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Julie Zhuo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Bill Scott

If you’re using advanced, or “rich” interactions in your web applications, then it’s likely you have Bill Scott and Theresa Neil’s Designing Web Interfaces on your desk, if not your bedstand. Published in 2009, it is perhaps the definitive tome on rich interactive design patterns for the web. Bill has dedicated a significant portion of his career to dissecting such interactions, creating the Rico JavaScript library, curating the Yahoo! Pattern Library and now overseeing UI engineering at Netflix—one of the first companies you think of when you think of Ajax-y web interfaces.

It’s hard for us to picture talking about web apps without talking about Bill and his research into design patterns. His new book is full of examples where he slows down time to explore each micro-stage of an interaction. Our Jared Spool got together with Bill to discuss his ideas about the nuances of Interesting Moments.

Jared and Bill discussed,

• Bill’s experience of aggregating successful interactions in the Rico JavaScript and Yahoo Patterns Libraries
• How his challenges at work lead to him writing Designing Web Interfaces
• How his interface research lead to better ways to capture interactions for documents and prototypes.
• Dancing Hamsters
• …and more

Bill speaks about both patterns—successful interaction models for common interactions—and anti-patterns. By showing what not to do, anti-patterns often provide insight on the right way to do something.

A good example [of an anti-pattern is from] the old Yahoo Photos site[…] dragging several photos into an album, there’s no indication that the photos actually dropped into the album folder, and there’s no feedback that says, “Oh, there was three, but now there’s six items in the folder.”

The designers had dropped in two extra “idiot boxes”, which is a great anti-pattern. The first idiot box says, “Do you really want me to drop these items into the folder that you so carefully managed to use your mouse dexterity to get to?” Not quite that message, but that’s gist of it.

Then there’s another pop-up that says, “Hey! Guess what? We did what we said we would do. We actually put those items in the folder.” It’s sort of, as Alan Cooper calls it, “stopping the proceedings with idiocy.” The missed moments were just those little, subtle feedbacks that could have been done, instead of the hammer approach, by having those boxes pop up and interrupt the user.

The take away for our work is that this interaction was backwards. It gave no indication that you were doing something successfully while you were doing it, and then penalized your time after completion with dialog boxes to confirm your success: “You did it!” After dismissing the dialog, you were left with an interface that didn’t reflect any of your changes.

By adding clues that the move was happening during the action, and then reflecting the changes with interface cues afterwards, we can make the experience smoother while avoiding “idiot boxes” altogether. (This interaction is detailed in chapter 5, “Overlays” of Designing Web Interfaces)

There are many more pearls of Bill’s wisdom available in the podcast, please tune in!

Don’t miss Bill’s full presentation, “Designing for Interesting Moments“, at our Web App Masters Tour. He’ll be with us in San Diego, Minneapolis, Philadelphia and Seattle.

Let us hear your questions about interesting moments in the comments below…

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Luke Wroblewski

Web forms are the mouth that feeds most web apps. There’s no way around that. Yet, few people are thinking about how to make one of the more unpleasant parts of the web more pleasant. The world’s foremost authority on web forms is Luke Wroblewski, author of the heralded book, Web Form Design. It’s no coincidence that we lean on Luke often to join us at events like our upcoming Web App Masters Tour.

Jared Spool sat down with Luke to discuss what’s been happening with web forms since his book came out. It winds up there have been some interesting developments recently.

The first trend Jared and Luke discuss is new ways of styling forms to make them less intimidating. Perhaps the most popular form to employ a friendly and unusual form design comes from our good friend Jeremy Keith and his innovative site for finding and listening to MP3 files, HuffDuffer. Jeremy’s Huffduffer signup form is unusual to say the least. If you’ve been a parent or child in the U.S. since the 1960s, you may think the form’s design strongly resembles that of a Mad Lib.

In general, anything that reduces the stress of filling in a web form, Luke likes:

Even though Jeremy’s form on Huffduffer looks like a piece of narrative, Mad Libs-style prose, underneath the surface it’s all real input fields. It uses what they call progressive enhancement, which is the JavaScript technique where you do this baseline HTML and then gradually layer more advanced functionality.

So his form will work on a real old browser. It’ll allow people to tab between the fields like they do on a regular form. It’ll allow them to put their cursor into every field and type in there. It’s coded in a way so that it actually has labels so screen readers can use it. It has a kind of primary action at the moment, that once you get through the whole thing you can submit. It does actual error checking, and so on and so forth.

So even though it’s this example of rethinking the format of a web forum, it’s still keeping true to things that keep web forms work online. It’s not breaking them, it’s not forcing people to really shift their mindset.

And I think that’s a very interesting direction I’m seeing across the web and in many places. It’s people building on what makes web forms tick, but using new rich technologies, new more interactive format, kind of maybe persuasive design, if you will, to make filling in those important web forms less painful.

