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.

• 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!

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Julie Zhuo

When Facebook tweaks anything, it gets coverage across the IT and design realms, and sometimes the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. If the users don’t like the changes, they form protest groups… how can a team operate under such a public microscope?

Julie Zhuo knows. She is the Product Design Manager at Facebook. As the principal designer behind the Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect experiences, she’s contributed to the last two major site redesigns. She also leads the front-end user interface engineering team. On her watch the site grew from 8 million college kids to 350 million people across the globe.

Jared Spool had a chance to chat with Julie recently. The stories she shared, from behind the scenes, are fascinating. When was the last time a throng of people gathered outside your office because you changed a feature on your site? Julie tells that story in the podcast, plus touches upon:

• The early years of innovation and launching features fast, and without testing
• Taking major design risks in front of a large, passionate audience
• How they moved to a strong routine of metrics, A/B tests, usability testing and staged rollouts
• …and much more

Julie talks about the transition from the run-and-gun design strategy that Facebook once used to roll out new features fast, and how it evolved to a more measured approach, while still moving quickly:

We are cognizant of the fact that every time we make a change, the initial user reaction is going to be a little bit negative. That’s why listening to feedback really matters. If all of the feedback is basically, “I don’t like this change because it’s different,” then maybe that’s a sentiment that will go away once people use it regularly.

But if the feedback is, “I don’t like this change because now I can’t find my applications,” or “I can’t find chat,” or “I can’t find messages.” Then that’s a real wake-up call for us that we really need to examine this change and see if we’ve regressed in making it easier and better for users.

They progressed to a test first, launch second strategy, that in some sensitive cases involved a lot of testing.

Last December we launched a change to privacy, and so when you logged into Facebook one day, you got a little privacy dialogue that said, “Hey Facebook is making some changes to privacy. Please revisit your privacy settings.”

That is not going to take that long to build. Right? It doesn’t take that long to design, it’s just one little dialog. But the process for us getting to that final point was months and months, because we knew privacy is such a sensitive topic for people that we wanted to be absolutely sure that what we were doing people would be comfortable with. It was the right thing to do.

Maybe four or five months prior to our launch, we were already bringing people in. We hadn’t even started building the pod. It wasn’t really even designed. We were just showing them a little text dialog with the language that we were going to use and with a lot of different options for how we would present this messaging to them.

These are like paper, low-fi prototypes, nowhere near what the final product will be. But prior to us even building and getting nice mocks from everyone, we already had at least five sessions with a bunch of users testing about 30 different versions of the language and the messaging for this dialog.

So many companies struggle with building the proper amounts of user research into their design process, but so few do it with so many users and so much public attention. Julie’s stories are fascinating case studies that should prove valuable to your own organization.

Julie has many more stories from behind the scenes at Facebook which she’ll share with us in San Diego at the UIE Web App Masters Tour. Join us for her Design Lessons from 350 Million session.

Are you struggling to balance the need to launch features fast with the necessary user research? Let us know in the comments.

(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.

One of Brian’s comments jumped out at me:

We took our knowledge and created, in a warehouse in San Francisco, an entire lobby made out of white foam core. We built it to scale. Then we brought in consumers to get feedback on the overall experience of the space. We didn’t want feedback on color choices, like blue versus red. Instead we wanted feedback on using welcome pedestals, rather than a clunky front desk. Our associates circle around the space rather than standing in one place, and we wanted customer feedback on that. And the foam core allowed for rapid prototyping. After we got user feedback, we could rip it apart and build it again to get the concept right.

It’s one thing to talk about the abstract notion of protoyping a web page or a dialog box. But to prototype an entire lobby experience? That’s pretty cool.

Not too different than what Apple did with the Apple Store. Who said an old-tyme business like Marriott can’t play the same game as the cool kids. See? There’s hope for us all!

Read the entire interview.

(Hat tip: Dana Chisnell)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A couple of weeks ago we held a UIE Virtual Seminar with Ethan Marcotte from Happy Cog West, a designer of beautiful websites. As always, we had a number of excellent questions from the live audience that we couldn’t attend to during the seminar, so Adam Churchill got together with Ethan to record this podcast and cover a number of those remaining questions.

If you didn’t attend the live seminar, and are interested lessons learned from case studies on collaboration between designers and developers, then you’ll still enjoy this podcast. If you find yourself wanting more afterwards, don’t forget you can still purchase a recording of the session for another 90 minutes of “couples therapy.”

