1. There's an unbalanced focus on the "shiny" and not the finished product

Let's face it, the days of hordes of web professionals walking in with black turtlenecks talking about how we are creating "immersible experiences" that don't relate to a return on investment are over.

Many user experience consultants, however, are still focusing on shiny presentations with pretty wireframes without the knowledge to back up their reasoning. They drive up in the fast cars and present fast wireframes in slick presentation folders. They wave their hands around, doing their best impression of Steve Jobs.

There's only one Steve Jobs, and even his opinion on products changes as he sees them evolve. Software and web projects should do the same over time. Companies are expecting well-reasoned solutions that will translate to their bottom line,  improve their brand and will evolve over time.

The Bottom Line:
Great looking wireframes are just that, if there's no depth.

I would almost say never trust a user experience consultant that delivers perfect wireframes. During the process of many projects, wireframes are used as communication tools and should never match the finished product. The real judge of a user experience consultant is the final result: how did the client benefit. If the consultant can't answer this, shiny is useless.

2. The consultant user experience process starts with wireframes.

The ad is posted, the user experience consultant is hired, and there is no discovery process. Within one day, there's a set of wireframes that describes a home page, inside pages, and a few other random pages that are a loose collection of detail and sketches. While it's enough to get the developers started, it becomes clear that the initial wireframes assume a target that does not exist.

It's like designing a house without asking the key questions like how many rooms the house is going to have, how many stories to design for, or even where the house is going to built.

Or – would you build a car without knowing who you're building a car for?

The Bottom Line:
Establish the business and user goals.

It doesn't have to be a very exhaustive process (and shouldn't be in some agile environments), but there should be a target with which to start. One project I worked on, we had a single set of two personas, and from the very outset, it helped the developers identify with the target users. We may have been wrong to begin with, but any project is a journey, not a destination.

3. When asked why something is designed a certain way, many answers are “because.”

The wireframes are being developed, handed over to the developers and turned into something real. Yet, nothing makes sense. After a few sprints, it becomes evident that design decisions made do not make sense; yet when the user experience consultant is asked about why they made those decisions or designed the functionality in a certain way, there is very little critical thought or data to back them up.

A lot of poor design decisions by user experience professionals begin with the usual: "Well, we've always done it this way" or "The last project I did was designed this way." While using patterns from previous project or two is a good place to start…

The Bottom Line:
"Because" isn't good enough.

There should be design patterns, established processes used from other sites or at the very least, guerilla usability studies behind the wireframes that are given to the developers. Design patterns I have used in previous projects are based on established best practices, success of previous projects, or based on real data. Even then, "because of this" may change due to user testing and initial results.

4. Their resume has a list of brands, but they don’t know where the offices are.

One of the oldest tricks in the book: web and graphic designers altering a single graphic or one line of text in the site and claiming credit for the project. It could be even how they presented a single idea to a client, and the resulting claim was how they personally changed the way that company did business. Think of those wonderful Windows 7 commercials in a professional environment.

More examples:
One user experience consultant I know of has never even been to some of the companies she has on her resume, or worked with them whatsoever. Another designer I know took credit for a project where he was one of nine designers.

The Bottom Line:
Ask them to explain what was accomplished for the client.

Whatever documents the user experience consultant has in his portfolio, he should be able to explain in detail what he did, what methodology he followed, and what the result was. The user experience consultant might not have all the pieces, but even if the site was changed he could ascertain why it was changed.

Most large projects should have teams of professionals on them, and I've personally been up front about this on projects I've worked on. Other professionals should do the same when explaining their background.

5. They can't explain the user experience process, other than calling out Cooper or Garrett.

There are a lot of user experience books out there, and many of them make fine reading on cross country flights (I read a Cooper book on a flight I was on recently, and a Tog book before that). However, they are a starting point.

Some user experience consultants follow a certain school or process, bringing up the "this person said this" or "this person said that" approach of reasoning, as if that person is the sole reason why users act a certain way.   Blanket statements like "this technology is bad" don't take into account the context of the application.

The reality is that each project is different and the author isn't the one on the project. User experience professionals have the challenge of adapting to the environment they were working and should act accordingly.

The Bottom Line:
The reason to know the rules is to know when the break them.

The best document I've used with my clients is a modified Gantt chart that shows not only the user experience process but a complete software development lifecycle as a whole. When I sit down with the client, I talk about elements of the process as an example, and then highlight process steps that may not apply.