However, the visual affordances can make or break the success of the form. Since most web forms haven’t changed since 1996, people have expectations. People succeed with Jeremy’s form because it’s obvious. But poor visual design can ruin a form, as well.

Luke recounts an experience he had at Yahoo! that exemplifies this point:

We had a directory page for the podcasts, and […] at the top of the page we had this input field that was open, which allowed people to tag that podcast episode with whatever terms they wanted.

And because people saw that input field and it was towards the top of the page, they immediately thought “search field,” and they would run search queries in there.

[…] it’s that sort of muscle memory aspect of, “This looks like a search field because it’s up at the top of the page and it looks like an input field. I know what that is. Let me just go ahead and start using it.”

There a number of ways that you can validate information that someone enters into your web form, on the fly. When done correctly, this really helps people get through long forms with less frustration. However, if you’re too clever with your validation, you can make the experience even more frustrating than it would have been without your “help”. Luke provides us with several examples in the podcast. Tune in to hear his advice on how to help and not hinder your users.

Clearly you can see we’re excited to have Luke join us for our 2010 Web App Masters Tour, with his presentation, Input: Moving Beyond Static Web Forms. We’re pleased that you’ll be able to see Luke in all four tour cities, San Diego, Minneapolis, Philadelphia and Seattle. He’ll have all sorts of concrete advice you can act on immediately.

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Peter Morville is the co-presenter of one of our most popular UIE Virtual Seminars of all time, Leverage Search and Discovery Patterns. As is often the case, our audience came up with a heap of thoughtful questions, which we decided to break up into two podcasts. This is the first, and the second will feature Peter’s co-presenter Mark Burrell answering even more of your questions. Even if you did not attend, there’s a lot of great information in these podcasts.

In this episode, Jared Spool sits down with Peter to address many issues, including an interesting notion that Peter mentioned in the seminar;

“Browsing doesn’t scale.”

This came up in discussion about whether a site needs to be optimized towards search or towards browsing. Peter said that the two are all-but inseparable. The idea was that for very large sites, there comes a limit to how deep you can patiently navigate to reach the information you’re looking for. In these cases, many users would start their journey with a search, and then navigate from the results. An example of this use case can be seen with how many people use Amazon.com. Their visit to the immense site may start with a search for a particular product, author or artist, and then begin to navigate from their initial search results.

Best Result First Pattern

Another topic that proved popular was Peter’s Best Result First pattern. It may seem obvious that you want the best search result for a query to appear first in the results, but achieving that is not particularly easy. Peter suggests that it takes iterative tuning and testing while tweaking relevance algorithms, but then also pulling in other factors like popularity, date, and format data.

Advanced Search

Several attendees had questions about “advanced search.” Should it be built into sites to assist novice users sort through results better or to help sophisticated users dig more deeply? Others questioned if the notion of “advanced search” was dead altogether.

Peter replied that advanced search wasn’t dead, though many might wish it so. He observed that advanced search often causes confusion among users and many of these interfaces and options overwhelm them. He says you should design your search as if there would be no advanced search at all. One innovative way to give more control to searchers is to present search results with faceted navigation. This way advanced and novices users alike can have an understandable tool to filter through their results.

Faceted Navigation within Search Results

Not all sites work well with facets. If you have your doubts, you need to measure the use of the facets and see if they’re leading to success. However, it’s difficult to determine the success of the facets because trouble could mean either their implementation was done poorly, or that facets simply aren’t a good match for your site.

There was much more in this interview, and I invite you to tune in to get more great insight from Peter and Jared. And check back shortly for the second podcast interview for this seminar, with Mark Burrell. And don’t forget, you can still access the recording of the Leveraging Search & Discovery Patterns seminar if you haven’t yet seen it.

What challenges are you facing with search on your site?

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We turn to Hagan Rivers for insight on designing challenging web applications year-after-year because she just keeps coming up with better and better ideas. When we were talking with her late last year, she mentioned she had another innovation in her web app design workflow, which sounded a bit strange at first blush: she designs the navigation as a separate application.

“How is that even possible?” we asked. Navigation is so central to the experience of the web that it frankly sounded like crazy talk. But we knew to hear Hagan out. Now we wonder how people do it any other way.

Recently, Jared sat down to talk with Hagan to discuss her somewhat radical notion, which she plans to discuss in detail at our upcoming Web App Masters Tour. Jared began by asking about the genesis of her application development strategy.

“I would be working on relatively complicated applications, and I found a lot of our design discussions would get really mired in the navigation. And the problem was, because we hadn’t fully worked out what was on each screen, we were kind of co-designing two things in parallel: how to get to the screens and what would be on the screens. And the two kind of affect one another, and so it was really hard to design these two similar objects at the same time.

And so what I started doing was just leaving this big, gray block at the top of the screen that says, “Navigation goes here. Let’s focus on the screen.” And once I did that, I found it got a lot easier to concentrate on what goes on each and every screen”

Of course, the primary application and the navigation are never truly separate apps. They’re always joined at the hip.

