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For our tenth show we bring you a special edition of the Userability Podcast… recorded LIVE from the Voices That Matter 2009 Conference, held in San Francisco in April.

We had two audience questions. The first question asked, are there are any applications or research best practices that Jared and Robert use to aid in persona creation?

The second audience question asked about the the usability of iPhone applications, especially considering that on-the-go, handheld, touchscreen apps are a relatively new concept.

Tune in to hear Jared and Robert duck and dive in front of a live studio audience.

Have a serious UX question? Send it in and Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr. will answer it with a healthy dose of levity. Please send your deep, vexing questions to us at userability@uie.com. We’d love to feature you on the show!

Do you have any persona tricks and tips? What’s your take on the “new” territory of iPhone apps? Is it new territory? Let us know in the comments!

PS— During the show, Robert referenced Apple’s iPhone/mobile Human Interface Guidelines, which are fully available from Apple.

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This week’s episode features a compelling question from Will Evans. Usually, this is the point in the post where I say something witty, but this is a question we hear so much, I will cut right to the chase!

Will asked,

When you are creating a web application or website, and you are ready to unleash it to the world, at what point can you say that it is “Usable Enough?”

Tune in for one of the most in-depth Userability Podcasts yet, as Jared and Robert give you advice on how to find that “good enough… launch!” point.

Have a serious UX question? Send it in and Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr. will answer it with a healthy dose of levity. Please send your deep, vexing questions to us at userability@uie.com. We’d love to feature you on the show! Till then, if your’re in a situation like Will, let us know how you would handle it in the comments!

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The audio was recorded at An Event Apart Seattle 2009. The session description was as follows:

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

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

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

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

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Robert Hoekman, Jr. recently joined us for a Virtual Seminar on Interaction Design Frameworks, called, Web Anatomy: Interaction Design with Frameworks. The concept is a new one, and Robert and I are exploring and introducing the concept in new book due out shortly. The seminar (which is still available) was well-received, and we asked Robert back to help us answer some audience questions we did not have time to discuss during the seminar.

Here’s the list of the questions we discussed,

• Do you see being able to abstract information architecture into set frameworks?
• Should design patterns really be referred to as production patterns that fit within creative frameworks?
• Are you basing design patterns on generally accepted Web standards or what’s standard within the uses of the business?
• If you’re assembling a site with anatomical framework pieces, how do you avoid building a Frankenstein?
• Is there any relationship between an IxD framework, and a UI framework like jQuery?
• If everything is encapsulated and solved with an Interaction Design framework… will there be less need for Interaction designers in the future and more need for visual designers to differentiate?

Tune in and see how Robert thinks frameworks could make your job noticeably easier and perhaps even more interesting. If you still have questions, let us know in the comments.

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This week’s episode features a shadowy UI Designer by the name of Jamis Charles, from a secretive organization located somewhere in Texas. Honestly, that’s all we know about him. Cloak and daggers aside, he brought an intriguing challenge to the show.

Jamis, if that is his real name, asked,

Should link treatments vary for different methods of displaying content to the user? For example, on a single page I have several links. The first one takes me to another page when I click. The second shows a hidden layer with more content if I click. The third shows more content if I hover.

If these links should be styled differently, should the treatments be organized by type of content, or by the user interaction method?

Tune in to see how our hosts answer this challenge while our guest and his project maintain their anonymity. And to hear Robert wax nostalgic for a steak he once ate in Texas.

Have a serious UX question? Send it in and Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr. will answer it with a healthy dose of levity. Please send your deep, vexing questions to us at userability@uie.com. We’d love to feature you on the show! Till then, if your’re in a situation like Jamis, let us know how you would handle it in the comments!

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Last week we held a UIE Virtual Seminar with Seth Earley and Stephanie Lemieux of Earley & Associates, a premier builder of industrial-strength taxonomies for organizations large and small. 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 Seth and Stephanie to record this podcast and cover a number of those remaining questions.

If you didn’t attend the live seminar, and are interested in taxonomies, then you’ll still enjoy this podcast. If you find yourself wanting more afterwards, don’t forget you can still purchase a recording of the session for another 90 minutes of taxonomy know-how.

During the podcast, I asked Seth and Stephanie to dig into these questions:

• What are “business drivers” and how do they relate to building a taxonomy?
• In the development of taxonomies, how do you avoid being bogged down in an organization’s structure and keep focused from a navigational vantage point?
• Do you use Personas to help develop your taxonomies? Why? How?
• How early do you integrate usability testing in the development process?
• We had many questions about Earley’s experience working with a global enterprise taxonomy system that they developed for Motorola. Stephanie discussed that process.
• How should you think about long term curation of your taxonomy?
• …and more

Tune in to get some tips on how to tune up your taxonomy. Still have questions? Start the discussion in our comments, below.

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This week’s episode features a surprise in-studio guest, Dana Chisnell of Usability Works. Dana is a usability consultant who pairs up with design teams on a regular basis, all around the U.S. She brought a relationship question to the show… apparently she had us confused with Loveline. (No Dr. Drew here!)

Dana asked,

When I work with design teams, there’s often a lot of competition for who on the team can spend the least amount of time working with the usability geek (me). What can I do, what do I have to do to court favor with the team to let them know that I’m not just an enforcer, but I’m on their side and that we can learn from one another? It’s usually a long-distance situation, where the design team is in one place, geographically (and perhaps spiritually, mentally, etc.), and I’m in another.

Tune in to see how our hosts answer this one without resulting to flowers and chocolate! (Though, those might not hurt anything.)

Have a serious UX question? Send it in and Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr. will answer it with a healthy dose of levity. Please send your deep, vexing questions to us at userability@uie.com. We’d love to feature you on the show! Till then, if your’re in a situation like Dana’s, let us know how you handle it in the comments!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Hagan Rivers is one of our favorite go-to people for web app design, and we recently had her host a UIE Virtual Seminar on Designing Better Navigation for Web Applications. The seminar (which is still available) was brilliant, and we asked her back to answer some audience questions we did not have time to discuss during the seminar.

Here’s the list of the questions we discussed,

• How do you conduct your user research?
• How do you measure user confidence in the navigation?
• What are your thoughts on activating menus with a click versus “on hover”?
• What is your opinion on breadcrumbs? What about advanced breadcrumbs, like on lonelyplanet.com?
• How do you scale navigation for larger web apps or sites (circa 40,000 pages)?
• What are your thoughts on user segmentation, and navigation based on that (for example, UT’s Be A Longhorn)?
• At what point during the project do you design the global navigation?
• Are there different considerations when you’re educating users about a new process or activity?

During our discussion of the user research question, we recommended Indi Young’s Mental Models as a great book on the topic. Don’t miss her UIE Virtual Seminar on Mental Models, either.

Tune in for the meaty answers. This podcast had almost as much information as the seminar! Still have questions? Discuss them in the comments below!

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This week Robert Hoekman, Jr. joins us to discuss Design Frameworks. Drawn loosely from the idea of coding frameworks that software developers use to more efficiently build software, design frameworks are an aid to assembling a design.

Frameworks sprung from research into web ROI that Robert conducted after a parade of clients came to him looking to improve their conversion rates. In the case of these clients, he needed to find the essential elements that encourage people to sign up for a web app.

From there, he applied that process to other areas, like search elements. What combination of essential design elements had to be assembled for users to successfully obtain their goals?

You can compare frameworks to design patterns, although patterns tend to be smaller, more specific solutions. Frameworks, when built out, can contain design patterns. Robert wrote a five-piece blog post series for Peachpit on his development of a sign-up a framework, called Five Tips in Five Days. Robert will detail the full story in a new book, co-authored with me, coming soon from New Riders.

Frameworks help create consistency in interface elements to help solidify the UX. Robert uses frameworks on all his current projects. He starts out with a check list of all the main elements what will help a person accomplish a goal. Projects will require frameworks for many different parts of the project and they need to dovetail with one another. Robert shared with us a story of what happens when they do not. It winds up that examining where frameworks clash can act as a diagnostic tool for some usability issues.

Tune into to the podcast for more details and a preview of the full-day workshop the Robert will be conducting at the UIE Web App Summit, entitled Web App Anatomy: Effective Interaction Design with Frameworks. We hope you join us April 19-22, 2009 in sunny Newport Beach to learn more about this useful new design method.

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This week’s episode features a surprise guest for Jared and Robert. Actually, every guest is a surprise, but this one is a surprise and an ambush by a friend of UIE, the always entertaining Scott Berkun. Scott wanted to know, what gives?

Don Norman’s seminal, The Design of Everyday Things, is approaching it’s 20th year in print. It explained why so many basic things in life are poorly designed and hard to use, such as pull handles on doors that need to be pushed. Since the world has been aware of these design flaws for two decades, why are so many basic usability failures still around?

Listen in to hear if Robert and Jared’s answer is what you would’ve said. Would you have answered differently? Leave a comment below.

Have a serious UX question? Send it in and Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr. will answer it with a healthy dose of levity. Please send your deep, vexing questions to us at userability@uie.com. We’d love to feature you on the show! Till then, if you think you know why so many usability failures remain, let us know in the comments!

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Userability is back with another episode. Have a serious UX question? Send it in and Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr. will answer it with a healthy dose of levity. Please send your deep, vexing questions to us at userability@uie.com. We’d love you to feature you on the show!

This week, we spoke to Miles Dowsett from Cambridge, UK who is straddling the worlds of desktop and web-based applications. He wanted to know,

What do you think is the most important or significant UX deliverable/activity in a web project, and why?

Tune in to hear Jared and Robert lock horns on their different approaches on must-have UX techniques… and leave your suggestions here, in the comments!

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This week we are happy to share with you a followup podcast to our recent Virtual Seminar with Jeff Patton, one of the world’s foremost teachers and consultants on the agile development process. If you missed the seminar, don’t worry, if you’re interested in agile, there’s plenty here for you too.

During the seminar we received, as usual, more questions than we had time to answer. So Jeff and I discussed them here. Our first question asked about the international nature of agile. Jeff noted while the ideas of agile were founded in the U.S. there’s a great deal of momentum and excitement for the process in Europe and Asia, as well.

A question was raised about the use of low-fidelity prototypes within the agile process. Jeff prescribes to the value of paper prototyping and is a fan of UIE-alum Carolyn Synder’s work in the field. Jeff believes that paper prototyping fits well within the process and says it’s worth the work to convince doubters who may not immediately see the value. He also brought up the use of testing those early prototypes on just about anyone, even if they aren’t your ideal user. It’s better to test on someone than no one, and in between your regularly planned tests with your targeted audience, short sessions with most folks will still yield important, and fast feedback.

Jeff and I discussed many more things including,

• RITE and introducing design concepts to developers
• The role of iterations in refining current work and how to move forward developing new components
• The emerging confluence of UI design patterns and the agile methodology
• The prioritization of quality in the agile process and your organization as a whole
• Converging UX and agile: upcoming agile conferences, and is Alan Cooper coming around to agile?

During the podcast, we mentioned these two links:

Salesforce’s Postcard Patterns - An Agile UI Pattern Creation Process, a presentation from IxDA ‘09, and

Agile Usability: Best Practices for User Experience on Agile Development Projects a 95 page PDF report.