6. They make the process more complicated than it needs to be.

A friend of mine ran into this when working in her organization. A fellow member of the team said there was this certain tagging process to follow, directly copied from a blog post off a prominent user experience site. The issue: the tagging process would have dramatically lengthened doing work within their environment, requiring much more work to perform the same amount of tasks.

It’s dangerous enough to copy posts from blog entries when there’s no context, but even worse when the post advocates a process that is ill-suited to the group at hand. Most of those processes are designed to be used in academic or enterprise environments, which obviously doesn’t work well for a team of ten.

Before using any method or process, there has to be a careful look at what you’re asking for before you jump into it.

The Bottom Line:
Do just enough user experience gathering to keep the process going.

I’ve done the full-on user experience process, but on one project I worked on, the wireframes consisted of sketches performed on print outs for A/B testing. The tools of user experience are communication tools to an end goal, and nothing else. If the user experience expert does not agree with that, then it’s really time to look for a new one.

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From Marketing Experiments Blog:

If you're like many companies, you might think outsourcing social marketing is your best bet.

But more than ever companies are working to keep social media in-house because it requires such an intimate knowledge of the brand and because of the personal nature of social media interactions in general. Customers want to talk to  you, not an "outsourced" spammy twitter account. And when you leave them with no choice, they happily take their discussion to your nearest competitor.

…

Instead of hiring or tasking the best person for the job, whether that's managing the Twitter account or actively engaging in forum discussions, many companies put their least experienced, least qualified people on an overwhelming number of social media initiatives. Usually this person is in marketing and may be tasked to cover topics or areas of social media they have little or no experience in. But this isn't the most efficient and certainly not the most effective method for achieving social media success.

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From Econsultancy: The main reasons why shoppers abandon their shopping cart.

High shipping costs – 44%

Not ready to purchase – 41%

Price checking – 27%

Price too high – 25%

Wanted to save products for later – 24%

Of course, providing clear delivery charges on product pages and elsewhere so that customers don’t have to add items to the cart to find out total costs would be one improvement, and it also makes sense for retailers to make it as easy as possible for customers to resume their sessions on subsequent visits.

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How true. How true.

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Read on:

The very way that we present content on the web is being reshaped by tablets and  ye olde linear newsprint that they seek to mimic.   Just look at how Safari's new  Reader feature "removes annoying ads and other visual distractions" (ie. all the things the web's good at, the very things publishers have placed on their page deliberately), paring articles down to their intrinsic text core. It's like printing off the web as a PDF.

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From The Oatmeal.

Read on…

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I’ve been doing a fair amount of work around screen resolutions lately. There’s always the “users don’t scroll” issue (they do), but have you thought about the device they may be using: laptop or desktop?  Probably not. And did you realize that it may affect the user experience, because they might not be using a mouse, but may be using a trackpad?  Absolutely not.

Laptop vs. Desktop:

• Screen sizes of 1280 by 800, 1440 by 900, and 1366 by 768 are indications the end user is most likely using a laptop.
• The 1200 by 800 is very popular among MacBooks, and the Sony laptop I’m on right now is 1366 by 768.

And something you probably haven’t thought of: laptops have outsold desktops  for years.

For some sites, the majority of users may be using a laptop.

Forget screen resolutions for laying out the page, think about the indications of device type. Over 34 percent of my blog’s audience is the middle of target laptop screen resolutions. A few other sites I work with have percentages that fall in the 40 to 45 percent range. These percentages alone may be a more important number than browser audience. Seriously, who cares about the box model and CSS issues, when the user can’t figure out how to use the scroll bar?

The Bottom Line
Figure out who your audience is. A website that is aimed at developers (a desktop audience) should be designed differently than a website aimed at sales people (a laptop audience). Consider who they are, and what their environment is. For example consumers are now mostly laptop users and expert users at work use desktops, you want to design for whichever of these two fits your audience.

A lot of laptops are on old technology.

A friend of mine has this laptop that’s four years old.

That might not seem that long, but…

(pause)

(pause)

(pause)

It takes ten minutes to boot-up.

Watching that laptop trying to crank through a website that’s shipping 800k down the pipe for the homepage can be a painful experience. There are millions of laptops and underpowered netbooks out there in the real world, many of them held by consumers that don’t want to migrate their files to a new computer, even if they can afford it.

So they stick with their old, trusty laptop until it dies.

Some reports I’ve seen have shown that 75 percent of the user base is still using Windows XP, which was discontinued two years ago.

That alone shows two points:

• There are a lot of people unwilling to upgrade.
• There are a lot of people on slow computers.

