Mobile is greatly influencing the user experience community. It’s challenging traditional approaches to design, but also bringing with it a host of new opportunities. Being a user experience practitioner in this changing environment is a bit scary. Yet coupling existing skill sets with the constraints of designing in the mobile space makes for an exciting world full of possibility.

The transition from designing for the desktop to designing for mobile can be a daunting one. Rachel Hinman of Nokia had her own experience with this challenge back in 2005 when the mobile world truly was a scary place to live in. Back then, the mobile web was little more than an afterthought. The experience of using the web on a mobile device was painful. With advancing technology and the advent of the iPhone and Android devices, mobile is becoming easier for users. Rachel considers that personal feeling and concreteness to be one of the exciting things about working in the mobile space.

The very nature of mobile offers opportunities that the desktop doesn’t, but also brings with it problems you don’t encounter on the desktop. Rachel thinks that it takes some “unlearning” to position yourself in the mobile context. Embracing the constraints of mobile and taking full advantage of capabilities such as voice and built in cameras are key. This allows you to leave the desktop mindset and design for the context.

Rachel will be presenting a full-day workshop at UX Immersion 2012 in Portland, OR April 23-25. Find out more details about the UX Immersion conference.

As always we want to know what you’re thinking. Share your thoughts in our comments section.

Recorded: January, 2012
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Full Transcript.

Jared Spool: Welcome everyone to another episode of the SpoolCast. I’m Jared Spool and I am your host for today.

We have with us Rachel Hinman, who is going to be speaking at our upcoming UX Immersion Conference, which is going to be April 23-25 in Portland, Oregon.

And Rachel is going to be doing a fabulous workshop that will help everyone, who is just getting into mobile design understand exactly what they need to do and how they need to approach the problem of designing great experiences for mobile devices. Rachel comes to us from Nokia and we have her here today.

Hi, Rachel!

Rachel Hinman: Hello!

Jared: Hello! You’ve been working in mobile now for a really long time, right? You were one of the first to really start designing in this space that I knew about.

Rachel: Yeah, I started my career in mobile in 2005. I had just gotten a job at Yahoo and, at the time, Yahoo was really interested in figuring out how to get Internet content on mobile devices. This was way before the iPhone was around or Android phones or Windows Mobile phones, so getting Internet content on a mobile device was a pretty difficult experience, difficult user experience. I was hired to help them figure that out and help them make that a better experience for their users.

Jared: And so back then, it must have been hugely challenging to do this. The browsers weren’t on every phone and the phones that had them, the browsers were really crippled in what they could and couldn’t do, right?

Rachel: There were a lot of sort of pain points for users at that time. There was definitely issues around the browsers and there was also this really big chasm between smartphone users and sort of basic phone users. And there was also sort of, people knew the Internet access was potentially a feature for their phone, but they weren’t even sure if their phone was capable of doing that because that language really wasn’t in people’s sort of mindset at that point.

I think another big problem that we saw, was that data plans was something that was a huge issue for people back then, as well. So even people who did understand and “get it” that they could get Internet content on their phone and were interested in it, then they would get these horrible bills because there really wasn’t a lot of clarity around how much it would cost and what the pricing was, what was driving the pricing. There were a lot of really significant user experience hurdles for folks in those days. My, how times have changed!

Jared: Yeah! Yeah, I remember back then having this little LG flip phone. We had a Verizon business account and they gave us six months free of a data plan, just so we’d get hooked on it.

I remember trying to use it and it felt so impossible because it wasn’t a smartphone. I had to do everything through typing in the letters with the number pad, so if I wanted a “C” I hit the “1″ key three times. Just typing in a website was like this major, major effort.

Rachel: Yeah, I have this great video clip that I remember from one of the research studies that we did where we asked the participant to… She had mentioned how one of the things she had done is that she would look up movies at blockbuster.com to see if a new title was available at the rental store and I asked her, “Could you demonstrate to me how you did it?” It was seriously like a four minute video clip of her typing in on T9, www.blockbuster.com and then, waiting for the page to fully render in the browser. It was a great clip because it really communicated just how something so simple that we take for granted on a PC, is so very challenging in the mobile world.

Jared: So it must’ve been, you know, here you are, hired into Yahoo and you’re tasked with making a great experience in those conditions. That must have been really scary because nobody knew how to do that back then, right?

Rachel: Yeah, I was really terrified, I would say, for the first three to five months of my time there. Because my experience before Yahoo had really been in the web — when I say web, at that time it was more the PC web — and I felt really comfortable in that space. I felt comfortable designing websites that were really for the PC context.

I had gone to graduate school at the Institute of Design and learned about user research and all that stuff, but I really didn’t have a lot of specific knowledge around mobile. In fact, a lot of people at that point didn’t. I think that I had done a project or two in my graduate program that involved mobile devices and I think that is why I got the job. But the first three to give months of that job, I was just really terrified by the fact that I didn’t really know a whole lot about mobile. I really didn’t know how to — I guess I would say — engage with it, if that makes sense.

Jared: Yeah, I mean at that point, it was really a different thing. So it took you a good long time, at that time, to sort of get comfortable. What were some of the things that stand out that were like “Aha!” moments for you back then?

Rachel: Well I think even knowing how to design for a small screen like, what are the design constraints? What are the typical design constraints? What’s the screen size? You know, I think with a website, you have a sense of how browsers work, and how page loads work, and sort of how to create a web page that, you know, it was of the medium of HTML and it would work. You know, it wouldn’t really choke the browser or be really difficult for a user to download or be really difficult to construct and build.

I think I didn’t really know a lot about that stuff and I got really caught up in sort of the technical parts of it. I think that that was probably for me, one of the things that really terrified me the most. Yeah, I would say that was the thing that probably terrified me the most. [laughs]

Jared: As you started to work in it, how did you start to get so you weren’t as scared of it and terrified any more? What sort of happened to get you there?

Rachel: I think, for me, one of the things that really kind of kicked me into it and really got me excited about it was doing user research because I was seeing firsthand how people were experiencing the stuff that was currently being built for mobile. I saw how poor it was. I just realized — here I am — I’m almost paralyzed in terms of my design skills, or being able to sketch out ideas and start to be able to put them together and build them.

And I’m seeing what other people have done and how really horrible it is for other people and I’m like, “I can’t do any worse.”

That was what caused me to just realize that I have these skills. I can empathize with users. I can draw and sketch. The technical skills that I don’t have, there are plenty of people within my group that I can look to, to help me with that. I realized after going out into the world and talking to people and seeing some of the broken experiences that they were having, that it was [inaudible] of me not to just jump in.

I found that to be just really something that made me just get beyond my fear.

Jared: It’s interesting that you said that the things that got you beyond your fear are basically, proven time-tested usability and user research techniques — just you know, sitting and actually watching people, seeing how bad the status quo experience was, realizing that you could sketch out your ideas and put them in front of folks and see if you could incrementally improve that experience over what was out there. I mean, that’s not new. That’s not new to mobile. There’s nothing mobile-specific about those things, right?

Rachel: Right, exactly. I felt like it was also interesting because going out into the world and talking to people, observing them and observing how they were using their mobile devices was something that was surprising that more people in the organization hadn’t already done that. There were some really significant issues that they were trying to solve and they were struggling with, and were trying to find good solutions to, but going out and actually watching people, and sort of understanding how they understood their mobile devices, was not something a lot of people felt comfortable doing.

I think from a user experience perspective, that ability to empathize with the user and observe that and sort of be able to come up with design solutions based on those observations and those insights, is something that like you said, it’s a tried and true, proven skill that sort of applies to a lot of things.

Jared: Let’s fast forward to today. Now, you’re working at Nokia. You’re sort of neck-deep in mobile experiences all the time, right?

Rachel: Yes.

Jared: We have the iPhone has come along and the iPhone 2, and the iPhone 3GS, and now the iPhone 4. We’ve got Android phones, and last I heard, Nokia has some awesome new phones running Windows Mobile 7. And so there’s all sorts of new experiences today. Does all this stuff make it harder or easier, than what you were dealing with way back in 2005, you think, for people who are just getting started?

Rachel: Well, I think it’s a kind of a combination of both. I think it’s easier because I think, you know, mobile’s not this sort of side thing, side interesting thing, it’s really something that’s I think become front and center, both in the user experience world, as well as the business world, technology world and it’s something that people are a lot more aware of.

That’s definitely a big change. I think that awareness and excitement around it — you’re not the mobile team of maybe three or four people kind of cobbling something together that not very many people use — there’s a lot more people now doing pretty sophisticated things with their mobile devices.

There’s a visibility now, and I think, a user group now, just in the general public that’s a lot greater than it was seven years ago.

But I think in some ways there’s kind of a… I don’t want to say that there’s a dark side to that. But I think one of the things that makes that challenging is, there’s a lot of noise. I mean I think that an image that comes to mind is — I use it in my book — was this image of the Oklahoma Land Rush. You know it’s like all of those horses running! There’s a sort of fervor around it. I think that energy can be not always the most productive for people.

I mean, some people work really well in that kind of a space, around that kind of energy, but not everyone does. I think in that some ways that can kind of get folks into trouble.

Jared: Say a little bit more about this “land rush” thing that’s happening.

Rachel: Well, I think people just feel like mobile is really hot right now and it’s just kind of like the Land Rush. They want to figure out their place in it. They want to get their piece of that opportunity. I think people are just sort of rushing in and trying to figure that out.

And I think, you know like I said, the positive side of that is that sort of optimism and sense that anything is possible is there. I guess I try to embrace that positive part of it. Like, “Anything’s possible! Infinity and beyond! Hooray!” It’s a nice thing to be around.

Jared: It is! What’s really fun for me is, I see clients who get really excited about the possibilities of mobile and start to say, “Oh, and we can give them status updates on where things are. We can let them check the progress of their deliveries. We can skip things in the user experience. They don’t have to check in with us anymore. They can now just do it on their phone and go straight to the gate or just take off.” Those things become simpler to imagine because they have so many experiences to compare to.

Whereas back in 2005, I think it was hard to imagine all the things you could do with your phone. It was much more “sci-fi-ish” back then.

