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New web project by the creators of BLA BLA and Just a Reflektor. A walk in the woods by Vincent Morisset, Philippe Lambert, Édouard Lanctôt-Benoit & Caroline Robert (AATOAA). Produced by the NFB & France TV.

Scroll Slow ↓ Have Fun

#website

The Must-See Documentaries for Designers and Artists.

#web design

Come and party with Pablo the Flamingo! Whatever you do, don't stop the music... Made by Nathan Gordon and art directed by Pascal Van Der Haar. Illustration by Jono Yuen. Built on MatterJs, ThreeJs and GSAP.

#website

Dodow est une solution naturelle et innovante pour vous aider à trouver le sommeil rapidement

#website

Draw a stickman and watch him come to life in this new stickman adventure!

#website

Every Last Drop is an interactive website which takes a detailed look at how much water we waste on a daily basis and how small changes can make a big difference.

#website

Ambition. Failure. Adversity. Love. Loss. Conviction. What forces drive one man to the presidency and another to become his assassin? Explore the dual paths of John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald that ultimately crossed in Dealey Plaza.

#website

Frog, a global product strategy and design firm, predicts the 15 most significant technology trends you will see 2014:

ANONYMITY WILL GO MAINSTREAM

DRONES. EVERYWHERE. AND RAPIDLY EVOLVING.

DISCONNECTING IN THE MODERN, DIGITAL WORLD

RISE OF THE CHINESE INTERNET GIANTS

MIND CONTROL!

AUGMENTED HUMANITY

SELF-DRIVING CARS

THE INTERNET OF THINGS GOES ART SCHOOL

PRODUCT DATA, RICH AND FULL OF VALUE

THE RE-INTERPRETATION OF CRAFT

BUCKING THE PRICE NORM

THE UBER-FICATION OF SERVICES

THE CONSUMER WILL OWN DATA

QUANTIFIED SELF AT THE OFFICE

REINVENTION OF PC AS PRODUCTIVITY TOOL

Read here for more details.

#Design #Internet #trends #2014 #Frog #Frog Design

Great design is a demonstration against thoughtlessness and carelessness, says the legendary iPhone designer in an interview with the Sunday Times.

Apple's rock star designer Jony Ive has given the Sunday Times (subscription required) a rare interview, talking about his partnership with Steve Jobs, his design philosophies, the importance of craftsmanship, and more. It's a rare peek inside one of the century's greatest design minds. Here are some of the takeaways:

YOU UNDERSTAND A PRODUCT IF YOU UNDERSTAND HOW IT'S MADE

"OUR SUCCESS IS A VICTORY FOR FOR GIVING A DAMN."

One of the things that Ive puts his finger on very precisely is what is, to the design-minded, perhaps the most important aspect of Apple's success: that a company has managed to take the deep commitment to form and integrity that is at the heart of the most timeless designs, and make it attainable to a mass-market audience.

“We’re surrounded by anonymous, poorly made objects. It’s tempting to think it’s because the people who use them don’t care--just like the people who make them. But what we’ve shown is that people do care," Ive says. "It’s not just about aesthetics. They care about things that are thoughtfully conceived and well-made. We make and sell a very, very large number of (hopefully) beautiful, well-made things. Our success is a victory for purity, integrity--for giving a damn ... It's a demonstration against thoughtlessness and carelessness.”

Ive says he thinks that we are living in an age of craft. People care about how things work, and how they function.

“Objects and their manufacture are inseparable. You understand a product if you understand how it’s made,” he says. “I want to know what things are for, how they work, what they can or should be made of, before I even begin to think what they should look like. More and more people do. There is a resurgence of the idea of craft."

PATRONS MATTER

"SO MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN ABOUT STEVE, AND I DON’T RECOGNIZE MY FRIEND IN MUCH OF IT."

After decades in which mass-production and shoddy craftsmanship were synonymous, design is being democratized. Anyone who can afford aniPhone can own an object that has had every bit as much thought put into its craftsmanship as an Eames Lounge Chair, or any other example of uncompromised design.

And for that, Jony Ive is as responsible as his great enabler, Steve Jobs. Ive is open about the fact that he would never have been able to achieve many of his designs without the support of Steve Jobs.

“When we were looking at objects, what our eyes physically saw and what we came to perceive were exactly the same," Ive says. "And we would ask the same questions, have the same curiosity about things.”

Of his friendship with Steve Jobs, Ive says: “So much has been written about Steve, and I don’t recognize my friend in much of it. Yes, he had a surgically precise opinion. Yes, it could sting. Yes, he constantly questioned. ‘Is this good enough? Is this right?’ but he was so clever. His ideas were bold and magnificent. They could suck the air from the room. And when the ideas didn’t come, he decided to believe we would eventually make something great. And, oh, the joy of getting there!”