During the podcast, Adam asked Ethan to dig into these questions:

• When using a typographic grid on fluid sites, can you talk about what happens when the browser window is pulled in narrower than the “ideal” width or min width?
• At what point do you folks check the accessibility and cross-browser compatibility?
• Is the transition any different between front-end developer and the back-end developer?
• Have you ever encountered a problem between the designer and a back end coder? If so, what was the problem? How did you overcome it?

Tune in to hear more about Comps vs. Code. Still have questions? Start the discussion in our comments, below.

Revealing Design Treasures from The Amazon

On its surface, Amazon.com just seems like a large e-commerce site, albeit a successful one. Its design isn’t flashy, nor is it much to write home about. But deep within its pages are hidden secrets — secrets that every designer should know about.

If one looks closely at what the team at Amazon has built, it’s filled with innovative functionality and clever designs, all of which creates a delightful experience for its users and directly produces regular profits for its shareholders. But not all is perfect. Some design changes in the last few years have not been the success that the team had hoped for. Amazon’s exceptional qualities and imperfections are critical knowledge for any designer that wants to dig deep into what makes the site tick.

In this entertaining presentation, Jared will share some of UIE’s latest research into the hidden treasures of (the) Amazon. You’ll learn:

• The simple Yes/No question that increased revenues by more than $1 billion
• The elegant subtlety of Amazon’s security system
• Why Amazon’s business model is more than meets the eye (and why designers need to care)
• The wins and losses that Amazon has had with social media functionality

Want to see it? Here it is (with audio recorded at An Event Apart Seattle 2009):

If you’re so inclined, you can download a PDF of the slides.

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This week I wanted to share my interview with Brian Kalma, Director of User Experience and Web Strategy for the darling of Internet retail, Zappos.com. In case you’ve somehow missed out on their meteoric rise to top of online retail, now conducting over a billion dollars in sales a year, then you’re in for a treat. I can’t think of a company with a more interesting case study in employee involvement and fanatical customer service. It’s really nice to see a company succeed for all the right reasons.

Zappos is a unique place. Every employee hired at their corporate headquarters in Las Vegas is required to go through the four-week customer loyalty (call-center training) course, including answering phones. So every employee has a strong grasp on the experience of their customers, from lawyers to VPs, managers to software developers.

You might be involved with a design team with a handful of designers or perhaps a large number of stake holders. Brian has a similar experience, with one notable exception. He regularly conducts web strategy meetings with an open invitation to the entire company. That’s more than 1,300 people! But design ideas are just the beginning. Employees are also encouraged to participate in other ways, from recording product videos, to being models on the site. In fact, all models on the site, which sells shoes, clothing, accessories, and more every day, are just regular employees.

On top of these duties, Brian also passionately supports Zappos’ social media outreach, where all employees are encouraged to look for comments about their company on places like Twitter and Facebook, and then actively engage with those customers, without oversight. For many companies, that would be a nightmare. Brian says it’s an amazing by-product of their dedication to their employees and their employees’ dedication to the customers. This is the basis of the Zappos culture, which Brian has to translate into content on their web site and use to drive sales.

And drive sales he has. 75% of their sales are from repeat customers, spending more than 2.5 times more in the following months than their initial purchase. And I asked Brian how he leverages their unique culture into their web presence to make these sales figures possible.

Tune into to the podcast for more details on the life of Brian at Zappos and their experience success stories.

[I should also mention that Brian is one of the expert speakers on our Web App Summit Proceedings disc, which we're now taking orders for. If you couldn't make it to the summit, this disc provides hundreds of pages of speaker materials, and 19 hours of presentation audio. Brian's 75-minute talk, Baking a Corporate Culture into the Online Experience is one of the 14 presentations included on the disc. The disc is a great source of information and inspiration for your work. Learn more about the Web App Summit Proceedings. You won't regret it!]

The article quickly became one of the most popular articles we’ve ever published. People love the fact that a small design change could be linked to a huge increase in revenues. It’s the ultimate ROI story.

Yet in our research at User Interface Engineering, we see these kinds of increases all the time. And $300 million isn’t anywhere close to the biggest.

In today’s article, The Magic Behind Amazon’s 2.7 Billion Dollar Question, I talk about a design element whose income contribution is possibly 10 times larger. It’s a simple question on the Amazon site – one you’ve probably seen a thousand times – yet it is critical to the success of the business.