Rachel: Yeah, I think that’s one of the things that has been really exciting about the last I would say two to three years of being involved in mobile. Is, I think, like you were saying, with the release of things like the iPhone and the Android phones and touchscreen devices, as well as tablets, I mean I feel like there were a lot of conferences and academics and people in research labs, who were talking about ubiquitous computing, but it’s almost like these devices and tablets have really become an almost gateway drug to what’s possible. Right?

It’s not something that’s this sort of wonky, abstract thing that people can’t relate to any more. The ability to access information from anywhere, from almost any context, it’s really sort of allowing people to experience that firsthand and make that type of experience concrete and more tangible.

And so it’s exciting because it’s no longer this kind of weird, abstract thing that most people can’t relate to, it’s something that is a lot more near and dear to them. They can experience it. They can get glimpses of that future.

Jared: Yeah, I mean if you’d asked me in 2005, what would be some of the neater apps, I wouldn’t have said,”Well, I’ll just point my camera at my W-2 form and Intuit’s tax product will read the form and fill out my income tax 1040 based on what’s right there.” But that’s done now. Then once you realize, “Oh, if we can do it that,” then Walgreen’s realizes that, “OK, well, I could just point the camera at a prescription bottle and make it a refill request.” All of a sudden, all this stuff just happens. It’s like, “Oh, that’s easy.”

So it’s almost like the palette of colors we have to paint with has just gotten hugely bigger.

Rachel: Yeah. That’s a great way to put it. It really is this sort of green field. I think that it’s almost like this golden age now, where these sort of wonky things that we thought would be so impossible, it’s like, “Wow, it’s really not.” It’s not impossible anymore.

Jared: So, given that, and all these cool things are there, there are still some challenges that people today deal with on a regular basis. What are some of the challenges that you’re seeing when you talk to folks who are trying to design for mobile today?

Rachel: Well it’s interesting, because I think a lot of times when I talk to people, a lot of the fears that people have are the same fears that I had when I first started, which was, I got really caught up in the fact that I didn’t have any experience in mobile. I got really caught up in the sort of technical aspects of it that I didn’t completely understand.

I know that those are valid fears. I’ve experienced them myself, but I also have experienced firsthand I can move up and out of that. Because most people, if they’re involved in user experience and have some sort of user-experience projects under their belt, they have developed some skills that will serve them very well in designing mobile stuff, mobile applications, mobile websites and whatnot.

It’s really around sort of recognizing that and having confidence in the skills that you have, and the contribution that that can make to whatever mobile projects you’re working on and for your team. I think that confidence issue is definitely one challenge that I see a lot of people having.

And the technical stuff, I think that that’s becomes a weird thing too, because when people ask, “Oh, should I make a native application, or a web-based application? Should I make a mobile website? Should I make an Android application? Should I make an iPhone application?”

To me, those are important questions to ask, but I think it’s really more of a timing question. I see people asking that question right away, like at the very beginning of their design process. I just feel like that’s not really the right time to be asking that question.

The right time to be asking that question is further along, after you’ve allowed yourself to explore and see what might be possible, and just let yourself explore what could be possible, explore what mobile experiences might make sense for your users, and then make your decisions, your sort of execution decisions, based on those ideas.

Jared: All this technical stuff, it sounds to me like, while it’s really important, what I hear you saying is that a lot of the issues that come up when you’re designing, there’s a way to do it most of the time, and if not, you’ll find it out pretty quick. So don’t worry about it too much. Chances are you have a group of people around you who are going to be able to guide you through the, “Oh, that’s easy” or “Wow, that’s going to be really hard.”

But the things that make a really good experience typically are not things that are technically difficult to do. Is that true?

Rachel: One of the things that I think is really important to remember with mobile is that even a beautifully executed bad idea is still a bad idea. Right? Execution is important, but it’s really around what your idea is.

I think one of the things that’s super exciting about mobile is the fact there’s still so much about it that we don’t know, and we don’t understand. And that’s why I really encourage people to allow themselves to explore that preliminary blue sky idea space, and give themselves a generous amount of time to do that, because there’s really a lot of room in mobile user experience to innovate.

I think it’s important for everyone to allow themselves to just take that time to come up with a bunch of crazy ideas, and really save the execution decision making part of the project for a little bit later in the process. Because who knows who’s going to come up with the next new interesting idea, right?

Jared: Yeah. Some of the coolest stuff in mobile has been really out of folks that you wouldn’t think of as a particularly innovative organization or group. I mean, take the prescription bottle thing from Walgreen’s. I think before that, if you had asked me, “Who are the top technology innovators in the world?” Walgreen’s wouldn’t have come to mind.

Same with the folks over at Bank of America. I think it was Bank of America. Who was it who made it so you can take a picture of your check and deposit it without having to be at an ATM?

Rachel: I think it was B of A, but I think actually, I want to say it may have been something government oriented, because I thought that the first people who were doing that, it was designed for folks in the military.

Jared: Oh, yeah. I think I might have heard that, too. But even so, neither of those organizations you would put at the top end of technology innovation. It’s not like they had some special incubator, or some think tank that was coming up with this stuff. It was just a bunch of guys that, “Hey! What if we took a picture of it? What could we do with that picture?”

So it’s sort of that playfulness that I think really makes mobile stuff really, really interesting.

I’m curious. You spend a lot of time helping people, and you’re writing this book for Rosenfeld Media called “The Mobile Frontier.” What are some of the traps that you see folks running into when they start, that it’s like, “Oh! Dude! You should be reading my book! You should come to my workshop, because you would so not have done that.”

Rachel: I almost think of it more as unlearning. But I think one of the things I see a lot happening with people is that it’s very difficult to recognize and be conscious of the fact that a lot of how we think about computing experiences and technology today is really based on the PC experience and the context of the PC.

So a lot of ideas, and even solutions that people come up with are very much sort of entrenched and tied to that legacy.

And I think it takes some unlearning to recognize that mobile is just a very different context to design for. There’s limitations to that that can be somewhat frustrating for designers, but there’s also a lot to it that’s kind of, like you were saying, taking a photograph of something and using that as a way to trigger an interaction. That’s something that you really don’t see a lot of with the PC.

Voice is another one, another input that has been explored somewhat on the PC, but mobile’s really taking that baton and running with it. I think also just playing around with information, information access in a different context. What does that mean? How do you depict information? How do you convey it in a way that is glanceable, is not annoying, is valuable to a user in a variety of different contexts?

Those are things that become interesting design questions for mobile, that I just don’t think the PC has ever really explored. I think that it’s that unlearning of the PC, and really allowing yourself to kind of cast off that anchor and explore a different way of doing things that really becomes a challenge for people.

Jared: This getting away from the PC. Are there tricks that you’ve been teaching people, to sort of divorce themselves of that thinking?

Rachel: One of the exercises that I tried kind of early on in my career and I was just so surprised at how excited people got as a result of that exercise, was… You know, a lot of times at the beginning of any project, you’ll have a brainstorming exercise. I think there’s a typical scenario for that brainstorming exercise, and that is, your team sits together in a conference room, maybe have a bunch of hash sheets, and you come up and you start brainstorming ideas. That’s the sort of scenario.

I was working on a project, and we were thinking, “Hey, instead of sitting around this conference room, let’s actually get out into the world and start coming up with ideas that way.” And it was actually sort of, we could have termed in “brainstorming in the wild,” but people going out into a variety of different mobile contexts, and using that as sort of fodder and inspiration for their ideas.

And I think what the result of that is is that your ideas can actually have a kind of empathy and sensitivity to some of the contextual issues that you encounter when you’re designing for mobile.

Even some of those challenges just become this sort of inspirational fodder for a kind of clever and interesting way to solve a problem that someone might have, or just think about access to information in a completely different way.

So I think that it’s that idea of getting out of the static context, is one really great way to kind of shake yourself out of, “Wow, I’m not designing for this sort of, I’m sitting at a computer with a keyboard.” Put yourself in a typical user’s environment and try to come up with some ideas.

Jared: Are there other traps that people run into too?

Rachel: I’d say that I’ve really found that prototyping is… I think for any user experience activity has been evangelized as really important to prototype, but I think in mobile, it’s like, three or four times more important to really give yourself the time and the space to prototype your ideas. I think for the PC, it’s really considered a luxury, but I think for mobile, it’s just, it’s essential to really just bust out and really get your ideas on paper, and find a way to really test out your ideas early and often.

Jared: What is it about mobile that sort of forces your hand on the prototyping thing?

Rachel: I always think of the design process you think about it in sort of four phases, like discover. You’re sort of in that big idea space and come up with lots of ideas. Then there’s that define, which is the second phase. It’s where you say, “OK, this is what we’re going to make, this idea.” Then you develop that idea, and you fine tune the design. Then you deliver. That’s sort of the fourth phase. So it’s discover, define, develop, and deliver are the four phases of design process.

I find that the place where things really fall off the rails for a lot of folk when they’re new to mobile is it’s really in that develop phase, where you’ve actually taken a couple of design ideas, or one design idea, and you start to develop it. It’s really because people lack the skills to make really good, educated decisions, because they’re new to the design space.

Something that maybe sounded really good in their head, or maybe like there was an interesting drawing, or a few rough prototypes of it, once you really start to develop it, you start to see some of the flaws. Then it just becomes like a pain parade till the end of the process, because you just really didn’t have a great idea that you could develop and deliver on.

If you start to prototype those ideas at the very first stages of that design process, in the discover and define phase of a design process, I just really prototype the heck out of all of your ideas. I find that it helps you make those decisions better. You’re not just relying on an idea in your head, or a really rough idea that you maybe lightly sketched out, or made a really rough prototype of. It’s like, if you vigorously kind of pursue that idea, and embodying that idea in a prototype, it helps you make better design decisions.

Jared: Well this has been really interesting. I’m really excited to see your workshop at the UX Immersion Conference, and the book, “The Mobile Frontier,” is coming out, and I know you’re going to be doing one of our Next Step Virtual Seminars with us, that we do in conjunction with Rosenfeld Media, that sort of celebrates the book and talk. We’re going to be talking to you a lot.