Jeff is a wonderful explainer in the Q&A format and I think you’ll learn a lot from our conversation. You’re welcome to leave your questions in the comments below, as well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Userability is the show that answers your vexing UX questions with irreverence and useful advice. Remember, Userability is 100% Soylent, which means it’s made of people—Err—people’s questions. Please send your deep thoughts to us at userability@uie.com.

This week we continue the international flare with a call from Shanghai, China. Daniel Szuc, of ApogeeHK had a question that stopped Jared and Robert in their tracks,

If there was ONE thing you would want an organization to take on board immediately to help UX in that organization, what would it be and why?

Tune in to hear what Robert and Jared would tell your executives if pressed. How would you have answered? Let us know in the comments!

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Yes, if you do it right, using Ajax techniques can improve accessibility. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Ajax is like most techniques and technologies on the web—they are what you make of them.

I had a chance to talk with Derek Featherstone, a world renown expert on web accessibility and principal of Further Ahead, a consulting firm out of Ottawa, Ontario that helps their clients get the most out of their web site designs.

In the podcast, Derek tells us that we first need to know how to think about Ajax as a design tool. Today’s toolkits (such as jQuery) can really help designers build functional prototypes to demonstrate their interaction concepts to developers, who will then integrate their ideas into the production system. Taking advantage of the many available libraries gives you a sandbox for trying out interactions without having to know the best practices for implementing the code.

Derek also discussed common misconceptions about Ajax. He said that, while implementing Ajax that aids accessibility has its challenges, it’s within the technical reach of most developers.

I was glad when he reminded me that many interactions that improve experiences for people with special needs also improve the experience of average users. Techniques like managing large data sets on one page through Ajax-powered content updates can also help users with special needs by maintaining context which is normally degraded by full-page refreshes.

As always, I found Derek’s insights fascinating and I bet you will too.

[In case you hadn't heard, this year we asked Derek to build a brand-new, full-day seminar just for UIE's Web App Summit. His session, Designing Great Interactive Experiences for Everyone: Implementing Ajax and Accessibility will unleash a torrent of information about integrating Ajax best practices into your design workflow.

For people who are new to Ajax, he'll define the technologies and techniques involved, and describe what they're really good for and what they are not. For those who are using Ajax currently, Derek will delve into where to get your biggest wins with these interactions and what the best practices are for enhancing accessibility with Ajax. It's going to be a great session from one of our best-rated presenters. You won't want to miss it.]

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This week’s episode demonstrates the lengths that people will go to be a part of the Userability Podcast. Or, at least how far their Skype connection will go; a bit over 10,000 miles (16,400km) in this case! We were joined by Keith Lang, co-founder of Plasq, makers of Skitch all the way from Canberra, Australia. He blogs at UI&us.

Keith offered this question,

All of us UI designers spend a lot of time with computers and become blind to certain problems. What would you say are the most common UIs, or processes, that confuse or impede the average computer-user?

For example, I notice many people having problems paying attention to dialogue boxes, and recalling what they said. They just click OK, even on ones with brief text–sometimes with bad results.

Tune in to hear what Jared and Robert thought.

We’re always looking for guests to stump Jared and Robert. Send us an email at userability@uie.com with your burning design-related questions.

What do you have to add to Robert and Jared’s list? What do you see confusing users? Let us know in the comments!

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We’re back again this week with more savvy and silliness from the world of Userability. But first we’d like to thank you for making our first show such a success, we’ve had a ton of downloads. Have you told your friends about the show yet?

This week the guys spoke with Jon Hartmann of Morgantown, West Virginia. Jon asked Jared and Robert,

I’m a web developer (programming), not a web designer (graphics), but I love analytics and designing user interfaces. How do I make the career jump from coding to interface design and usability?

Tune in to find out if Jared and Robert can help Jon make the jump. As a free bonus, you’ll also learn where to find coffee in West Virginia.

We’re always looking for guests to stump Jared and Robert. Send us an email at userability@uie.com with your burning design-related questions.

What’s your two cents on the advice Robert and Jared gave today? Let us know in the comments!

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When I tell people that one of our most popular conference sessions of all-time is about Web Form Design, people think I’m pulling their leg. Those people, of course, haven’t actually attended a workshop conducted by Luke Wroblewski.

Luke Wroblewski is a Senior Principal of Product Ideation & Design for Yahoo and has his own shop, LukeW Interface Designs. He is the author of two books, the new top seller Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks and the popular Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability.

Since writing a popular book on the subject, Luke has found himself inundated with questions tall and small about form design problems. He shared his two most asked questions (and answers) with me.

How many pages should my complex form be?
Of course, there’s no easy answer to this question. A key point to consider when resolving this challenge is context. If you met the person filling out your form in person, how would you ask them these questions? That will help you arrange the questions, and if you find natural groupings for many questions, these may be natural pagination points. If they don’t naturally break, perhaps that’s an argument for one long page.

Luke discussed Matthew Frederick’s 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School at this point in the conversation. He was particularly interested in the concept of parti.

Dynamic Forms, are they a good idea?
Forms where the site assists the user, when done well, can really help relieve stress on your user. A classic example of this is choosing a screen name for an account. No one wants to pick a name, password and hit submit, only to be told it’s not available and bounced back to the first form, with all the fields emptied to start from scratch… and still not knowing if the next name they choose will work! Live database queries for items like these can be a godsend. Additionally, language presented during these rich interactions presents the opportunity for a pleasant human interaction.

Good examples for dynamic interactions with forms can be found in the search box of Apple.com and the signup form for Jeremy Keith’s Huffduffer.com

Luke will be presenting his popular full-day workshop Web Application Form Design at our Web App Summit, this April, 2009 in Newport Beach, California. Why not come see what all the excitement is about?

Web forms have you down? You can always take comfort in the comments below… if you can endure our form.

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Friends, I’d like to introduce you to our newest creation, the Userability Podcast. No, I didn’t mistype that. As we’ve mentioned previously, each week I’ll pick a caller to ask a UX question of experts Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr., who will do their best to find a good answer. The catch is, I’m not telling Robert and Jared what to expect… they have to answer you on the spot.

Today we’re releasing our pilot episode, with guest Rob Fay, who called in from Washington, D.C. with a great question. Rob asked,

I work for an e-learning company. We have a grading feature in our product that gives teachers the ability to grade an assignment by applying a grade to a gradebook. When we designed this, because of time constraints, we only focused on a few “grading” use cases and we only came up with a few design ideas. I wish we had brainstormed more. How can I influence my team’s culture to value design exploration, even within our current constraints?

Tune in to see if Robert and Jared can answer coherently! That’s the format of our little show: one caller, one question, a handful of useful takeaways, and hopefully some fun through out.

We need your questions. Submit your real-life design conundrums at userability@uie.com.

Give it a listen, and let us know what you think of the new show in the comments!

Dealing with real-life web app production isn’t as glamorous as some aspects of design in the digital realm, but it is full of challenges and can honestly make or break a project. There are ways of truly optimizing certain aspects of the production so that you can create a product with consistent quality at a faster pace. To find out how, I turned to Nathan Curtis.

Nathan Curtis is a principal and co-founder of Eight Shapes in Washington, D.C., where he is spearheading research into design patterns and component libraries. Eight Shapes turns out great work in the UX and IA realms, with some impressive clients.

In our discussion, Nathan and I first defined design pattern libraries and component libraries. A pattern library is a repository for ideas and solutions to design interaction problems. Component libraries are comprised of actual functioning parts with real code. An example would be a log-in process. Your pattern would define the experience of logging into your application, from the interaction, and often visual standpoint. Your component would be the chunk of code that represents the set of fields and controls that can be replicated across your organization’s web properties, so that you can easily create a consistent experience for your users, no matter where they may enter your system.

You can see just from this one example that if you’re designing even a moderately large site, having repositories like these can save you tremendous production time. You can multiply those savings if you have multiple teams working on different portions of the same property. Each team doesn’t need to invent their own wheels and engineer them from scratch.

We go into more detail in the podcast and also compare these to style guides, which were the first step toward this idea—one that is too often broken, over restrictive, and simply ignored. Tune in to hear how pattern and component libraries can help you avoid these traps.

Nathan will teach us much more about how to build out your own library of reusable patterns and components in a full-day seminar at our Web App Summit, coming April 2009 to Newport Beach, California. You won’t want to miss it.

Have you employed a pattern or component library in your projects? What experiences can you share? Please let us know in the comments.

This week, our long time friend, Molly Holzschlag, joins us to discuss the cutting edge of web standards as they apply to web application development. Molly is the unsinkable author of a metric ton of web development books, is a noted teacher, and an in-demand consultant in the field. There’s likely no one better to ask about web standards than Molly.

There are a number of new standards that have come out recently, HTML 5 being perhaps the most notable for web applications, because it was brought forth with applications in mind. New features, like canvas, are designed to improve dynamic interactions between the presentation layer and the behavior layer, for example, with things like ECMAScript, more commonly known as JavaScript. JavaScript’s usage has really matured and become nearly indispensable as developers have really begun to exploit its full capabilities. JavaScript’s importance to front-end developers continues to grow.

In this podcast, Molly and I discussed the impact these and other advancements are having on web application design and development, along with the tremendous benefits building with standards (or even a subset of them) brings to the lifecycle of a product.

(During the episode, Molly and I touched upon the critical security exploit that effects all versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer for Windows. Please be careful out there, folks.)

If you found this podcast interesting, you’ll be happy to know that Molly will conduct a full-day workshop for web application developers on harnessing the power of web standards in their work at our Web App Summit in April 2009. Please join us and take your work to the next level!

We’re curious to see if any of our audience is venturing into the HTML 5 waters, or using other newish standards in their work. Won’t you let us hear your story in the comments?

We love to talk to Steve Mulder (from Molecular) and Riccardo La Rosa (from Isobar) about building out a Web 2.0 strategy and incorporating elements, such as social features and highly-interactive elements to the design.

Steve and Riccardo work with mainstream organizations, which may not be as familiar as, say, a Silicon Valley startup with what the state-of-the-art is for these types of features. In this interview, they told me about the solutions they worked on with Reebok (a sports apparel company) and HumanaOne (a direct-to-consumer health insurance company). We talked about the challenges they faced on these projects and what they needed to do to overcome them.

During the podcast, we discussed how to determine what features to build, how to tell if the features are working as expected, and how results changed over time. We talked about how starting small and iterating is most successful, but not an easy sell in many situations. You’ll want to listen to hear how they overcame this challenge and other Web 2.0 adventures they had.

Enjoy the podcast? Well, you can join Steve and Riccardo for their UIE Web App Summit full-day workshop, Web 2.0 Strategy and Design, and learn how to apply the elements of social media, openness, rich interfaces, and emerging digital interactions to your designs.

At the beginning of this month, we had Joshua Porter in the office to present his Design for Sign-up talk. Designing for sign-up should be simple, yet it’s often the most challenging area of your design. Josh had some great ideas on how to increase the ease of sign-up and how to motivate your users to want to.

