Great post. What they said. Read on.

Everyone develops opinions regarding how things should look, how things should behave, and what things should be called. These  cognitive biases make up the filter between what actually exists, and what we perceive to be true.

The field of experience design attempts to realize a user's cognitive biases, or opinions, and rationalizes design decisions that make use of those biases.

If a UX designer or UX strategist does not go through the process of identifying and incorporating users' cognitive biases into their work, it stands to be misinterpreted, and site goals stand to be unachieved.

What many UX professionals tend to forget is that they also develop cognitive biases that influence the work they produce. If these biases aren't recognized and accounted for, the produced experience could be optimized for the designer, rather than the user. A common issue in agency life involves catering an experience to the cognitive biases present in the room (the stakeholders), rather than those  identified through research and ethnography.

Read on…

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Great Read. Too often, we work alone. Great design is a collaboration, not a solo event.

In the design world, the idea of working in a “team” often provokes dread. Teams introduce overhead; they require communication; members often battle to see their ideas implemented. The end result of teamwork is often seen as compromise, i.e. as a “taco pizza,” i.e. a situation in which everyone (including the customer) loses.

On the other hand, there are  many examples of highly functioning creative teams, and my own experience tells me that a team approach can be vastly more efficient and effective than working solo. Who doesn’t want a well-matched partner to ensure that the ideas flow, the problem is considered from all angles, and dead-ends are avoided? And lets face it – some of the most interesting and important problems are too big to solve alone.

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Still, how do you ensure that people with similar skills and interests will work well together?

You make sure that each team member knows and understands their responsibilities, that they enjoy giving up a little personal ownership for the benefit of others’ perspectives and skills, and that they deeply trust the other team members to play their parts. Without those fundamental qualities, the team is likely to go the way of Tolstoy’s unhappy families – division, mistrust, high drama. Good material for a novel, but bad for designing compelling products and growing a business.

Read on…

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This is a cross-post of a blog entry over at Jobvite, a social recruiting platform. Enjoy.

Let’s just say these are busy times in Silicon Valley, especially for developers and user experience types. Many of my friends in software development are getting multiple calls a day from recruiters, pitching the next startup or some great contract work.

It’s nice to be wanted, but it’s also a frustrating process having to say no thank you to recruiters especially when they have completely misread my resume. I’ve gotten a lot of calls for front-end developers, database architects, and even iPhone development – and none of those are things are on my resume.

I’m in the unique position of doing user research by interviewing the same group of people that call me: recruiters. I strike up wonderful conversations with them, and it’s a win-win situation. They tell me what they need (sometimes I can give it to them), and I get great feedback about their needs for applicant tracking and social recruiting. I’ve worked before as a recruiter and have built a team from scratch, so I understand recruiters’ needs. I also understand that, at their core, recruiters are sales people, except they have to sell two parties to close a deal.

Recruiting is like real estate, except you’re brokering talent instead of houses. Both recruiters and real estate agents that are best at what they do have common traits. They both may make money on commission and depend on selling the candidate on the company and vice versa (the buyer and seller of a house). Both also have the same goal – to close the deal.

Here are a few tips on how to get great candidates:

Reputation is everything

The candidate is interviewing you as much as you are interviewing them. They’ll be grading you on everything from your knowledge of the company to whether they understand what you do as a profession.

They’ll be asking a list of questions. You’re on the clock for presenting the company as a great place at which to work. Forty hours a week (or more, if you’re at a startup) is a lot of time to spend anywhere. In other words, it’s a decision no one should take lightly. In down economy, people will suck it up. On the way up, it’s more of a sales pitch.

For some professional communities, word spreads fast. I used to live in Southern California, and we used to say, “Big city, small town.” This applies to the Bay Area even more so. Candidates trade stories about places to work and recruiters, especially in a superheated social media culture, so each impression speaks volumes.

To recruiters that are straightforward with me, I pass along candidates. To recruiters that aren’t, I warn others about.

Understand the position

Hiring for software developers is much easier, because managers will give you a list of acronyms to use when finding candidates. Typing in Java, Swing, and Hibernate will get you a fair number of enterprise developers, for example. User Experience types are harder. We’re in a field that’s fairly amorphous and that works in conjunction with a lot of fields, like sales and marketing.