The Bottom Line
Bells and whistles might not be a good thing, when considering your audience. A website that works on a web designer’s souped up MacBook Pro might not be working on an end user’s laptop with 1GB of RAM.

Using a laptop means a different user experience.

That doesn’t mean that they are always using the laptop screen, but what it does mean is they are definitely using the laptop as a web surfing device. This dramatically changes their user experience. Instead of sitting up in their chair, they are looking down at their laptop, typing and using a trackpad.

I had a long conversation with a game developer about the iPad, how people metaphorically see it as a window because they are looking down. Laptops are much the same way. They have to be judged within their environment, whether it is a Starbucks, an airport, or a cubicle when the user is on the run.

Home users might be watching a television show or chatting with friends on Skype, but whatever they are doing, they could be performing multiple actions in an environment that’s not sitting at a desk. Four to seven different application windows may be open, and the browser window will not be expanded.

The margin of 700 pixels becomes 600 pixels. That email you are sending for marketing purposes might only be 300 pixels wide by 600 pixels high.

Another consideration: many popup windows and dialog boxes are designed to be 700 pixels high, which are unusable on netbooks that are 1024 pixels wide by 600 pixels high.

The Bottom Line
Designing for the top left corner of a page is more important than ever before. We might have to rethink always having that branding logo there.

Certain actions are difficult on a laptop.

Get on a laptop and try using it without a mouse. Quite a different experience, right?

Certain actions are assumed to work, like using the arrow keys to scroll through a web page. This is because browser designers have built their applications to work this way. But, there are other actions that are  difficult at best and impossible at worst, most of them require holding a button on a mouse — re-size a window, scroll through an editing text area, and perform a multi-select action. These actions require two hands: using the trackpad to scroll while pressing the left trackpad button. Some laptops are missing things. A lot of laptops don’t have page up, page down keys, so the users have to use two keys to scroll down.

A study performed in 2002 found that not only was scrolling 23 percent faster using a mouse versus a trackpad, the error rate for hitting the target was three times higher with the trackpad.

Trackpads change user behavior. Many laptop users, like myself, are experts at hotkeys — so much so that when I’m using a laptop, I use the keyboard more than the mouse. Actions, such as tabbing through a web form, have to work well or it’s useless. Like most gestural interfaces, if you are depending on mouseovers to indicate status, laptop users are going to be missing out on a lot of feedback, because they are trying to perform an action as quickly as possible.

The Bottom Line
Ironically, many of the same concepts around Section 508 compliance also work well for designing for laptop users. Design it so it’s closer to a keyboard-driven application versus mouse-driven application.

Consider Fitts’ law when designing for interactions.

The size of the target, when using a trackpad, makes navigation on certain sites and, more importantly, performing precise actions, hard. To drag-and-drop in a precise manner is impossible using a trackpad. Try navigating Photoshop using one. I guarantee you’ll be be tearing your hair out in five minutes.

Scroll twice, and hit a target the size of a postage stamp to sign in for personalization — that’s the challenge on CNN.com.

Targets have to be sizable, and dragging the pointer long distances is worse using a trackpad than a mouse. For example, when using a trackpad to go from one end of my screen to another, I have to scroll two separate times from the top left to bottom right corner of my screen. The same works for any direction on the screen for my laptop.

The Bottom Line
Consider distance to take an action and what that action is (for example, a social sign in, which drives a lot of traffic), when designing the page.

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A podcast from Google:

Collaboration is key to the UX process, but it becomes increasingly difficult across locations. Working remotely with engineers, product managers and other UX’ers is challenging. Learn how members of the Google UX team work with other offices and team members domestically and internationally to create the best user experiences possible.

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The article:

“People love to talk about JetBlue because the experience is so unexpected. Most airline travel has a particular pattern: small seats, bad entertainment, and little (if any) food. JetBlue breaks this pattern. Leather seats, your own entertainment system with dozens of channels, and at least some choice of food. People can’t stop talking about the experience because they have to express their surprise especially given the “value” price. They are so used to airline travel being poor, late, or uncomfortable these days that cases where a company seems to care and provide good service seems noteworthy. Satisfaction itself is unexpected.”

Other companies should be listening.

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Enough said.

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From The Onion. Totally silly.

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Twitter, Facebook and the App Store will never, ever kill blogs.

From Say Everything:

Starting a blog continues to require no one else's permission. No App Store approval process sits athwart your path. And anyone with a Web browser can read your work. App Store offerings can tap into some capabilities of Apple's device hardware that a browser can't. But today any decent browser taps us into a teeming multitude of other people's minds. This choice isn't even a close call.

Read on…

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