“One of the things you learn as a college president is that if an undergraduate is wearing a tie and jacket on Thursday afternoon at three o’clock, there are two possibilities. One is that they’re looking for a job and have an interview; the other is that they are an asshole. This was the latter case.”
I wish I had something that was worth $100 million.
Even $30 million.
I wouldn’t be suing, I’d be enjoying my life.
Both Visual and User Experience Designers are important, but most don’t have the skillset to really do interaction work. Just like how many User Experience Designers don’t have a visual skill set, it works the other way:
This ambiguity can lead many visual designers to misunderstand what user experience design is, especially if they’ve never worked alongside a dedicated user experience designer. This has also led a lot of visual designers to mistakenly believe that because the work they create results in some kind of user experience, that makes them a user experience designer.
…
Over the last 12 months I’ve come across far too many visual designers describing themselves as user experience designers because they don’t fully understand the term. Instead they’ve seen a few articles that explain how UX is the new black and decided to rebrand themselves.
I’ve also come across many fantastic visual designers who feel pressured into becoming user experience designers because they think this is the only way to progress their careers. It seems that due to a lack of supply, user experience design has somehow come to represent a higher order of design, or design done right. At best this is nonsense and at worst this is actually damaging to peoples careers.
I agree. both parties are just as important.
Visual designers don’t have to rebrand themselves — they’re a shortage of both good visual and User Experience Designers. Hone your craft. Both of us will be in shortage for a very long time.
This is a five-part series written by Karen Fojas Lee, the owner of Nomad Chique. I thought it was so good this would be a good place to republish. Each part will publish on Wednesdays. Cheers.
The second to last step in the IDEATE Design Loop is
For my process, this usually means we are ready to either:
A. Prepare designs for usability testing
OR,
B. Move into production
If we need to prepare visually treated designs for usability testing, then our designs do not necessarily need to be completely accurate for slicing up and programming, but they need to be clean. What I mean by “clean” is that the layouts are crisp, spelling is accurate, and persistent items (like navigation menus, headers, footers, global navigation) are positioned consistently across all pages to be tested. This ensures that the user will not be distracted by tiny layout changes and can focus on navigating the site and completing the tasks being tested.
The ultimate goal of usability testing is to confirm whether the visual designs meet our original criteria and whether they resolve the problems we had in the first place – ex). “User’s can’t find this feature”, “Shoppers get lost in the checkout process”, “The site doesn’t excite users or feel like our brand.”
Now, testing doesn’t have to be a big, daunting, expensive endeavor. As mentioned in the last article, it’s important to “Test Often and Test Early” so do take the time to test, or stop and review the visual designs against best practices by an unbiased eye during your process even if it’s at a smaller scale than your ideal. Much formal usability testing is conducted in a relatively controlled environment with an analyst working side by side with pre-screened users, or remotely using software and web capturing devices that allow the analyst and user to communicate.
But usability testing can be as simple as asking a few folks in the cubicle down the hall some simple questions to test a screen. A great book that I think is quite helpful in making usability more approachable for designers and business owners alike is Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug. Check out the chapter called “Usability Testing on 10 Cents A Day” for a good read on how to make usability testing an easier part of the process without breaking the bank.
If we’re ready for production, this means we are at a point where we’ve finished refining designs and these designs have met or exceeded our initial design requirements, creating a compelling user experience for our audience. To cross-check our work we can ask ourselves these 4 questions:
•• Have we explored enough screens to establish an overall design language that can be applied to most any other pages that might come later? This is where that sitemap or information architecture diagram comes in handy again to cross-check my work where I had outlined all the critical screens or page types needed.
•• Is the design language clear enough to be easily translated to CSS styles or other global styling? In my experience, the best way to communicate the important features of the final visual design is to create a style guide document that specifies dimensions, fonts, colors and any unique elements that will need to be built. Here’s a sample of one style guide element I’ve created that shows layout dimensions for one screen. Other pages within the style guide specify color codes and text styles. To view more samples or other style guides I’ve created, send me a comment or DM me on Twitter.
