February 2012 Issue
IA Strategy: Addressing the Signatures of Information Overload
By Nathaniel Davis
Published: February 6, 2012
The one thing we know about information overload on the Web is that we don’t know enough. The rapid rate at which people and organizations create and propagate information complicates our getting a grip on information overload in the domain of information technology. Our information includes things like our Honey-Do lists, gigabytes of digital documents, and the deluge of email messages that pile up in our email inboxes. The amount of information we consume and manage is growing in both its volume and volatility. Probably worse than the self-inflicted burden of information glut that we’ve invented for ourselves is the fact that the less we know about information overload, the less we can know about the relevance of our collective stockpiles of information.
Signatures of Information Overload
In this month’s column, I’d like to broaden the scope of our IA strategy lens by raising awareness of six information signatures that many of us may have observed in practice, but never related collectively to the information overload problem.
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Topic: Columns | Information Architecture
Communicating User Research Findings
By Jim Ross
Published: February 6, 2012
“No one reads reports!”
“PowerPoint must die!”
We’ve all read monotonous reports and struggled to remain awake during boring presentations, but must all deliverables be interminably dull? Conveying user research findings so people can understand them, believe them, and know how to act on your recommendations can be challenging. And providing enough detail without boring your audience is a difficult balance. But there are some best practices in communicating user research findings that can make them more effective—and even entertaining.
Why Provide Any Deliverable At All?
First, you might question whether your project needs a formal deliverable. Some project teams are tempted to simply translate their research findings into a product’s design without producing any documentation of their research findings. This saves time in the short term, but the danger is that, without some kind of description of the findings, the research knowledge remains in the brain of the researcher. When that person moves on to another project or another employer, you’ll lose that knowledge. I experienced this problem recently when I took over a project from a researcher who had left our company. It was extremely difficult to understand the previous research, because there were only raw notes and no deliverables.
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Topic: Columns | User Research
Dealing with Difficult People, Teams, and Organizations: A UX Research Maturity Model
By Tomer Sharon
Published: February 6, 2012
An increasing number of organizations and individuals who develop software products, Web applications, Web sites, or other digital products are gaining a better understanding and appreciation for user experience and UX design and research. Subsequent to the introduction of some magnificent products and services that many executives now own or use—such as smartphones, tablets, Web applications, social media, and video games—they have gained a better understanding of what UX design and research can do to boost the success of a business offering.
That said, it still seems that the majority of product development organizations and the individuals who work for them have not yet fully bought into the benefits of UX design and even less so of UX research. When you encounter these sorts of organizations or individuals, you have a decision to make: fight or flee. To make a good decision, you should start by identifying the maturity of the organization in which you work. It might be helpful to do this by considering the UX research maturity model I’ll describe in this article.
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Topic: UX Strategy | User Research
How to Get Yourself Started in Statistics
By Caroline Jarrett
Published: February 6, 2012
How do you feel about statistics?
For a long time, I was a stats refusenik. Years ago at university, I took a class in mathematical statistics, and it never made any sense to me. My sporadic attempts to overcome my fears and learn to understand p-values, t tests, and χ2, or chi-squared, had never come to anything.
But recently, I’ve been dealing with my fears and overcoming my resistance to learning statistics. I’m writing a book on surveys, and what’s the point of getting lovely, large-sample data if you can’t run a few statistical tests on it? So I knuckled down, bought a variety of introductory statistics books and tackled them. Plus, I took some college courses for good measure. And I’m pleased to report that all of my effort is sort of working. Although I’m definitely still a statistics newbie, I no longer automatically skip the statistical section in every academic paper I read. So that’s progress.
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Topic: Columns | User Research
Designing with the Mind in Mind: An Interview with Jeff Johnson
By Kristina Mausser
Published: February 6, 2012
mindful |ˈmïndfəl|
adjective [predic.]
conscious or aware of something
Design, as a creative process, is often subconscious. What we create might be based on design principles, but what we ultimately produce largely comes down to emotion—how we feel about a design and, more important, how we think others will feel about it.