“They are obviously interweaved. […]you have to always design the navigation system with the rest of the screens deeply in mind, and you’re going to be inserting little bits and pieces here and there. But it’s still something you can design as its own freestanding thing.”

Hagan brought up the idea of momentum in design, where inspiration doesn’t just appear on demand, but when the ideas do start flowing you don’t want to hamper them. Navigation is often a decelerator of momentum. Leaving navigation until later in the process doesn’t just ease addressing the primary tasks of the application. There are other advantages to having many of the app’s screens complete, prior to having a navigation system. For example, during your usability testing of prototypes,

“Because you don’t have the navigation system in front of [your users], [they're] not being led by it. You’ve just got the raw screens. You know, sooner or later, to make a purchase order you have to collect certain information. No matter how the user got there, you know you have to collect. It’s a bunch of forms to fill in.

In what way does the user think about that? How do they get to those screens? What are they prepared with when they arrive there? What do they know? What don’t they know? Do they need to quit halfway through sometimes because they have to go look things up? All of those things will tell you what the navigation system needs to be.”

We feel that’s an powerful way to address the needs of your users with the navigation, gaining even more value from your research and testing efforts.

These are just a few tidbits from the interview. Be sure to listen to the interview to gain even more web app wisdom.

Obviously, we’re really excited that Hagan will be discussing this topic in depth at our Web App Masters Tour. Her “Escaping Navigation Hell” will be featured at all four stops on the tour, San Diego, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and Seattle. You won’t want to miss it.

When do you address navigation when building complex web applications? Would Hagan’s idea help you in your situation? Let’s discuss in the comments!

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How can we design systems that encourage the behaviors we want?

One of the bleeding edge ideas we’ll be talking about at the UIE Web App Masters Tour is adding motivation to web applications. How do you encourage user behavior through the design of your web app? It may initially sound a bit far-fetched, but there’s an industry that’s been shaping its customers’ behavior since the beginning: the gaming industry.

Stephen Anderson

Stephen Anderson is a consultant and a thought leader on the idea of motivating user behavior through design. He and Jared Spool sat down sat down for a discussion as part of our series of interviews with the Web App Masters.

Stephen’s developing a deck of cards to aid designers in brainstorming their designs, with consideration to behavioral cues. He calls them Mental Notes Stephen says,

“We focus on things like visual design, usability, or the information architecture and we forget about, ‘Oh yeah, there was that thing about gifting or curiosity or the peak-end rule.’ This is really a way to apply intention, or a way to intentionally remind people to use some of these, or try to leverage these.

These are ideas about human behavior and how humans respond to different ideas or different stimulus. So my idea is why aren’t we applying these to web design? We’re applying them to marketing, to retail, to interpersonal relationships, and to dating.

A lot of these ideas are nothing new, but I think we’re just now reaching the point where we’re thinking more consciously about how can I apply something like recognition over recall to web design?”

Stephen also gets into how we can use these persuasive or seductive ideas into shaping the initial engagement a web app has with its user.

“Attention is so scarce today that people spend 30 seconds on something, and they might not see the value or see why it could be useful to them in those 30 seconds. So my focus started shifting from the product itself to that initial engagement, that initial interaction, and how do we make that first experience a lot more seductive, so people stick around long enough to see that you really do have something worthwhile here?

Going back to real world analogies, think about if you were doing those not with a system online, but with a human. The human could be very straightforward, very to-the-point, in asking the questions, or that human could be very personable, and maybe crack a joke, or ask you how you are doing, do these things to be more personable. …why can’t these systems adopt some of those similar ideas?”

Stephen mentioned an internal corporate knowledge-sharing web app that he was involved with. The company used a lot of game-type incentives to encourage employee participation, but many of the most successful attributes are some of the most counter-intuitive. For example, to add content to some pages, employees had to “pay”. And this encouraged participation. They paid with points they accumulated doing other tasks within the system, like answering co-workers’ questions. Employees would attempt to answer the questions first so they could gain points before someone else beat them to it.

“…they described, in very qualitative ways, how you earn karma (“points” in this example) and how you get better at this game or this system. But they were not explicit with what activities you do and how many points you get for each. And I think that was very smart.”

We appear to be at the very cusp of adding psychology and a touch of gaming into web apps. From the friendly copy tone on Flickr to the full-on game strategy employed in Stephen’s example, it’s clear there’s a lot of potential here. You’ll want to listen to the entire interview and of course, you’re not going to want to miss Stephen present his talk, The Art & Science of Seductive Interactions, at our UIE Web App Masters Tour. It’s going to be impressive.

Stephen Anderson is just one of the incredible speakers we’ll be hosting during the Web App Masters Tour. Learn more about our locations dates and speakers at UIETour.com.

Are you building your web apps with an eye towards motivating specific behaviors? Let us know in the comments!

