Fast Forward Four Months…

We’d like to thank you for doing a fantastic job as our 2012 Winter Business Intern. You started with a thorough analysis of the purchasing patterns in our UIE Virtual Seminar series. This led to some amazing insights on how we could restructure the program, which helped us with key initiatives we launched this spring.

At the same time, you put together a marvelous weekly social media outreach strategy. Once you started executing it, we saw a real lift in the conversations we’ve had with our customers, which has had a direct affect on our bottom line.

When you turned your keen attention to compiling the history of our revenue sources for the last few years, you uncovered some interesting patterns about who our customers are and how they like doing business with us. We’ll use those insights to drive new products for years to come.

You also created a database of our marketing partnerships, to help us know who to contact and what they’re interested in. This makes it easy for us to make our partners aware of our latest offerings.

To top it off, you’ve even helped us document our business development process to make life easier for future interns.

Thanks for your energy and enthusiasm during your internship. We know you’ll succeed at your future ventures.

Now Back To Today…

If you’d like this to be your story, send us your resume with a half-page write up of your most significant business accomplishment. While we’re less concerned with your skills and qualifications, we won’t compromise on your ability to deliver team results. We’ll be back to you in 24 hours if you have what it takes to achieve something special.

You might even want to check out our web site for some insight into what we’re doing. We think you’ll be excited by where we are today and the challenge to get us where we’re going.

You will work in our North Andover offices. (Sorry, we don’t hire remote employees.) We’ll provide all the equipment you need, including Apple hardware and Mac software to bring out the best in your talents and skills.

Send your resume and write-up to: BusinessInternJob@uie.com

or

Jared M. Spool, CEO
User Interface Engineering
510 Turnpike Street, Suite 102
North Andover, MA 01845

Fast Forward Four Months…

We’d like to thank you for doing a fantastic job as our 2012 Winter Web Developer Intern. You’ve driven the launch of a new web site for our latest conference. You worked your magical HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript/JQuery skills to get us a slick, good looking, easy-to-use site. You updated it with new content as we got closer to the event and, because of you, the event was a success.

Your site development skills are top-notch. You’ve helped us clean up some of our old PHP server scripts, removing outdated advertising and content from the site.

You also helped us migrate our UIE Virtual Seminar pages to our new ExpressionEngine-based Content Management System. We were impressed with how quickly you picked up on what we were doing and the improvements you made.

To top it off, you’ve even helped us document our Git-based design and development process to make life easier for future interns.

Thanks for your energy and enthusiasm during your internship. We know you’ll succeed at your future ventures.

Now Back To Today…

If you’d like this to be your story, send us your resume with a half-page write up of your most significant web development accomplishment. While we’re less concerned with your skills and qualifications, we won’t compromise on your ability to deliver team results. We’ll be back to you in 24 hours if you have what it takes to achieve something special.

You might even want to check out our web site for some insight into what we’re doing. We think you’ll be excited by where we are today and the challenge to get us where we’re going.

You will work in our North Andover offices. (Sorry, we don’t hire remote employees.) We’ll provide all the equipment you need, including Apple hardware and Mac software to bring out the best in your talents and skills.

Send your resume and write-up to: WebDevInternJob@uie.com

or

Jared M. Spool, CEO
User Interface Engineering
510 Turnpike Street, Suite 102
North Andover, MA 01845

Outsourcing your user research work is like outsourcing your vacation.
It gets the job done, but probably won’t have the effects you were seeking.

I usually say this when someone is asking me to do their user research for them. This is something we did quite a bit in the early days of UIE, but don’t do any longer.

Usually, they are asking us to do this to save time, because they don’t have trained folks, or because they are afraid of bias. All these reasons are rational, but there are better ways to deal with them than hiring someone else to do the research on their behalf.

As I said, I founded UIE as a company to do just this. I felt the rational reasons where why companies weren’t conducting their own research. I thought we could offer cost-effective, inexpensive research services to help. User Interface Engineering, in 1988 (it was our 23rd birthday yesterday!), was one of the first companies to make user research services available to other companies.

However, after working with hundreds of teams and providing their research, we started to looking at how effective we were. Were the teams’ designs getting better? Were they doing more research? Were they creating better user experiences?

We were sorely disappointed with our results. While every team told us they really got a lot out of our work, most weren’t improving their designs. They were appreciative of our reports, but hadn’t read them. They enjoyed our presentations, but weren’t really adopting the recommendations. And, most importantly, their culture didn’t change — they weren’t integrating users into their design process any more than before.

It wasn’t only UIE’s clients with this problem. We reached out to organizations using other outsourced user research services and discovered the same results. Hiring the work out wasn’t getting the job done.

We realized that we were missing an important variable in user research: the team’s direct exposure to their users.

When we take a team on a field research project, we introduce the team members to their users and having them spend time seeing them use the product and doing their work. In doing this, we’ve accomplished 90% of the work of the project.