Rachel: Will be exciting, yeah. It’s going to be a fun spring, that’s for sure. 2012 is going to be a good year.

Jared: It is, it is. And it’s just in time, because I think this mobile thing is finally about to take off.

[laughter]

Rachel: I’d say.

[laughter]

Jared: Yeah. I predict all sorts of people will be using their phones. [laughs]

Rachel: Yeah. I mean, I don’t know, I’ve talked to a lot of people lately, and I’m super excited for the future and what’s happening, because I think there’s just so much possibility, and so much space for innovation and invention. It’s like I said, I’ve been in this industry for seven years, and I’m still excited by the possibilities of it.

I just see a lot of designers who are intrigued by mobile, but I can also sense that sort of hesitation and fear that they have. I hope that people just are able to move beyond that sort of hesitation and fear, and just jump in, because it’s a fun place to be. It’s where the action is.

Jared: Well, at the UX Immersion Conference in Portland in April, you’re going to be helping people get over their fear, with your full day workshop. I think people are going to really love it.

Rachel: Yeah, I do, too. I promise there will be no trust falls.

Jared: No trust falls. OK. Excellent. Well, Rachel, thanks for spending the time with us.

Rachel: My pleasure. Thank you.

Jared: And if you want to see Rachel, you’ll want to come to Portland, to the UX Immersion Conference. Again, that will be April 23-25. You’ll also want to be checking out her book that’s going to be coming out from Rosenfeld Media later this year, called, “The Mobile Frontier.”

That would be an awesome way to get a great introduction into how to design for mobile. I want to thank everybody for listening, and as always, thank you for encouraging our behavior. We’ll see you next time.

In her seminar on February 28, 10 Tips for Designing Effective Surveys, Caroline Jarrett will talk about how to rescue already-in-progress surveys and strengthen their performance, as well as how to approach new surveys from scratch. The next time you need your surveys to obtain useful user data, you’ll have some practical ideas on how to get the best from them.

You’ll learn to:

• Entice site visitors to participate in surveys
• Get users to engage with your questions
• Help your users answer questions accurately
• Deliver survey feedback to stakeholders

If you’ve ever heard, “Let’s do a survey,” then register now so you can learn to obtain insights through a pragmatic method that facilitates clearer decision-making.

We’re creating the Next Step Series in cooperation with Rosenfeld Media.

Join us on February 23 for Designing Dashboards: The Do’s, Don’ts, and D’ohs! Designing a new UI? Evolving an existing one? You’ll walk away from this session knowing how to make your dashboard what it needs to be.

You’ll learn to:

• Determine what’s succeeding or failing in your dashboard
• Create a strategy for overhauling your dashboard
  or making a new one
• Prevent interaction pitfalls by focusing on tasks
• Design customizable dashboards that don’t suck

Whether you’ve got an onerous dashboard on your hands or you’re charged with designing a new one from scratch, then you simply can’t afford to miss Hagan’s practical and information-packed seminar on dashboard design.

We started out with 100 spots, but already we’re down to 80 for the UX Immersion 2012 Conference in Portland, OR April 23-25.

You can register at the lowest rate of $1,349 to secure one of the remaining 80 spots. After these spots are gone, the price increases by $300.

We’re not surprised at how fast these spots are going. Once you see the full-day workshop topics and amazing speakers, you’ll want to grab your own spot.

Spend 3 intensive days devouring the latest UX techniques in 2 important areas: Agile development and mobile design.

The goodies that come with your registration

• Two full-day workshops: You’ll choose among 3 Agile and 3 mobile design focused workshops
• One day of Featured Talks: Hear from each of the workshop presenters, 2 case study presentations, and a keynote from our very own Jared M. Spool
• Complete conference materials: We’ll send you the PDFs of every talk and workshop just before you leave for the conference
• Recordings of the Featured Talks: After the conference you can relive every Featured Talk at your office with your entire team

Learn more about UX Immersion 2012

Save your seat before they’re gone

Now is the time to act. Register now and we’ll guarantee you get into the workshops of your choice. You’ll get to choose your workshops at the end of February.

$1,349 is the lowest possible price. Don’t miss it.

We’re celebrating this year’s User Interface 16 Conference’s fantastic program by giving everyone access to last year’s great show. The recordings and slide decks contain these great topics:

• Engaging team members in the design process
• Developing a content strategy
• Designing for mobile
• Evangelizing design within the corporate culture
• Understanding styles of decision making
• Incorporating testing and prototyping
• Making successful personas
• Evolving design ideas
• Creating a UX library

You’ll hear from these top UX experts: Luke Wroblewski, Kristina Halvorson, Nathan Curtis, Dan Rubin, Leah Buley, Dave Gray, Kim Goodwin, Tamara Adlin, and Jared Spool.

How to get the free recordings?

It’s easy. Just sign up by October 13, 11:59 PM ET and you’ll get last year’s UI15 talks and materials for free. No tricks, no gimmicks. We’ll send you an email with details on how to access this bundle of goodness.

Now hurry and get last year’s UI15 recordings before October 13, 11:59 pm ET.

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

Employ Simple Show and Hide Techniques

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

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

Toggle Wireframe Annotations

Add notes to your interactive design.

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

Fake Simple Ajax Interactions

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

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

Get Started with JQuery UI Widgets

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

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

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

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

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

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

As we use a multitude of devices to access the same content, we expect a similar experience across platforms. If you have a great user experience on the desktop, it would be easy to rationalize that your mobile experience, for example, shouldn’t be painful. User experience professionals now need to consider how and where their applications and content are being accessed more than ever before.

Bill Scott knows this. Bill is the Director of UI Engineering at Netflix. Users can access Netflix on TVs, mobile devices, tablets, not to mention on the desktop. Bill believes that it’s not just the devices themselves, but also the context in which they are used that designers need to keep in mind. Developing rich interactions across all of these platforms can be a daunting task. Employing design patterns can help ensure that your users have a great experience wherever they use your product. Patterns develop a common vocabulary and create a shared understanding amongst the team.

Bill will be sharing more of his thoughts as well as examples of some patterns that work well, and some that don’t work so well, in his full-day workshop at the User Interface 16 Conference in Boston, November 7-9. Bill’s is only one of seven workshops at the conference. For more details visit UIconf.com.

Here’s an excerpt from the podcast.

“…It’s really about that shared understanding concept, where engineers have a shared understanding of business and design, and designers have the other two and et cetera. And marketing, you know, even educating them on what developers go through and what their process is at a very high level, gets everybody in the same ballpark where they really understand each other and get a sense for what’s hard, what’s easy, get a sense for the time crunch, get a sense for all those sort of things.

It sounds pretty touchy-feely, but I like the term “shared understanding.” I think that sort of captures the essence of it. You could put as much process or as little process to shared understanding. It could be very detailed wire-frames, or it could be just a hallway conversation, depending on what is needed for that organization in that context…”

Listen to the podcast to hear Bill address these points:

• Are design patterns about establishing a vocabulary?
• Is there any truth to the idea that patterns stifle innovation?
• Are patterns used more to lay out a path than to declare “absolute rules of engagement”?
• Do you ever push something out that is less than optimal and rework from there?
• How do you ensure that what you hand over gets implemented as you intend it to?
• Do you employ “hack days” to generate new ideas?

Do you use design patterns? Share your thoughts with us in our comments section.

Recorded: August, 2011
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Full Transcript.

Jared Spool: Welcome, once again, everybody to our current episode of the SpoolCast. I have with me today the wonderful Bill Scott, Director of UI Engineering at Netflix. And he’s going to be speaking at our User Interface 16 Conference on Monday, November 7th. The conference itself goes from Monday to Wednesday, November 9th, but he’ll be speaking in a full-day workshop on designing rich, interactive experiences, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

Bill, welcome.

Bill Scott: Hey, I’m glad to be here.

Jared: I’m glad to have you here. So, let’s just start talking here. I’ve known you for a really long time. You and I go way back. You were at Yahoo and before that at Sabre, and you’ve sort of always been in the center of what’s been happening in terms of this rich interaction stuff. Really bringing out over the web and through devices the ability to control and give access to data through all sorts of gestures beyond just a simple click of a button or a link.

How did you come to pick all that stuff up? What was your journey like?

Bill: I think my start, just to real quick go way back, was running one of the first games for the Macintosh actually, a game called GATO Submarine Simulation.

Jared: Oh yeah!

Bill: That was in 1985… early ’85, late ’84. And it was this whole thing of, we’ve got this new world with a mouse, with menus and icons, and how do you actually design a game? We didn’t actually have any examples in front of us, but we just thought we’d take the best of what was in that world and meld it into a video game.

And you know, I feel like we were pretty successful. That game was actually a best seller, number one on the best selling list for a while and at least the top ten the first year or two. Not a lot of sales compared to today’s market, but a lot for back then.

That really got me hooked on the power of — for example, we could add a mission editor for the submarines, right, and that wasn’t in part of the original spec. We just added that because we thought, well, with drag and drop and stuff you could create your own islands. You could create your own paths for the bad guys to come, and you know we added path editors and such like that. It was just so much easier to do with the mouse and everything. That sort of got me hooked.

And then, over time, I was always designing and developing together, because in the late 80s and early 80s and early 90s, there weren’t really that many disciplines that were pure user experience. You had to be in HCI or something like that. So it was always very pragmatic and always kind of tried to understand what were these emerging patterns? What could you do with technology, because there was always kind of a limit to what you could do.

That just kind of evolved over time into thinking about patterns. I remember discovering Christopher Alexander’s book on design patterns, and then finding some of Jenifer Tidwell’s work on cataloguing patterns for rich experiences, you know, for the desktop. That got me thinking.

Then as I moved to the web, I immediately went back to sticks and mud, because there was no way to do anything. You had that horrible request/response cycle, and you couldn’t do anything without refreshing the page. So we immediately started using some of the stuff in IE to get around that. This is early 2000, 2001, whatever. And then we finally, when Ajax came on the scene, when Google Maps came out, it really became possible.

So, at Sabre we were building a rich library, an Ajax library that would allow normal developers you know, that weren’t UI developers to actually create pretty good experiences without having to think too much about it. And so it behooved us to catalogue those patterns, and so we started documenting those and we started building a JavaScript library that we could release to the public, which was a slice of what we were doing at Sabre. That became Rico, which was one of the early Ajax libraries.