Unlike the previous story, where we worked on the project, this story comes from our research of Amazon, independent of any projects we’ve done for them. Therefore, our revenue projections are estimates this time. But even if we’re off by an order of magnitude, it’s still an impressive number that tells us how a well-thought-out design can make a big difference.

Increasing the effectiveness of a design is exactly what we’re talking about at the UIE Web App Summit, in Newport Beach, CA, April 19-22. Not signed up yet? Register now!

Have you had any design changes that had a big impact on your organization’s bottom line? We’d love to hear your stories. Share you thoughts below.

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Without planning, web apps have no where to go. Planning documents for web app projects are often overlooked, despite their importance in the success of the product. As a designer, no matter how great your research is, or how amazing your programmers are, if your planning documents do not develop well, your project will fail.

One of the great user experience success stories in the U.K. is the Brighton-based agency Clearleft. They’ve developed successful, sophisticated methods of planning for their projects. I was able to get a hold of two of their talented crew to discuss those methods in this episode of the SpoolCast.

James Box (UX) and Richard Rutter (Co-founder and Production Director) have been working on ways to plan highly interactive web apps that make the process more efficient. And that’s exactly what we spoke about during the podcast.

James and Richard first told me that they hold back from traditional deliverables, and show clients what they call ‘design tools.’ Some clients prefer tidy deliverables, but many clients like these rougher documents. The advantage to these is that they stress design as a process, rather than set in stone. Sometimes overly polished documents can make a solution appear complete, without the client being able to change its course.

This method aids the flow of dialog between the designers and the client. Rough prototypes help your client stay focused on the core issues you’re demonstrating, like interactions, while avoiding getting caught up on visual elements that aren’t important at this very moment. As an example, when possible, they leave color out altogether.

A key element to the success of their design tools is that prototypes are interactive. They make many prototypes with HTML and enough jQuery to demonstrate the interaction. They don’t feel this process takes any longer than using relatively static tools like Visio or OmniGraffle, and offers more utility. They’re always looking for ways to improve the process with reusable pattern and code libraries.

There were more quality nuggets in the conversation too, so please tune in for more on peer reviewing, prioritizing usability testing and real code production.

James and Richard will be joining us in California this April for our Web App Summit, where they will be conducting a full-day workshop on “Wireframing and Prototyping for Highly Interactive Web Apps.” If you enjoyed this conversation, please join us to learn how their techniques can help in your organization.

Have you moved to interactive prototyping for expressing complex situations? Let us know in the comments.

UIE is excited to announce our new UIE Roadshow: Secrets Behind Designing Great User Experiences, a full-day workshop, based on 10 years of UIE’s extensive research, that will deliver new insights and inspire your team to create the best user experiences. 

This winter, we’re taking this workshop on the road to:

• Portland, OR on Tuesday, February 17, 2009 
• Minneapolis, MN on Thursday, February 19, 2009 
• Atlanta, GA on Monday, March 2, 2009

Recognized industry leader, Jared Spool, will share information that previously we’ve only made available to our biggest clients. 

During the day, Jared will lead you through these sessions:

9:00 am: Designing for the Age of Experience

Jared will open the day with an overview of UIE’s research into great experience design. He’ll reveal the factors that are found in the organizations that are successful at delivering great experiences. And, he’ll show you the important criteria that you can use to measure your team’s effectiveness.


10:45 am: UX Level-Up: Taking Your Team to the Next Level


You’ll assess the critical dimensions that will pinpoint what your team needs to succeed. Jared will share how UIE measures organizations, which factors are most critical, and how to tell exactly where your group falls. From there, you’ll put together a solid action plan, describing the exact steps you need to take, to go to the next level and beyond.


1:00 pm: The Making of a UX Vision

You’ll discover the secrets behind creating a unified user experience vision that you can share with your entire organization. (Hint: it’s not nearly as hard as it sounds.) Jared will show you how, once you’ve created your vision, your team can use it to guide and focus your entire organization on a path that will yield delighted users while exceeding business objectives. 


3:15 pm: Magic and Mental Models: Using Illusions to Simplify Design

In a perfect session to end the day, Jared will use professional magic effects to demonstrate the parallels between the world of magical illusions and the world of digital design. He’ll reveal the secrets from several magical illusions, and then show you how to use the same mechanisms to create delightful experiences for your users.