It’s the exposure that changes the way people work. The same is true for usability testing or interviewing users. The direct exposure is the most valuable part of the project.

When you hire out your user research, even to the most competent of user research professionals, you’re losing 90% of the value. The research becomes a game of telephone, where the “away team” (to steal a Star Trek term) learns all about the users and somehow has to communicate back what they’ve learned. No mount of report writing or presentations can replace that lost experience.

Some UX service companies will tell you that they’ll remain part of the team, integrating the knowledge they learned into the design as the project continues. However, that creates an imbalance, where some people on the team know the users well and others have no idea. Those others, who will eventually own the entire design, are working at a disadvantage and won’t be making their design decisions using this critical knowledge.

This is why we now refuse projects where the team wants to outsource their research. We still do plenty of field visits and usability tests with our clients, but only if they come along to every session. If the client team isn’t there, we won’t conduct the session – there’s no point.

For the folks that think they don’t have time to do their own research: You’re better off taking the money you’ll spend on hiring someone and burning it in the back yard. You’ll get the same value in your product.

Seriously, if you want someone else to do your research because you don’t have time, you’ll need to dedicate twice as much time to spend with the researchers, extracting every little thing they learned about your users. Otherwise, you won’t get the value you paid for. It’s not a time saver to go this route at all.

For the folks who feel they don’t have the skills onboard: That’s an easy problem to fix. Training on user research methods is pretty easy. This is the bulk of our consulting work these days. We use a “Watch one, Do one, Teach one” approach. (We stole it from the medical training world). Most teams pick up the skills pretty quick and do a damn good job in just a few weeks.

And for those folks who feel doing your own research introduces a bias: You’re right, but it doesn’t matter. There’s always a bias in research, even when you get a third party to execute it. There’s nothing wrong with biased research, as long as you understand your biases and how to counter act them.

If there’s anything you can outsource, it could be participant recruiting. However, make sure you work with someone trained in UX recruiting, not market research recruiting. UX trained folks (we use Usability Works – they’re awesome!) know how to deliver the information they learn about your users in the process.

That said, you should even try to resist outsourcing your participant recruiting. You learn a lot when you talk to your potential users, even if they don’t qualify for the study. When you’re outsourcing it, you’re flushing a lot of great source material down the toilet.

Once you’re in the habit of doing your own research, you’ll never want to go back. It’s just too awesomely addicting and useful.

Fast Forward One Year…

We’d like to thank you for your fantastic job helping us deliver User Interface Engineering’s products to our clients during the past year. Your hard work increased our sales and opened up new channels of revenue for the company. Your constant attention and adjustments to our marketing communications continue to deliver outstanding results.

We’re amazed how adeptly you’ve handled the different parts of this critical job. The marketing descriptions you crafted for our conferences brilliantly brought out the excitement of being at these in-person events. Your UIE Virtual Seminar marketing has increased attendance and customer satisfaction—people now see the value we pack into each seminar. Your persuasive ads really tap into exactly what our clients need.

Since you’ve taken over our editorial and publication process, we now have a consistent communications voice and tone that says what User Interface Engineering is all about. Our thousands of newsletter subscribers love all the new value you’ve packed into each issue.

You handle the publication process with ease, making it easy for us to get our knowledge and skills into the hands of designers all over the world. Your innovative approach to our marketing communications has increased both our audience reach and repeat attendance.

We loved how you have curated the library of articles and podcasts. Your new organization makes it easy for our clients to quickly find the resources they’re seeking. Your special collections are a real hit with the user experience professional community, who regularly cites these as must-have design resources.

Everyone in the company would like to thank you for your dedication. We can’t wait until next year.

Now Back To Today…

If you’d like this to be your story, send us your resume with a half-page write-up of your most significant copywriting accomplishment. While we’re less concerned with your skills and qualifications, we won’t compromise on your ability to deliver results as you work within our team. We’ll be back to you in 24 hours if you have what it takes to achieve something special.

You might even want to check out our web site—www.uie.com—for some insight into what we’re doing. We think you’ll be excited by where we are today and the challenge to get us where we’re going.

Send your resume and write-up to: MasterCopyCraftsman@uie.com

or

Jared M. Spool, CEO
User Interface Engineering
510 Turnpike Street, Suite 102
North Andover, MA 01845

Special note to Recruiters:We’re sure you are brilliant at what you do. However, right now, we’re not interested in using a recruiter for this position.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Find out more about Dana’s seminar and register?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In advance of the presentation, we’d love to hear from you. What challenges do you face with your web application’s navigation system? What advice can you pass along to others? Are you planning to be at the Web App Summit in Newport Beach this April? Share your thoughts below.

So, it’s a nice fifteen minutes of fame when we get picked up by the popular press, in this case, Fast Company magazine:

Cliff Kuang did a nice job describing the research I described in my $300 Million Button article from a few weeks ago:

UIE studied people actually using the site, and it turns out that the prospect of registering was enough to turn some users away; meanwhile, even return users had problems logging in because they didn’t remember the email address or password they signed up with. (45% of users apparently had multiple registrations—a few had up to 10.) Granted, these represented a small portion of users. But for a retailer with $25 billion, even small portions signify huge lost profits.