We got back together with Josh to follow-up on the seminar so we could answer a number of viewer’s questions that we didn’t have time for in the seminar.

In this podcast, we discussed,

• Best practices for web form design
• Suggestions for user testing sign-up during the design phase
• Placement and design for sign-in forms
• The role of immediate engagement, delaying sign-up till after the user is engaged
• The 9× effect and it’s application and implications for sign-up
• Writing copy that encourages sign-up

There’s a lot of great stuff in this show. Even if you missed the live seminar, we think you’ll get a lot out of this interview with Josh.

In the podcast, Josh recommended reading this Harvard Business Review article, Eager Sellers and Stony Buyers by John T. Gourville

We’re interested in hearing your comments on sign up, feel free to discuss in the comments!

I think the 2009 UIE Web App Summit (April 19-22, Newport Beach, CA) has one of the best line ups of speakers we’ve ever had. We’ve spent the past six months hand-crafting this excellent program that’s all about planning, designing, and building web-based applications. We’re very excited about it and you should be too.

In this podcast, Brian and I discuss the Summit program details. You’ll hear about all four days of the conference — the great topics and why we chose this set of experts. You’ll get a great overview of the sessions and see, first hand, why we think it’s so exciting.

We’d love to see you in Newport Beach, CA this April. Listen and let us know what you think.

We recently had our friend Patrick Hofmann a designer with Google Australia in for a Virtual Seminar covering the Essentials of Effective Visual Design. His wealth of knowledge from his years of design and usability research into visual design provided an incredibly interesting and popular seminar.

As usual, we received many more excellent questions that we could deal with during the seminar, so we recorded this podcast.

In this episode, we discussed:

• A short summary of the main points of the seminar
• International issues regarding graphics and colors for different cultures
• The color and styling of hyperlinks
• Above the fold… is this important? How does it relate to the rule of thirds?
• How to deal with images that are too big to fit your page template
• What questions are most effective to ask a user after testing your images?
• How do you handle getting graphics approved across your organizations departments?
• Thoughts on images used for beauty’s sakes vs purely content images

In the podcast, we referenced a T-Shirt site that had an interesting technique to display larger images in line in galleries, the name of the site escaped us, but check out the technique at Zazzle.com.

If you missed our live seminar, a recording of Essentials of Effective Visual Design is available for viewing.

Are you doing anything to improve the impact and usability of your visual design? Share your experiences in the comments!

If you ask designers what the most frustrating parts about designing a project are, one of the top answers would undoubtedly be “communicating and documenting the design process.” And with good reason… it’s not easy.

That’s why I interviewed Dan Brown for this week’s SpoolCast. I don’t know of anyone who knows more about solid design communications than Dan, the co-founder and principal of Eight Shapes, a UX firm in Washington, D.C. Dan wrote the excellent book Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning, one of our favorite design resources.

In this interview, Dan and I explored the documents that help make large design projects go smoothly. We discussed how these important docs can become living documents (one that evolves when necessary) and how Dan believes there’s value in seeing them as actual team members. That may sound weird unless you think about large teams and the meetings. Sometimes, it’s easier to “ask the document” how something should work instead of figuring out who would be the best person to ask. At meetings, these documents can sit at the table and answer questions, as well!

Dan covers many types of documents in his book: content inventories, usability testing planning, usability testing results, and wireframes, just to name a few. In the podcast, we spent some time with two of the documents: concept models and flow charts. These particular documents are intriguing because they don’t cover concrete ideas (which are easier to document), but instead cover the higher-level abstract ideas that often power the site invisibly.

You can join Dan for his Web App Summit Full-day Workshop, “Communicating Design: Essential Deliverables for Highly Effective Design Teams” and learn to conquer the documents and deliverables which are critical to bringing your designs to life.

How are you using various documentation to keep your projects on track? Let’s hear your documentation questions in the comments. (Dan will monitor your comments and will use them to steer his Web App Summit workshop!)

Back in October we had the good fortune to host Dana Chisnell’s popular Virtual Seminar, The Quick, the Cheap, and the Insightful: Conducting Usability Tests in the Wild, where she told us you don’t have to run usability tests by the book to get great value out of them. Quite a statement considering she co-wrote the book: The Handbook of Usability Testing, Second Edition.

[If you missed the live seminar, you can purchase lifetime access, for you and your team, to the recording here.]

As happens frequently, seminar viewers sent in more excellent questions than we could answer during the session, so we sat down with Dana afterwards for a quick follow-up.

In the interview, Dana gave me great answers to these viewer questions:

• Is there a middle ground between “classic” testing and “quick and dirty” techniques?
• How many people do you need in these “wild” tests to create enough valuable data?
• How should you screen subjects?
• Should designers observe “wild” tests?
• How do you answer critics who claim quick and dirty testing is not scientific?
• What ethical issues are there with recording test subjects?
• Once you get this quick data, what are the next steps?

During the podcast, Dana & I talked about ways to analyze results and we mentioned the KJ Technique. This is a great way to get a team on the same page about the top priorities that emerge from testing. You can find more about the technique in this article.

Are you going rogue and conducting usability tests that aren’t “by the book”? Tell us your trials and tribulations in the comments!

This year, we thought we give our attendees a special UI13 advice podcast. The show covers getting to the conference, a brief overview of the conference agenda, and lots of tips for getting around the Boston metro.

If you’ve never been to the Boston-Cambridge area, it’s a wonderful place to visit. Plenty of history, sites to see and fun to be had. If you’re like me and light on traveling experience, I asked Jared for a bit of basic traveling advice. If you’re a road warrior like Jared, we have advice on getting around for you, as well. Plus, you’ll know where to eat drink and make merry.

If you’re a regular listener to our podcasts, you’ll notice we didn’t put this in our regular feed. We didn’t want non-attendees to become confused, perhaps think we’ve become a travel company or something.

Below you can listen to the podcast in the player (press the grey play button), or download and take it with you.

The UI13 Attendees Podcast — Direct Link to MP3 File

Not sure what sessions to attend at the User Interface 13 Conference this October? Or looking for more information on what each session covers and who the speakers are? Then we have the podcast for you. We’re so excited about the content and expert speakers at this year’s UI13, we decided to create a podcast to help make sense of everything.

I sat down with Brian Christiansen and we discussed, in detail, each speaker’s topic, and who the session is targeted for. Our goal with this podcast was to help our registered attendees decide which sessions they’d like to attend, and to give even more information to those who might still be on the fence on attending. (Of course, if you’re not able to attend, you’re still welcome to listen in and hear about the speakers and topics.)

In additon to the content and speaker information, we discussed the myriad of fun things to do in the Boston area when you’re not in session. Want tips on where to dine, see a museum, a band or take a tour? We’ve got your tips right here!

We’d love to know if this podcast was useful in selecting your sessions at UI13 or learning more about the conference. Please share your thoughts with us below.

(Don’t forget, you can find out much more about the conference at the User Interface 13 conference site.)

Have you ever thought about how many buttons should be on a mouse?

Bill Verplank has. Bill was part of the Xerox PARC team who was responsible for taking the mouse and many other computing paradigms from theory to indispensable.

I had a chance to speak with Bill about his time at PARC and all of his other influential work for this week’s podcast. If you’re interested in where many of today’s computing metaphors come from, or in design and computing history in general, this is the show for you.

Today’s usability, interaction design, and experience design disciplines have their roots in human factors engineering, which many, including Bill, trace back to the 1950s, when the U.S. government was investing heavily in cockpit design of jet fighters. It was upon that foundation, Bill studied design and engineering at Stanford and did his PhD. work at MIT in man-machine systems.

From there, he spent considerable time with Xerox PARC, working on some of the first office systems, including the Xerox Star, which was a major influence for both the Macintosh user interface and Microsoft Windows. Bill continues to trace his history through some of the most influential design agencies of our time, like IDEO, and winds up with a question of design education: what happens when engineers and artists meet and try to create something usable for humans? Bill is seeing important schools, like the Rhode Island School of Design and Carnegie Mellon University, experimenting with programs that put engineers and artists together. We also debated the impact and interpretation of experience design and its impact on various industries.

Our conversation ended with a preview of Bill’s Spotlight Plenary presentation at our UI Conference this fall. Bill is known for his mesmerizing talks where he sketches his points along with the talk. (At the conference, we’ll have a camera set up so you can watch him sketch as he talks!)

[If you'd like to see Bill Verplank's Design Metaphors Spotlight Plenary keynote in person, please join us at the User Interface Conference, this October in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]

Brian Christiansen and I recorded a special episode comprised entirely of questions from our customers. On August 14, we held the UIE Virtual Seminar - Galleries: The Hardest Working Pages on Your Site. During the seminar, we received far more questions than time would allow answering. As is tradition, we put together this follow-up podcast to answer even more of your excellent questions.

In this episode, we discussed:

• A review of Gallery pages and their connection to Scent
• How Gallery Pages are special, and a comparison to a Department page
• The role of Galleries in Intranet environments
• We dive into the use of “learn more” links with a little more depth
• Our observations about how users really “browse” the web
• Advice on coping with large numbers of links on Gallery pages, and what links belong there
• A preview of September’s Virtual Seminar on Critiquing

If you missed our live seminar, a recording of Galleries: The Hardest Working Pages on Your Site is available for viewing.

Still have questions or comments about gallery pages? Ask them in the comments below!

(Producer’s note: My apologies to the Discount Tire folks for calling you “Direct Tire” once in the episode. I got it right the second time, though!)

What is the difference between good and great interaction designers?

That is the subject matter for this week’s show, which features a compelling conversation with Kim Goodwin. Kim is the VP of Design and General Manager at Cooper, one of the world’s premier design consultancies, in San Francisco. She suggests that three traits of great designers include design judgment, communication skills, and the ability to observe people’s behavior and then design something that can give them a good experience.

Design judgment is the ability to know if your solution is good or not. Great designers have the ability to look at their own work with a critical eye, and implement outside suggestions that make their solutions better. Effective critique is essential.

• The teams at Cooper follow the fifteen minute rule—if you’re experiencing difficulty with a design for fifteen minutes, get another brain in on the solution.
• Critique early, critique often. Critiques test your solutions and challenge your assumptions.
• Being solo is tough. Don’t have the advantage of a design team? Kim suggests reading is huge supplier of continuous inspiration and education. Analyze well-designed products. Keep sharp by going out and meeting other designers.
• Good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment. Failure is part of the system. Failure is an experience imperative to growth.

Communication skills are incredibly important. Active listening skills are important for extracting the most information out of a conversation. Active listening takes practice.

• Listen thoughtfully and dig for the needs behind the words.
• Approach any situation with the axiom “I don’t know what I don’t know.”
• Don’t lock yourself into a solution until you’ve really soaked in the full scope of the problem. When ideas inevitably pop-up, sketch them out quickly, so you can capture the ideas and then clear them away so they don’t distract you from absorbing the total problem.

Be open to the world. Kim’s advice is to make no assumptions, go see the problems.

• Accept that you may not know the problem as well as you think you do.
• There are people that may already have the context and solutions. Explore them.
• Simply be curious about your environment. Designers have boundless curiosity.