And in that we just saw the melding of showing examples of patterns as well as implementing those patterns. Because design patterns were a good way to bridge the gap, really, between design and engineering, because it creates a vocabulary. It names things that are hard to describe otherwise, instead of saying, “Well, you can take you mouse and you can click something.”

Of course, we have drag and drop, and we can say that in shorthand. That was a very early form of that in the early 80s. But as you go forward, things you know, page slides and hovers, accordions, and all those sort of things like that, and when are they good and when are they bad. I have sort of this reductionist mindset anyway, where I try to reduce things to simplicity. Maybe that comes from a software background, too, but I felt it played real well with the patterns.

Then, when I came to Yahoo and joined there as the Ajax evangelist, the Yahoo pattern library had already been started by Erin Malone and Matt Laycock. They had done a great job, but most of the patterns were really of the older school because this had just started emerging.

So I just started writing patterns for that pattern library. I had about 50 or 60 I added that were new, that were rich, and I started just cataloguing like crazy. At that time, in 2005, at Yahoo we were just starting to experiment with Ajax and get really into it and what could you do with the web, and it just led to more and more cataloguing.

Then, because I had actually written most of the patterns in the library, or at least half of them, I said to Erin Malone that, “Well, maybe I should, in addition to my other job, just take over the pattern library” since Matt was moving to something else. And so I did, and then we launched it as a public pattern library and got a lot of great feedback from what we put out.

And that just kind of kept me going down that path of doing that. But I’ve always felt like patterns were really about being able to take something and boil it down into just a few words so that I didn’t have to explain it over and over again, and you could just make it part of your toolbox.

Jared: Well, and this is interesting to me, because I was just discussing with somebody this week that I thought that a big piece of the value that comes from patterns just comes in establishing the language, the vocabulary. The sort of discussion of, what is it we’re trying to do, and what is that subtlety and nuance? And the more complicated these devices get, the more that subtlety and nuance happens.

Do you think that design patterns are really about that vocabulary creation, or is there another value that comes out of them that I’m missing?

Bill: No, that’s exactly right. And when we released the Yahoo design pattern library, you know, it wasn’t about, “Oh, hey, this is the only way to do it.” It was more about, “This is what we’re discovering. Let’s start a dialogue about this.”

There are people out there who are very, very semantic about the way they define patterns and go about and document those patterns. I appreciate those folks. I’m not one of those folks, because it’s like getting too far in the meta where you’re straining in a nat. And the reality, people just need examples. And I felt like that was actually the biggest contribution I was making was just collecting lots and lots of examples and putting those in the screen casts so that people could see those and associate those with an idea.

And then, once you have that picture there, that vocabulary, something somebody can see, you can talk about the nuance of it. You can talk about, well, why does it work in this situation and not this other situation? Because design is all about that nuance and the context.

And just exposing people that haven’t been through the design-thinking process, that maybe come from another background, there’s some very objective things but there’s also a subjective piece to it. The objective part is these patterns, but the subjective is how you apply them. And I think that helps a lot of people who especially don’t come from a design background. I think it helps people with a design background, too, but I know that what I’ve shared a lot seems to resonate especially with developers.

Jared: One of the things that came up in this conversation that I was having was that one of the folks felt that they’d seen design patterns used as a way to sort of stifle innovation. I’ve never seen it that way. His thinking was that the organizations that were using these patterns were being so rigorous about documenting and enforcing the patterns, more in a style-guide notion, that people couldn’t do things that made sense to do that fell outside of the patterns.

Whereas, when I’ve seen them used, they get used in less of an enforcement mode and more of a, “Here are what your options could be, and here’s the language you use to describe it. And if you come up with something better, that’s great. Just document it and add it back into the library.”

Bill: My hunch is that there definitely are groups like that, just like any bureaucracy. You have the police mindset, and you have the “I’m here to assist” mindset. When they become a resource, they’re good. When they become a stifling set of rules that have lost their context, right? That’s the whole thing. And you can’t crystallize these things. You can’t define every nuance and every context in those patterns. They get way too unwieldy.

I do know, in chatting with a few people, I’ve seen people try to go down that path, and I’ve tried to encourage them: “Don’t get hung up on the enforcement side of it. Really get excited about assisting and helping the teams and providing them with lots of resources and a common vocabulary. If you did just that, you would be successful.” But some people start to feel like they get measured by–they’re a central group in an organization. I was talking to a company a few months ago that’ll remain unnamed. A large social network. But anyway.

Jared: [laughs]

Bill: Anyway, I won’t go any further. Because there’s several of those, so I can leave it like that.

The people in the group were not of the ilk to do that, but I think they were feeling pressure that, well, shouldn’t they be getting more adoption? They were asking, “When you were at Yahoo, what was the adoption rate?” I said, “Not really that great, with our central guidelines and our central practices, but everybody grabbed the patterns idea and took it from a vocabulary perspective. So…”

Jared: Yeah, I mean, do you think that it’s really about making the designer and the teams that they work in a bit smarter and a bit more savvy, in terms of being able to talk about what they’re trying to do and sort of laying out a path that is proven, more than it’s about declaring what the absolute rules of engagement are?

Bill: That’s right. Yeah. Whenever you have groups that are seeking the best idea, the best solution, things work well. When people put some kind of stake in the ground, well, it’s like our political system today, right? You’ve got the two parties. It’s almost that same sort of mindset, where it’s no longer about solving problems; it’s about posturing and position. And I hate it. When the patterns come that way, I get very uninterested.

At Yahoo, we had a user group that I set up for pattern authors to join and I quickly lost interest in that mail list because there were these endless discussions about what was the canonical pattern, a pattern for a pattern.

Jared: [laughs] Oh God, that sounds miserable. [laughs]

Bill: And arguments about what kind of examples should you have, and whether they were four sections you should have versus eight sections. I don’t care. At the end of the day, the business has got to be successful, and design and engineering’s about bringing something to life.

Jared: Customers are not going to get excited because you’ve defined your patterns rigorously.

Bill: It reminds me of, this is back in the software world. I worked with a very bright engineer who had gotten the Gang of Four book, “Design Patterns for Software,” which was the first, really, application of Christopher Alexander’s patterns into the field of technology, and it’s a great, classic book. This was back in about, oh, probably ’94, ’93, something like that.

And one day he came around the corner and he had this big smile on his face, and he had the book in his hand and he was shaking it back and forth, and he says, “I did it!” I said, [laughs] “What did you do?” And he goes, “I’ve implemented all the patterns in this book in our software.” [laughs]

And a few years later, I’d left that company and I came back–actually, it was Sabre–and I came back, and through a quirk of a bunch of funding changes, for a while I ended up taking over his code, and was not a happy person, because that did not make better software, just applying [laughs] all the patterns blindly. So, same thing with design.

Jared: Yep. So, to sort of change directions here for a second, the work you’re doing at Netflix now, you’re involved in a lot of the day-to-day production of what goes out on the Netflix site, right?

Bill: That’s right, yeah. My job right now is much more focused. On purpose, I took a more focused role around acquisition. I hadn’t worked in that area before with marketing. And so it’s really around the sign-up flow and it’s around account services, probably what, in some ways, is seen as the less sexy stuff. I was involved with the member side for a good, long while, and still am tangentially.

But I just find it kind of fascinating to see just how fickle–that’s maybe one way to put it–the whole acquisition and conversion channel is. So it’s been an interesting education in that.

Jared: By acquisition and conversion, we’re talking about getting new people to realize that Netflix exists and then converting them into customers. And you guys have been moving into new countries, too, right?

Bill: That’s right. We’ve announced that we’re going into 43 countries in Latin America, and that will be in the not-too-distant future we will be launching that.

Jared: So there’s lots of new customers to acquire.

Bill: That’s right, and they’re different. They don’t have the same bandwidth. They don’t have the same movie watching habits, TV habits. They don’t have the same devices. They don’t have the same kind of payment methods. There’s a whole bunch of things that vary. Cultural differences, how you state things, you know all those sort of things come into play.

Jared: So now, what are you learning in terms of the rich interaction stuff that you can draw on to use in this new role that you’re focused on over there at Netflix?

Bill: Well, one thing we tried… And it’s interesting. This is a good example of where, even though you can do something, it may not be the thing that really works. So I’ll give more of a counter example I guess.

One of the things we experimented with was a single-page sign-up. So that, you just come to the page itself and you know, you do everything in one page and you’re signed up, that’s it. We’ve seen success around that with hotels and other things that have gone to a very simple flow like that.

The thing is, when we did that we actually saw a drop in acquisition, and our theory on that is because people need that second screen. They get the first screen, they put their email and a password in, and they need the second screen to really digest the whole payment area. And then, once they’ve done the payment they’re done. We’ve simplified the flow down to just the two steps and the confirmation.

But to get to that one step, we’re not there yet, and we’ve tried a few things. I think people need that break, go to the next page, digest the payment, feel comfortable that, this next step I’m going to actually be paying and not doing it in a one-step process.

So, even though we were doing a rich experience there, it ended up not actually working. We’ll definitely revisit it again with some different approaches.

Jared: Yeah, I mean, by bumping into these things you get a chance to learn what works better going forward. How do you get everybody involved in understanding what the goals are so you don’t push something out that is less than optimal? Or, do you push stuff out that’s less than optimal and then you just sort of regroup and figure it out?

Bill: Oh, yeah. That’s one of the mantras here is to fail often and fail fast. Everything you try is an experiment. A lot of times you don’t have full confidence. You have misgivings about some of the stuff you’re going to try. But you know you have enough volume that with customers, especially around the acquisition channel, you’ve got some pretty clear metrics about success or failure.

It doesn’t mean that, for example, that one-page sign-up would never work. We just may not have hit on the right way to do it yet, right? So you can’t throw out the whole concept. You can only say, “Well, with these particular tests it didn’t work.”

So what we do though is, you know marketing does a good job they’re, in essence, like our product managers providing us with a business context. And Netflix as a whole, there’s not any business information that’s not shared all the way down. It’s not just limited at the director level; it goes all the way down to employees.