So UIE redesigned the site, replacing the “register” button with “continue.” They also added a message, saying that registering wasn’t required to checkout, but was optional and might be helpful if you returned.

Sales went up 45%—$15 million in the first month, and $300 million in the first year.

Read Cliff’s write up on FastCompany.com.

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

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

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

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

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

I haven’t had a chance to watch voters use either site, so I chose four scenarios that I thought would be common tasks for a voter visiting each site. I rated each site on a scale of one (very frustrating) to five (easy and delightful) scale. (Because I was interested in the design of the site, I didn’t take any points off about the candidate’s positions or message.)

Current News task: What has the candidate said or done about the debates and dealing with the economy in the last 24 hours?

For this task, I looked for any details about what I’ve been hearing in the news. Will the candidate show up for the debates? What is the candidate proposing to solve the economic strife we’re dealing with?

BarackObama.com: 4
There’s an article on the home page that leads to the information. It has a ton of information on both issues in a 16 minute video, but it’s not transcribed, so you have to watch the entire thing.

JohnMcCain.com: 5
There’s an article on the home page that leads to his statements. The site provides a detailed transcript of his statement (which is a good thing, because the audio for the statement is not very coherent).

Specific Issue task: What is the candidate’s position on stem cell research?

For this task, I tried to locate what each candidate feels about stem cell research.

BarackObama.com: 2
The categories in the Issues menu make no mention of this issue. Not found in Ethics, Family, Technology. There is no search function on the site. The Issues page doesn’t mention it. External search found it under Women’s issues.

JohnMcCain.com: 3
The categories in the Issues menu make no mention of this issue. I found it in theHuman Dignity and The Sanctity of Life category. (Sometimes listed as “Values”.) The Search function returns a large number of links, 2 of the first three have no mention of stem cell research. You have to go the seventh result to get to the Human Dignity page (labeled “Values”), but the blurb talks about McCain’s POW experience.

General Issue Task: What differentiates the candidate from his opponent?

I tried to see if there’s any easy way to tell what makes this candidate different. Guess what? There isn’t.

BarackObama.com: 2
They have a 33-page report available for download. The report’s pages don’t print on standard printer without chopping of edge text. Elements of the report are dispersed around the web site, but there’s no summary of positions without bouncing through pages.

JohnMcCain.com: 3
I couldn’t find any summary of entire position. Multiple levels of detail (good!) spread across many pages (not good!) with no way to see the entire story.

Make Donation Task: How do I contribute to the campaign?

BarackObama.com: 4
Easy to find the donation page. URL is for the same site. Instructions at the bottom on how to mail in a check (instead of paying by mail). Error messages tell you where problems are. First time small donors still need to put in employer info (not clear). Very little small print. Page design is simple.

JohnMcCain.com: 3
Easy to find the donation page, but it opens in a different window and the URL is for site not associated with the campaign (will people be concerned about phishing?). No instructions for mailing in a donation. Error messages don’t say where entry issues are. It’s clear you always need to put in employer info. Tons of small print. Page design is more convoluted and feels like an eBay order form.

Winner: JohnMcCain.com

If you want to average the scores, BarackObama.com came in with a solid 3. JohnMcCain came in with a 3.5. Both sites have a ways to go to get perfect 5s, or even a solid 4.

The big problem, I think, is the sites don’t do great at letting the meat of what the candidate stands for come to the surface. If someone wants to do some solid research on what these guys are really about, it’s hard to get that from either site.

They may be running for President, but content is king!

For eight years, I’ve been excited and happy to come to the office every day, continually challenged by my work. While my job role has evolved significantly over the years, I’ve enjoyed every moment: conducting usability research, collaborating with the leaders in the world of design, consulting with clients, teaching courses, developing new product lines, and most recently, managing the day to day operations of the company.

I’m extremely grateful for the support I’ve received from everyone at UIE. I would like to thank all of my co-workers for making UIE such a fun and exciting place to work. I would especially like to thank Jared Spool for giving me the opportunity to learn from his brilliance for nearly a decade. Jared: you’ve been a wonderful mentor and friend.

I expect to collaborate with the great folks at UIE in the not-too-distant future. I have full confidence that User Interface Engineering will continue to be a leader in the field for years to come.

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

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

Now, I’ve asked Christine to work on a new project for UIE because it really needs her talents. I can’t say any more about it, except that it is going to be cool.

That means we need an amazing, top-quality event manager to continue the great work Christine started. This new person needs to be extremely organized, have great people skills, and like to travel, as we’re expanding our programs to Europe and Canada in 2008. (Asia and Australia are also in our sights.)

Oh, yeah, that favor: I’m hoping you know someone who would make a great addition to our staff. As you know, we shoot for hiring only top-caliber folks, which is why I thought of asking you. I’m betting there may be someone in your circle who would be great addition to the team.