Jeff Johnson’s new book, Designing with the Mind in Mind, demystifies the cognitive and emotive components of design by forcing us to consider the physiological aspects of interaction design and the psychological factors that influence its interpretation. I had a chance to catch up with Jeff recently to talk about how, as user experience and interaction designers, we can all be a little more mindful of these aspects of the designs we create.
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Topic: Human Factors | Interviews
Video Diaries: A Method for Understanding New Usage Patterns
By Paul Bryan
Published: January 23, 2012
In my new column, UX Strategy, I’ll explore the growing field of user experience strategy, which combines business strategy with user experience design to build a rationale and a road map for guiding an organization’s UX efforts. This column will address methods and practices that UX Strategists can use to collect data, formulate personas and interaction models, document UX strategies, and create UX road maps.
These are exciting times. The business of user experience is evolving rapidly. In a very short period of time, the complexity of user-interface considerations has multiplied. New product and service introductions occur so fast that trying to keep up with last month’s announcements is like drinking out of a fire hose. Consumers have so many options at their fingertips that the vast majority of them have barely begun to exploit the resources that are only a tap or a download away.
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Topic: Columns | UX Strategy | User Research
Defining an Interaction Model: The Cornerstone of Application Design
By Jim Nieters
Published: January 23, 2012
In March of 2011, I joined HP to lead the User Experience and Front-End Development organization for Consumer Travel. My goal? To design products that transform the future of travel. At the time, eleven UX professionals had already been working on the design for one of our travel applications for several months. Unfortunately, I had to throw the entire design away and start from scratch. Why? In addition to other challenges, the team could not articulate an interaction model.
What Is an Interaction Model?
What is an interaction model? An interaction model is a design model that binds an application together in a way that supports the conceptual models of its target users. It is the glue that holds an application together. It defines how all of the objects and actions that are part of an application interrelate, in ways that mirror and support real-life user interactions. It ensures that users always stay oriented and understand how to move from place to place to find information or perform tasks. It provides a common vision for an application. It enables designers, developers, and stakeholders to understand and explain how users move from objects to actions within a system. It is like a cypher or secret decoder ring: Once you understand the interaction model, once you see the pattern, everything makes sense. Defining the right interaction model is a foundational requirement for any digital system and contributes to a cohesive, overall UX architecture.
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Topic: Interaction Design
When All On Means All Off
By Carol Barnum
Published: January 23, 2012
We hear a lot about the difficulty of getting all of our entertainment devices to talk to each other. Jakob Nielsen once wrote an Alertbox column about this problem, showing the six different remotes he uses to watch TV.
Often, people buy after-market, add-on products to remedy such problems—for example, Logitech’s Harmony all-in-one remote, which lets users connect to all of their devices via a single device—or so they advertise. It’s a testament to the frustration level of many people that they are willing to pay upward of $200 for a device just to support the devices they already own and use.
But what if the problem is not having multiple remotes, but issues with just one remote: the essential DVR remote? Here’s my own experience of the problems I encountered with my DVR remote after my recent switch from one cable provider to another.
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Topic: User Experience (UX)
Global UX: A Journey
By Whitney Quesenbery and Daniel Szuc
Published: January 23, 2012
In our increasingly connected world of 2012, we have more ways of continually learning to better understand, communicate, live, and work with each other, both locally and globally. The old boundaries, borders, and divisions are slowly disappearing, and established systems are starting to break down, making it challenging to learn what this new world means to all of us.
When it is easy to become a friend of someone who does not live in our neighborhood or even our country, our assumptions about other people start to change. Similarly, the UX research and design professions are seeing a shift that edges us beyond the boundaries within which we live and work, forcing us to look outside our window when designing and improving the products and services we work on.
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Topic: Business of UX | UX Community
How Important Are UX Degrees and Certifications?
By Janet M. Six
Published: January 23, 2012
In this edition of Ask UXmatters, our experts discuss whether UX professionals need to have degrees or certifications in areas of study relating to user experience to practice in the field and the value that they provide.
In my monthly column, Ask UXmatters, a panel of UX experts answers our readers’ questions about a broad range of user experience matters. To get answers to your own questions about UX strategy, design, user research, or any other topic of interest to UX professionals in an upcoming edition of Ask UXmatters, please send your questions to: ask.uxmatters@uxmatters.com.
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Topic: Columns