Kim has even more thoughts in the podcast about concise communication, time management and collaboration skills, you’ll want to give it a listen.

You can hear Kim Goodwin present her workshop, The Essentials of Interaction Design at the User Interface 13 Conference in Cambridge, MA — October 13-16, 2008. She’ll cover fundamental skills like sketching, workflow, storyboarding; and explore innovative techniques to keep the ideas flowing and designers fresh.

How are you staying sharp and curious as a designer? Share your questions and experiences in the comments.

“We’re struggling with how to measure how well we are innovating […] Are we innovating better this year than last year? How would I know?”

If you work in a larger company and you haven’t heard a statement like this, you’re going to. Innovation has become such a buzzword, it’s nearly meaningless. But that doesn’t mean innovation itself is dead. In this week’s show, we sat down with Scott Berkun, the dynamic speaker and author of “The Myths of Innovation.”

Innovation is critical, but it’s not being defined for those folks challenged with implementing it. Innovation is hard work. Scott asks that we face facts here; to find big, new ideas that will change things for the better will never be easy.

OK, how do we innovate? Scott suggests that the key word is risk. The best organizations (Google, Apple, Pixar and 3M are offered as examples) promote this through a culture where it’s OK to take risks, where failure is acceptable if valuable lessons can be learned. Whenever risks can be taken in a safe environment innovation is much more likely to be successful.

Often times middle management is actually the key to fostering this environment. They see the organizational “big picture” and can shield the front line workers who are challenged with focusing on the work. It allows for in-house entrepreneurship, allowing for creativity and flexibility outside of their traditional responsibilities. Google’s “20% time” is a popular example of time where employees can branch out on self-made projects. In Google’s case, it gave birth to products like GMail.

Innovation happens in both small and large organizations, but in large companies, it takes dedicated resources, and the expectation of some amount of failure. Scott has found that in organizations resistant to change, you can find success in pitching that innovation is the tradition of the company.

As for Innovation and User Experience, in the early design stage there’s a delicate balance between collecting data from users and knowing where to take calculated risks that may run counter to the data. When taking a different approach, don’t be afraid to step out on a limb. Then test to see if it works.

Of course, this is just a taste of the half hour discussion we had, so you’ll want to listen to the entire thing to get the most of Scott’s insights on the subject.

[ You can hear Scott Berkun speak more about Innovation at the User Interface 13 Conference in Cambridge, MA — October 13-16, 2008. The structure of his workshop, The Myths of Innovation: How to Lead Breakthrough Projects, will be broken out into the following:
• What does a breakthrough mean?
• Training from the history of great innovation
• Jargon and terms in the business of innovation, and how to deal with them
• Creative thinking
For more information about UI13, check out our conference site, UIConf.com ]

Does your organization foster innovation as well as it could? Share your questions and experiences with innovation in the comments.

The Agile development process is about breaking things into small pieces and acting on each piece really quickly. Yet, traditional user experience practices aren’t used to working fast. How do we adjust our practices to survive in a fast-paced agile process?

That’s the question we posted to Jeff Patton, the noted independent UX/Agile consultant and speaker, who joined me on this week’s show.

During our conversation, Jeff and I discussed some of the issues surrounding development speed that UX practitioners encounter when working in an Agile development team. While we talked, Jeff shared these observations from successful teams:

• Rapid Iterations: We’ve known for a while that fast iterations can help design, but now the rest of the team is iterating quickly too. Jeff proposed regularly using development partners — people you revisit — can help you with low-hassle usability testing and feedback sessions.
• Continuity: One of the key challenges in the agile environment is that working with small pieces of the project can lead to a lack of continuity between the pieces. Jeff suggested that a key role of the user experience professional on the team is to maintain the big picture: seeing what’s been built and what’s about to be built, and ensuring those pieces come together to form a coherent experience.
• Are your designers your users? It’s been said that Apple’s designers created the iPhone for themselves, without user testing. When the designers are avid users of a product, this can be successful, but such instances are rare. For most projects, it’s nearly impossible for designers to consistently put themselves in their users’ shoes. In agile environments, there may be more temptation to skip the user testing and go with designer intuition. Successful designers acknowledge that this intuition, talented though it may be, is usually no substitute for real user research.
• The RITE Method: Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation, is a successful method developed at Microsoft. It combines fast iterations with testing, looking to make improvements after each participant. Jeff suggests this is something agile teams should investigate.

Of course, I’m not doing Jeff’s ideas justice with this summary. You really want to listen to the entire interview to hear all of his wisdom.

[Jeff is teaching a full-day workshop, “Bringing User-Centered Design Practices Into Agile Development Projects”, at our User Interface Conference this October in Cambridge, MA. If you work in a fast-paced agile environment, Jeff's seminar is for you.]

Questions, comments? What have you done to adapt to the speed of the Agile process? Let us know about your experiences in the comments.

“Can you make it look pretty?”
“Can you make the logo bigger?”
“Can you make this more discoverable?”
“Can you make that pop?”

Heard these before? Or said them? In this week’s show, our friend Luke Wroblewski, Senior Principal of Product Ideation and Design for Yahoo, joins me to discuss visual design on the web. Luke shares his thoughts on the concept of visual design and it’s importance in helping users accomplish core tasks and strategic business goals.

• Cues from Your Client such as “can you make this look pretty?” Do you understand why these common requests are red flags, and understand the danger in them? Visual design is more than just styling. A fresh coat of paint doesn’t solve core problems, good visual design can.
• Design is Inevitable and not a step that can be skipped or filled in. It can be good or bad, but any product will have design as a component. Luke suggests there are some core principles that can be used to prioritize the presentation of information, actions and interactivity. One recommendation is to spend time with the team to prioritize what’s important about the project and keep that content independent of the design layout.
• Visual Design is a Priority. Uncover the importance of starting with visual design. Luke’s experience shows that in successful projects the visual organization needs to be a key consideration early in the process.
• Do You Greek? When building something, such as a web page, be sure to include all the elements up front – even the text - to ensure that design will take into account every aspect. It’s important to use the visual presentation to form a hierarchy for this real information. Luke enforces the point that real elements and real constraints will help us understand if the end result will work.
• Set Context Appropriately for the team. Skip “what do you think?” and paint the picture underlying the design. Those making suggestions on fonts, colors, and layout may not be comfortable making decisions on the strategic direction for the product so they stick to these minor aspects in which everyone can have an opinion. Decisions like these made in isolation don’t always yield overall coherent design or balance.

Luke Wroblewski is a Senior Principal of Product Ideation & Design for Yahoo and has his own shop, LukeW Interface Designs. He is the author of two books, the new top seller Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks and the popular Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability.

In fact, we have a special offer to pass along. Rosenfeld Media, publishers of Luke’s book would like to extend the following to SpoolCast listeners: Receive 10% off Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks when you purchase the book at their site, and use the promotional code “UIEWFD“.

[Luke is teaching a full-day workshop, “Visual Design for the Web: Communicating with Customers”, at our User Interface 13 this October in Cambridge, MA. Luke is one of our most highly rated presenters from previous events.]

Questions, comments? What experiences have you had wrangling visual design in your organization? Let us know in the comments.

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

In this episode, we discussed:

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

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

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

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

In this episode of Usability Tools, Brian Christiansen and I continue on how to moderate a usability test. As I mentioned last week, the episode got so long that we decided to break it into two parts. You can find part 1 here. This week’s show focuses upon the step-by-step tasks of running the session with a participant and your observers.

Good moderating is critically important to a successful session. Here are a few points we touched upon in the show:

• Practice and repetition improves your moderation skills. Start the session on the right foot by greeting your user on time and by laying out exactly what will happen during the session.
• Inform your user of their rights as a participant; their comfort is key. Have and follow a testing protocol which will lead you through all the information, and through all the testing steps. It should also govern your observers.
• End your session on time. Respecting the time of your participants and observers is paramount. Walk your user out, both out of politeness and because small talk may lead to critical insights.

There’s much more in the show. If you have questions about the role of the moderator, feel free to ask them in the comments. We’ll try to answer them and may even work them into a future show.

[This show is the first in a series we're going to do on the fundamentals of usability testing. In future shows, we'll cover the entire gamut of testing, from initial planning, through task design, to data analysis and beyond. We want to create a complete resource that you'll share with your entire team.]

In this episode of Usability Tools, Brian Christiansen and I talk about how to moderate a usability test. Turns out, the episode got so long that we decided to break it into two parts. This week’s show focuses upon the different roles a single moderator needs to take on during the session.

The usability test moderator has a lot of influence on the success of the test. Moderating isn’t rocket science, but you’ll need to understand the basics before you sit down with your users.

In this week’s show, I talk about the three roles a moderator needs to play during the test.

First is the scientist. The scientist makes sure your tasks get done, notes get taken, and keeps the show on track.

Then we have the sportscaster. The sportscaster gives play-by-play so the design team members don’t miss anything the user does.

Lastly, there’s the role of the flight attendant. This is the most important role. Keeping your test participant happy and comfortable is your number one job.

Tune in to learn the specifics of each role and how they affect one another.

If you have questions about the role of the moderator, feel free to ask them in the comments. We’ll try to answer them and may even work them into a future show. Stay tuned for the second part of the Moderating show next week.

[This show is the first in a series we're going to do on the fundamentals of usability testing. In future shows, we'll cover the entire gamut of testing, from initial planning, through task design, to data analysis and beyond. We want to create a complete resource that you'll share with your entire team.]

Update: Part 2 is now posted.

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

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

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

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

This week, our good friend, Peter Merholz, joins us for the show. Peter is the President of Adaptive Path, a leading experience strategy and design consultancy. Peter is the co-author of the recently published book, Subject to Change, which discusses new strategies of thinking and working to adapt into innovative and commercially successful organizations.

In our discussion, I ask Peter about mapping out a product’s evolution. Launching a product is no simple task. Every new product falls on the spectrum somewhere between feature-complete, perfect execution and actually shipping with a pile of features on the cutting room floor. Realistically, most sway towards the latter. But that doesn’t mean your products needs to feel unfinished. Peter and I discussed how the best products never offer their users an incomplete feeling experience. And with proper planning, future features won’t feel simply tacked on. Listen in to our conversation for some real-life advice from Peter on how to actually accomplish this feat.

[Peter Merholz and Andrew Crow will show you how to map out your product's evolution, plus several other techniques for creating great experiences, in their full-day seminar, Subject to Change: Product Strategy and Planning Tools for Great User Experiences, at our User Interface 13 conference that will take place this October 13-16, 2008 in historic Cambridge, Massachusetts.]

We look forward to your questions and thoughts on this podcast. How is your organization staging its product rollouts? Are those rollouts working? Let us know what you think in the comments!

This week, I had the great honor of speaking with Dana Chisnell, noted usability expert and principal at Usability Works, a consultancy based in San Francisco. Dana is also the co-author of the recently-released second edition of the Handbook of Usability Testing—a book so fine that I was thrilled when they asked me to write the foreword.

