What I’ve been reading lately (week 24)

Published June 16, 2013
  1. Requiem for a Back Button
    If you ask me, that back button, the one that has been with us since the iPhone debuted, was the best back button design of all time.
  2. What Leap Motion And Google Glass Mean For Future User Experience
    With the Leap Motion controller being released on June 27th and the Google Glass Explorer program already live, it is obvious that our reliance on the mouse or even the monitor to interact with the Web will eventually become obsolete.
  3. Popular Design Trends for Responsive Navigation
    The mobile responsive website layout has become a very common apparatus for designers. Building a layout is never easy and each website generally requires a unique solution
  4. Associating UX Changes to the Net Promoter Score: Measuring Usability
    A bad experience will impact how likely users are to recommend a website or product to a friend.
  5. Measuring The Visual Appeal of Websites
    Is a beautiful website more usable?
  6. Interesting Facts Make Web Pages Compelling
    Users hunt for facts online, so factually rich content will attract readers and keep their attention.
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Dear Apple, here’s my wishlist for WWDC

Published June 9, 2013

What I want this year from Apple. At this time I’m setting up my own little home office, so this is what I need (yes, need). Thank you in advance.

  • Thunderbolt Display
    I’m getting an external display, and I’m guessing there will be a new one pretty soon with the same design as the new iMac’s. Probably won’t be presented on stage, but a silent update is all I care for.
  • New Macbook Airs
    With retina displays? Whether that will be the case or not I’m getting a new computer. The Macbook Air 13″ I have right now is from 2011 and while it’s the best computer I’ve owned and covers my basic needs, it feels like it’s about time for an upgrade.

That’s it. Don’t really care about new iPhones, iPads, Mac Pro’s or anything and all upgrades to iOS and OSX presented at WWDC will be a bonus .

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What I’ve been reading lately (week 23)

Published June 9, 2013
  1. Karen McGrane on Content: The Alternative is Nothing
    The history of technology innovation is the history of disruption. New technologies become available and disrupt the market for more-established, higher-end products.
  2. Sweat the Small Stuff
    Time and time again, we’re told “don’t sweat the small stuff” and focus on the things that really matter. Typically, we hear this when we’re obsessing over a pixel here and a pixel there instead of concentrating on the direction and concept first. Most of the time, this makes sense and is sage advice—except for when it isn’t.
  3. Designing for Breakpoints
    Jeremy Keith notes that what happens between the breakpoints is just as important as the breakpoints themselves—perhaps even more so. While I agree with this, we do have to start somewhere. In a way, this part of the process reminds me of storyboarding, or creating animation keyframes, with the in-between frames being developed later. We’re going to do that here.
  4. Packaging as Media and the Future of Customer Experience
    The world is becoming increasingly virtual, and mainstreaming technologies, the trajectory of retail, and a culture of change will radically impact the future of product packaging. Packaging as media will take on a new role in a radicalized retail context where space, shopping experience, and currency are dramatically evolved from today’s paradigm.
  5. Three Reasons We’ve Outgrown Mobile Context
    “Accessing the Web from mobile devices is on track to surpass desktop usage in a just a year or two.”
  6. Demystifying UX Design: Common False Beliefs and Their Remedies: Part 3
    Another widely held belief among UX designers: that making a user interface look simple is always good practice.
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What I’ve been reading lately (week 22)

Published June 2, 2013
  1. The importance of sketching in product design
    There are a lot of hurdles to creating an effective product team. Perhaps the biggest hurdle of all is managing the relationships among the product team members and how those relationships affect the process they use to envision, design, and build the product they’re working on.
  2. How to Design for the Gut
    What makes your favorite mobile app so addictive? You know, the one you check over and over again throughout the day?The likely answer is visceral design. It’s the difference between a high aesthetic design with little emotional connection.
  3. The State Of Responsive Web Design
    Responsive Web design has been around for some years now, and it was a hot topic in 2012. Many well-known people such as Brad Frost and Luke Wroblewski have a lot of experience with it and have helped us make huge improvements in the field. But there’s still a whole lot to do.
  4. Improving UX with Customer Journey Maps
    The necessity of providing user satisfaction on every key touchpoint in your business is critical to your success.
  5. Data Monday: What Are People Doing on Mobile?
    Reality’s the second screen, and [mobile] is the first screen.
  6. Our web development workflow is completely broken. – Kenneth Auchenberg
  7. Are you in a teflon-coated UX role?
    Maybe you’re a UX researcher, passing choice insights into the product development machine. If what comes out the other side doesn’t seem right, you feel free to bitch and moan. “Didn’t they listen to the findings I gave them?”
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Connecting – a documentary on interaction design