We’ve written up a job ad. If you know someone who you think we should talk to, please let me know right away.

We’re looking for someone with expertise in:

+ PHP
+ MySQL
+ Database design and administration
+ Apache
+ .HTAccess
+ xHTML/CSS
+ DHTML
+ JavaScript

If you know a freelance developer specializing in PHP, located in the greater Boston Area, we’d love to talk with them. Have them pop me a note at jobs@uie.com and we’ll get the conversation started.

You can see more of Brian’s pictures on Flickr.

At my gym, you can tell it’s the New Year. The parking lot is full and the treadmills are going strong. Everyone is resolved to get into better shape, especially after all the “shape-enhancing” meals they enjoyed over the holidays. Traditionally, this only lasts until mid-February, when their loved one pronounces, “I love you just the way you are,” and the need for radical exercise and diet dissipates for all but the most dedicated to the cause.

Here at UIE, we’ve made some resolutions too. With the success of our UIE Virtual Seminar series (more than 6,000 people have participated in last year’s seminars), we plan to bring an even better program this year, with an improved experience.

In 2007, you’ll see more reports in our very popular Designer’s Guide to Web Applications series, along with a couple of new series we’re very excited about. I can’t tell you too much about them, but I know these will be essential additions to your group’s library.

We also have great plans to build up the publicly available content on our web site. Our Brain Sparks blog continues to grow, being a great place to discuss the latest thinking in experience design. The Articles library contains a wealth of knowledge not found anywhere else.

And, you’ll hear new audio recordings from our conferences and summits, and our newest podcast, The Josh and Jared Show, where Josh Porter and I discuss interesting UX happenings. You can listen to the audio recordings here.

If you’re looking for your own resolution, you’ll enjoy today’s UIEtips article, where I discuss the fine art of touring web sites for good design ideas. There’s a gold mine of inspiration out there, waiting for us to explore.

Hagan Rivers, our favorite expert on web app design, has done her own touring and produced a wonderful report, The Designer’s Guide to Web Applications, Part II: Web App Tour 2007. In this beautifully illustrated report, Hagan describes some very interesting aspects of Salesforce.com, Serenata Flowers, 37 Signal’s Backpack, and others. You can get more information on the report here.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

What sites have you toured? Did you find anything interesting? Were you able to overcome your design challenges by seeing how others tackled the same problems? We’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Leave a comment and join the discussion below.

[If you find this article interesting, I encourage you to join us in Monterey, California this January for our UIE Web App Summit. I will be presenting the Summit Keynote: Moving Towards Delight: Following the Rapid Evolution of Web-Based Applications. I will predict where web applications are going by looking at where they have been. You don't want to miss out. See the Summit website for more details.]

Who am I, and why am I here?

Excellent questions all. I’ll start by telling you that I’m a new UIE employee, joining the company one month ago. But from there, it gets cloudy.

Since I’m filling a new role here at UIE, they’ve asked me to suggest a title for myself. It seems that CEO is taken, and I’ve never been really great with math so CFO might not be such a good idea. That’s why I need your help.

Help me choose a title for my role at UIE.

What do I do here, anyhow? For the past few weeks I’ve done a little bit of everything, and that is my mandate. I’ve been editing podcasts, designing marketing materials for the UIE WebAppSummit, and spearheading the (85%) company-wide switch to Mac. Going forward I will be doing more of those things, maintaining IT, contributing to marketing, and working with the design and development of the website. I will be producing virtual seminars and as with everyone here at UIE, doing plenty of heavy lifting for our conferences and events.

Some ideas for a title include the pedestrian but descriptive “Content Developer,” or perhaps “Communication Designer?” “Chair of the Lunch Committee,” anyone?

Think about it and let me know in the comments. I look forward to hearing your suggestions, serious or fun…

Since this is an introduction post, you may also be interested in some third-person, biographical stuff…

Brian Christiansen has worked previously for Apple Computer, the University of Connecticut, and on his own as a freelance web developer. Brian is a graduate of the University of Connecticut with a BA in Visual Communications. He focused on digital media with courses in graphic design, communications science and journalism.

He currently makes his home in Medford, Mass with his lovely wife Amanda and their overly-cute miniature schnauzer puppy, Greta. When he’s not on his Mac at work or home, you might find him riding one of his bicycles. Or banging on something. Brian is a percussionist of 20 years and has performed for crowds of thousands. They weren’t specifically there to see him, but they were there…

To do this, we’re looking for a talented Graphic Designer, preferably very familiar with the subtleties of Adobe InDesign and experience with book or report design.

If you know of someone who can help, have them contact us. We’re thinking this is a contract position.

(We’re not accepting requests through the comments for this entry. If you are interesed, use the contact form.)

It was a lot of fun and we got into some interesting discussion. You can hear the podcast here.

Editorial Assistant

Help us with our publications. Email newsletters, blog entries, reports, client communications, and other publications we prepare. We’re just starting to use Adobe InDesign, so that’s a plus.