In this interview, I asked Dana what makes the best user researchers better than the pack. Dana suggested that great user researchers dig deeper into who the users are. They don’t just stop after watching novices interact with the design for the first time. Instead, they look to constantly learn about the full range of people who use the design.

Also, the top user researchers look beyond the use of functionality to the entire experience. Dana shared how Enterprise Rent-a-Car spends a lot of time and energy thinking about every interaction they have with their customers. They stand around in their retail outlets and watch individuals getting their cars and turning the cars in, looking at how the experiences fit together.

Dana had a lot more to say about what makes the best stand above the rest. You’ll want to listen to the rest of the podcast to hear her thoughts on the subject of excellence in user research.

[For even more insight, you'll want to attend Dana's full-day seminar, Usability Testing Guerilla Techniques: Collecting User Data on a Shoestring, at our User Interface 13 conference that will take place this October 13-16, 2008 in historic Cambridge, Massachusetts.]

We look forward to your questions and thoughts on this podcast. How are you integrating usability testing into your organization? Let us know what you think in the comments!

This week, Ajax design expert Jeremy Keith joins us from Brighton, England. Jeremy is the technical lead at Clearleft, a leading design consultancy in the UK. He’s the author of the popular books, “DOM scripting” and “Bulletproof Ajax.”

Ajax has really evolved since the term was coined. The technologies that we use to make responsive web pages and applications continue to evolve as well. Jeremy has his fingers on the pulse of these changes, and has a lot to tell us about the when, the where, and the why of using Ajax.

Talking with Jeremy was fascinating and, during the interview, he offered several juicy nuggets about using Ajax effectively. For example, he suggested that we think twice about if our business logic should be in the client-side environment. He proposed the server should be doing the heavy lifting, since this is a controlled environment. The interactivity should appear within the browser, so the interactions appear quick and seamless.

His rationale is interesting: Since browsers are diverse and quickly changing environments, Jeremy recommends we use them primarily for display and interaction, and we should resist the urge to process too much data with JavaScript. Instead, we should move the data to the server for processing. It may increase your bandwidth or server load, but both of these, he argues, are good problems to have—it means your app is popular!

Of course, you’ll want to listen to the rest of the podcast to hear the other wisdom that Jeremy has about using Ajax in production environments.

[For even more wisdom, you'll want to attend Jeremy's full-day seminar, Bulletproof Ajax: Designing Interactive and Usable Ajax Solutions, at our User Interface 13 conference that will take place this October 13-16, 2008 in historic Cambridge, Massachusetts.]

We look forward to your questions and thoughts on this podcast. How are you deploying Ajax to improve your experience? Let us know what you think in the comments!

This week, I had the pleasure of speaking with Donna (Maurer) Spencer, a world-renowned information architect and owner of the freelance agency MaadMob, based in Canberra, Australia. For nearly 10 years, Donna has been a prominent player in the information architecture world, sharing her experiences for designing some of the most challenging clients around: large government sites.

For this interview, I asked Donna, “What separates good information architects from great information architects?”

Donna said that she believes that great IAs can think structurally, can synthesize many inputs at once, can work strategically, and can work in the smallest details. A good IA can get by doing these things very occasionally, or not at all. But, great IAs do all of these constantly, bringing more value to the project.

Over the years, Donna has come into contact with some diverse and multi-talented IAs. She noted that one thing they all have in common is they all do more than just information architecture. Donna told us how she keeps herself balanced by also practicing other user experience disciplines, such as interaction design.

Donna also suggested that perhaps the strongest skill the great information architect needs is people skills. It’s one thing to build a quality taxonomy or navigation system, but if you cannot interface with your own team or the client, you may find your usefulness diminishes greatly.

This was a great interview. We had a lot of fun making it and I’ll bet you’ll enjoy listening to it.

This October, Donna present a full-day workshop, “Information Architecture Essentials: Best Practices for Organizing Your Site’s Content”, at the User Interface 13 Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It’s a great place to learn what it takes to become a great information architect.

We look forward to your questions and thoughts on this podcast. Do you agree with Donna about what it takes to become a great information architect? Is there anything she left out? Let us know what you think in the comments!

In this podcast, I had the pleasure of speaking with Sean Kane. Sean helped build one of the world’s most successful web applications as the Director of UI Engineering at Netflix. Last year, Sean left Netflix to co-found Get Listed, a start-up that is going to revolutionize the job search business.

Moving from a mature organization that understands the role of experience design to a brand-new start-up environment without any of the same infrastructure or support can be a real challenge. A challenge that is not unlike the challenge that many UX practitioners face when trying to bootstrap their user experience efforts in a growing organization.

I asked Sean to reflect a little on his previous experience at Netflix and about the challenges he’s facing at Get Listed. We started by talking about Netflix’s culture of metrics and the impact it has on their design. We then discussed the culture shock he’s experienced as he moved to this new gig. Finally, we talked about building both a web app and and a web app team from scratch.

It was interesting to see how the impact of his experience at Netflix is reflecting the decisions he’s making while shaping his new startup environment. I believe anyone who is building out their own user experience efforts will find Sean’s thoughts inspiring.

I think you’ll enjoy this podcast. We look forward to your questions and thoughts. Let us know what you think in the comments!

[Note: We had prepared this podcast to be released earlier this year, but due to schedule conflicts, its release was delayed. As a result, the intro mentions the very successful 2008 Web App Summit as if it's still to come. But don't worry: we'll have another one next year, so stay tuned!]

In this week’s SpoolCast, I had a chance to speak with Bill Scott. Bill has been one of my heroes for years, having really pushed the envelope as an evangelist for the public Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. He then went on to work on the Yahoo! Teachers project, where he took his knowledge of Ajax and Web 2.0 techniques and applied it to a creative solution for educators. Most recently, Bill has become the Director of UI Engineering at Netflix, where he now is driving how technology can enhance the user experience at one of the companies that understands what it takes.

During our conversation, we talked about some of the innovative techniques he’s using at Netflix, what he learned from the Yahoo! Teachers project, and his most recent work on Anti-patterns — learning from what we shouldn’t be doing.

I think you’ll enjoy this podcast. We look forward to your questions and thoughts. Let us know in the comments!

[Note: We had prepared this podcast to be released earlier this year, but due to schedule conflicts, its release was delayed. As a result, the intro mentions the very successful 2008 Web App Summit as if it's still to come. But don't worry: we'll have another one next year, so stay tuned!]

In February we held one of our most popular Virtual Seminars ever, Mental Models: Getting Into Your Customer’s Head, presented by Indi Young. Indi explained her mental model method of organizing the beliefs and philosophies of users, then comparing them to the current and planned functionality, to see if the users’ needs align with the design.

When we were done with the seminar, we had a number of compelling questions left over from the seminar. In this Podcast, we got back in touch with Indi and discussed some of the more interesting ones.

Indi had some interesting opinions on:

• whether you use surveys for data collection,
• how long it will take to do a mental model assessment,
• how you ensure the accuracy of the interpretation of the data you collect,
• and much more…

[Note: Unfortunately, while we were recording, there was a motor running in the background and the mic was picking it up. Brian worked extremely hard to scrub this noise out as much as possible, but there are places where doing so would've made it hard to understand what Indi was saying. We apologize in advance if the recording is a little difficult to listen to in places.]

Later this month, Indi will be presenting her full-day workshop on this subject, Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior at our Web App Summit in Coronado, California. We’ve almost sold out, sign up now for one of the few remaining seats! You won’t want to miss it.

In the podcast and seminar, Indi expounded upon the information in her new book, Mental Models, Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior. If you’re interested in purchasing the book, enjoy a 10% discount with our compliments. Use the code FOUIE010 at checkout. (The code stands for “Friends of UIE.”)

Each week in our Usability Tools Podcast, we will be sitting down to discuss tips and tools for improving your site’s user experience. The goal of our weekly podcast is to share some of the most important findings from UIE’s research on web design and usability.

A button is a button right? Move the mouse over it. Click. Not much to it, eh?

Well, when it’s a well-designed button, all the work your brain is doing to click the button is invisible to you. However, when it’s poorly designed, things start to become harder. Maybe you overshoot the target area? Or maybe you have trouble clicking because the button is too small. Often its not difficult to recover, but it costs attention and attention is expensive.

In this week’s podcast, we discuss the implications of Fitts’ Law. In short, the law states, “The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.”

While this seems obvious, it’s surprising how often it’s forgotten and the trouble that causes. And there’s magic that can happen when a designer takes special care to use Fitts’ law to its full advantage. Listen to the podcast to hear about how that can work.

As always, we’re very interested in hearing from you. Do you have questions or comments about this episode? We love to create shows based on your questions. Please leave a comment below or email us directly at mailbag@uie.com

UIE’s Latest Research: If you’re interested in the topics we discuss in the podcasts, I highly suggest you sign up for our free newsletter, UIEtips, to read our latest usability and design research as soon as we publish it. We’ll also notify you in UIEtips when we publish new podcasts.

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[ Text Transcript ]

Each week in our Usability Tools Podcast, we will be sitting down to discuss tips and tools for improving your site’s user experience. The goal of our weekly podcast is to share some of the most important findings from UIE’s research on web design and usability.

In this week’s podcast, Brian Christiansen and I continue exploring usability techniques for web-based applications. Web-based applications are different from content-based web sites because the users are involved in a transaction. When we’re researching the usability of a content-based site, we’re focused on how users will find and react to the information. However, with web-based applications, there are many other considerations that we need to account for.

If you missed the first part of the show, you can listen to it here:
Usability Tools Podcast: Useful Web App Usability Techniques, Part 1

This week, we explore the usability technique toolbox, focusing on those methods that help us with web-based applications.

In this episode we start with the basic usability test, move onto variants, then talk about field studies. In each case, we explore the web-app specific advantages and talk about how we get the information we need to make informed design decisions.

We talked about several books in this episode:

• The Handbook of Usability Testing—by Jeff Rubin
• A Practical Guide to Usability Testing—by Ginny Reddish and Joe Dumas
• Paper Prototyping—by Carolyn Snyder

As always, we’re very interested in hearing from you. Do you have questions or comments about this episode? We love to create shows based on your questions. Please leave a comment below or email us directly at mailbag@uie.com

UIE’s Latest Research: If you’re interested in the topics we discuss in the podcasts, I highly suggest you sign up for our free newsletter, UIEtips, to read our latest usability and design research as soon as we publish it. We’ll also notify you in UIEtips when we publish new podcasts.

Each week in our Usability Tools Podcast, we will be sitting down to discuss tips and tools for improving your site’s user experience. The goal of our weekly podcast is to share some of the most important findings from UIE’s research on web design and usability.

In this week’s podcast, Brian Christiansen and I explore usability techniques for web-based applications. Web-based applications are different from content-based web sites because the users are involved in a transaction. When we’re researching the usability of a content-based site, we’re focused on how users will find and react to the information. However, with web-based applications, there are many other considerations that we need to account for.

Because this is a big topic, we’ve divided it into two podcasts. In Part 1, Brian and I lay down the framework for what our usability research needs to tell us about our web-based application. In Part 2, will look at the techniques for finding that information.