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Our audience clearly embraced Fred Beecher’s recent Virtual Seminar on prototyping, The Whys, Whats and Hows of Prototyping, because we were nearly buried under all the thoughtful questions we received. It’s clear people are looking for more effective and efficient ways of working through their design ideas. Our Adam Churchill got together with Fred after the seminar to go through the pile and deliver more answers for you.

During the podcast, Adam asked Fred to explore these questions, and more:

• Can you tell us how design differs from prototyping, and where
  elements like visual design and wireframing fit in?
• Does prototyping require organizational change? Anything you
  recommend when working with others in the organization that aren’t
  members of the design team?
• What are the best methods and tools for online testing?
• What recommendations do you have for collaboration when working with
  people in different locations, and possibly at different skill levels?
• Which prototyping tools do you recommend, and how do they differ, from low fidelity to high fidelity?

I know you’re going to enjoy this episode because I couldn’t get through editing the audio without pausing to look up some of the resources Fred suggests.

Do you still have prototyping questions? Ask them in the comments below.

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Conducting a usability test can be stressful, but you know how important this effort is. Effectively moderating a usability test is a critical part of your user research. It can put the design team on the path to success or failure in the next steps of a product’s design. With a little guidance, and some practice, you can master this art of interacting with you users and get the results your organization needs.
 
Back in October, we asked usability testing expert Beth Loring to present a UIE Virtual Seminar on how to Effectively Moderate Usability Tests. In her presentation, she talks about how to interact with participants and finding that balance between helping them feel comfortable and being too friendly. Beth covers what to do when participants get stuck, or even fail a task. There’s quite a bit of good information that will help you moderate your next usability test. As is often the case, we got lots of great questions from the live audience, but just couldn’t get to them all. I got together with Beth to record this podcast and cover some of the remaining issues. If you find yourself wanting more afterward, don’t forget you can still purchase a recording of the session for another 90 minutes of Effectively Moderating Usability Tests.
 
During the podcast, I asked Beth to explore these questions, and more:

• What is the recommended pathway for learning how to moderate usability tests?
• How much subject matter expertise should a moderator have going into a usability test?
• What’s the impact of using a participant more than once?
• How do you respond to a participant when they’re looking for feedback on how they’re doing in the test?
• What’s the reasonable maximum amount of time for a user test session?

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

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User experience research lives or dies by the appropriateness of the participants in the study. If the participants match the real users, you’re set. But if the participants aren’t like the target users, the project probably dies an ugly death. Worse, the design that is based on the bogus data croaks in public.

Earlier this Fall, I asked usability testing expert Dana Chisnell to present a UIE Virtual Seminar on one of the trickier parts of user research projects—Recruiting for Usability Testing. In her presentation, she talked about how to source and screen participants, how to compensate them, and even why you should do the recruiting rather than outsourcing it. We had more excellent questions from the audience than we could ask during the live event. So, I sat down with Dana to record this podcast and cover some of the remaining issues. If you find yourself wanting more afterward, don’t forget you can still purchase a recording of the 90-minute session, Recruiting for Usability Testing.

During the podcast, Jared asked Dana to dig into these questions, and more:

• Why recruit based on behavior, not demographics?
• How many people should you recruit (as opposed to how many you should test) for a user research project?
• How do you define recruiting criteria for a product that doesn’t exist yet?
• How do you take time zones into consideration when recruiting for remote usability testing?
• How do you word your subject lines in emails for the recruitment process?

Tune in to hear more about recruiting for your usability testing. Still have questions? Start the discussion in our comments, below.

If you didn’t attend the User Interface Conference this year, you may have missed the buzz over Leah Buley’s session entitled “How to be a User Experience Team of One”. Attendees loved it. Leah gave them tips and techniques used by top user experience teams that any UXer can use in a small team or an unsupportive environment.

Below are some notes I took during Leah’s session and slides from this portion of the talk. The slides here are shrunk to fit our blog, but the materials on the disc are full-sized PDFs suitable for printing.

Leah began with telling the story of her transition to a new job at Adaptive Path. Up until then, she had been a UX team of one at a financial firm. Her time was mostly spent walled up in a cubicle, headphones on, sketching and otherwise prepping wireframes on the computer, based on up-front meetings determining business requirements. After a few weeks she would emerge from her design cocoon with designs ready to be shown in a dog-and-pony show-style.

Her first day at Adaptive Path was radically different. She was handed paper and a Sharpie and, along with a couple of other designers, was asked to tackle a problem by generating several solutions, collaboratively, on the spot. She was initially flush with panic. They didn’t teach this at library school!

After a short while she warmed up to the process. To get to the quality ideas, you first must generate a lot of ideas, and be OK with many of them being subpar and others simply being tossed aside.

Now instead of jumping to the finish, as she had at her previous job, she was exploring more ideas more efficiently with techniques you can use with or without collaborating designers.