Training Coordinator

Help us organize the events we do through out the year. Work on all aspects of the events, from speaker coordination to registration, from venue collaboration to material preparation.

Both positions require good communication skills, solid work habits, and an outgoing personality. Health insurance available in addition to the hourly salary. We also provide lunch everyday. One benefit of UIE is all current and former UIE interns get to attend UIE events for free.

All the work is in North Andover, MA. No recruiters or telecommuters please.

Contact us using this form if you’re interested.

It’s been an amazing year for us. We had a very successful User Interface 10 Conference, a record-breaking UIE Roadshow, and our new Virtual Seminar series. The success of these events have helped fund our current research, including our work into the ideal team structure for user experience development, web site design, and new web 2.0/social network design techniques (including Josh’s work on Tags and Folksonomies).

In the next year, we plan to move forward on our research and share more findings with you. These will come in the form of our upcoming User Interface 11 conference, more UIE Virtual Seminars, and new stuff we’ll be announcing throughout the year.

We’re all very happy about the year that passed and very excited about the year to come. It’s going to be a ton of work, but great fun to make it happen.

And we’re glad you’re along for the ride.

The article, The MySpace Problem, takes a good look at the question of why so many designers perceive MySpace pages to be “ugly” and, yet, the site is so successful. This has created quite a stir in the design community, putting the value of design into question.

Check out the article, which has scored more than 1,000 on Digg.

Congrats, Josh!

Last year she rode 94 miles in 45F temperature, with a steady rain and high winds. This year, we’re hoping for much calmer weather.

You can spot her in the crowd at the starting line here:

Amidst the other 400 riders was MA Senator John Kerry:

Here’s Christine (biker on the left) riding out of the first checkpoint, with only 70 miles to go:

The ride’s charity, Best Buddies, is really quite remarkable. Founded by Anthony Kennedy Shriver, it helps people with intellectual disabilities enhance their lives with close friendships and integrated employment. At last years ride, I had the chance to meet several buddies and I found them to be charming and fun.

So far, Christine has raised more than $1,300 for Best Buddies and the ride. To support her, we’re matching donations. If you want, you can donate to support her ride. Even small donations are welcome — every dollar counts (and counts twice because of our matching donation).

I’m going to ride in Christine’s pit crew this year and I’ll be sure to update you on her progress. We’re all really excited about the ride and wish her the best of luck!

Everyone’s healthy, though Josh seemed exhausted on the phone. (Didn’t he have the least amount of work to do?)

We’re very happy for them. Congrats Josh & Alana!

Jared Spool and I will be your hosts. Jared and I are in Atlanta for the kick-off of our UIE Roadshow 2006. We want to take this opportunity to meet and chat with others in our field.

The happy hour takes place from 5:00-6:00 pm at Django Gypsy Kitchen & Saloon in downtown Atlanta. Django is located at 495 Peachtree Street, Atlanta, GA 30308. Please come, network, and meet your local colleagues. RSVP by emailing events@uie.com.

I fly into Portland on the 15th and leave on the 17th. I’d love some recommendations for what to do while there. Also, if anyone would be interested in meeting up for a drink, just pop a note. (You can use this form.)

Next month, I’ll be in Bedford, Massachusetts doing a one-day workshop with the product developers at Progress Software and Christine will be in Portland, Oregon to do a workshop with Standard Insurance.

For each of these, we’ll be reaching into our vast vault of design knowledge and pulling out content especially tailored for their needs.

We could do that for you to. All you have to do is ask.

We’d love to come to your place, meet with your folks, share what we know, talk about your toughest problems, and help get everyone on the same page.

Interested? Just pop a note. (You can use this form.)

We’re especially keen on any place warm and sunny right about now.

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.

1. 5-Second Tests: Measuring Your Site’s Content Pages
How can design teams be confident their content pages are understandable to users? How does a team ensure they’ve designed content pages that communicate the essential information effectively? A simple usability testing technique can help design teams quickly measure how a content page performs with users. We call it the 5-Second Test.

2. What Makes a Design Seem ‘Intuitive’?
An intuitive interface doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when one of two specific conditions are met. In this article, Jared describes the critical relationship between current knowledge (what the user knows when they encounter the design) and target knowledge (what the user needs to know to accomplish their goal), showing the two conditions that lead to an interface users will perceive as intuitive.

3. Testing Web Sites with Eye-Tracking
Thanks to some usability studies we conducted using an eye-tracking system, we now have real evidence of where users actually look when they view a web page.

4. The KJ-Technique: A Group Process for Establishing Priorities
UIE’s researchers have one favorite technique for helping designers collaborate better with each other: The KJ-Method. UIE routinely uses the KJ-Method to help teams find patterns in large amounts of unorganized data. It quickly helps groups establish design priorities and reach consensus.

5. Seven Common Usability Testing Mistakes
As we work with teams all over the globe, there are mistakes that we see frequently. These mistakes are very easy to prevent — if only the team members realized they were making them. Here are seven of the most common mistakes.