In this episode we cover,

• The differences between hub-and-spoke and interview-based web applications
• When in the design and development process we look to user research
• 5 major classes of usability concerns to consider when testing web apps

Here are some UIE resources on web apps that relate to this episode,

• Five Usability Challenges of Web-Based Applications—Research Article
• The Designer’s Guide to Web Applications: Web Apps Tour 2007 - Learning from Successful Designs—PDF Report
• The Designer’s Guide to Web Applications, Part I: Structure and Flows—PDF Report
• The WebApp Summit, March 2008—in beautiful Coronado, California

As always, we’re very interested in hearing from you. Do you have questions or comments about this episode? We love to create shows based on your questions. Please leave a comment below or email us directly at mailbag@uie.com

UIE’s Latest Research: If you’re interested in the topics we discuss in the podcasts, I highly suggest you sign up for our free newsletter, UIEtips, to read our latest usability and design research as soon as we publish it. We’ll also notify you in UIEtips when we publish new podcasts.

This week, we have the latest installment of the SpoolCast crew (which we recorded back in December, and then got busy — sorry!).

Almost every company has to struggle with the balance between customer needs and internal business objectives. In this episode the crew examines the recent situation at Facebook. While trying to please both users and build a business model, the fast moving organization has stepped on many toes.

Our panel took a look at this delicate balance and how the future UX team at Facebook might help to resolve this. Facebook makes a fascinating business case from which to extract lessons, and we think you’ll enjoy it, too.

Returning to the crew this week was our foreign UX correspondent based in Hong Kong, Mr. Danial Szuc. Dan is the Principal Usability consultant with Apogee Usability Asia Ltd.

Joining the crew for the first time in this episode were special guests David Armano, VP of Experience Design for Critical Mass and Robert Hoekman, Jr., CEO of Miskeeto. You can learn more about David at DavidArmano.com and you can learn more about Robert at rhjr.net. I think you’ll find their contributions to the panel insightful!

How do you communicate complex and interactive design ideas to the development team? To answer this question, I had a chance to speak with with D. Keith Robinson, the Creative Director of Blue Flavor, a premier design and development shop based in Seattle, Washington. In addition to being one of the design experts we turn to for guidance, Keith was formerly the Editor-in-Chief of Digital Web Magazine.

We had a great discussion regarding the “backstage” portion of web app design. I think Keith has some innovate ideas which will inspire your own projects. In our chat, we discussed:

• “Projects from hell”
• Where can communications break down when designing web apps?
• How do effective deliverables affect the success of a project?
• What’s involved in creating enhanced deliverables to improve communication and the interaction design process?

We’re excited to have Keith speaking at our UIE Web App Summit this coming March. Keith will be discussing his successful communications methods for highly interactive designs, especially those where the design elements can’t be captured with static images.

You can catch his talk, Making the Translation: Critical Web App Design Deliverables on day 3 of the UIE Web App Summit!

Today’s podcast features a fascinating conversation I had with New York Times graphic journalists, Andrew DeVigal and Steve Duenes.

Andrew and Steve are part of the team responsible for taking data and raw information from the day’s news and turning it into highly interactive and informative online experiences.

For example, the team built the NYTimes Debate Analyzer, a tool to explore the presidential debates. Readers can see how frequently a specific term, such as “health care” or “iraq”, is mentioned by each candidate. They can scroll to a specific answer in the transcript and the video automatically plays that section, bringing an entire new way to experience the debates.

In this discussion, we also examined some of the NYTimes.com’s other amazing interactive graphics and multimedia applications, including:

• Paths to the Top of the Home Run Charts - An interactive chart showing how quickly record holders beat the MLB home run record
• Trailer Living, Then and Now - Explore how vacation trailers have changed over the years
• Exonerated, Freed, and What Happened Then - An multimedia exploration of 200 prisoners exonerated by DNA evidence

I think you’ll enjoy my conversation with Steve and Andrew. You’ll learn a great deal about the their journalistic techniques for building for successful interactive online experiences.

I’m also greatly anticipating their presentation this March at our Web App Summit in San Diego, California. They will present the talk, Engaging an Audience: Using Out-of-the-Box Thinking to Create Great Designs.

Each week in our Usability Tools Podcast, we will be sitting down to discuss tips and tools for improving your site’s user experience. We’ll share some of the most important findings from UIE’s research on web design and usability.

It’s tempting to spend a ton of time creating slick flyout, dropdown, or pop-up navigation on our site, but is it worth the effort?

This week, Brian Christiansen and I discuss interactive mouseover techniques for navigation. Are they a good idea when it comes to actually using your site? Based on our testing, we don’t think so.

Some of the issues we address are:

• Why would designers want to use mouseover navigation?
• How do mouseovers become an obstacle to navigation?
• What effect does mouseover navigation have on users finding their trigger words?
• What sites are good examples of navigation without mouseovers?

Here’s our list of referenced links for the episode:

• The UIE research article that started it all: User’s Decide First, Move Second
• Our research in link-rich home pages: an article, Lifestyles of Link-Rich Home Pages; a podcast, Home Page Design; and a 90-minute Virtual Seminar, Initial Scent: The Latest Thinking on Home Page Design.
• Our research on gallery pages: an article, Galleries: The Hardest Working Pages On Your Site; a podcast, Gallery Pages; and a 90-minute Virtual Seminar, Gallery Pages: The Hardest Working Pages on Your Site.
• Two sites we believe are good examples of link-rich designs: Staples.com and Analog.com.

As always, we’re very interested in hearing from you. Do you have questions or comments about this episode? We love to create shows based on your questions. Please leave a comment below or email us directly at mailbag@uie.com.

UIE’s Latest Research: If you’re interested in the topics we discuss in the podcasts, I highly suggest you sign up for our free newsletter, UIEtips, to read our latest usability and design research as soon as we publish it. We’ll also notify you in UIEtips when we publish new podcasts.

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We would like to give you and your co-workers free admission to our next Virtual Seminar program, with full, lifetime access to the archived program as well! All you need to do to win is give us your feedback on your podcast listening experience. Fill out the following survey and each week we’ll randomly send one survey participant a free admission to the next UIE Virtual Seminar and Archive, a $169.00 value! We appreciate your input!

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In September, I had the opportunity to speak at the Webmaster Jam Session, in Dallas, Texas and was fortunate to meet Derek Featherstone. Derek travels the globe as a premier expert speaker on web accessibility, and was the closing keynote speaker at the conference. As expected, he gave a fascinating talk on real-world accessibility design for the web. I knew I had to pull him aside for an interview!

Derek and I spoke about how accessibility is an often downplayed, yet critical aspect of web design. We discussed:

• Accessibility is more than vision-impaired and screen reader access. What about mobility issues with touchscreens and people who use mouth and head wands?
• Does achieving technical compliance actually result in a usable design for a user?
• Can personas assist in designing for accessibility?
• Updated browsers and standards-based code: how are they helping today?
• The W3C Accessibility Checklist: Is it a goal for designers or just a starting point?

During the session, Derek mentioned the following resources:

Accessify.com
WebAIM.org - Web Accessibility in Mind

You can find Derek and his company at FurtherAhead.com, and his blog at Box of Chocolates.ca. Derek will be talking about how you can go beyond compliance and make truly accessible experiences at our upcoming Web App Summit.

Derek has a lot to teach all of us. I think you’ll find our talk enjoyable and informative!

New: Survey and listener drawing!
We would like to give you and your co-workers free admission to our next Virtual Seminar program, with full, lifetime access to the archived program as well! All you need to do to be eligible is give us your feedback on your podcast listening experience. Fill out the following survey and each week we’ll randomly send one survey participant a free admission to the next UIE Virtual Seminar and Archive, a $169.00 value! We appreciate your input!

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Each week in our Usability Tools Podcast, we will be sitting down to discuss tips and tools for improving your site’s user experience. The goal of our weekly podcast is to share some of the most important findings from UIE’s research on web design and usability.

This week, Brian Christiansen and I discuss avoiding redesigns. When we talk about avoiding redesigns, we don’t think your should stay anchored in the past, far from it. But we think the best route to change is through incremental deployment.

Some of the issues we addressed were:

• Why is a site-wide redesign in one major relaunch a bad idea?
• What are some of the leading sites doing when they want a new design?
• How can staged redesigns help avert risk?
• How do users react to staged redesigns?

We find the staged redesign is the most effective way to go about changing your site. Listen in to find out how you can harness this technique to make your next project more effective.

As always, we’re very interested in hearing from you. Do you have questions or comments about this episode? We love to create shows based on your questions. Please leave a comment below or email us directly at mailbag@uie.com.

UIE’s Latest Research: If you’re interested in the topics we discuss in the podcasts, I highly suggest you sign up for our free newsletter, UIEtips, to read our latest usability and design research as soon as we publish it. We’ll also notify you in UIEtips when we publish new podcasts.

Survey and listener drawing!
We would like to give you and your co-workers free admission to our next Virtual Seminar program, with full, lifetime access to the archived program as well! All you need to do to win is give us your feedback on your podcast listening experience. Fill out the following survey and each week we’ll randomly send one survey participant a free admission to the next UIE Virtual Seminar and Archive, a $169.00 value! We appreciate your input!

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Each week in our Usability Tools Podcast, we will be sitting down to discuss tips and tools for improving your site’s user experience. The goal of our weekly podcast is to share some of the most important findings from UIE’s research on web design and usability.

This week, Brian Christiansen and I discuss On-Site Search. Our research has shown us that no matter how great your search technology is, it will fail your users if the experience hasn’t been carefully crafted. You may be surprised by how easy it is for even the best sites to get it wrong.

Some of the issues we addressed were:

• Why are your users searching your site?
• What separates the best search experiences from the worst?
• What can be done to improve search results?
• How can you tell Search is succeeding on your site?

You’ll want to tune in and hear about the results of our Search Obstacle Course and to learn about the four types of search results. We feel a little time spent improving your site’s search can go a long way.

As always, we’re very interested in hearing from you. Do you have questions or comments about this episode? We love to create shows based on your questions. Please leave a comment below or email us directly at mailbag@uie.com.

UIE’s Latest Research: If you’re interested in the topics we discuss in the podcasts, I highly suggest you sign up for our free newsletter, UIEtips, to read our latest usability and design research as soon as we publish it. We’ll also notify you in UIEtips when we publish new podcasts.

Survey and listener drawing!
We would like to give you and your co-workers free admission to our next Virtual Seminar program, with full, lifetime access to the archived program as well! All you need to do to win is give us your feedback on your podcast listening experience. Fill out the following survey and each week we’ll randomly send one survey participant a free admission to the next UIE Virtual Seminar and Archive, a $169.00 value! We appreciate your input!

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Each week in our Usability Tools Podcast, we will be sitting down to discuss tips and tools for improving your site’s user experience. The goal of our weekly podcast is to share some of the most important findings from UIE’s research on web design and usability.

This week, we follow up our Virtual Seminar presentation on Building Robust Personas In 30 Days or Less, with answers to questions attendees asked during the session. I highly suggest you take a listen. You’ll uncover some wonderful insights even if you didn’t attend the seminar.