Read the detailed program description.

Knowing that times are tough for folks, we’ve made a special effort to make the UIE Roadshow a very affordable event. We think it’s important to get our latest research out, so we’ve priced this full-day workshop for far less than other programs. Additionally, we’re offering a $75 discount when you register with the promotion code SHOW09. 

Do you have a team to send? We’re offering steep discounts. Bring your team and the price goes as low as $299 for each person.

This is guaranteed to be an eventful workshop, with a ton of detailed examples, hands-on exercises, Jared’s usual funny material, and, for the first time, live magic tricks! 

We hope to see you there.

The client had hired us because they were concerned about checkout-process abandonment. Their analytics were showing a 13% drop off in sales, which, based on the average value of the abandoned shopping carts, was worth about $1.2 million a year in additional revenue.

Checkout-process abandonment is common in e-commerce sites and something that you can easily detect with your site’s usage logs. You just look at the number of people who get to the first screen and then the number of people who actually complete the transaction. Everyone who doesn’t make it is an abandonment.

When the team contacted us, they’d already pretty much decided what the problem was and how they were going to fix it, even though they had never watched any shoppers make purchases. And they were dead wrong. Not only was their fix not going to help, our research showed that it was going to increase abandonment.

Two weeks of usability testing on the live site (and on competitors’ sites), followed by two weeks of iterative paper prototype testing produced a streamlined checkout process, which, once implemented, showed a dramatic increase in revenues. It’s amazing what you’ll learn when you actually watch your users.

Today’s article, The $300 Million Button, talks about the bulk of that increase — how a simple change to a common screen produced $300,000,000 of additional revenue over the next year. I’m sure you’ll find it interesting.

Improving forms, like a checkout process, can show immediate results in your design’s user experience. We’re fortunate that at this year’s UIE Web App Summit, we have Luke Wroblewski repeating last year’s top-rated Web Application Form Design full-day seminar. If your site has forms (and what site doesn’t these days), this is a must-take course!

Have you seen results from changes to your forms? We’d love to hear your experiences. Share them with us below.

Naturally, our clients’ teams start by focusing on their direct audience. They look to make the best experience for these folks, to make creations come to life quickly and effectively.

It doesn’t take long, once they start researching how their direct users are taking advantage of these tools, to see that not every creation represents the tool well. Quickly, the goal of the team becomes to expand the scope to enhance the lives of what we call the downstream users.

In moving the design focus from the direct audience to the downstream users, we’ve found having robust personas and scenarios helps tremendously. The field research behind the personas involves both the direct users and the downstream users. Scenarios are often interconnected between personas, since the stories describe the direct user’s relationship with their downstream users.

The most successful of our clients in this endeavor have had great luck when they’ve put together a solid vision of what key downstream users experience, then talk about the idealized vision for the direct customers’ development process to reach that experience. The combination of the two viewpoints becomes very powerful.

Interestingly, the theme of how to learn from failure was pervasive throughout the conference. Dana Chisnell talked about how to extract takeaways from usability tests. Jeff Patton discussed techniques for learning during the iterations of an Agile development process. Peter Merholz presented his challenges for organizations. And I discussed how teams need to celebrate failures, so teams have a chance to savor the rich insights that come from them.

It turns out that it’s no accident people are talking about failure these days. Over the last few years, our research has shown that the organizations that embrace the mistakes they make are more likely to show growth and improvement in their designs. That’s the great paradox: failure is strategically important to success.

In this week’s UIEtips, I describe how one nameless client got themselves into big trouble, how Amazon.com minimizes the risk from major design changes, and eight common mistakes preventing organizations from getting the most from their failures. I think you’ll enjoy it.

Read the article – Failure Is Not an Option — It’s a Requirement.

What does your organization do to embrace its failures? We’d love to hear from you. Share your thoughts below.

In the June 2008 issue of the Harvard Business Review, there is a super article by IDEO’s Tim Brown on what it takes to bring innovation down to the execution. Tim’s solution: Design Thinking.

Tim tells us that Design Thinking is:

a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.

Anyone who is immersed in UX design will find familiar comfort in Tim’s descriptions of how this works. There’s nothing new is how he goes about it. It’s just that he’s done a great job of explaining what we do in business terms that executives can understand.

