Hey, I just started a flickr group about Great user experience!
While working in the usability field, we are often talking about bad and great user experience. I have found several Flickr groups about bad design/bad experience but I haven’t found one that lists great design/great user experience. So here is one.
Have a look and I invite you to contribute in uploading pictures or sketches of products (any interfaces, controls, services, etc) that made your day: At the end, you had a great experience.
Have you heard about Daniel Szuc? I had the chance to attend one of his recent talk, here in Wellington.
Topic: Sell UX
I simply loved his talk; I smiled several times
We are all working in different organizational cultures and it’s important to know in which one you are working to better understand how you should sell UX.
Challenges when you work in an Engineer-centric culture: (From Dan’s talk – slide 33)
Tendency to deem a product usable if it is possible to do the task.
Rely heavily on their own experience in UI design.
Feel they are doing the right thing for the customer, even if they don’t have evidence.
Design-centric culture
Define the UX in terms of aesthetics rather than ease of use.
Focus on visuals rather than workflows.
Rely heavily on their own instincts about users.
Focus only on data that confirms their viewpoints.
Sales and marketing-centric culture
Rely heavily on customers’ self-report and customer suggestions to assess usability.
Disproportionately weight their biggest or loudest customers.
Often overconfident in their ability to know what the customer needs.
These are real challenges, if you want to sell UX to upper management, you need to understand these. I have worked in all three cultures, or sometimes a mash-up of these and often, at that time, I was not aware of these challenges. It was harder to present UX and the benefits of doing user research.
Another point that stroke me was how often UX language is ugly. That’s true, we talk about heuristic analysis, card sorting, Information architecture assessment, etc
We prone usable stuff, but our lingo is not much understood across departments. What should we do?
At the end, here is his take in what sells:
Passion - If you are not passionate by what you are doing, it will be very difficult to sell it to somebody that is unaware of your usefulness.
Choose the right project - If you are in a big corporation and you feel alone having the goal to improve customer satisfaction/experience, try to focus on one project that you know your input with have an impact. Then, it will be easier to take it as a case study.
Choosing the right tools – Don’t try to use the whole set of tools that we have, keep it simple to 1-3 tools that will add the most value for the current context.
Here is talk… sadly, there is no audio, but still worth flicking thru the slides.
That’s the way to go! Nobody likes to fill forms. What do you really need to register on a website, sometimes corporations ask you to fill forms longer than a Tax Return; what about a corporation that only ask for your email. One of the good practices of designing forms is to reduce the amount of questions asked. Instapaper does it right. This website allows you to save web pages to read later. Have a look at their registration process.
I simply love it! Only your email address is required.
The only thing I would change is the size of the email address field (using larger fonts). The reason is simply to reduce the probability of filling a wrong email (typo). By having larger font, it’s easier for the user to catch his error before clicking Register.
If you want to be get a password, you simply visit Account Settings.
And then, you add a password to your account.
What happen when you log in, you might have a password or not. Instapaper simply puts it that way. They explain briefly that if you have set up a password, you need to enter it otherwise, you don’t need, period!
I started to used that website a week ago with my iPod and I like the idea and allows me to save articles and read it on the bus.
Would it be possible to design a simpler registration form? No registration required?
I have to thanks a colleague, Andrew, who sent me a link to Instapaper after having a discussion related to forms.
Have you ever bought a good bottle of wine and wanted to keep the name to buy that one again in the future? You can write the name down, add a note to your iPhone or BlackBerry or, like my parents were doing several years ago, immerse the bottle for a while and then take the label off. The latter takes time… On a trip to Australia, I discovered a nice way to keep the name of a good bottle. Have a look.
The detachable small label contains the estate name and the grape variety. That’s interesting but I guess there is something missing; their website and if it’s a vintage, there should be the year. After removing the label I thought it was like a stamp, so I would be able to affix in a note book, but it wasn’t, I was a bit disappointed. Overall, I believe it’s a great idea but with few things missing.
