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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In this episode, we discussed:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update: Part 2 is now posted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indi had some interesting opinions on:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Duration: 22min | File size: 12.5 MB
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[ Text Transcript ]

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

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

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

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

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

We talked about several books in this episode:

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

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

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

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

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

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

In this episode we cover,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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