If we’ve successfully answered yes to these key questions, then your design is ready for handover to your client and their development team.
Next week we will come full circle to the last step of our IDEATE Design Loop with the second “E” – Evaluate the Results.
Luke Wroblewski disclosed a couple of numbers in Design Solutions for Log In Problems that were interesting (and close to what I had long suspected):
User Interface Engineering’s analysis of a major online retailer found that 45% of all customers had multiple registrations in the system, 160,000 people requested passwords per day, and 75% of these people never completed the purchase they started once they requested their password. Ouch.
And…
When someone connects their Facebook or Twitter account to a Web site, they simply need to click the Sign In with Facebook or Twitter button to log in. Of course, they need to be signed in with the account provider to have things work with one click. But since 50% of Facebook’s 500 million active users log on to Facebook in any given day —odds are good one click is all it will take.
Over 50 percent of the internet users in the U.S. have a Facebook account. That’s a pretty good hit rate. What does that mean?
In one click, they’re in like Flynn? That’s great usability, yo!
In that same article, he talks about their approach of requiring people to type in their name so they can figure out which social account they used to sign in with Facebook. It’s a few less clicks, but there might be something here.
“Whenever I have to sign into Bagcheck, I’m filled with anxiety. Not because I don’t love the service, but because of the log in screen. I cannot remember whether I signed up through Facebook, Twitter or if I should know some special entry credentials.”
While I’m not in total agreement with their design approach, Bagcheck’s designers partnered with engineering to spend some time on this approach to see if this eases the friction for signing in. This partnership is important, because developers didn’t see it as “wasting time” but “gaining valuable insight into user behavior.” You need to try ideas and measure results to learn from your users.
Once you enter your name, they know exactly which service you used, and hide the other service (here, Facebook is hidden).
Quora’s been trying a few different login ideas too to ease that friction. Many of them have some kind of auto-suggest or cookied identification as part of the process.
I would think once they login once with the social account, you could easily grab their profile photo and name and identify this is the account they signed in with, right?
Note: I’m moving it because I have a conflict with a cocktail party. Cocktail parties are always first!
As an experiment, I’ve decided to start Google Plus Hangout Thursday, July 21 at 6pm PST. It’ll go until I run out of whiskey.
We’ll talk about anything and everything User Experience, San Francisco, and Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, not necessarily in that order. I know the room is limited to 10 people, but I wanted to see how many people showed up. It should be a hoot. I’m not the smartest User Experience professional out there (that’s for Jakob Nielsen, and he’ll tell ya :) ), but my opinions are my own.
The guest list is…
I promise it will be a Robert Scoble and Chris Brogan free zone.
I’m going to broadcast it to people that are part of my User Experience circle. To add me, visit my Google Plus profile. Drop me a note, I’ll send you a calendar reminder.
If you want a Google Plus invite, ping me on my Twitter feed.
Exhibit 1 for this argument: Apple. In the better, faster, cheaper era of the engineer, Apple version 1.0 fell to the brink of irrelevance. … Steve Jobs (full disclosure: his picture is on my wall of heroes) decided to compete using a different rule set. He pulled Apple out of the era of the engineer and into the era of marketing. Today the iPhone has set the standard for what a cell phone should be. But by the standards of better, faster cheaper, the iPhone is pretty terrible. It doesn’t have the fastest processor or the most memory or the highest display resolution. Yet it’s the phone I want. Why? Because Apple has developed a core competency of customer understanding.
In the coming decades, success will be defined by the ability to understand the complex problems that customers face, and the ability to solve these problems elegantly.
Someday a kid will say, “When I grow up, I want to be a user experience expert.” When that happens, we all should be proud.
This is wonderful. I don’t know how I missed this. You all should buy the album.
The song list is here. The lyrics are here.
Props to Kevin and Bean for putting them on the show.
Patrick Neeman is Director of User Experience at Jobvite, a social recruiting platform and runs both the UX Drinking Game and Startup Drinking Game | More | Contact
If you're a UX Designer in San Francisco, ping me at Twitter. I want to add you to a list I have there.