Published May 31, 2013

Every once in a while I find myself trying to explain what I do to someone, and every now and then I feel the need to actually take a step back and reflect on what it is that I actually do and why I do it. This 18 minutes video that I stumbled across a while ago explains interaction design pretty well and puts it in perspective to where it was a few years ago and where we’re going.

There’s a lot of talk of mobile and Internet of things and everything that is hot right now and there’s a lot of smart people in it. It’s super exciting.

Connecting from Bassett & Partners on Vimeo.

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Storytelling done awesome

Published May 30, 2013

Firestorm

There is plenty to support the value of storytelling in design, not least in service design and as a tool to make yourself heard and understood among both team members and customers.

There’s quite a few good examples out there as well, but this one from The Guardian is one of the most engaging I’ve seen.

Firestorm: The story of the bushfire at Dunalley

 

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What I’ve been reading lately (week 21)

Published May 26, 2013
  1. Design = emotions + usability
    While fine art is a subjective field, graphic design is more formulaic in its fundamentals. An effective design should make people feel a certain way and take a certain action. In this article I’d like to share Gravity Switch’s web design principles and our thinking behind them.
  2. Better User Testing
    “We don’t have the budget or time for user testing,” is something I’ve heard all too often during planning and estimating meetings. Testing with real users has traditionally been an expensive and time-consuming line item in project plans—usually one of the first to be cut when budgets are tightened. It’s no mystery why: most testing methods have classically been stressful to set up, requiring a tremendous amount of scheduling, coordination, resources, and time.
  3. Beyond The Button: Embracing The Gesture-Driven Interface
    As a mobile UI or UX designer, you probably remember the launch of Apple’s first iPhone as if it was yesterday. Among other things, it introduced a completely touchscreen-centered interaction to a individual’s most private and personal device. It was a game-changer.
  4. Four Pricing Principles to Never Forget
    Most startups are eventually faced with the key question: How much should we charge? There’s no one true answer. There are no gurus. There’s just you, your financials, and the need to make money.
  5. Mobile UX Research: Exploring Ten Fundamental Aspects Of M-Commerce Usability
    Everyone is talking about mobile. Some e-commerce websites are venturing into it. Mobile commerce (also known as “m-commerce”) has immense potential, exhibiting a 86% growth rate and hitting $25 billion in 2012 (set to reach $86 billion by 2016, according to eMarketer). It’s also a whole new platform, with new interaction methods and usage contexts that introduce a host of limitations and pitfalls to watch out for when designing and running an m-commerce website. With few best practices yet established, m-commerce is, to a large degree, unchartered territory when it comes to actual implementation.
  6. Should Technology Follow Human-To-Human Communication Rules?
    What do we expect when we communicate with technology? Do we expect that the technology will communicate with us following the same rules as when we communicate with other people? The answer is yes, and I explain the implication of this in this video excerpt from my Design For Engagement online video course.
  7. Shifting to Disposable Personas
    “We tried creating personas and it was hard. It took us months and they never got traction. Eventually we abandoned the project.” I’ve heard this dozens of times from design team managers. They all embarked on these big persona projects, often with energy and excitement, only to find that energy dissipate and the project lose its momentum. Personas that don’t help make design decisions are a waste. However, it doesn’t have to be that way. These projects fail because of a perspective problem. The design teams think of making personas as a project in itself. I’ve come to the conclusion that thinking this way will lead to failure.
  8. 10 Metrics for Testing Website Navigation
    Website navigation is at the heart of good findability. To measure findability, we perform a tree test or a click test on a live website. In both types of studies, we collect many metrics to help uncover problems with terms and taxonomy.
  9. Are your forms converting? How to effectively A/B test your forms
    Are your forms converting? Have you tested them? How would you even go about testing the effectiveness of your forms?
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Best of Mobilism 2013