If you have questions, do research. Find out what a wireframe is. Learn about user research. Present a few initial candidates to the hiring managers, and ask questions like, “Does this person have enough experience?” before calling the candidates. Even better, join Quora, and do some searching there. There are a ton of questions about each of the fields, and the best and brightest that have written well-researched and thoughtful answers.

The best recruiters I know bracket candidates to get a good idea of the sweet spot for the position. They’ll present people with too little or too much experience to get to that “just right” spot. The recruiters that I’ve worked with that understand what I do have captured more of my respect. I don’t necessarily expect them to design a website, but I do want them to understand what I do.

Recognize the candidate’s needs

When I was a graphic designer, my co-workers and I had a common joke about some of the jobs that we’re offered – midnight shift, must make coffee, must answer phones – that had requirements totally outside of what we could or would want to do. The same goes for hiring people today.

The best recruiters will do a good job of understanding who the candidate is and whether the job is at the right level.

The best way to understand the candidate is to read their resume. Look at their experience level, where they have worked, and with what the brands. Even look at on what kind of applications they have worked. For example, the last time I designed a microsite that was very interactive was in the 20th century. I probably wouldn’t want to do it again.

Have realistic expectations

There’s nothing worse than getting a phone call and they want to present you for something that’s at least $30 an hour under market rate.

Recruiters should have a deep understanding of  the market rates, and educate the client. All companies want the best bang for the buck, but the true understanding of salary is that you are mitigating risk by attracting the right candidates. They should also understand that candidates in a hot market probably will want to improve their lot, so a drop in title or salary isn’t in the cards.

Work with the client to learn what their expectations are, and what they are willing to pay. Go to a few candidates and ask them ballpark figures of what they are expecting.

Build relationships

The best recruiters I’ve worked with talk to me even if I’m not a commission. We talk about the market, companies, and what’s going on. They’ve helped me standardize recruiter terminology for Jobvite, and we’ve gone out for drinks. We trade stories about the best places to work, and I help them understand some the motivations of other professionals we may know.

The best recruiters turn it into a professional friendship that goes beyond the initial sale, in the same way real estate agents reach out to people that live in the neighborhood. It’s the virtual apple pie on Fourth of July. My favorite recruiters ask me for referrals, which I’ll give without thinking twice. I’ll tell them about companies that are looking for candidates, and match them up with other great people that are a better fit for the position.

I’ve referred over 30 people to positions over the last two years and will keep doing so. I almost always pass (or don’t care) about the fee, because I enjoy the relationship. I would rather gain the trust and respect of a recruiter; and the social capital is in invaluable. I also understand the nature of Weak Ties, which is invaluable when building your career.

When someone is ready to explore new opportunities, all it takes is one great referral to seal the deal. That means if you get a shot, you can look like a hero to your client or company.

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Yup. I’ve hit writer block. Need some other people to help out.

Kim Proctor has been a featured podcaster on Usability Counts, and runs Customers That Click, a customer experience consultancy out of Los Angeles. This post is a concise list that should be considered when building a website. Enjoy.

You want visitors to come to your website and click around, return, and tell their friends – right? It takes a better than average site to do that.

What are your favorite websites – the ones that really impress you and make your life easier. It's the sites with great usability and great presentation that stay updated. Yes, of course, Facebook you might be saying, but also great ecommerce sites (think  Zappos.com,  amazon.com,  llbean.com,  overstock.com, etc).

However, many business websites end up either being too serious, too boring or too static. Sorry to say.  But that means you can really stand out from your competitors.

Here are the top 7 questions you need to consider when building or revamping your website.

1. How easy is it for your customers to find what they want? (Good correlated question: How many clicks does it take them to find key information?)

2. How easy is to scan the content on your pages to find what they want?

3. How clear is your content / message? (Consider style, tone, length, format.)

4. How often is your content updated?

5. How much do you offer for free (before a user has to register or pay)?

6. What kind of interaction is possible on your site (forums, commenting, rating, etc)?

7. How does your site compare to Web usability of your competitors and best in class websites?

The danger here is that you're so in love with your own voice or how you already built your website that you aren't willing to change and be what your customers want (and what will help your SEO too).