I’m looking forward at everything we have planned for 2006 and I can tell you I’m very excited.

The 2006 UIE Roadshow is shaping up to be quite popular. (We’ve already exceeded our initial goals and are investigating expanding the program a bit.)

We’ve been working on the program for The User Interface 11 Conference (October 9-12, 2006 in Cambridge MA) and I think we’re going to out-do ourselves. (And UI10 really rocked!)

We’ve got a couple of other programs in the works that we’re excited about. Can’t say much about it, except you are going to wish you had more in your conference budget for this year.

Also, we’ve been busy working on some new reports. I just saw a draft of Christine’s upcoming publication and I think it’s fantastic. (More details in a few weeks.) You’ll see some great titles in the next few months, all at an affordable price. We expect to add new reports to our library throughout the year.

Our first two audio recordings were a tremendous hit, so you can expect a lot more of those. And our Brain Sparks Live programs proved very popular, so we’ll be looking at expanding that program for 2006.

Plus, we’ll be speaking at CHI 2006 in Montreal, the IA Summit in Vancouver, WebVisions 2006 in Portland, Web Design World in San Francisco, and a variety of regional events.

For the last few months, our phones have been ringing off the hook with people inviting us to speak to their organization. We love doing these visits because they allow us to really get to spend time really delving into the hard problems our clients are facing. (Would you like us to come visit your group? Give us a yell!)

Along with all this, we’ll be looking at blasting through our research agenda: creating a new understanding of design in today’s business context. Which will give us even more to talk about with everyone.

Wow! When I list everything going on, it’s quite exhausting! 2006 is going to be so busy that we might just have to take 2007 off!

That’s the advice my mother gave one of her Thanksgiving dinner guests who had just complained about some frustration he was having with his home computer.

“Oh really? So, what is it your company actually does with computers?” he asked, as he turned to me probably hoping that I could magically restore whatever data loss he’d suffered.

So started my annual ritual of trying to explain to my mother’s friends what UIE does. Short answer: we don’t fix broken computers. Well, sort of.

Here’s the long answer, which doesn’t really play well at my mother’s dinner events, but did play very well with the Procter & Gamble executive I was talked to yesterday, who basically asked the same question (however for different reasons):

User Interface Engineering is a think tank exploring user experience, design, and the usability of technology. Our long-term mission is to improve the quality of people’s lives by eliminating all the frustration that comes from the introduction of technology. We figure that’s likely to take a hundred years or so.

Our thinking is, a hundred years from now, UIE won’t be producing all of the technology. Instead, we want to be a major source of the information technology designers and developers use when creating and developing their ideas.

Right now, our thinking is focused on three areas:

• Design: What designs works best for users? What were designers trying to achieve with their choices? How did those choices actually work out for them? What can we learn from what they’ve done?
• Research Practices: What techniques and practices are most effective for analyzing what to design, how the design works, and pinpointing what to change?
• Organizational Structures: What kind of organizations produce the best designs? If you’re going to start a new group, what kind of skills should you staff for? Should your user experience efforts be centralized or distributed? What can be outsourced or off-shored?

To answer these questions, we conduct a lot of research, mostly using observational techniques, to determine how people interact with technology today and what changes in design, research practices, and organizational structures are likely to make improvements. This research has produced some interesting work:

• Our work on the Scent of Information helps designers better understand how to structure large sites and design the pages within them.
• Our development of the Goldilocks Content Framework potentially guides designers on how to plan the necessary content on their site.
• New research variants, such as 5-Second Tests, Category Agreement Analysis, and Inherent-Value Testing help teams zero in on specific design issues.
• Our work investigating “common wisdom” such as the 3-clicks rule and the role of download time has proved that designers shouldn’t believe everything they hear.
• The research we’ve conducted on return on investment, what teams need to know about users, and effective ways to disseminate design information help teams know how to manage their limited resources.

Initially, we funded our research through consulting projects. As we’ve accumulated knowledge, we started sharing it to others through our events and publications. Over time, these have also become effective fund raising tools for further research.

We’re doing less and less consulting as the years go on. We now do more “advisory” work, where we guide teams using the knowledge we’ve acquired. This leverages our assets better while being more cost effective. It’s a good complement to our events and publications, as it gives teams direct access to the fruits of our work.

The cycle is now: conduct research -> share what we’ve learned -> fund more research. Buying our reports, attending our events, and calling on us for advice is the best way to help us conduct more research.

However, we’re still not the right people to call if your hard drive craps out. My mom’s friend needs to find someone else.

We’ll be back next week.

Happy Thanksgiving from everyone at UIE.

Design for the Scent of Information

Jared Spool is CEO and co-founder of User Interface Engineering (UIE), a think tank. They advise clients how to design their browser-based systems for the best information retrieval experience possible. This includes web sites, but also knowledge management systems –nowadays better known as enterprise content management systems.