Leah used the idea of redesigning the eVite.com digital invitation and RSVP service to demonstrate some of the techniques she learned after joining Adaptive Path. (For the purposes of this blog post, we’ll be covering just the first part of the brainstorming process)

She avoided the computer. Computers can lock you into only one idea and you often get sucked down by minutia you shouldn’t be addressing at this stage.

She started with a “6-up” – a single sheet of paper with six, smallish, blank browser viewports and a pen. This allowed for 6 different ideas of how to solve one problem, say the eVite landing page. One or two ideas came easily. How do you push through to the next ideas?

[Download a PDF file of Leah's 6-up template]

Leah uses a couple of so-called “lightweight conceptual frameworks” to help push more ideas out of her head. A “Spectrum” is one such framework. A spectrum is a range from two opposing points. For example, what would the landing page at eVite.com look like if it was intended solely for a first-timer? What would it look like if it was solely for a long-time user of the service? What would pages on the spectrum in between those to points look like? What characteristic would they exhibit?

None of the sketches you make on the spectrum may be the right solution. But that’s OK, because we’re not drawing solutions. We’re drawing ideas. This framework gets you to try ideas you might have avoided before. Now you have a pile of ideas to pick from. Perhaps the best design features aspects from several of these thumbnail sketches.

You can hear the rest of Leah’s talk plus the other seven speakers and Jared Spool’s keynote presentation on the UI14 proceedings disc. The disc is loaded with over 12 hours of audio recordings, all the handouts from the Featured Talks and the presentation slides from the 8 full-day workshops. Order the proceedings disc by November 20, 2009 to guarantee your set and get the lowest price.

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How many IBM or General Electric television ads do we need to see before we are groaning at the mention of the word “innovation”? It’s too late for me, personally. But that doesn’t mean real innovation is dead. Steve Jobs has been quoted saying Apple will innovate their way through tight times. This past week Apple announced record revenues for the past quarter on impressive sales of premium products that aren’t supposed to sell well during down times. How are they flourishing while their competition is not?

How can you bring real innovation into your projects? That’s what I asked Scott Berkun when we spoke earlier this month. Scott is one of our favorite speakers on the topic of innovation and project management. He tells us you have to be opportunistic and start small. High-priority challenges may be a tempting place to start, but he suggested to first look at low-hanging fruit. You can build momentum for positive change by racking up a number of small wins that together move the project in the right direction. Having these small successes under your belt gives you more influence when attempting larger changes later on.

True innovation starts with you allowing yourself to be creative and recording your ideas religiously in a safe place like a notebook or sketchpad. Don’t self-censor, either. Initial precision and “getting it right” are the antithesis of creativity. It’s essential to let the ideas flow, and your ideas will improve as you continue to record them. Your journal is an incubator of ideas. Not every idea will be a success, and some will be terrible! But Scott says that’s OK. When an opportunity for change arises, you’ll have a treasure trove of ideas to pick though.

Once you have an idea, you need to involve other people to make it happen. The key differentiator in successful, innovative environments is group trust. People need to feel they are safe to share ideas with their team. If you work in an environment where you’re fearful of this, find one person on your team who is the most enthusiastic and try sharing with them. Once you have other people on board with your idea, you’ll have an easier time sharing it with others.

A common difficulty is honest and constructive critique among teams and individuals. This is an area where the most successful teams have excelled. Good critiques take practice and trust within your team. This usually requires time and commitment.

Scott has a lot of great ideas for your team from his years of research into the habits of highly innovative teams. And we have asked him to present his findings in a full-day workshop at our User Interface 14 Conference, this November in Boston. Scott presented on this very topic last year and received rave reviews as one of our most entertaining and informative speakers. You won’t want to miss it.

What experiences have you had trying to introduce new ideas? Politics and “we’ve tried that before” getting in the way? Let us hear about it in the comments.

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What can a non-designer do to harness the power of visual design without calling professional help? Quite a lot, says internationally-regarded visual designer Dan Rubin. We called Dan to talk about what design techniques are accessible to mere mortals. He also gave us a preview of his day-long workshop for non-designers at our User Interface 14 Conference, this November.

Call it low hanging fruit, Dan says, but there are a lot of small, seemingly simple things that combine to have a strong, positive effect upon your site’s impact. If you’ve built with web standards, especially using CSS for style, these small changes can be trivial to execute across your site. Start with the spacing between elements. Consistency with the white space and alignment bring an important sense of order to your pages.

“Humans love patterns and order,” Dan tells us. Patterns and rules are tools pro designers use to organize page elements. Arbitrary placement leave sites looking cluttered and out of sorts. Creating rules — for example, the amount of space between certain elements — is something non-pros can do to bring order to a page. Choose a spacing and alignment scheme and stick to it. The earlier you set these rules and patterns, the easier it is to wrangle your page elements. Once rules are in place, you’re left with fewer arbitrary decisions to make. Arbitrary decisions are often the cause of disorder.