Be ready to slice and dice your website to pull customers in with helpful headlines, clear calls to action and labels. Don't ramble on – put the pay off up top and don't be afraid of graphics and buttons.

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Sometimes, you just can’t make this stuff up:

So…Why don't ducks get social media?

1. It's nearly impossible to type with webbed feet
2. Computers just don't like water
3. Broadband access isn't available in ponds…yet!
4. Frankly, it all seems to be so much hard work maintaining all those updates
5. Quacking comes naturally, tweeting is for other birds
6. Blogging each night is just too much with ducklings to feed
7. Stumbleupon is more to do with a slippery pond
8. Delicious sounds like   a   a good worm treat
9. Blogging is just too confusing
10. Social media mobile apps for ducks just aren't popular, so no one is developing them

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From Salon.com:

The Web, email, podcasts and streamable/rippable online video combines a new search-and-aggregation culture with sheer infiniteness. Couple that with the now-ubiquitous use of DVR, and content has not only been disaggregated from its branded source, but also has had its old bonds to advertising severely weakened. Keep throwing circumventable ads at the audience, and they’ll just keep fast forwarding or clicking past them. Make ads technologically unavoidable, and the audience will likely go somewhere else because content consumers surfing the infinite Internet are no longer physically captive to a confined set of old-media conduits — they can and will find compelling content that has fewer ads.

Considering all that, unless media outlets are fusing unavoidable ads to truly unique products, those outlets will likely suffer if they stick to the old advertising-content formulas.

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[Another] model is subscription, which substitutes user fees for ad revenue. That’s the Wall Street Journal/New York Times pay wall, XM/Sirius, independent podcasts, Netflix and iTunes. The former three are having trouble, in part, because much of their content remains similar to what other free outlets are offering. The latter three, on the other hand, are proving viable because much of their programming is, indeed, unique and not replicable.

For content to survive, there has to be innovation on how to marry content with advertising.

Something new. Something different. Something Google and Facebook aren’t pushing, because everything isn’t about pay per click.

The NYTimes.com paywall isn’t going to work (or is priced too high, because I’d pay for a lower price point — like one that was cheaper than receiving the physical paper version). Other experiments are failing. Only in extreme cases where the content has a high enough value (Wall Street Journal, for example) can there be existence of a pure subscription play.

I don’t know the answers. I don’t know if anyone does.

The question really is: What would  William Randolph Hearst do?

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This rocks.

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Great post:

For more than 20 years, we’ve known that teams spending time watching users, can see improvements. Yet we still see many teams with regular user research programs that produce complicated, unusable products. We couldn’t understand why, until now.

Each team member has to be exposed directly to the users themselves. Teams that have dedicated user research professionals, who watch the users, then in turn, report the results through documents or videos, don’t deliver the same benefits. It’s from the direct exposure to the users that we see the improvements in the design.

The more you watch them, the more you learn. Not exactly rocket science.

And…

The teams with the best results were those that kept up the research on an ongoing basis. It seems that six weeks was the bare minimum for a two-hour exposure dose. The teams with members who spent the minimum of two hours every six weeks saw far greater improvements to their design’s user experience than teams who didn’t meet the minimum. And teams with more frequent exposure, say two-hours every three weeks, saw even better results.

Nice. Why don’t more groups do usability testing?

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I’m applying.

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I answered this question over at Quora, and thought it might make a great post here (plus I’ve been busy). Read on…

Having a bad UX designer can kill a startup, or seriously hinder a product. I’ve worked on several products past and present that had a lot of catchup to do because the previous UX designers and product types were brought on because they were cheap.

Remember, developers will build what’s designed, and if what is designed has issues, that’s going to be the result.

Money and Options That’s Appropriate To Finding Great Talent

There’s nothing worse than hearing the sentence, “We pay less than other places and we think the option package is fair.” While UX Designers are not completely driven by money, they want to be rewarded for what they bring to the table. In that sense, their talent can sometimes make or break a startup.

I love what I do, but I also have to pay rent on my posh mansion in North Beach (sarcasm). Unless the idea is going to cure cancer, the business folks should have the funding in place to pay for talent.