People are coming from all different industries: health care, universities, financial services, government, military, design consulting, publishing, non-profits, communications, energy services, and retail. Hundreds of organizations such as Travelocity, New York Life Insurance, eBay, The Vangaurd Group, MIT, AARP, EPA, City of Tucson, Intuit, Icelandair, Fidelity Investments, Microsoft, and University of Northern Iowa, have regularly been represented amongst our attendees over the years. The breadth and diversity of our attendees is what makes the conference so interesting.

We’ve been preparing for this event for more than a year. Eighteen months ago, we started talking to potential speakers. We started with more than 30 candidates and whittled it down to the 14 best. We’ve been working with them all year to ensure they produce the most detailed, best presented sessions available anywhere.

The details for producing a conference like this are impressive. Yesterday, I placed an order for 3,712 books for the proceedings. Christine, who handles most of the logistical details, has been preparing for the 7,012 individual food servings we’ll ask the kitchen to prepare throughout the week. For our 10-year-anniversary gift, we gave away hundreds of Apple iPods. The bookseller is bringing tons of copies of the newest titles in design and UIs to sell.

The last two weeks before the conference are the most intense and exciting, as all the disparate pieces start to come together. Believe it or not, once people start walking into the welcome reception, things become a lot easier — the ball is rolling and because of our team’s excellent planning, everything really just comes together.

(Not to say there isn’t a hitch every year. This will be our fifteenth conference in the ten years since we started the event. I’m sure something will not go as planned. As I say every year, we’re gonna just keep doing this until we get it right.)

The conference is really exciting and something I look forward to every year. I’ve enjoyed meeting the more than 3,000 people who have attended in the past 10 years. I’m looking forward to meeting another 400 this year. It’ll be great fun. I’m excited.

(I’d love the chance to meet you. If you’re coming, please make a point of stopping me and saying hi. If you’re not coming, well, there’s still a little room. You’ll want to register right away! I’d love to see you there.)

Would you like to join us? I’m still currently looking for volunteers who are available to assist us throughout the full five days of the conference. You will be asked to arrive at the conference in the afternoon on Sunday, October 9th to help us set up for conference check-in and the Welcome Reception.

Throughout the main four days of the conference, volunteers will be assigned to full-day seminars and short talks to assist conference speakers with their needs. In addition, you will have at least one free day to attend conference sessions (probably more) for free. We’ll make every effort to accommodate your preference for which sessions you’d like to attend.

You will be responsible for paying for all travel and hotel accommodations. But we’ll provide breakfast and lunch Monday through Thursday of the conference.

If you’re interested in volunteering, or if you have any questions, please send your replies directly to uiconf@uie.com. I’ll give priority to full-time students and those of you available to help out for the full conference, from Sunday, October 9th through Thursday, October 13th.

As this post is appearing, I’m speaking at the Nexus Energy Software Marketing Users Group meeting. Tomorrow I’m speaking at CSAIL HCI seminar at MIT.

Next week, I’ll be in Philadelphia, speaking at The Vanguard Group and the week after I’m speaking at SAP’s Boston TECHED Conference.

As you can see, we get around.

Christine, Josh, and I would be more than happy to come speak to your organization. Just contact us and we’ll set up a time to talk about how we make it happen.

The good news is that we’ve secured more rooms at the Residence Inn Boston Cambridge Center, which is in the next building over. The discounted rate is $219 per night. You need to use the promotion code UIF to get the discount.

If you’re planning on traveling with someone, you might consider calling them and seeing if one of their 2 bedroom suites are open. These are usually reasonably priced and they are basically two separate bedrooms (each with their own bathroom) and a common living room and kitchen. It’s basically a small apartment. I stayed in one a few years back and it was extremely comfortable.

The other cool thing about the Residence Inn is that they have a hospitality hour every weeknight, with hot and cold buffet and a complimentary breakfast buffet in the morning, all included in the room rate. Plus, they have free high speed internet in the guest rooms. (The conference hotel charges $9.95 per night.)

(I get way too excited about hotels. I spend too much time in them, I guess.)

We only have limited space and I’m betting it’s going to go fast, so I suggest you book your room right away, if you haven’t already.

We’ve spent this week going over logistics and I can tell you the program just floors me. I can’t believe all these great people are assembling in one place to share their knowledge. It’s going to be a lot of fun and, by the time the attendees get to Christine, Josh, and my presentations on Thursday, well, their brains are just going to be full.

If you are still thinking of coming, the pricing goes up at the end of next Tuesday. You can save hundreds if register before then.

If you are among the hundreds who have already registered and you haven’t chosen your sessions yet (you know who you are!), you’ll want to do so very soon. Several sessions are close to filling up and we’ll be turning people away soon. (The conference hotel is already full, though we are in the process of securing space at some nearby places.)

Hope to see you there.