Massive gains can be made by addressing typographical issues. Proper typography establishes the hierarchy of information, guiding your visitors through your site content. Create a visual identity for a kind of content, and then use it consistently. Dan says most pro designers limit the number of typefaces (fonts) in a design to one or two; often one serifed face (Georgia is an example), and one sans-serif (Verdana is an example). From there, Dan advocates restraint, by making the smallest effective change to call attention to differences. Don’t combine large text, bold, italics, and color on one element where bold alone would have sufficed.

Color is a challenging topic. Many feel color choices are subjective, but there are considerations to consider. Using a color palette, like kuler.adobe.com, will help you pick colors that naturally work together… but if you already have brand colors, you should try to stick with them as much as practical. Remember, you can use black, white, and the spectrum of grays to accomplish a lot of your design’s heavy lifting. Be sure, when you do interject colors, to remember that they often have cultural, meanings. Dan used the example of red, in many cultures, representing a warning. Be wary of red in a context where it might lead a user to think they’re being warned when they are not. Try to work with these cultural perceptions instead of against them. Be sure to understand audience; those with color blindness and those from different cultures may literally view your colors differently.

Dan wanted everyone to remember that, in design, “We’re solving problems… but not for ourselves.” He also had another bit of advice, “When you design something right, no one will pat you on the back, because now it works like it’s supposed to.” That might be hard to accept initially, but it means you can make small changes without startling people. An adjustment to the line-height of your text might not be noticed by a regular reader, but they’ll find themselves more comfortably reading the content.

Dan has gathered all this advice and much more into his full-day User Interface 14 workshop, Visual Design Essentials for Non-Designers: Effortless Skills for High-quality Designs. It’s so full of enough valuable content, you’ll keep you tweaking your site for months to come.

Are you responsible for the visual design on your site, without pro-design resources? What effective steps have you found to improve your site? Let us know in the comments.

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Donna Spencer is our long-time, go-to expert on the topic of Information Architecture. We’re happy to bring her stateside again for the upcoming User Interface 14 conference. Recently, I spoke with her, all the way from Australia, in advance of her trip to Boston.

I asked Donna, what happens when, one day, you’re asked into the boss’s office and they drop “the web site” and “information architecture” into your lap? Regardless of your experience, where do you begin? Donna says your first question should be, “Why do we bother to have a web site in the first place?” “What’s its purpose?” She says if you don’t get this out of the way first, you’ll run up against it when you’re further along the trail and it won’t be easy to deal with.

One strategy Donna likes is to work backwards. Start with what should not be on the site. Sometimes pruning your unnecessary or no longer timely content is an effective way of honing the site. You should ask, “What’s the value of this content? Is this still relevant?” Before you can answer this for certain, you need to research your users’ needs thoroughly. Along with establishing the site’s purpose, knowing your users is the most important step to begin with. These two items will work hand in hand.

I asked Donna, once you have these established, should we just dive right into the homepage and start making changes? Generally, the answer is no. A few initial homepage tweaks aren’t always bad, especially if you can get some quick wins there. Hopefully your research has revealed the site sections in most need of assistance. Starting there will often be productive. You should most likely start with the content pages, where more people enter your site and where they spend most of their time. Be sure that your content pages work for their specific content, as all your content will not likely be all cookie-cutter. Generally, Donna shies away from using Lorem Ipsum text for content page designs. Also, if you know your customers don’t generally begin on the homepage, don’t create your navigation by starting with the homepage.

Your goal should be to get something informed in front of people quickly. At some point you’ll need to take what you know and create a first draft. You’ll have to make some of it up. Don’t expect it to be 100% right. Check it against your research, show it to people within the organization, and tweak. Show it to users and see if it functions well. The good and bad should become apparent once you put it through these paces.

These points are of course just a few of the highlights from our conversation. Please join us for the complete discussion in the podcast. If you found this useful, you’ll likely also be interested in Donna’s full-day workshop at UI14, Information Architecture Essentials, Best Practices for Organizing Your Site’s Content, which was UI13’s highest-rated workshop, newly revised and updated. You won’t want to miss it.

Have you had the task of redesigning your site’s IA just dropped in your lap out of the blue? Where would or did you start? Let us know in the comments!

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Todd Zaki Warfel has just finished two years of research into the tools and processes used in prototyping web sites. His findings will be published in a book due out this fall and we’ve asked him to give a full-day workshop on the topic at UI14. Did you know some people are actually building prototypes in Microsoft Excel? It’s true. “People are using what they have at their disposal and what they are comfortable with,” Todd tells me.

In the podcast, we discussed a number of the more popular tools that are being used today, from Adobe Fireworks, to Axure RP, to good old PowerPoint. Todd doesn’t think your choice of tool is important if you are able to communicate your ideas effectively to your audience. He thinks it is worth knowing the capabilities of a few other tools in the event you need to do something in the future that your current tool can’t handle.