For example, the Tim explains why prototypes are important to an organization’s understanding of the problems they are trying to solve through design:

Prototypes should command only as much time, effort, and investment as are needed to generate useful feedback and evolve an idea. The more “finished” a prototype seems, the less likely its creators will be to pay attention to and profit from feedback. The goal of prototyping isn’t to finish. It is to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of the idea and to identify new directions that further prototypes might take.

If you don’t have a Harvard Business Review premium subscription, it will cost you $6.50 to get the PDF of this article. However, if you are looking for a good way to help your senior management team understand the value of design, this article will be well worth it.

Access the Harvard Business Review Article, Design Thinking by Tim Brown.

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."]

On my recent trip to the d.Construct 2007 conference in Brighton, England, I had the good fortune to sit down with acclaimed designer Cameron Moll.

Cameron is the Interaction Design Manager for the LDS Church in Salt Lake City, Utah, where the work he oversees reaches a world-wide audience. His very popular design blog Authentic Boredom, regularly features engaging articles and unleashed the “wicked worn” look across the web, which earned him a mention on NPR.

Cameron’s excellent talk at d.Construct was about the differences between good design and great design. (Fortunately, he’s covering this topic — and much more — in his almost sold out full-day UI12 tutorial session.) I found Cameron’s perspectives on graphic design theory, HCI principals, and his communication-centric approach both fascinating and stunningly effective.

In our conversation, Cameron let me in on his background and his unusual journey to both design and the web. We discussed the importance of getting to know your customer before you make design decisions. We also discussed what to do after each project so you take its lessons forward.

Like many of us, Cameron works in a large, complex organization. This means managing design decisions and wrestling (often inflexible) enterprise technology. He talked to me about how he has integrated his real-world experiences into his UI12 tutorial and how he is working on bringing elegance and great function to his complex work projects.

Even though Cameron is recognized for his world-class design talent, I am surprised how friendly and humble he is. We had a fascinating conversation that I think you’ll enjoy.

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

Looks like a fascinating talk.

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

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

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

I had the good fortune of meeting up with Patrick Hofmann at the Usability Professionals Association’s Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas. At any given time you may find Patrick in London, Sydney or Toronto. He travels the world working on design projects for organizations internationally, including HP, Nokia, Motorola, FedEx, and many more. The conference was all a-buzz about Patrick’s sessions, so I cornered him and recorded a podcast.

In this podcast, we discuss,

• Design deliverables and evaluations – gathering insight
• What’s involved in internationalization without words
• Writers, software engineers, and others learning to express ideas visually

We had a great conversation, and I think you’ll learn something. I did. As always, we welcome your feedback in the comments.

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Rebekah explains why she uses comics:

Comics are effective not only because they are essentially narrative, but also because they are unpretentious, easy to follow, and accessible. Whereas a functional specification document uses words and often “tech speak” to communicate functionality, comics use pictures and interactions to get ideas across. Comic artist and Yahoo! staffer Kevin Cheng put it best, calling comics “the universal language.”

And how she uses comics to explain the user experience in a series of steps:

Step 1: Focus on the point (forget the details) I was already well aware of our key scenarios and use cases, so I crafted brief stories in paragraph form for each one. Taking the time to write these stories before incorporating them into a comic allowed me to focus on the main points and the completeness of the message without the clutter of images and thought bubbles…

If you’re still skeptical of the value of comics, I think Rebekah’s story will give you a new perspective. You can read Rebekah’s full article, and see the sample comics here: Comics: Not just for laughs!

Back in January we had planned to have Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Flickr, speak at our Web App Summit. Sadly, events conspired to force Stewart to Europe at the last moment. In his stead Peter Merholz and I got together to lead an analytical interactive discussion on what makes Flickr such a success in the Web 2.0 space, and as a popular destination in general. What makes it such a draw? It can’t just be AJAX.

» What tools does Flickr use to foster its community?
» Does the service have a personality?
» How is it different from competing sites?
» How does Flickr invite you to discover new tools?
» How does the app leverage its API to increase its values?

Flickr is often mentioned in our individual talks for just a few minutes. It was really interesting to collaborate and dig deeper into the app and explore its many layers of innovation. I hope you enjoy this recording as much as I enjoyed the session.

Sean Kane, showed off some of his behind the scenes work on Netflix.

Jon Wiley showed off some of his and his team’s work behind the scenes on Google Apps. He asks, can you market usability?