So, everybody’s kept up to date on all the strategies and purposes and what we’re doing. There’s nothing hidden from the employees, which I think is really good. A lot of organizations don’t understand why the decisions are being made, and we have a very open culture about that. I think that kind of starts right at the top.

And then the business ideas are there, and then design and engineering understand that early. And then, in the process of, you know, raising issues and having conversations, it’s not like one team is just dictating and somebody goes off in a corner and implements without any knowledge. I’ve seen that happen in the past too many times, but we don’t do that.

Jared: Right. How do you make sure that when you’re designing something up and you’re handing it over to the folks who are going to implement this thing that … I guess there are two issues, right? One is, is that what you’re asking can be implemented, and second, that they get it enough that they can go off and do it the way you intend it to be happening?

Bill: Well, some of the things we’ve done in the past that have worked really well in that is, for a while to get everybody on the same page, we started having round tables where we get design and engineering together and have conversations.

Because design may put together their Photoshop assets in such a way that it actually causes a lot more work on the developers. And also, developers maybe have ideas or techniques that the design team doesn’t know about that are possible that are actually pretty easy to do that they could make part of their bag of tricks.

So, having an open forum that design and engineering can get together pretty informally, and not driven from top down but more bottom up. Anybody in the team can bring up a topic and make that the topic, or several topics, for the conversation. What that does is it gets vocabulary out in the open.

I remember the member design team. Some of the people in the member design team like to use the term “lockup,” because they came from an advertising background, describing the area where you have a box shot of the movie with the rating and whatever else goes around the particular movie title.

They call that a lockup, and half the developers didn’t know what the heck a lockup was, and once that was explained with the background … That came out through the round tables. I don’t think it would have ever come out and disseminated in normal hallway conversations or anyone would have sent an email about it.

It’s putting people together. It sounds pretty simple, but actually it’s one of those things we forget. It’s sort of like, how do you understand users? Well, you get with users, right? Obviously there’s more to it than that, but often those very, very simple things don’t happen.

So like, for example, the brand marketing design team, I’ve spent time with them. I did an HTML5 presentation, CSS3, et cetera and walked them through what is possible first on WebKit, because our TVs and our devices, our new devices that we’re going onto, most of them support WebKits, so we have all the capability of WebKit for those.

And then for the website, you know, what are the current browsers we’re supporting? What can they do in the HTML5 world and CSS3 world, et cetera, versus what can be done in flash? And those sort of conversations have been really helpful to them.

So, it’s really about that shared understanding concept, where engineers have a shared understanding of business and design, and designers have the other two and et cetera. And marketing, you know, even educating them on what developers go through and what their process is at a very high level, gets everybody in the same ballpark where they really understand each other and get a sense for what’s hard, what’s easy, get a sense for the time crunch, get a sense for all those sort of things.

It sounds pretty touchy-feely, but I like the term “shared understanding.” I think that sort of captures the essence of it. You could put as much process or as little process to shared understanding. It could be very detailed wire-frames, or it could be just a hallway conversation, depending on what is needed for that organization in that context.

Jared: I think that the shared understanding has got to be critical. And I think, when I look at the organizations that we work with that really struggle at getting good designs out, you can go back to surprises that happen in the process, where it comes from people not having that shared understanding, you know, “What do you mean that’s difficult to implement? You did it over there.” Or, “How come that’s going to take five weeks? Isn’t it just a simple changing of a few words?”

They just don’t have a sense of what’s going on. Of course, on the other end, it’s the devs and designers saying, “What do you mean that when you click here, it has to go to this other screen you didn’t tell us about, or it has to produce a message, or you’re going to want to extend this in the future to have these other options?”

Bill: That’s right. Yeah, exactly.

Jared: And so that shared understanding piece really does make a lot of sense. One question I have in terms of this is you had shared with me a while back that you guys were doing all this cool hack day stuff. Do you still do that on the acquisition side? You have a hack day type thing that happens?

Bill: Well, it happens company-wide. So it happens with facilities, where they may be doing something around hacking the phones. [laughs] It could be the content team, hacking stuff down in Beverly Hills, hacking together with some engineers. I did a hack with them a year or so back where you could go to Google Map and zoom in somewhere and see all the films that were shot in that location. Right?

Jared: Oh, cool.

Bill: And then, for fun, I added a little extra dimension in it where there was two little buttons. One was Mars and one was the moon. You could click on Mars, it brought in a Google Earth plug-in and flew you out to Mars and showed you some of the movies that were shot on Mars. [laughs]

Jared: Very cool.

Bill: [laughs] It was a joke.

We’ve had a number of things come out of the hack days. One thing we continue to test is how to find related content really easy, kind of like the six degrees of separation, Kevin Bacon kind of thing, right? We had a “more like this” kind of feature that came in in one of the hack days, where you have a page where the movie sits in the middle and then all the other movies that are related to it in some fashion are around it, and then you click one of those, it slides to the middle and more come out around it. We actually implemented it on the site. It didn’t test too well.

Of course, what we find out often with the media consumption we do is that anything that feels complicated at all, people don’t tend to do. It has to be really simple. But what’s happened is that thought has continued to have, I don’t know, at least maybe six or eight different incarnations. None of them have actually fully worked yet.

We have one example on the device that worked better than control. And on device, on our TVs–PS3, I think it was, we were testing this–you had a row showing up on your TV, and when you move your arrow back and forth and land on a movie or a TV show, below it, the next row, is all the related content. And if you go down to one of those and select it, then the row below it becomes related to it. So it’s almost like a tree navigation, but it’s just rows, right? That actually did pretty well.

The problem is, how do you integrate that back into something like the normal experience, where you’re showing just, here are your areas of interest, which we call sub-genres, or micro-genres, we’ve built and based out of your taste input and what you watched and stuff, like quirky, funny movies from the 1700s. I don’t know.

Jared: [laughs]

Bill: So, how do you tie that into that? So there’s some tests around doing that that are coming out to play with that.

Jared: So the neat thing about the hack days is, do you feel that has a huge effect on the shared understanding? I mean, do things sort of burst out of that and people go, “Oh”?

Bill: Yeah, I do. I think there’s a lot of stuff, like some technologies on the edge, that not everybody’s getting a chance to play with that somebody brings in. Like when the Kinect stuff first came out, you know, there was a pretty cool hack around that and sort of opened some thinking up around some other stuff.

Real early on, some guys had hacked the iPhone so you could control the Roku player with it. And those were quite interesting. But a lot of it is just you sort of get a chance to see what other people consider to be problems they’re trying to be solve. Right? What are the itches that are trying to be scratched around the organization? And I think that’s pretty helpful.

Jared: So in November, you’re going to join us and spend an entire day sharing this wealth of knowledge you have, and the stuff that went into your book and a variety of insights and details and videos and techniques on building interactive stuff. You’re going to show us how to deal with the flow in the application, how to deal with input, how to deal with responsiveness and all the sort of techniques that you’ve put together. I’m really looking forward to this session.

Bill: I am, too. I did a workshop similar to this, but this has more material, especially now adding a little bit with the device world and tablet and TV and mobile back in Lisbon. And the workshop went really, really well, and people seemed to really enjoy it. I know it sold out really fast. So I’m hoping the same interest is here in this. I believe it will be.

Jared: I think it will.

Bill: And really, I guess people that are considering whether to come to something like this, my goal is to make it as pragmatic as possible. When people hear “patterns,” sometimes they think of the theoretical. It’s not at all. It’s really just about lots and lots of examples that work well and don’t work well. And when you come out of the workshop, what you really should have, I think, is just a pretty rich vocabulary of what’s possible and what maybe to avoid, and then you can go back and share that with the team and have a toolbox. Expanding your toolbox is really what it’s about.

Jared: Cool. I’m looking forward to getting my toolbox expanded.

Bill: [laughs]

Jared: Excellent. Thanks for taking the time to talk about this with me today.

Bill: I’m always happy to talk, Jared.

Jared: Excellent.

Bill: And to talk with you is icing on the cake.

Jared: There you go. And I want to thank our audience for joining us today and for supporting everything we do. And, as always, thank you for encouraging our behavior. You can see Bill at the User Interface 16 Conference in November. November 7th through 9th. You can find out details about that at uiconf.com. Hope to see you there. Thank you very much.

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Read all about each Master’s session on the web site.

Special Deal for Our Blog Readers

It would be downright awful if you missed this last tour stop. So we’ve put together a special deal. Just use the promotion code TOURBLOG when you register and you’ll get the $895 price – $200 off from the final price. Be sure to register by June 21 to get this discount.

Don’t miss the event of a lifetime. Join us in Minneapolis and inject new energy and inspiration into your designs.

In this week’s UIEtips, we reach back into the articles archives and look at some of the challenges we’ve seen users encounter in our usability tests. These are challenges to look out for when users interact with your applications. I hope you enjoy it.

Read the article, 3 Important Usability Challenges for Designing Web Apps.

At UIE, a big part of our research agenda focuses on how to create web applications that delight users. We feel it’s so important that we created a conference focusing on web applications. It’s the Web App Masters Tour.

During the 2 day conference, you’ll hear from 9 Masters on mobile design strategy, data visualization and design best practices. Get all the details on the Seattle and Minneapolis stops at http://www.UIETour.com.

To help make things easier for you, we’ll publish a list of events occurring in the upcoming months. We’ll create a monthly blog post the first week of each month.

Mark your calendars! There are some fantastic events coming soon.

UIE Virtual Seminars

A Practical Approach to Better Project Kickoffs
Presented by Kevin Hoffman
Thursday, February 3, 1:30 pm ET

After having one too many expensive and unproductive kickoffs, Happy Cog reinvented its project definition process around full-day, interactive activities and collaborative design exercises. Kevin will show you how to make your kickoffs the critical jumping-off point they should be.

Read more about Kevin’s webinar.

The Secrets of Great UX Documentation (in cooperation with EightShapes)
Presented by Dan Brown
Thursday, February 17, 1:30 pm ET

In this virtual seminar, Dan will explain the evolving role of formal documentation in a design process that continually reinvents itself. He’ll offer practical tips for making documents easier to read, easier to produce, and relevant throughout the design process.