I got Todd to reveal the process his own shop, Messagefirst, is using to prototype. It may surprise you that they start with rough, black and white sketches which they share with their clients both early and often. Whereas some design shops may work hard on a prototype for three months before first showing it to their client, Todd thinks that’s a bad idea. There’s nothing worse than diving deep into a design direction only to have it unilaterally shot down in the first review.

Instead, you need to get your client to give you lots of feedback very early in the process, starting with basic and rough sketches. It will save both sides a lot of time, effort and frustration. Once the design direction is solidified, Todd and his team move their prototypes into color and interactivity. The Messagefirst crew is now often jumping straight to HTML, CSS and JavaScript for the higher fidelity mockups.

Todd tells us that someone with basic HTML skills can (and have) learned to create high fidelity prototypes in just a couple weeks of effort. The secret is the availability modular tools, for example, CSS frameworks like the 960 Grid System and JavaScript libraries like jQuery. This move to code earlier in the process is becoming more and more popular around the web.

Todd and I talked more about his two years’ worth of findings and he gave us a preview of his UI14 full-day workshop. Tune in to the show for more on prototyping.

We’d love to know what process and tools you’re using in your own designs. Have you incorporated feedback early into your process? Let us know in the comments!

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

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

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

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

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

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One of the most popular speakers in the history of our User Interface Conference is Gerry McGovern. Certainly most of that popularity is thanks to Gerry’s no-nonsense, customer-centric approach to content management strategy. Perhaps a small portion is due to his dulcet Irish brogue. Gerry coined the term “customer care words”, which are distinct words and phrases that visitors are looking for that lead them to success and satisfaction. This is complimentary to a concept we at UIE call “trigger words”, but not quite the same. Trigger words are content-related and navigational–words that help lead you along the path to what you seek. Care words are task-related not content-related; they are the words that visitors need to see to complete the task they are on your site for. These words are not always found in your search logs or in keywords that have led people from Google to your site. But, through polling, testing and observation, care words can be discovered.

Customer care words are both a concept and a eponymous technique that Gerry uses with his clients. When enough participants take part in his processes, his technique both shows top words people are attracted to and, perhaps more importantly, reveals the top tasks the customers are visiting the site to accomplish.

Top task management, quite simply, is what Gerry thinks your site’s whole design should revolve around. Most site owners view their sites as places that house information, but your visitors are on your site to accomplish a task. You should optimize your site, mostly through language, so that it excels in helping visitors accomplish their most common tasks. Traditional site management concentrates on technology, like search engines, and content. But all site projects should ultimately be judged by the satisfaction and success of the users… not by whether your new CMS transition went technically well.

Once the content management system is in place, many organizations write and publish copy without knowing how it will be used. Optimizing your content for top tasks can produce increases in customer satisfaction and task completion. Gerry has seen this with many of his own clients, some of whom were skeptical at first. The biggest objection to optimizing for top tasks is the fear that your customers look to do many things on your site, not just these top tasks. However, if customers have trouble with their common tasks, why would they trust your site to dive into the other ones? In some cases, the top tasks weren’t the most obvious ones to site owners, underlining the importance of both talking to your customers and observing users on your site regularly.

Measuring your customers’ success rate, time-to-completion and their disaster rate–when they think they’ve successfully completed their task, but actually have not–will show you whether or not your changes are beneficial. What’s key is to measure and to revisit these areas until we have them right. Too often, Gerry says, there’s a culture of “launch and leave” with sites: build it and then never revise. Constant, incremental improvement is a better culture to work towards. Gerry has seen seen customer satisfaction rates “sky-rocket” after such changes.

There’s so much more Gerry and I discussed. Please listen to him in his own words on the podcast; your customers will thank you. And if these issues are truly hitting home for you, you won’t want to miss Gerry’s full-day workshop on Mastering Top-task Management for top tasks at our User Interface Conference this November.

How are you ensuring your customers are completing their top tasks successfully on your site? Discuss your methods in the comments below.

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This week we have our longest, and certainly one of our most interesting episodes to date. Jared and Robert met Joshua Muskovitz on the IxDA discussion list when Josh posted an innocent-enough question to the list: what do you call someone who sits squarely on the fence between interaction design and implementation? How do I market myself while job hunting when I have been in the industry so long that I have a really broad range of skills?

Josh certainly does claim a wide range of skills, from interaction design and usability to front-end development, back-end programming, and business development. That brought up the question an employer might also have when reading his resume… “Is this guy for real? Can he really do all of this stuff well?”

As with most debates that Jared and Robert delve into, this one got messy, fast. But it also became very interesting. I knew I had to find Josh and invite him on Userability. I’m glad I did, as it made for a great podcast. Tune in to hear the debate, and if you have an opening for a man like Josh, won’t you let him know?

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!

