a report on just this topic back in 2001.) Today’s Flash interfaces are typically far more usable than the early ones, when we were still testing the materials.

The same is happening now with new technologies, such as Ajax and Eclipse. We need to experiment with these technologies to see what works and what doesn’t. A lot of what we learned with Flash still seems to be true, but these new technologies bring new challenges, so we still have a lot to learn.

Ajax is the topic of this week’s UIEtips featured article. Joshua Porter has steadily been watching the evolving world of Ajax development and paying attention to how designers are testing the materials. As we learn more about what people are doing with this evolving technology, we’ll be talking about what designers need to know to ensure they produce a quality interface for their users without wasting time or frustrating their customers. (Joshua will be speaking about this in detail at the User Interface 10 Conference in October.)

Are you experimenting with Ajax and other new technologies? What are your experiences? Good? Bad? What lessons have you learned? I’d love to hear what your discovering.