Read more about Dan’s webinar.

Information Design: Letting Data Tell the Story
Presented by Noah Iliinsky
Thursday, February 24, 1:30 pm ET

In this seminar, Noah Iliinsky discusses the types of visualizations in common use, why and when they are useful, what different types are good for, how to think about different types, and who’s doing good work.

Read more about Noah’s webinar.

Mobile Design: Designing Tapworthy Mobile Apps
Presented by Josh Clark
Thursday, March 17, 1:30 pm ET

In the seminar, we’ll explore the practical principles of mobile and touchscreen design. You’ll learn to: capture the elusive ingredients of irresistible mobile interfaces; craft comfortable ergonomics for fingers and thumbs; dodge the usability gotchas of handheld devices; and turn tiny-touchscreen constraints to your advantage.

Read more about Josh’s webinar.

Live Workshops and Conferences

Web Design Master Class (partnered with Sidebar Interactive)
Thursday, February 24 – Los Angeles, CA
Thursday, April 7 – Austin, TX
Tuesday, June 14, Philadelphia, PA

This is an intensive one-day clinic that walks you through new
techniques and different approaches to front-end design and
development.

Read more about the Web Design Master Class.

Web App Masters Tour
March 21-22 – Philadelphia, PA
May 23-24 – Seattle, WA
June 27-28 – Minneapolis, MN

You’ll hear from leading thinkers and doers behind today’s most
successful web-based applications. You’ll learn from their
expertise, hear about their successes, and come away ready to enrich
your users’ experience with the latest techniques and thinking.

Read more about the Web App Masters Tour.

Events UIE Is Partnering with

Healthcare Experience Design Conference
Monday, April 11 – Boston, MA

The Healthcare Experience Design Conference blends the powerhouse perspectives of healthcare thought leaders, product developers, and design implementers across a broad spectrum of healthcare technologies and delivery channels.

Read more about the Healthcare Experience Design Conference.

Confab 2011 – The Content Strategy Conference
May 9-10 – Minneapolis, MN

Whether you’re a content strategy veteran or curious about where to
start, this is your conference. Real-world case studies. Hands-on
workshops. All the experts.

Read more about Confab 2011.

He invited all the key players from various departments. As they started filing into the room he started hearing murmurs of, “Here we go again, a useless kickoff meeting.” Eyes were rolling before the meeting even started, and half the attendees were checking their email, working on something else, or tweeting.

If only Joe had done his homework and read Kevin Hoffman’s article, Kick Ass Kickoff Meetings. Everything would have started differently.

Our good friend, Kevin Hoffman, contends that too many kickoff meetings squander the busiest, most expensive people’s time reiterating what everyone already knows. His challenge is that if every meeting is an opportunity, why waste your first, most important one?

In today’s UIEtips, were sharing an article Kevin wrote that caught our attention. We split the article into 2 parts. In part 1, Kevin explains the advance work that should take place prior to the kickoff meeting, and the type of questions you should ask your stakeholders. This article will start you down the path to better kickoff meetings.

Read the article, Kick Ass Kickoff Meetings.

It just so happens Kevin will be delivering our next virtual seminar on this very topic. He’ll share lots of great examples and the lessons the team at Happy Cog learned from one too many expensive and unproductive kickoffs. Learn more about Kevin’s seminar.

How do you prepare for kickoff meetings? What techniques do you employ to be sure team members leave those meetings full of ideas to explore? Share your thoughts with us below.

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

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

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

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

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

If you joined us for any of the stops on the 2010 Web App Master’s Tour, you know we loaded the lineup full of awesome. For me, one of the many highlights was Stephen Anderson’s talk, Serious Play: Designing Seductive Business Apps.

We’re lucky to have him adding this topic to our UIE Virtual Seminar schedule on November 4: Leveraging Seductive Interaction Design.

Here’s an example. A while back, LinkedIn experimented with a feature: a little meter above the user’s information, showing their profile’s “percentage completed.” Suddenly, more users filled out their profiles. The feature didn’t have a clever interface, a sophisticated information architecture, or show any technical prowess. It just leveraged basic human psychology.

Seductive interactions take us to a new level in design. They leverage the latest advancements in social science, psychology, and behavioral economics.

For a peek at one such trick to engage your visitors, scarcity, check out part I of Stephen’s article we reprinted in UIEtips this week. Or, we’d love to have you join us on Thursday, November 4.

What simple things can you do to increase engagement? Is there a place for fun in business sites? What are some of the ideas from psychology that you apply to design? We’d love to hear your stories below.

We get excited when folks do cool things with our Boss’ presentations:

Rachel Hinman’s (@hinman) awesome sketchnote of Jared’s #UXAustralia session

Whitney Quesenbery (@whitneyq), a recent UIE Virtual Seminar presenter, and her coauthor Kevin Brooks (@storykevin) just love to share storytelling ideas to help you do your job better.

Juicy stories sell design ideas, add the emotional level to persuasion. See how. (UXmatters)

Our friend Kristina Halvorson (@halvorson) and her gang at Brain Traffic (@braintraffic) share this:

Writers are asked all the time: How do you get ideas for your stories? Jennifer Egan dedicated a website to the answer.

A couple UIE alums are putting on a cool workshop on prototyping:

Boston UX workshops from UIE alums @bokardo & @cperfetti: Designing for Social Web & Paper Prototyping

If you’re not following Andrew Maier’s blog, you should. UX Booth (@uxbooth) is loaded with all sorts of UX resources for your team. And the tweets from them point us to even more. We thought this one on UX diagrams was worthy of revisiting.

New on UX Booth: Must-see UX Diagrams .

The folks at Crayola (@Crayola) make color seem so simple. But it’s not, is it?

How much time do you spend thinking about color in your design? Here’s an interesting post on how colors affect purchases .

What can we learn from video games, even older ones?

Oh so cool – you got to try it! RT @UIE: Who needs Flash? HTML5 Asteroids.(Hat tip: @threefour)

What have you been thinking about this week? What resources rolled in that you’d like to share? Let the UIE followers know by adding your comment below.

As we were talking, I had suggested that a UX Design Library was a snapshot of what the team felt the future of the design would be like. “Oh, no,” Nathan exclaimed! “I strongly disagree with that idea.” He went on to say that the library really was a snapshot of the past, not the future. A great library represents the best and most promising pieces of the design, so that future work could take advantage of what can be done.

Creating a library that works for the team isn’t technically challenging. However, there are important considerations and steps that the team needs to make sure it’s a success.

In today’s UIEtips, Nathan walks us through the process of creating a library. He’s broken it down into four doable steps (and even has a fabulous poster-grade visualization of the process). You’re really going to enjoy his article.

Read Nathan’s article, How to Create a UX Design Library.

One of the best things about my job is that I get to talk with Nathan on a regular basis. Every conversation we have is eye opening and amazing. You can have that same opportunity when you sign up for the UI15 conference. Nathan will deliver his fabulous full-day workshop, Standards, Reuse, Consistency, & Libraries, where you’ll learn how to capture the best of your work for the future. Read more about the workshops.

Have you put together your own library? How did it go? We’d love to hear about your experiences below.

Explore Nathan’s workshop and the full conference program. Register for UI15 by September 22 with promotion code BLOGPOST and get $400 off.

We’ve asked two uber-talented online marketing experts to show us a tool that will make both groups happy. Our next UIE Virtual Seminar, Produce a More Persuasive Site: Where Design & Marketing Meet with Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg, is happening Thursday, August 26, 2010.

Google gives us a standard you can employ to get others in your organization all on the same page, doing things you want them to do, to help you improve your site. It’s Google’s Quality Score.

The Eisenbergs will teach you that the Quality Score is based upon three elements: relevance, credibility, and navigation. Bryan & Jeffrey will share 7 perspectives to help you determine the relevance in your content. And they’ll give you 10 tips to improve your credibility, demonstrate value, and enhance the persuasiveness of your navigation.

What’s your relationship with your marketing team? This is a perfect virtual seminar to invite them to, and learn how both groups can be on the same page. Share your success and war stories below.

On August 5, Whitney Quesenbery, co-author of Storytelling for User Experience will present our next UIE Virtual Seminar, Storytelling for UX. Whitney is a user experience expert and master storyteller. She’ll teach you how to craft and tell your own unique stories to improve your designs.

Share an example of a story you told to motivate or persuade. What about an example of a story you heard that motivated you to take some action, or understand something new? Share your storytelling experiences here.

Anyone who registers for the User Interface 15 Conference by July 15 will automatically be entered into the 4 weekly drawings starting on July 16. Imagine immersing yourself in 3 days of high power UX workshops and presentations and capturing all the incredible takeaways on one of these little babies.

Clear your calendar and be ready to hear from the best designers and UX experts in Boston on November 8-10. We know it’s unlikely you’ll register for the User Interface 15 Conference just because of the cool iPad give-away. Of course, it’s the conference that matters. The give-away happens to be the icing on the cake.

Here’s the recipe to UI15′s success, eight parts speakers, three parts days, one part you. Mix that all together and you’ll cook up a conference that guarantees you to come back with new tools and methodologies that will have your designs rise higher than ever.

Topics and Speakers

Take a look at the awesome full-day workshops from these folks.

• Good Design Faster – Leah Buley
• Building Effective Personas – Tamara Adlin
• Web Form Design & Beyond – Luke Wroblewski
• Effectively Communicating Design Ideas with Sketching – Dave Gray
• Scenarios: Putting Personas to Work – Kim Goodwin
• Visual Design Essentials for Web Designers – Dan Rubin
• Standards, Reuse, Consistency, & Libraries – Nathan Curtis
• Everything You Need to Create a Content Strategy – Kristina Halvorson

More information on the program at www.UICONF.com.

Sure these are awesome presenters and you’re guaranteed to boost up your designs. You’ll bring back tons of new tools and methodologies to share with your team. But wouldn’t it be amazing to have an iPad to take notes on while at UI15?

Be part of the dozens of folks already registered and in the running to win one of these must-have iPads. Regardless, you’re guaranteed to be the envy of your team, just for attending this conference.

Don’t you want to be included?