Great development talent is finite, but so is great UX talent. Both should be compensated accordingly.

A Great Idea To Start

UX Designers are in tune with what works and what doesn’t (well, the good ones, anyway). If a UX Designer interviews, looks at the idea, and screams at the founder, “This will work only if hell freezes over,” and the founder is STILL insistent on the approach as described, that company doesn’t want a UX Designer, they want a wireframe monkey.

We as a group get to work on very few ideas that are truly special, and I’m going to put effort into something I want to believe in.

A Champion In Management

Most UX Designers that are good aren’t necessarily the most politically correct, so they need someone in management to give them the support to run the UX Process so it’s about finding the best solution and not have it be design of one or design by committee.

The best clients I’ve had and wanted to work with wanted to test over and over, because that’s when you got the best feedback.

Freedom From A Cubicle

I believe that the best UX doesn’t come on a 9-to-5 schedule — it may happen in a bar, or walking, or at 11pm at home.  It may happen 1,000 miles away. You never know. Collaboration is important, but like any great company, there should be freedom to work away from people and let ideas percolate.

I’ve been told a few times, “your job is to sit in a coffee house and think up shit.” That’s what UX designers do — they think up ideas. They watch people. They observe their surroundings. And they come up with amazing solutions to really tough problems. You cannot do that in a cubicle.

This is probably why so many UX Designers like to work remote (like me) — because that’s how they work the best.

Look To Products You Like — And Steal That Designer

The good UX designers are on LinkedIn, Coroflot, and usually can be found hidden in plain sight. They write blogs. They surf Quora. Do reference checks with other UX designers to ask how good they are.

Contact them directly. Tell them about your idea. If it’s a really good idea, they’ll listen. If the idea isn’t so good, they’ll tell you why.

Best of all, you’ll learn if they are easy to collaborate with, because the idea you started with is not the idea that’s going to launch.

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Great post:

This week I was fortunate enough to be asked to speak at ASA in regard to a Social Media workshop. The topic of discussion was Social Media – Where's The ROI? Within that discussion what I heard that was glaringly apparent is people need help with what the key things are they should know about Social Media and what can be expected.  Well, there is not an exact science (I know, not what you want to hear, right?). I can tell you like everyone else to get on Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin. OK – great! (You might be thinking.)

Then what Jenn? What can I expect, what do I do? One of the keys (and there are several of them…) to a successful Social Media strategy as an individual is to be comfortable within the networks you choose. You can't conquer the world if you are not even sure how to get there and forget about the fact that you are already there but didn't know.

With that being said, here's the 10 things you wanted to know to use Social Media, but your Mom never told you (because she didn't know).

And Number 8:

Don't try to do everything at once. Take it one Social Network at a time. Social overload is such a thing.

In Japan they have a term called Mixi Fatigue (Mixi is a social network there). Mixi Fatigue is the  psychological state of a Japanese youth experiencing a sense of tiring from using Mixi and voicing a desire to discontinue using Mixi and finally deciding to terminate the Mixi account. So do not get Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, or whatever other social network(s) you decide to use "fatigue".

Read on…

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From TechCrunch:

Everyone knows MySpace traffic is going the wrong way, but the accelerating decline (and big financial losses) is a serious problem. Parent company News Corp. is in the middle of a sale process, and everyone from venture firms to private equity firms to operating companies are taking a look. "It's like slowing down at the scene of an accident," says one person with knowledge of the discussions, "everyone wants to take a look at how bad things have become."

The problem with negative growth is that predictive modeling has to be thrown out the window. And an accelerating decline in audience suggests that MySpace won't be stabilizing soon. Right now, people are fleeing as fast as they can from the site.

Amazing.

The story reports that their audience dropped 14 percent in a month.

It’s soon to be the next Friendster or Tribe.net.

I had a conversation with a UX designer that worked there up until the last layoff. What it came down to is when you don’t understand the audience and try to design to it, you’re going to fail (most of the people involved bailed before the layoff, knowing what the writing on the wall was).

Other conversations with people who knew the audience said how much they hated the redesigns, but there was no way to voice for users to voice their opinion effectively.