Details: User Interface 10 Conference

Let’s take a closer look. Consider the following text:

Web 2.0 Design: Bootstrapping the Social Web
By Richard MacManus & Joshua Porter

Humans can instantly recognize this as a title and authors of a work, in this case a column here at Digital Web Magazine. We know this because of past experience. We’ve seen similar things before. It is apparent that the first line is a title and the second line is two authors. Given this information, humans are able to act on it in a meaningful way. For instance, you could answer someone if they asked you “Who wrote that?”

Machines, with their rigid information processing capabilities, need everything spelled out for them. To be able to do something useful with this title and byline, a machine would need to be able to parse it correctly. It would need to know that the number (2.0) in the first line is part of the title and shouldn’t be interpreted as a numeric value, that the spaces around it separate words from each other, and that the second line is made up of two names and not one. In other words, a machine would need to be able to do algorithmically what we humans do almost without thinking.

This would work amazingly well, and is very possible even today, except that the syntax of titles and bylines changes from person to person and from usage to usage. What if I changed my first name to just be the initial “J”? Or misspelled it? Humans would still understand the endless permutations. Machines, though, unless programmed for every single possible permutation, cannot reliably make the same decisions that we can. The human ability to adapt and interpret is special.

“I would say going forward that AJAX is going to have a ton of focus and support behind it,” says Joshua Porter, research consultant and director of Web development for research firm User Interface Engineering. “Because it is built on open standards, it is going to be the next plateau that we reach on the Web, like with HTML.”

‘On www.uie.com, there is a box about the UIE blog. Please correct the grammar to say, “It’s different from..” rather than the incorrect, “It’s different than..”

Yes, it does make a difference. The educated among us place less value on your recommendations if even the most basic rules of grammar are not followed.’

Here’s the image in question:

I’ll be the first to admit that my grammar isn’t perfect. My curiosity, however, wouldn’t let me simply take this person’s word for it and accept that my usage was incorrect. So I did a bit of digging…

My extensive research turned up a comparison of “different from” vs. “different than” on alt.usage.english.org. Apparently, “different than” is used much more in speech than it is in writing and is much more popular in the U.S. than it is in the U.K. Who knew?

After reading this comparison, I feel justified in how I used it in this situation because I stayed within common usage. However, there seems to be two opinions on common usage. One is to let common usage fly, as I did, accepting any and all usage as OK. The other is to hold to strict, agreed-upon conventions, based on past usage but not necessarily current usage.

The Information Architects out there might recognize this as a debate central to the recent advent of folksonomies, a user-driven approach to organizing content. In general, the debate was between the “categorization from usage over time” camp vs. the “categorization by professionals” camp. The debate has since become more nuanced, because there were many more subtleties to it than were first apparent. Not surprisingly, it seems like folksonomies will be useful in some areas, while traditional categorization will be useful in others. (and probably combinations of the two in still others)

Despite my extensive research into the usage of “different than” and my reluctance to give in on account of what is “proper”, the kind reader’s input is still most certainly valuable. Not only did they pay alarmingly close attention to the words used, but they took the time to write in about it. That fact, more than anything else, has persuaded me to update the graphic.

It’s an important lesson, retaught, and it is different from the lesson on grammar. The lesson? Every word matters.

Josh & I heard today DUX 2005 has accepted our paper: The Goldilocks Content Framework: Identifying Just-Right Information

Here’s the abstract from the paper:

Content is an essential part of any successful web site. However, little work has been done to help designers understand how much content they need or what that content should say.

Using a novel approach of analysing the conversations between users on discussion lists, the authors have determined there are essentially 14 types of content that form a framework of what users need.

This initial look at the research results gives insights into the Goldilocks Content Framework and potentially gives designers a tool for planning, budgeting, and assessing the quality of content on their web site.

Coincidentally, we based this work off of the same research that we’re reporting in tomorrow night’s Brain Sparks Live! session.

I’m going to be presenting some of our research on the content that users ask for, based on our analysis of thousands of message board postings. I’ll be talking about the exciting patterns that emerged as we studied each message, allowing us to create an interesting framework for any site that is publishing content.

If your going to be in the Boston area, you’ll want to sign up here. I hope to see you there.

Go figure…

(Maybe that’s why they haven’t accepted any of my submissions for the conference in years.)

Right now, my day is fair open, so if you’d like me to come by and visit, please pop me a message. (If there’s enough demand, I can extend my stay.)

(By the way, the reason I’m coming to town is that on 8/24, I’ll be at the Adaptive Path User Experience Week.)

For all of you who have just added our RSS feed to your newsreader or have decided to check out our new blog, I want to say, “Welcome!”

For those of you using RSS feeds, you can get a feed that contains the blog entries and our articles. (If you were previously signed up for our articles feed, don’t fret. You’re automatically set up to receive the blog entries also.)

Things are still a little rough around the edges, so we’ll hope you’ll be gentle. However, feel free to let us know what we can do better. You know us: we’re always about the improvements.

I hope you’ll post your thoughts and questions in our comments and keep us up-to-date on what you’re doing. We love to hear from you.

Jared

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.

What a long, strange trip it’s been…