Why wait to sign-up for the conference and lose four chances to win the iPad? If you’re planning on coming, sign-up now and guarantee yourself a seat in the workshop of your choice, spend time with 8 great minds in the UX community, and learn what your peers are doing. And you’ll be in the running to win one of 4 Apple iPads. (We should mention that you can enter the drawing without registering for UI15.)

If you happen to miss the July 15 deadline, you can still register at the low sneak preview price of $1295 and be entered into the next drawing for the Apple iPad (there’s a drawing every week until August 9.)

I look forward to seeing you in Boston, and good luck on winning your iPad.

Usability testing is not new, but remote usability testing absolutely is. It’s a unique and useful way to watch people use your design. The more time spent watching people use your design, the better your design will be.

When remote usability testing is done right, the information you capture will inspire innovation. Can it really work? Is it easy to make mistakes? Will you be successful? In this seminar Nate Bolt shows you how to make remote testing work, as well as what you need to avoid.

Nate will answer your questions and offer some strategies to consider. This seminar will give you valuable tips to use right away. Sign up today, and learn from one of the experts in remote research practices!

Do you have experience with remote usability testing? Do you think it’s as effective as your traditional methods? Or is this your first attempt to intercept your users as they interact with your product? Please share your thoughts, stories, and concerns below.

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

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

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

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

It’s time to take charge and manage content like a critical business asset. Having a content strategy is key to delivering useful, usable content to your online audiences.

Content strategy is an emerging practice, and in our June 3 UIE Virtual Seminar, you’ll hear from Kristina Halvorson, the leading advocate for this discipline. You’ll learn to overcome dueling deadlines, shrinking budgets, clashing agendas, and your current web content woes.

Oh, and by the way, thanks to Kristina and our friends at PeachPit we’re giving away a FREE chapter from her book, Content Strategy for the Web. It’s chapter 4: “Audit—Learn how to take a close-up look at your current content.” Once you register, you’ll find the link to your copy in the confirmation email.

Where does content rank on your organization’s checklist? Does it come first, or dead last? How do you ensure content is treated like a valuable asset? Please share your thoughts and stories below.

Today, UIEtips features two amazing speakers, Bill Scott and Stephen Anderson. Both speakers strongly fit what we think is an ideal presenter. We extracted excerpts from their Web App Masters Tour talks and created podcasts. These talks are loaded with useful information to implement when designing web applications.

Bill Scott’s podcast, Designing Interesting Moments: Live!, delves into one of the principles he covers in his talk: input where there’s output. He gives us great examples of patterns and anti-patterns and how it effects the user’s interaction with the application.

Listen and learn more about Bill’s podcast, Designing for Interesting Moments: Live!

Stephen Anderson’s podcast, Designing Seductive Business Apps: Live!, looks at incorporating behavioral psychology into your design. He discusses three concepts: scarcity, set completion and the feedback loop and how it all plays into a user’s psyche and actions.

Listen and learn more about Stephen’s podcast, Designing for Seductive Business Apps: Live!.

Bill and Stephen cover a lot more material in their talks on the Tour. You still can hear them, plus 7 other Masters, at one of the two remaining Tour stops taking place on both sides of the US, Philadelphia or Seattle. Explore the whole program at www.UIETour.com.

Until May 31, register for Philadelphia or Seattle and get $100 off when you use the promotion code TOURBLOG. Learn more about the tour at www.UIETour.com

Luke Wroblewski did a great job capturing the essence of Jason’s presentation, Backstage at 37signals. In addition to Jason’s session, he also blogged many of the other Masters’ presentations in Minneapolis. You can read these posts on his site, LukeW.com.

Now, on to Luke’s post.

At the UIE Web App Masters Tour in Minneapolis MN, 37signals founder, Jason Fried described how 37signals solves design problems and collaborates by showing four days worth of chat transcripts about an ongoing redesign project at the company.

• The overview screen in the 37signals application Basecamp has been around for four years. 37signals tried to redesign it once and got a lot of pushback from their users, so they pulled back. That was quite uncharacteristic for them, so Jason hopes they never need to do that again.
• Before deciding to redesign the Basecamp overview screen, 37signals gathered feedback from a survey over a couple months. In the survey, people said they do not have a good feel for what is going on in their projects. When looking at customer surveys, 37signals does not implement product ideas from users but instead tries to get an understanding of the problems people are having.
• The current Basecamp overview page is a listing of what happened on a project per day. Everything is organized by day: to-dos, comments, files upload, etc. It’s all useful data but it is hard to get a sense of what happened in a summary view. Things are grouped by time and not type. This was the impetus for the redesign and all the direction the team was given to get started.

Insights from the 37signals Process

• 37signals does not use documentation, schematics, or traditional user testing. They try to design the real thing right away and iterate until they get what they want.
• It’s important for a manager or creative director to know what is important at any given time. Up front, you need to provide feedback on the big picture not on the details. Once you are going in the right direction, then it is time to focus on the details.
• It’s very easy to get stuck on things that don’t matter. Don’t do it. Try to get the big picture ideas in place first then work through the rest.
• Instead of talking too much about feedback, one of the best ways to respond to a design is with another design. This response could just be a simple sketch. Working back and forth with pictures helps to remove misinterpretation. If you spend too much time talking about something, you need an image to ground the conversation.
• When you redesign something, you don’t have to change everything. What is the least amount you can change in a design to have the biggest effective difference? Look for small but impactful changes.
• Typically, 37signals does not try to change 15-20 things at once. They make one change and upload a new screen shot to discuss. This allows them to control everything but the one thing they are changing. When you make multiple changes at a time, it is hard to see what worked and what didn’t. Better to go one thing at a time. When people go away for a week and work on stuff that does not matter, that’s time lost.
• Don’t base the design on something you can’t do. If you can’t build something now –remove it from the design.
• Always try to use real information in your designs. Use real numbers, data, and names so you can think through the way a design will support actual content. A variety of data can help work through potential issues.
• At first you are in the excited phase with a new design. But then you get used to it and start to look at it critically again. This is ok –it helps bring up additional issues.
  If you build things for other people, you are judging everything by proxy. “will other people like this?”. Solving your own problems allows you to effectively judge them. Design for yourself if you can.
• 37signals prefers to kick off projects with loose requirements because they are not smart enough to know exactly how things will go. Allowing the project to evolve yields more insights as things progress.
• 37signals currently has 3 teams: 2 programmers, 1 designer. Each team breaks up and reforms every two months. They always divide work into two week increments. Even big initiatives can be broken down into smaller tasks.

Jason Fried is just one of the Masters at the upcoming Web App Masters Tour in Philadelphia and Seattle. Learn more about the Tour program and dates at www.UIETour.com.

Until May 11, register for Philadelphia or Seattle and get $100 off when you use the promotion code TOURBLOG. Learn more about the tour at www.UIETour.com

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

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

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

Thanks to Luke (by the way he’s also one of the Masters) we’re republishing his blog posts on the Web App Masters Tour. Besides providing excellent summaries of our Tour, his blog has some great posts that are worth exploring. Be sure to check out his writing.

This first summary is on Stephen Anderson’s talk; Designing Seductive Business Apps. His talk was interactive, fun, engaging, and educational. You can still catch Stephen’s talk at the Web App Masters Tour in Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and Seattle. Look for a special promotion code at the end of this post for a discount. Learn more about the Tour at www.UIETour.com.

And now, here’s Luke’s summary.

Stephen Anderson’s Serious Play: Designing Seductive Business Apps talk at the Web App Masters Tour in San Diego, CA outlined how principles from psychology could be used to motivate Web application users.

• Seduction: the process of deliberately enticing a person to engage in some sort of behavior
• What motivates people to change their behaviors? Increasing motivation = psychology. Removing friction = usability
• People react to game mechanics within Web apps (badges, points, etc.) as skeptics, cynics, or enthusiasts. But why do they work?
• Motivating human behaviors through psychology is timeless. When the points system may become old and tired but core psychological motivators will still matter.
• Putting psychology principles into action… First, Second, translate problems into behaviors to change. Third, decide what things might encourage that behavior

Examples of Psychological Motivators

• Fun: can change behavior for the better (examples at thefuntheory.com)
• Scarcity: we infer value in something that has limited availability or is promoted as being scarce. When you see supplies are low, you are encouraged to take action. Examples: limited tickets left, limited amount of points to allocate, limit amount of characters, etc. The more of an incomplete picture you see, the more you want to see the rest of the image.
• Set completion: desire to compile a complete set of items.
  Ownership bias: want to ensure representations of you are accurate.
  Social proof: people tend to follow the lead of others when they don’t know what they should do.
• Recognition over recall: do not ask to recall things, let people recognize through visual presentations.
• These principles are going to be available as a card set of 50 insights that can be used as an easy reference and brainstorming tool. Each card describes one insight into human behavior and suggests ways to apply this to the design of Web sites, Web apps, and software applications. Learn more at Get Mental Notes

Examples on Web Apps

• LinkedIn profile completeness meter: gives you indicator of what you can do to get complete. Works because of levels, challenges, and our innate need for completeness –psychology drives the interaction.
• Foursquare is a location check-in service. You earn points, mayorships, and badges on Foursquare for getting out and discovering places. These game mechanics are in place on many sites like Stackflow, Foodspotting, and the 160 (for music).
• Collecting (badges), ownership bias & lose aversion (mayorships), feedback loops (immediate response for doing things –points), curiosity (when do you get badges & why), status (leaderboards are a sign of status), variable rewards (unsure when things will be given to you), and limited duration.
• In Cubeless you need to gather points to unlock ability to add photos, etc. 60-70% of Sabre employees use Social Q&A system. 60% of questions are answered within one hour, each question receives an average of 9 answers. Status, feedback loops, privileges, limited duration, and reciprocity are all in use on Cubeless.
• Game mechanics can help train people on software. Palm Pilot had a game called Giraffe –which worked like Space Invaders but with graffiti characters. Had to write correct characters as they fell. Microsoft released an app called Ribbon hero. You score points for using Word and play challenges that help you learn new skills. The system has hints to help you get points.