Luke Wroblewski of Yahoo! talked about the structures of web content. What do M-16s and AK-47s have to do with Web 2.0? (hint: révolution!) How does usability address the complexity of data on the web?

The three then participated in a round table discussion.

The entire two and a half hour presentation is available to view on Google Video. There’s lots of great stuff here.

Additionally, Luke also did a followup blog interview with moderator Reshma Kumar, VP of WebGuild, in which he expands upon the topics he discussed at the event. This interview will also stand on its own if you don’t have time to watch the video first.

In the interview, Luke touched upon the roles of form and visual organization in usability, addressed design for the mobile web, noted the value of usabilty testing, and more. Check it out.

For those of you not familiar with SharePoint, it is a web application from Microsoft that’s deployed within an organization for collaboration purposes. I’ll pigeon-hole it as an intranet-in-a-box™ app.

There are a lot of people out there, web developers and designers especially, who have this app in their organization and they don’t much about it. And now they’ve been charged with wrangling it. The complaint I hear repeatedly is that it is difficult to make properly coded web pages (CSS, semantics, et al) on the SharePoint framework. The phrase “surrender” is thrown about commonly.

Several people have referenced Jared’s comments on the topic of SharePoint at the Web Directions North conference.

Implementing Sharepoint is a lot like building a house. It’s like a friend of yours says, “I know exactly what to do.” And, he drives you to a Home Depot, drops you off at the front door and says, “Everything you need is here.” Then, drives off.

Luckily for SharePoint users, Cameron knows a ton about semantics and CSS, has been thrown into the same position as many of you, and is sharing his discoveries. A big thanks to Cameron.

Unlike most of its hardware and software rivals, Apple has eagerly used open standards and open-source software to develop–ironically enough–a system that combines proprietary hardware with proprietary software. Apple’s iCal was one of the first widely available desktop calendar programs to adopt the iCalendar standard; Apple embraced iCalendar so early that many people mistakenly thought Apple had invented it.

Being so intimately familiar with Apple myself, sometimes I forget than many people may not know how involved in open-source software Apple is. It has a reputation for being proprietary, but since the return of Steve Jobs, UNIX and other open-source projects have become a staple upon which Apple innovates.

All this borrowing is completely legal, and the result is that Apple is able to direct more of its R&D dollars to developing distinguishing technology, since it doesn’t have to spend as much on the “plumbing” of today’s information infrastructure. That directly benefits customers by lowering Apple’s cost of innovation. It also benefits Apple’s third-party developers by making Macintosh development not all that different from Linux development, which is generally regarded as a lot easier than developing software for Microsoft Windows.

If you’re curious how much they are leveraging this, Apple’s produced a 20-page PDF on the topic of open-source and UNIX in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). Expect more in 10.5 (Leopard) this October.

Could you free up some resources by using more pre-fab plumbing in your product?

When we talk with design teams, more often than not, they articulate that “users are our first priority.” Yet, as projects progress, the priority often shifts to the appropriate technology solution and the needs of the business stakeholders. It’s not that the design teams don’t think the users are important. But somewhere along the way, the primary focus moves off of the users’ needs.

How can design teams ensure they continue to focus on their users first? In our research, we’ve found that many successful teams are solving the problem by creating an experience vision.

In this week’s UIEtips article, I introduce the technique of creating an experience vision. With this strategy, organizations think about what the experience of using their design will be like at some time in the future. After reading this article, I believe you’ll see why your organization may want to consider creating and articulating a vision for your designs.

As always, please share your thoughts with us. Is your design team having trouble focusing on the users? Does your organization have an experience vision? Join the discussion below.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

[If you find this article interesting, you'll definitely want to attend the UIE Road show in June, Secrets Behind Designing Great User Experiences, a full-day workshop, based on 10 years of UIE’s extensive research. Explore the program.]

So, what can we learn from In-N-Out Burger?

In-N-Out Burger does a great job of using preconceived notions to their advantage. They take a step beyond the expected and pleasantly surprise their customers. By offering fresh ingredients, outstanding quality control, and made-to-order food, In-N-Out exceeds the standards of the typical fast food joint. They don’t use microwaves or freezers, their fries are hand-cut and prepared on site, and the building is actually clean.