During the podcast, Brian Christiansen and I discussed the following topics:

» What are personas?
» Should your organization have dedicated UX team members for maintaining updated personas?
» Can just one person participate in the persona building process?
» Should you develop scenarios for multiple personas that all fit one task?
» Can you create personas based solely on survey results?
» How do personas relate to Actors and Use Cases from the Rational Unified Process (RUP)?

During the podcast, we also mentioned several valuable resources for incorporating personas into the development process:

Steve Mulder’s The User is Always Right

Alan Cooper’s About Face, 3rd edition

Alan Cooper’s The Inmates Are Running the Asylum

John Pruit and Tamara Adlin’s The Persona Lifecycle

As always, we’re very interested in hearing from you. Do you have questions or comments about this episode? We love to create shows based on your questions, just like we did with this episode. Please leave a comment below or email us directly at mailbag@uie.com.

UIE’s Latest Research: If you’re interested in the topics we discuss in the podcasts, I highly suggest you sign up for our free newsletter, UIEtips, to read our latest usability and design research as soon as we publish it. We’ll also notify you in UIEtips when we publish new podcasts.

Survey and listener drawing!
We would like to give you and your co-workers free admission to our next Virtual Seminar program, with full, lifetime access to the archived program as well! All you need to do to win is give us your feedback on your podcast listening experience. Fill out the following survey and each week we’ll randomly send one survey participant a free admission to the next UIE Virtual Seminar and Archive, a $169.00 value! We appreciate your input!

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Each week in our Usability Tools Podcast, I will be sitting down with UIE’s Managing Director, Christine Perfetti to discuss tips and tools for improving your site’s user experience. The goal of our weekly podcast is to share some of the most important findings from UIE’s research on web design and usability.

This week, Christine was tied up getting ready for our upcoming UI12 conference, so Brian Christiansen joins me for a show whose topic came from our reader, Colin. He wrote in to ask about the statistical significance of usability or field tests.

Statistical significance revolves around having enough participants to make your findings valid. However, the number of participants necessary can vary widely, depending on what you’re studying and how.

During the podcast, Brian and I answered these common questions:

» Many people talk about statistical significance, but what does it really mean?
» How many people does it take to produce reliable results?
» Why do usability tests require many fewer participants than surveys?
» How do we know we’ve gathered enough data from our research?

As always, we’re very interested in hearing from you. Do you have questions or comments about this episode? We’d love to create a show based on your questions, just like we did with this episode. Please leave a comment below or email us directly at mailbag@uie.com.

UIE’s Latest Research: If you’re interested in the topics Christine and I discuss in the podcasts, I highly suggest you sign up for our free newsletter, UIEtips, to read our latest usability and design research as soon as we publish it. We’ll also notify you in UIEtips when we publish new podcasts.

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We would like to give you and your co-workers free admission to our next Virtual Seminar program, with full, lifetime access to the archived program as well! All you need to do to win is give us your feedback on your podcast listening experience. Fill out the following survey and each week we’ll randomly send one survey participant a free admission to the next UIE Virtual Seminar and Archive, a $169.00 value! We appreciate your input!

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

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

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

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

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

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

New: Survey and listener drawing!
We would like to give you and your co-workers free admission to our next Virtual Seminar program, with full, lifetime access to the archived program as well! All you need to do to be eligible is give us your feedback on your podcast listening experience. Fill out the following survey and each week we’ll randomly send one survey participant a free admission to the next UIE Virtual Seminar and Archive, a $169.00 value! We appreciate your input!

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Each week in our Usability Tools Podcast series, I will be sitting down with UIE’s Managing Director, Christine Perfetti to discuss tips and tools for improving your site’s user experience. The goal of our weekly podcast is to share some of the most important findings from UIE’s research on web design and usability.

In the design world, there’s always been an assumption that some users demonstrate “search-dominant” tendencies by going right to the search engine when they first visit a web site looking for content. But back in 2000, UIE made a groundbreaking claim that blew away the web design world. From our research, we concluded that users aren’t Search dominant. A few years back, I wrote the article, Are There Users Who Always Search?, and have received tons of questions about the findings ever since.

In this podcast, Christine Perfetti and I discuss the study, including:

» Why no user always went to the search engine on a site
» How the design of a site’s page determines what location strategy users employ
» How the design community reacted to UIE’s research on Search Dominance
» Why your site’s navigation may be poorly designed if your users are gravitating to Search

As always, we’re very interested in hearing from you. Do you have questions or comments about this episode? Do you have suggestions for future episodes? We want to know. Please leave a comment below or email us directly at mailbag@uie.com.

UIE’s Latest Research: If you’re interested in the topics Christine and I discuss in the podcasts, I highly suggest you sign up for our free newsletter, UIEtips, to read our latest usability and design research as soon as we publish it. (We first published the results of our research on Search Dominance in our email newsletter.)

New: Survey and listener drawing!
We would like to give you and your co-workers free admission to our next Virtual Seminar program, with full, lifetime access to the archived program as well! All you need to do to be eligible is give us your feedback on your podcast listening experience. Fill out the following survey and each week we’ll randomly send one survey participant a free admission to the next UIE Virtual Seminar and Archive, a $169.00 value! We appreciate your input!

Participate in our survey to win!

Each week in our Usability Tools Podcast, I will be sitting down with UIE’s Managing Director, Christine Perfetti to discuss tips and tools for improving your site’s user experience. The goal of our weekly podcast is to share some of the most important findings from UIE’s research on web design and usability.

This week, Christine Perfetti asked me about one of UIE’s most popular usability testing techniques, Interview-based Tasks. A couple of years ago, I wrote an introductory article about interview-based tasks, and we’ve been getting questions about the technique ever since.

In usability tests where we incorporate interview-based tasks, the participants interests are discovered, not assigned. Unlike traditional task design methods, the test facilitator and participant negotiate the tasks during the tests, instead of proceeding down a list of predefined tasks. Because each task is drawn from the experience and interest of each participant, no two participants perform exactly the same tasks. In this podcast, Christine and I discuss:

» How interview-based tasks successfully engage users
» How to create interview-based tasks
» Why User Interface Engineering’s researchers moved away from traditional task design
» How to recruit users with this technique
» How to combine interview-based tasks with other types of tasks
» Where to learn more about task design: The excellent book by Ginny Redish and JoAnn Hackos, User and Task Analysis for Interface Design

As always, we’re very interested in hearing from you. Do you have questions or comments about this episode? Do you have suggestions for future episodes? We want to know. Please leave a comment below or email us directly at mailbag@uie.com.

UIE’s Latest Research: If you’re interested in the topics Christine and I discuss in the podcasts, I highly suggest you sign up for our free newsletter, UIEtips, to read our latest usability and design research as soon as we publish it. We’ll also notify you in UIEtips when we publish new podcasts.

New: Survey and listener drawing!
We would like to give you and your co-workers free admission to our next Virtual Seminar program, with full, lifetime access to the archived program as well! All you need to do to be eligible is give us your feedback on your podcast listening experience. Fill out the following survey and each week we’ll randomly send one survey participant a free admission to the next UIE Virtual Seminar and Archive, a $169.00 value! We appreciate your input!

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In today’s SpoolCast, I had the good fortune to speak with Kevin Cheng. Kevin is a senior interaction designer with Yahoo! Brickhouse, an advanced development team within Yahoo!. Prior to joining the Brickhouse, he worked on the Yahoo! Maps and Local team. Kevin is the co-creator of the usability and design comic, OK/Cancel. At Yahoo!, Kevin merged his interests and introduced the use of comics for conveying new design ideas and concepts.

In the interview, we discuss the use of comics to express user experience ideas early in the brainstorming stage of a project. Comics show the team how a user will experience the design. This lightweight approach helps you iterate quickly without making major time and resource investments. You don’t need to be an artist to effectively employ comics in your UX processes. Kevin also discussed his presentation for the upcoming UI12 conference in November and gave a sneak-peak at what attendees can expect.

While we were talking, Kevin mentioned the following collection of comic-related resources on his site: Creating Concepts with Comics.

Kevin shared a lot of great information here. I think you’ll enjoy it. As always, we welcome your feedback in the comments.

New: Survey and listener drawing!
We would like to give you and your co-workers free admission to our next Virtual Seminar including full, lifetime access to the archived program! To enter, give us your feedback on your podcast listening experience by filling out the survey!. Each week we’ll choose one winner from the survey participants and send them a free admission to the next UIE Virtual Seminar and Archive, a $169.00 value! We appreciate your input!

Last week’s winner was Carolyn K. You could be next week’s winner (even if you’ve entered before). Just participate in our survey to win!

Each week in our Usability Tools Podcast, I will be sitting down with UIE’s Managing Director, Christine Perfetti to discuss tips and tools for improving your site’s user experience. The goal of our weekly podcast is to share some of the most important findings from UIE’s research on web design and usability.

This week, Christine Perfetti asked me about User Interface Engineering’s groundbreaking study on download time. In this study, we found the actual download time of a page didn’t impact a site’s usability. In this podcast, Christine and I discuss:

» What users *really* mean when they say a web site is too slow
» User Interface Engineering’s methodology for conducting the study on download time
» The strong reaction of the design community to UIE’s findings
» UIE’s shift in perspective regarding download time due to the prevalence of high-speed connections

As always, we’re very interested in hearing from you. Do you have questions or comments about this episode? Do you have suggestions for future episodes? We want to know. Please leave a comment below or email us directly at mailbag@uie.com.

UIE’s Latest Research: If you’re interested in the topics Christine and I discuss in the podcasts, I highly suggest you sign up for our free newsletter, UIEtips, to read our latest usability and design research as soon as we publish it. [We first published our download time findings in UIEtips.] We’ll also notify you in UIEtips when we publish new podcasts.

New: Survey and listener drawing!
We would like to give you and your co-workers free admission to our next Virtual Seminar program, with full, lifetime access to the archived program as well! All you need to do to be eligible is give us your feedback on your podcast listening experience. Fill out the following survey and each week we’ll randomly send one survey participant a free admission to the next UIE Virtual Seminar and Archive, a $169.00 value! We appreciate your input!

Participate in our survey to win!

Each week in our Usability Tools Podcast, I will be sitting down with UIE’s Managing Director, Christine Perfetti to discuss tips and tools for improving your site’s user experience. The goal of our weekly podcast is to share some of the most important findings from UIE’s research on web design and usability.

This week, Christine Perfetti asked me about one of UIE’s most valuable usability testing techniques, Inherent Value Tests. Inherent Value Testing gives the team important information about how well a web site communicates the inherent value the designers are putting into the site. In this podcast, Christine and I discuss:

» How inherent value tests help measure how your site communicates your product’s value
» How inherent value tests are different than traditional usability testing techniques
» How to recruit users with this technique
» How to combine inherent value tests with other types of tasks

As always, we’re very interested in hearing from you. Do you have questions or comments about this episode? Do you have suggestions for future episodes? We want to know. Please leave a comment below or email us directly at mailbag@uie.com.