We want to hear your take on this debate. Can someone do all the things that Josh can, really well? Can he fit into a corporate structure, or does he need to find a small operation who can really put all his tools to work? Get the debate started again in the comments

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I had the pleasure of chatting with Leah Buley recently, in advance of her appearance at our User Interface Conference. She’ll be speaking about getting to a Good Design Faster with new techniques to getting at your creative ideas. She’s done some wonderful research on early-project design stages that you really need to hear. There’s a ton of great content in this podcast, and I can only share so much with you here, so please tune in for more of her insights.

When Leah told me that wireframes are really holding back the design process, she grabbed my attention. Designers sit down with some rough ideas and start trying to fit them into one or two pages. Next they start sliding design elements around until things feel good, and then they show it to someone for feedback. That someone or group then sees a design that’s pretty far along, and looks pretty concrete. If some of the ideas in the wireframe are not developed as much as they should be, it’s difficult to stop the forward momentum and reassess.

How can we explore a range of solutions before diving into a single solution? Wireframes are very useful to the process, but instead, we should consider delaying them. Before wireframes, Leah suggests a very open, cross-team exploratory stage. Invite people from across your organization and even collaborate with those who might not normally be within the core design group.

Leah suggests a week-long ‘design sprint’ that begins with a group brainstorming meeting in the morning with lots of people… and everyone’s opinions count. Then that afternoon, the group sketches out a large number of low-fidelity sketches further exploring the experience they’re looking to design, based on the morning’s activities. Sketching many iterations based on different perspectives like, ‘how would we optimize this for a first-time user?’ ‘how about for a power-user?’ ‘how about for this demographic?’

Then the week-long process continues. Grouping the different approaches together, sort the best from the bunch, mixing and matching the best ideas and build upon them (Leah calls this ’sketch-boarding’). Next, take the sketches and flows with the most potential, and make those the first round of wireframes, which you present to a group critique. At the end of the week, take the feedback from the group critique to improve the wireframes.

The end result is a wireframe that has a tremendous amount of collaborative thought behind it. Instead of surprising many stakeholders at this point, their good ideas are already baked inside. You can now share these fire-tested ideas with the next groups that need to see them. This is clearly different from the way many groups and designers are using wireframes today, and I think it’s a really powerful proposition.

Leah and I also talked about ways to become an effective sketcher, how to run productive group critique sessions and much more. You really need to listen in, this could really help your teams process. After our conversation, I’m even more excited to see her full-day workshop on this topic this November at UI14 in Boston. I hope to see you there, as well.

Till then, what are your experiences with the early rounds of design? What are you doing in advance of your wireframing? Can you see implementing this process in your organization? Let us know in the comments!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Last month we held a UIE Virtual Seminar where I presented my talk, Search, Scent, and the Happiness of Pursuit. As always, we had a number of excellent questions from the live audience that we couldn’t attend to during the seminar, so, with a little help from Adam Churchill, I recorded this podcast and cover a number of those remaining questions.

If you didn’t attend the live seminar, and are interested in helping users find what they seek, 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 Search, Scent, and the Happiness of Pursuit.

During the podcast, I dig into these questions:

• Should the failed search log be getting smaller if the design is good?
• Is there a correlation between search volume and customer satisfaction?
• How important is the number of search results shown? Do users want to see lots of results and filter down, or see fewer results and browse?
• Would you expect these results to change if you were studying Intranet sites?
• Is Advanced Search relevant or necessary?

Tune in to get some tips on how to get your users to what they seek. Still have questions? Start the discussion in our comments, below.

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This week we receive a call for help from Louisiana, where the gumbo isn’t the only thing that’s hot. Ms. Tatum Dutile had this to ask the panel…

Is it good to have multiple links to the same destination on one page, for instance, a link in the text, in the navigation bar, and on the right side of the page?  Or do too many redundant links make the page harder to use because people have to scan through more things to get to what they’re looking for?

Tune in for a detailed discussion of the desert climate of Arizona compared to the oppressive humidity of the deep south… or tune in to gain some insights on where your users expect to find certain links within your designs. (We cater to many audiences.)

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!

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This week a question from one of the world’s most well-read cities fittingly enquires about the must-read books in design.

Damon Dimmock of Cambridge, MA, asked,

If you had to recommend just three books on user experience (classic, new, fundamental, etc.), which ones would they be?

How will Robert hold off from recommending his own books? You’ll have to tune in to see!

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!

Here are links to each of the books Robert and Jared recommended:

Robert:

• The Inmates Are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper
• A Project Guide to UX Design by Russ Unger and Carolyn Chandler
• Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug

Jared:

• Designing for People by Henry Dreyfuss
• Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge
• User and Task Analysis for Interface Design by JoAnn Hackos and Janice Redish

What are the most influential books you’ve read in the field? Share them with us in the comments!

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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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Earlier this week we released a “slidecast” of Jared’s popular Revealing Design Treasures from the Amazon presentation, which features the audio of the talk synced with the slides. It’s almost like being there, except you can pause it. Since then, we’ve had a (metric) ton of requests for a version in audio-only/podcast format. Here you go.

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.”)