A lot of people bailed during redesign try number one, and with this second one, they removed one of the key features that was keeping people around: customizable profiles. The demographics of that audience sucked from an advertising standpoint, but if you’re McDonalds, you don’t change the menu so everything’s over $50 when people are to Combo Meals.

Say what you want about the previous management (Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe), but at least they understood the audience.

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Most consumers in the end don’t necessarily care about features, they want experiences. The Automobile market is an excellent example of that. I drive a Saab. I don’t know what’s under the hood, but it’s a pretty fast car and is sufficiently anti-establishment for me to drive.

The leather seats are nice, too.

Mobile phones are also statements of personality, and what kind experience the user expects.

I shudder every time I hear a commercial about a mobile phone. One of them was boasting about the incredible speed and power, and it sounded like it was written by a bunch of engineers. My mom wouldn’t care. I didn’t buy an iPhone 4 for it’s incredible speed, but it is a statement that I care about the iPhone 4  experience.

From Jason Putorti:

The extranormal guy talking about features still thinks that the consumer actually cares about them, and that's often the mindset of an engineer. Engineers are very interested in making the impossible, possible- and a device and feature are expressions of that possibility. Designers focus, or at least they should, on empathy with real people, and how to use the available technology to create a solution that delights them and solves their problem.

Funny aside, there's an important insight in this clip: the cell phone market, like many other technology markets, has become an  experience market. This is why the consumer asking for the iPhone over and over again for reasons unknown makes absolutely no sense to our techie, who thinks feature parity or supremacy matters. The reason for this seemingly irrational desire of course, is the experience- that's what the consumer is after.

…

An example of a technology cemented firmly in the possible? QR Codes. Engineers have figured out how to pack a lot of data into a small image, but no designer has yet figured out how to make the experience around QR codes useful. SXSW had them on badges last year, and made a big push to get people using their scanner app, and they were notably absent this year. Engineering the technology alone doesn't make something useful or usable by the mainstream. The Segway strikes me as another cemented in the "possible".

Read on…

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Designing mobile sites is all about context and limiting choice (really, not much different than designing a regular website). This article from UX Matters points out 10 ways designing mobile websites are different than designing for a computer.

However, the design of mobile sites is still in its infancy. As Jakob Nielsen's 2009 study on mobile usability pointed out, users' success rates when using mobile devices to access mobile sites averaged only 64%, which is quite low in comparison to the 80% average success rate for users who access Web sites on a computer. The form-factor difference seems to have a dramatic impact on the success rates of users' interactions, and therefore, should impact how we design mobile sites as well.

New principles and best practices will inevitably arise as mobile site design continues to evolve. As a first step toward achieving this evolution, I've looked at how some successful mobile sites already differ from desktop Web sites. Based on my analysis of several verticals, including airlines, ecommerce, social networking and entertainment, and travel sites, I have identified 10 ways in which mobile sites should be different from desktop Web sites.

Read on…

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Funny. True.

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From Six Revisions:

The early warning signs were there from the start, and people have criticized Microsoft’s choice to include HTML5 and CSS3 (both unfinished specifications), arguing that poor rendering (which does exist) and future changes could leave the browser in an  IE6-like situation when it gets outdated. The frequent release cycles and automatic updates (by default) of other browsers will minimize this problem, but given how slow Internet Explorer has always been with major versions, it may well become the IE6 of 2020!

…

It’s true that while Microsoft’s new browser appears far from perfect, no other browser gets it quite right either. All of the other browsers have their share of flaws and bugs, missing technologies, and incomplete spec implementations.

However, the problem with Microsoft is partly due to how it portrays itself and the frustrating way it sometimes goes one step forward, two steps back.

I think some of the blame has to go to the standards’ bodies — they have to agree on something. It’s hard on agreement when you have to test how it’s going to look, but this situation makes it hard for all developers, browser and web.

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• At 11am-12pm, 51% of Twitter users are looking at tweets, but only 31% are sending them. At 4pm-5pm, 56% of Twitter users are looking at tweets, but only 39% are sending them.
• On Facebook, weekday usage is pretty steady, however Wednesday at 3:00 pm ET is consistently the busiest period. People are less active on Sunday compared to all other days of the week.

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