UIE’s Latest Research: If you’re interested in the topics Christine and I discuss in the podcasts, I highly suggest you sign up for our free newsletter, UIEtips, to read our latest usability and design research as soon as we publish it. We’ll also notify you in UIEtips when we publish new podcasts.

New: Survey and listener drawing!
We would like to give you and your co-workers free admission to our next Virtual Seminar program, with full, lifetime access to the archived program as well! All you need to do to be eligible is give us your feedback on your podcast listening experience. Fill out the following survey and each week we’ll randomly send one survey participant a free admission to the next UIE Virtual Seminar and Archive, a $169.00 value! We appreciate your input!

Participate in our survey to win!

Each week in our Usability Tools Podcast, I will be sitting down with UIE’s Managing Director, Christine Perfetti to discuss tips and tools for improving your site’s user experience. The goal of our weekly podcast is to share some of the most important findings from UIE’s research on web design and usability.

This week, Christine Perfetti asked me about one of UIE’s most popular usability testing techniques, 5-Second Tests. A couple of years ago, Christine Perfetti wrote an excellent introductory article about 5-Second Tests, and we’ve been getting questions about the technique ever since.

The 5-Second Test Method shows users a single content page for a quick 5 seconds to gather their initial impressions. Five seconds may not seem like a lot of time, but users make important judgments in the first moments they visit a page. In this podcast, Christine and I discuss:

» Why 5-Second Tests should be used primarily to test a site’s content pages
» Why 5-Second Tests aren’t effective on most Home Pages
» How to conduct this test with your users
» What some of the common mistakes design teams make when conducting a 5-Second Test
» How to recruit users with this technique
» How to combine 5-Second Techniques with other types of tasks

As always, we’re very interested in hearing from you. Do you have questions or comments about this episode? Do you have suggestions for future episodes? We want to know. Please leave a comment below or email us directly at mailbag@uie.com.

UIE’s Latest Research: If you’re interested in the topics Christine and I discuss in the podcasts, I highly suggest you sign up for our free newsletter, UIEtips, to read our latest usability and design research as soon as we publish it. We’ll also notify you in UIEtips when we publish new podcasts.

New: Survey and listener drawing!
We would like to give you and your co-workers free admission to our next Virtual Seminar program, with full, lifetime access to the archived program as well! All you need to do to be eligible is give us your feedback on your podcast listening experience. Fill out the following survey and each week we’ll randomly send one survey participant a free admission to the next UIE Virtual Seminar and Archive, a $169.00 value! We appreciate your input!

Participate in our survey to win!

Each week in our Usability Tools Podcast, I will be sitting down with UIE’s Managing Director, Christine Perfetti to discuss tips and tools for improving your site’s user experience. The goal of our weekly podcast is to share some of the most important findings from UIE’s research on web design and usability.

In last week’s podcast, we talked about Gallery Pages, which are pages with links to the site’s content pages. This week, Christine asked me about two other types of pages: Department pages and Store pages. These pages become crucial when an information-rich site has thousands (and sometimes millions) of pages.
In this podcast, we discuss:

» How Department and Store Pages help narrow down the content choices for users
» How Department pages help users make confident choices between galleries
» What sites successfully take advantage of Department Pages, including the Bureau of Labor Statistics
» What common mistakes designers make when implementing Department and Store pages

As always, we’re very interested in hearing from you. Do you have questions or comments about this episode? Do you have suggestions for future episodes? We want to know. Please leave a comment below or email us directly at mailbag@uie.com.

UIE’s Latest Research: If you’re interested in the topics Christine and I discuss in the podcasts, I highly suggest you sign up for our free newsletter, UIEtips, to read our latest usability and design research as soon as we publish it. We’ll also notify you in UIEtips when we publish new podcasts.

New: Survey and listener drawing!
We would like to give you and your co-workers free admission to our next Virtual Seminar program, with full, lifetime access to the archived program as well! All you need to do to be eligible is give us your feedback on your podcast listening experience. Fill out the following survey and each week we’ll randomly send one survey participant a free admission to the next UIE Virtual Seminar and Archive, a $169.00 value! We appreciate your input!

Participate in our survey to win!

This week, we have the latest installment of the SpoolCast crew.

In this episode, we discussed Adaptive Path’s Todd Wilkens recent blog posting, Usability is a path to failure. Not surprisingly, we had some interesting thoughts on Todd’s controversial post.

We talked about the role of usability research on product development, including the reasons why successful design teams launch both huge hits and products that fail to excite users. Next, we discussed the impact of outside influences on the design process, such as team and company culture. Finally, we explored whether we can apply the bold visions that we see in the consumer space, like 1987’s Apple Knowledge Navigator, within the enterprise realm.

This is one of the best discussions I’ve had with the group and and I think you’ll enjoy it.

New: Survey and listener drawing!
You and your co-workers have the opportunity to get a free pass to our next scheduled Virtual Seminar and lifetime access to the archived program! To be eligible for the drawing, please give us your feedback on your podcast listening experience. Fill out the following survey and each week we’ll randomly send one survey participant a free admission to the next UIE Virtual Seminar and Archive, a $169.00 value! We appreciate your input!

Participate in our survey to win!

In today’s SpoolCast, Christine Perfetti, UIE’s Managing Director, sits down with Kim Goodwin, the General Manager and Vice President of Design at Cooper. The folks at Cooper are widely regarded for their design methods, including Goal-Directed Design and Personas.

In the interview, Christine and Kim discuss:

» An overview of Goal-Directed Design, an interaction design methodology based on user research
» Why personas should be fictitious user archetypes synthesized from research with actual users
» Cooper’s groundbreaking design methods for gathering user data
» The role of usability testing in the design process
» A preview of Kim’s UI12 full-day seminar, The Essentials of Interaction Design

There’s a lot of great information here and I think you’ll enjoy it. As always, we welcome your feedback in the comments.

New: Survey and listener drawing!
We would like to give you and your co-workers free admission to our next scheduled Virtual Seminar, with lifetime access to the archived program as well! All you need to do to be eligible is give us your feedback on your podcast listening experience. Fill out the following survey and each week we’ll randomly send one survey participant a free admission to the next UIE Virtual Seminar and Archive, a $169.00 value! We appreciate your input!

Participate in our survey to win!

Each week in our Usability Tools podcast, I will be sitting down with UIE’s Managing Director, Christine Perfetti to discuss tips and tools for improving your site’s user experience. The goal of our weekly podcast is to share some of the most important findings from UIE’s research on web design and usability.

In this week’s episode, Christine asks me about UIE’s research on Gallery Pages. Gallery Pages, the list of links to content, are a web site’s hardest working page. They are the final page that determine whether users will successfully find their content.

In this podcast, we discuss:

» How galleries help users make confident choices
» What behavior users exhibit when gallery pages fail them
» How to order links so users can successfully find their content
» Why alphabetized links are often viewed as randomly ordered links
» How to utilize trigger words, the specific words that have meaning to users
» Why longer gallery pages may help users

I hope you enjoy our discussion. For a more lengthy discussion on the topic of Gallery Pages, I highly recommend you listen to our recorded Virtual Seminar, Gallery Pages: The Hardest Working Page on Your Site.

As always, we’re very interested in hearing from you. Do you have questions or comments about this episode? Do you have suggestions for future episodes? We want to know. Please leave a comment below or email us directly at mailbag@uie.com.

New: Survey and listener drawing!
We would like to give you and your co-workers free admission to our next scheduled Virtual Seminar, with lifetime access to the archived program as well! All you need to do to be eligible is give us your feedback on your podcast listening experience. Fill out the following survey and each week we’ll randomly send one survey participant a free admission to the next UIE Virtual Seminar and Archive, a $169.00 value! We appreciate your input!

Participate in our survey to win!

I’m very excited to announce the launch of the first episode of UIE’s Usability Tools Podcast. Each week, I will be sitting down with UIE’s Managing Director, Christine Perfetti to discuss tips and tools for improving your site’s user experience. The goal of our weekly podcast is to share some of the most important findings from UIE’s research on web design and usability.

In our first episode, Christine asks me about UIE’s latest thinking on home page design. We decided to kick-off our podcast series discussing home pages because they can play a critical role in the user’s experience on your site. It’s the first page users interact with and its design determines whether users succeed or fail to complete their objective.

In this podcast, we discuss:

» Why a site’s home page is actually the least important page on your site
» How the most successful designs focus on understanding users’ main goals and tasks
» How “link-rich” home pages can help your users find their content
» How the most successful home page designs focus on driving users to the most important content pages
» Why users spend little time on the best home pages

I hope you enjoy our discussion.

As always, we’re very interested in hearing from you. Do you have questions or comments about this episode? Do you have suggestions for future episodes? We want to know. Please leave a comment below or email us directly at mailbag@uie.com.

New: Survey and listener drawing!
We would like to give you and your co-workers free admission to our next Virtual Seminar program, with full, lifetime access to the archived program as well! All you need to do to be eligible is give us your feedback on your podcast listening experience. Fill out the following survey and each week we’ll randomly send one survey participant a free admission to the next UIE Virtual Seminar and Archive, a $169.00 value! We appreciate your input!

Participate in our survey to win!

In today’s SpoolCast, I had the opportunity to speak with Gerry McGovern. Gerry is a widely-acclaimed speaker author and consultant on the topic of web content. Gerry is known for his insights on writing and laying out content for the Web, information architecture design, and development of content management strategy. Gerry has a new book out that we think is just great, called Killer Web Content.

In this podcast, we discuss how Gerry recommends:

» Frequent and small design refinements to please your customers
» Use click stream analysis wisely and eliminate clicks to improve experience
» Studying your most popular search queries to tune the top results

Gerry also makes the point of putting your customers in the center of your universe by concentrating on the things they want to accomplish. Help them accomplish certain things fast by putting their needs ahead of yours. The reality of the web is, ‘if you waste their time, they’re gone.’

There’s a lot of great information here, and I think you’ll enjoy it. As always, we welcome your feedback in the comments.

New: Survey and listener drawing!
We would like to give you an iTunes or Amazon gift card for giving us your feedback on your podcast listening experience. Fill out the following survey and each week we’ll randomly send one survey participant a $25 iTunes or Amazon gift card (your choice). We appreciate your input!

Last week’s winner is Carlos S.

Participate in our survey to win!

Eric Mattson is on a quest to record 1,000 podcasts. Last year, I had the good fortune to be one of his interview subjects. Today, I had the chance to turn the tables on Eric and see what’s going on with him and his many pursuits. Eric is a marketing consultant, a researcher of social media in business, as well as a serial podcaster.

In this podcast, we discuss,

• Why Eric is doing 1000 podcasts
• Trends Eric’s found while interviewing innovators, like the influence of individual personality on marketing and innovation
• Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail and its manifestation in podcasting and web content
• How experience design can be fundamental to branding and marketing, especially word-of-mouth
• Eric’s suggested Jenerous podcasts for designers and tech people

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

New: Survey and listener drawing!
We would like to give you an iTunes or Amazon gift card for giving us your feedback on your podcast listening experience. Fill out the following survey and each week we’ll randomly send one survey participant a $25 iTunes or Amazon gift card (your choice). We appreciate your input!

Participate in our survey to win!