Going against the grain got In-N-Out Burger noticed. In their case, being the black sheep doesn’t have to be a bad thing. It’s interesting how In-N-Out offers a peculiar variety of drink choices. While they could have saved money by only offering Coca Cola or Pepsi products, they chose to offer customers Coke, Diet Coke, 7-Up, and Dr Pepper; the latter 2 produced by Cadbury Schweppes. In-N-Out strives to produce the best experience to customers even when it meant branching out to more than one beverage distributor.

Creating a sense of intrigue and exclusivity can do wonders with customers. A good story can often stimulate people’s interest and keep them coming back for more. Did you know In-N-Out has a secret menu? The customers that are aware of the secret menu feel like they are part of the in-crowd, and find great joy placing an order “animal style,” only to hear the folks around them inquire what that is. In-N-Out also doesn’t have any restaurants more than a day’s drive away from its main distribution center. While I’m assuming this is done for quality reasons, it also allows In-N-Out to remain exclusive to a certain area. Whenever I am in In-N-Out territory, I make it a point to go, as do many other people.

In-N-Out has also chosen to remain relatively small in comparison to other fast-food chains, which allows them to adapt quickly while holding steadfast to their tried and true values. I recommend to many of our clients to avoid striving for world domination, that way they can stay true to their loyal audience base. Just as Seth Godin points out in his new book, Small is the New Big, there is an advantage to being small. Small companies can do big things. In-N-Out is a family-owned chain that refuses to franchise. This allows them to foster an extremely close relationship with their associates and customers while staying true to tradition.

Finally, In-N-Out keeps their choices simple. Their menu is one of the simplest I’ve encountered. When I make my burger choice, there aren’t any complex decisions I have to make. Think about Barry Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice. In a culture where we seem to have limitless choice, Barry argues that more choice doesn’t necessarily lead to greater satisfaction or superior alternatives. He believes more choice leads to psychological and emotional detriment. Either you want a burger or you don’t; no wasting time and effort choosing among 50 different menu items, frustrating yourself, wondering if you made the right decision. The menu is as easy as 1, 2, 3.

Leave it to me to relate everything to food…

[Photo courtesy of Christine Perfetti]

I guess that’s what interested me when I read this in yesterday’s New York Times article, Stirring Up the Cubicles at eBay (Registration may be required, the story may hide behind their pay-wall in a few weeks.):

[John Donahue, deputy to eBay's CEO and president of eBay Marketplaces, one of eBay's most important divisions] accompanied two members of eBay’s research group to the San Jose apartment of Kanvasi Tejasen, a 30-year-old Lockheed Martin engineer who had agreed to have her online buying habits studied by the company in exchange for $200.

With Mr. Donahoe (who makes $800,000 a year and has received around $10 million worth of eBay stock) sitting on her sofa taking notes, Ms. Tejasen shopped for a TV tuner and visited rival sites like Amazon and Google. In one crucial moment, she plugged the term “4G iPod Nano” into the eBay search engine and received 1,700 results, which she said she found confusing. That set Mr. Donahoe scribbling furiously.

“We have to do a better job getting her what she wants,” he said afterward. “If we improve search efficiency even 1 percent, it’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars.”

What would happen if your CEO went on a few site visits?

Khoi Vinh, the Design Director of NYTimes.com, discovered a bit of hidden joy the other day in his Address Book, a bundled app with Mac OS X. He intended to update a contact that he already had a vCard for, with a new one he’d just received. Having never done this before, he feared duplicating his entry, but instead was surprised and delighted by the care that was paid to such a situation.

To my surprise, something unexpected happened: Address Book launched, alright, but a brand new screen appeared, one I hadn’t ever seen before. It identified the new vCard as a duplicate, highlighted the updated data, and offered to let me choose between retaining the original card, retaining the new card, retaining both, or simply updating the old card with the new information. I chose the last of those options, which also happened to be the default.

Khoi continues on, making some other great observations on taking pride in the little things to bring joy to your users. Have you made someone smile today?

Schwab.com has done a pretty good job of managing change on their site. They announced the pending change on the “positions” page months before they made the change, complete with a link to see the new page (not a screen shot, but an actual page with your stocks). Now, months after the change, they still have a link back to the old page.

The changeover was done in the light of day, not overnight. It was introduced and explained, and users had plenty of time to get used to it. Personally, I love the new page and always went right to the new version after it was introduced. But, I guess some aren’t as receptive to change when it comes to their finances. Schwab accounted for the receptive and the reticent in the change.