Published May 22, 2013

Last week, Mobilism took place for the third year in a row and quite a few top talks could be enjoyed in a spectacular theatre in central Amsterdam. I loved every bit of it (except for the Dutch weather outside perhaps…). Anyway, here’s a short recap of the talks I enjoyed the most and got a lot out from. Videos from all talks are obviously on the way, and if you’re into mobile design or development at all I can definitley recommend you to take some time and watch it. Until then, enjoy this summary and the attached presentation material.

Cennydd Bowles, Designing with context

I’ll start with my favorite talk, wherein Cennydd presented a framework on how to approach the challenge of designing with context. And context is not just about here and now, he says. “Instead, it refers to the physical, digital and social structures. Mechnically, a football match is the same wherever it’s played; yet context skews the odds: a team playing at home receives a proven advantage from their favourable environment, fan support, and potentially even elevated hormonal response.”

He goes on to talk about the danger in designing for stereotypes, a typical mobile environment that for some reason always includes public transport and so on.

His framework for designing with context touches the subjects of

  • Device context (what devices will be product be used on and what can be done with them?)
  • Environmental context (where will it be used?)
  • Time context (when, for how long?)
  • Activity context (e.g. single tasked vs many activities?)
  • Individual context (what preferences and abilities does the user have?)
  • Location context (where will it be used and how does it matter?)
  • Social context (e.g. will it be used in public, alone?)

The very appropriate, and probably not entirely accidental, acronym is then DETAILS, and I highly recommend you to read more about it on Cennydd’s blog.

http://cennydd.co.uk/2013/designing-with-context

Josh Clark, Beyond mobile

As the last presenter of the first day, Josh did an amazing job to capture the audience’s attention and present some more or less mind-blowing designs that are already available in todays world in mobile and what will be possible in a not so distant future.

The big take-away was that we should basically stop designing interfaces and start designing around the mobile devices possibilities and what these devices might be able to do tomorrow. There are more possibilities with mobile, not less! “Your API is the application”.

Looking forward to the video so I can watch it again.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2461754/beyond-mobile.pdf

Sara Wachter-Boettcher, What you don’t know will hurt you: Designing with and for existing content

All about content strategy and how to work with content in a world where content has been stacked up for ages and how to deal with it, because there is no escaping it if we want to create great experiences and do good business. What we need is structure, and that requires hard work. And time.

Some takeaways:

  • Get into the content. Do content audits and remove all clutter that’s just eating time, energy and space.
  • Design with real content and don’t blindly design around dummy text. If you don’t have real content, at least know the structure of the content.
  • Design systems and structure, not pages

http://www.slideshare.net/Saraboettcher/what-you-dont-know-will-hurt-you-designing-with-and-for-existing-content

Mat Marquis, Responsible Responsive Images

This was a really interesting insight into what’s going on with (responsive) images when it comes to standards, performance and optimisation. Mat also explained a bit of the W3C processes and where image handling stands there (in short: he wasn’t all happy).

https://speakerdeck.com/wilto/responsible-responsive-images-1

Dave Shea, Mobile Web Design Anti-Patterns

The first, but not the last, to mention Doorslams as an anti-pattern that pushes people to use an app instead of the (crappy?) website. That among other anti-pattern and also recommending more tips and approaches, like how to optimize for performance. He was also the first among others on the conference to mention the humongous new Oakley website (85 MB).

http://mezzoblue.com/presentations/2013/mobilism/

Stephen Hay, The New Photoshop, Part 2: The Revenge of the Web

Stephen presented some practical tips on how to work in responsive design projects, particularly using the browser more and Photoshop less – pretty much exactly the experience that I’ve personally had in my recent projects, so I thought it was spot on. There were also some concrete tips on tools to use to make it easier. Good stuff!

https://speakerdeck.com/stephenhay/the-new-photoshop-part-2-the-revenge-of-the-web

…and there was more

You could see the entire program on the Mobilism website.