More on Seductive Interactions

Want to learn more on seductive interactions? Listen to an interview with Stephen that Jared Spool did back in January. You can also hear him in-person at the Web App Masters Tour in Minneapolis, Philadelphia, or Seattle. Until April 19, you can register for any of the Tour cities for $795 when you use the promotion code TOURBLOG. Learn more about the tour at www.UIETour.com

But when it comes to prototyping tools and methods to use, many of us are unsure what to do.

There’s lots of tools to choose from. It’s often a mystery as to which one will work best for you and what’s best to use based on your situation. That’s where Todd Zaki Warfel comes in (cue the Superman music).

Todd is a thought leader in the user experience design world, as well as the author of the acclaimed book, Prototyping: A Practitioner’s Guide. Thanks to Todd and his publisher Rosenfeld Media, today’s UIETips article is a reprint of chapter 5, Picking the Right Tool, from his book.

In this article, Todd explores what tools people are using and  what kinds of prototypes they make. I’m sure you’ll find this book excerpt of great interest.

Read the article, Prototyping: Picking the Right Tool.

On March 31, 2010, Todd is presenting the next UIE Virtual Seminar on his Eight Guiding Principles for prototyping. Whether you’re just starting with prototyping, or you’re a seasoned veteran, I’m sure you’ll get a lot out of this webinar. And when you register, thanks to Todd and Lou you’ll be sent a pdf copy of Todd’s entire book. Learn more about it Todd’s seminar, A Practitioner’s Guide to Prototyping.

What tools do you use for prototyping? We’d love to hear your experiences below.

Our favorite taxonomy and category expert, Stephanie Lemieux, has spent the last few years integrating folksonomies into several large-scale web sites. In our next UIE Virtual Seminar—Tagging with Folksonomies in a Taxonomy World—she’ll share her experiences, showing us what works and what to avoid, when you integrate folksonomies into your taxonomy and category design process.

Implementing tagging won’t replace your site’s taxonomy. Instead, a well-integrated folksonomy can create a synergy that makes a site’s vast content more findable. Stephanie will walk you through several proven implementation strategies for public-facing web sites, behind-the-firewall enterprise systems, and intranets.

Did you miss the webinar on Taxonomy that Stephanie did with Seth Early in 2009? Register for our next webinar with the promotion code BRAINSPARKS, and we’ll send you the link to that recording.

How do you classify your information? When your users have added their tags, what challenges did that create for you? We’d love to hear what you’ve learned and what questions you still have.

If you’re not familiar with it, Robert and I do a little podcast show we call Userability. You ask us a question. We give you an answer. Occasionally, we give you a good answer. Sometimes, we (and by “we” I mean Robert) gives you the right answer.

It’s time to get more questions. If you’d like to be on our show, just enter your question here or send us an email to userability@uie.com. We’ll select the most entertaining and interesting questions, then set up a time to record the answers.

When you kick off a project right, everything is much easier. When that doesn’t happen, the team pays the price. We’ve all seen projects where, part way in, a well-intentioned executive derailed the team by changing the direction. To prevent this, we want to put everyone with the power to take the project off course, on to the same course.

Tamara Adlin has developed a great technique to make that alignment happen, which she calls Ad Hoc Personas. Her method, borrowed from research-based personas, creates characters out of information the organization already has at their fingertips. They’re inexpensive and easy to create, ensuring a customer focus from the very start of the project.

Register for this seminar before February 11, and we’ll automatically send you another great webinar recording, Making Personas Work for Your Web Site, with Steve Mulder. (Look for it in your confirmation email.)

Ever had a project de-railed after you’ve already started? How do you get everyone customer-focused and on the same page before you begin? Share you stories below.

Icons and images are being used more today than ever before to aid people in finding information. How can you employ these in design to maximum effect? How will you know if you’ve succeeded?

This UIE Virtual Seminar will address Patrick Hofmann’s most recent usability research and visual design projects to answer these questions.  Want to learn more, see Patrick’s preview, or register?

Why Patrick Hofmann?  We’re huge fans of Patrick and you’ll quickly see why. If you have heard Patrick present, or if you joined us for last Fall’s popular webinar on The Essentials of Visual Design, you know he has a passion for removing words from interfaces and replacing them with pictures.

If you’re wondering how to elevate your visual design, join us, as Patrick shares his findings and ideas for effective use of icons and images.

How do you decide where and when to use icons and images?  What stories do you have to share, successes or struggles?  Get the conversation started by adding your experiences below.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Content is What Makes UI14 Unique

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

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

Good Design Faster: New Techniques for Creative Ideas

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

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

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

Fast Prototyping Made Easy

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

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

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

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

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

We hope to see you in Boston!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Web Anatomy: Introducing Interaction Design Frameworks

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is sign-up part of your design? How do you engage users long enough to motivate them to take that precarious step of giving you information? What methods do you use to assure them that signing up on your site will provide them true value? And is that enough?

Next week, we’ll explore the issues of sign-up and user motivation with Joshua Porter. In the December 11 UIE Virtual seminar, Designing for Sign-up, Josh will describe the steps you can use to create the motivation for them to care about your product, using techniques employed by successful sites, such as Netflix, TripIt, and BlinkSale.

You’ll want to attend this critically important seminar if your team struggles with enticing your users to take the next step in long-term engagement, whether it’s subscribing , purchasing , or joining your offering. If your organization needs to implement a strategy that overcomes the customer’s natural resistance and engages them with your products and services, you won’t want to miss this presentation.

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

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

In advance of the presentation, we’d love to hear from you. What tips and tricks can you share to make sign-up a successful aspect of others’ sites? What challenges has your team faced and what did you do to overcome them? We’d love to hear from you.

[If you haven't signed up for the UIE Virtual Seminar on September 24, there's still room. Sign up today.]

In the preview, I share the four sites we’ll look at in the seminar. Watch the seminar and pick the sites you want to critique. (You’ll want to plan to spend between 15 to 30 minutes exploring each site, then another 15 minutes writing up your thoughts on them. So, if you only have 45 minutes, just pick one site. If you can spare more time, choose accordingly.)

The four sites we’ll look at are:

• NASA
• Management Sciences for Health
• The Hospital & Healthsystem Association of Pennsylvania
• Home Shopping Network

In the preview, I explain what we’ll be critiquing on each site. Doing your own critique is optional, but it’s the best way to get the most out of the seminar. If you’re watching the seminar with your colleagues, there are two approaches: you could each critique a different site, so that you get coverage. Or you can each critique the same site and compare amongst yourselves.

See you at the seminar next week. It’s going to be fun!

Under the guise of making this study as valuable as possible, these teams make the novice mistake of trying to do too much. Their ambitious approach puts the project in jeopardy. A failed usability study can send a message through the organization that the technique is too expensive and difficult to do well.

In this week’s article for our email newsletter, I talk about a team who wants to evaluate a bunch of design prototypes with their first test, resulting in far more work than they originally realized. Instead, I propose a counter-intuitive way for them to get the necessary feedback without having users compare each alternative.

You can read my article here.

Have you needed to evaluate multiple designs with limited time and budget? What would you have proposed for our clients?

Managing usability studies on a shoestring budget is just one of the great full-day topics we’ll have at the User Interface 13 Conference, this October 13-16, in Cambridge, MA. If you register by Tuesday, May 20, you’ll get a great registration price and a Flip Ultra Video Camera. See UI13 Conference site for more information.

One method employed by many of the teams we’ve talked with is to have a framework to guide their design decisions. Each team developed their own framework, starting with their philosophies about design and then filled in with specifics, often from their own experience. For example, having received complaints that first-time users were struggling with an efficiency optimized command structure, the team made sure to consider infrequent usage in their design framework.

In today’s UIEtips, we provide Part II of the Seven Critical Considerations for Designing Effective Applications. I wrote this article by combining the essence of the frameworks we’ve seen in our tours of the best design teams, with the intent that your team could use it as a starting place for your own framework.

Read the second part of my article here.

What considerations do you look for when creating your designs? Are there experiences you’ve had that now influence your future work? We’d love to hear from you. Leave your thoughts below.

[Critical design considerations are just part of what we'll be talking about at the upcoming Web App Summit, March 26-28, 2008 in San Diego, CA. You can be part of that event and receive your limited edition Web App Summit iPod nano by registering before 12/11. More details here.]

I’ve been nominated to the Association for Computing Machinery’s Distinguished Speakers Program.

They’ve contacted me and asked for references.

If you think I’d be a good addition to their program, please feel free to send Lauren AT hq.acm.org an email saying so.

Thanks!

Scott is the best selling author of The Art of Project Management, and recently published his new book, The Myths of Innovation. In The Myths of Innovation, Scott examines the history of innovation and reveals how ideas truly become successful innovations-truths that people can apply to today’s challenges.

In the interview, Scott discusses the road to innovation, whether innovators are born or made, the challenges innovators face, and why the best ideas don’t often “win.”

Question: Is progress towards innovation made in a straight line? For example, transistor to chip to personal computer to web to MySpace.

Answer: Most people want history to explain how we got here, not to teach them how to change the future. To serve that end, popular histories are told in heroic, logical narratives: they made a transistor, which led to the chip, which create the possibility for the PC, and on it goes forever. But of course if you asked William Shockey (transistor) or Steve Wozniak (PC) how obvious their ideas and successes were, you’ll hear very different stories about chaos, uncertainty and feeling the odds were against them.

If we believe things are uncertain for innovators in the present, we have to remember things were just as uncertain for people in the past. That’s a big goal of the book: to use amazing tales of innovation history as tools for those trying to do it now.

Question: Why don’t the best ideas win?

Answer: One reason is because the best idea doesn’t exist. Depending on your point of view, there’s a different best idea or best choice for a particular problem. I’m certain that the guys who made telegraphs didn’t think the telephone was all that good an idea, but it ended their livelihood. So many stories of progress gone wrong are about arrogance of perception: what one person thinks is the right path—often the path most profitable to them— isn’t what another, more influential group of people thought.

I think you’ll definitely find this interview interesting if you see innovation as central to you work, or if you’re managing or leading any kind of creative projects.

You can read the entire interview here: Ten Questions with Scott Berkun, Author of “The Myths of Innovation”

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.