I sincerely hope the conference will run for at least another year, despite the worrying signals we’ve  heard that’s hard to make it financially viable. Organisers, you did a great job and I hope to see you again.

The sponsors were also both nice and generous, and I actually manage to walk away from the conference one Nokia Lumia 820 richer. #win

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What I’ve been reading lately (week 20)

Published May 20, 2013
  1. Six Ways Interaction Designers Should Act More Like A Product Managers
    “So why should I understand what a product manager does?” It’s because 60 to 70 percent of what Interaction Designers do has a direct correlation in skillset to the Product Management job description. Outside of pricing models and a few other business methodologies, good Interaction designers can easily act as Product Managers in many environments.
  2. How Your Product Development Model Impacts UX Strategy
    Putting together a cohesive and successful product development process requires some thought about how much you plan to involve customers. This, in turn, drives your team’s level of commitment to user experience…
  3. Designing the new, fully responsive wired.co.uk article pages
    Recently, Condé Nast Digital undertook a complete redesign of the articles published on wired.co.uk. The aim was to provide a more content-first and immersive experience.
  4. UX Strategy and the Age of Alignment The proliferation of organizational silos often results in poor alignment between the business units and teams that should all have a hand in creating a unified experience for customers.
  5. Service Design + Lean UX + Disruptive Design = UX Strategy?
    It seems like the UX community has been struggling a bit to reach a common definition of UX strategy. Is it a framework or an approach? Is it a methodology or a philosophy? For me, it is all of these things; but the most important thing is that UX strategy is fluid, not fixed. Companies pay a lot of money to hire UX Strategists to prepare UX strategy documents, without realizing that a UX strategy needs to be alive and current to be valuable.
  6. Google Glass Simulator: Let’s Skip the 1.0 Apps
    The beginning of game-changing technologies are almost always marked by triviality before transformation. The countless Glass app ideas discussed to date only scratch the surface of what can be done with this technology, reminiscent of computers being initially perceived as slide rules or iPhones as portable gaming consoles. How can we inspire the community to skip past “1.0 ideas” and dive into exploring how Glass can meaningfully improve our lives?
  7. The Greatest Secrets of UX Revealed!
    I’m a big fan of Penn and Teller, and have been for many years. I saw them live for the first time last month and was blown away by their performance.
  8. The web needs fewer doorslams and more personality Around a year ago, experience designer Aral Balkan complained about doorslams—modal messages that interrupt user flow, to ask them to download your app. We recently wrote about how devs are increasingly rallying against such anti-patterns
  9. Create a Better Responsive User Experience
    The mobile market is exploding with unprecedented growth, and marketers are no longer hesitating to embrace responsive web design.
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What I’ve been reading lately (week 19)

Published May 12, 2013
  1. Metaphors, Idioms and Why the Save Icon is Broken
    In a recent post I promised to write a follow-up article on why the save icon was “objectively” broken. I know this topic has run its course, so I will keep this brief. I’ve started to think more broadly about this save icon subject—specifically around using metaphors in design. The metaphors for computing concepts established decades ago are starting to show their age and time has exposed the weaknesses of relying too heavily on them.
  2. Brave New World: Designing For A Maturing Android
    Android is huge: 480 million people currently use Android devices, and 1 million new devices are activated daily. This means that every three weeks, the number of people who activate new Android devices is equal to the entire population of Australia. (Recent studies by Nielsen show that more Android devices are on the market than iOS devices.)
  3. Creating a Successful Information Experience for Your Users
    In a world where people of all ages and backgrounds are spending increasingly more and more of their time navigating through software and web and mobile apps, providing an experience that engages and guides users is crucial for the success of the application.
  4. Shopping Cart Usability :Why a simple, honest checkout sequence (usually) wins
    When it comes to e-commerce sites and shopping cart flows, usability testing is more than good practice. It’s a precious tool that helps uncover missed opportunities and dollars left on the table.
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