COPYCATS ARE THEFT

Asked about what he thinks about copycat devices, like Samsung's Galaxy series of smartphones and tablets, Jony Ive is extremely blunt.

“It’s theft. What’s copied isn’t just a design, it’s thousands and thousands of hours of struggle. It’s only when you’ve achieved what you set out to do that you can say, ‘This was worth pursuing.’ It takes years of investment, years of pain.”

To Ive, it's not just how an object looks, or even functions, but the process by which it was designed. Those "years of pain" are part of an iPhone's design that can never be copied, but are there nonetheless. It is what determines a design's authenticity; the difference between a Galaxy and an iPhone, to Ive, is the agony that went into creating something truly new.

THE BEST DEVICES ARE YET TO COME

"APPLE HAS A PORTFOLIO OF NEW PRODUCTS IN THE PIPELINE."

While Ive would not comment on future Apple products, he was dismissive of the idea that Apple's best days were behind it.

Asked about the iWatch, Ive coyly replied. “Obviously, there are rumors about us working on … and, obviously, I’m not going to talk about that. It’s a game of chess, isn’t it?”

Even if Apple isn't working on an iWatch, Ive says that Apple has a portfolio of new products in the pipeline. Asked if he would quit if he believed that Apple could no longer define entirely new categories of devices, Ive replied: “Yes. I’d stop. I’d make things for myself, for my friends at home instead. The bar needs to be high."

That said, Ive doesn't think that's going to happen. "We are at the beginning of a remarkable time, when a remarkable number of products will be developed. When you think about technology and what it has enabled us to do so far, and what it will enable us to do in future, we’re not even close to any kind of limit. It’s still so, so new.”

Jony Ive's full interview has been republished here.

By John Brownlee • Co.Design

#Design #Co Design #Jonathan Ive #John Brownlee

Kanban walls, status reports, risk logs … with so many project management tools, it's easy to fall into the complacent feeling that a project is staying on track. But keeping a project on-track in terms of enhanced user experience goes beyond just hitting that next release deadline: it’s also about adding value to the business and building features that matter to end users. It’s also important not forget the UX debt we may have built up thanks to shoddy software practices.

When it comes to keeping all of these elements in perspective, storymapping is a great technique that can help us focus on the bigger picture, while also keeping our wider stakeholder group (like developers and product owners) aware of the project’s progress. As designers, we are uniquely poised to maximize the potential of storymaps to help visualize the status of our team’s work and bring in a new flavor of project management to the development kitchen.

Let’s examine what storymaps are and then look at how to build one.

What are Storymaps?

Storymaps are an agile tool originally conceived by Jeff Patton in 2005 and further explained in his 2008 article, “The new user story backlog is a map.”

Patton has gone on to write about how storymapping and UX relate, championing storymapping as way to alleviate the lack of common understanding that comes with trying to tie agile and UX together. As he explains, “[S]oftware has a backbone and a skeleton—and your map shows it.”

Agile Alliance defines storymapping rather formally as “a more structured approach to release planning … consisting of ordering user stories along two independent dimensions.” At its most basic though, storymaps are large card arrangements, not too dissimilar to other walls used in software development. The only difference with storymaps is that instead of focusing on the day-to-day "flow" of a team's development pace, a storymap reveals how tasks relate to larger buckets of work, grouped by activity.

In short, a storymap provides a visual representation of the overall piece of work you're trying to accomplish at a glance, rather than trying to keep it held up in documents. The photo below shows a story map in practice.

Storymaps are a great addition to any team’s project wall, whether next to in-use Kanban lanes or to-be design mockups. They help to flesh out what an entire project looks and feels like, illustrating how far your team has moved forward without trying to assign everything an ambiguous column.

And the best part about storymaps? You don’t have to use them strictly in agile environments. They work with all sort of activities and tasks. In fact, I’ve used storymaps to track everything from content strategy work to the requirements refresh of a banking system. They’re adaptable to a project’s needs and a team’s desires.

How Do Storymaps Help Projects?

Storymaps help with the planning, prioritizing, and visualizing of project work. Agile coach Steve Rogalsky explains that storymaps not only encourage iterative development (which is a key to evolving the design of a user experience), but also help with outward progress tracking—an added benefit for most visually oriented designers.

It’s often hard to track how big a project is and where we’re adding value. Storymapping takes a different approach to project management, looking at the entire project as a whole, using groupings to break the work up in manageable chunks.

Storymapping takes a different approach to project management, looking at the project as a wholetweet this

Storymapping is not too far off from release mapping, but instead of thinking about our work in terms of batch releases, we think about it in terms of activities. As we begin each unit of work then, we can strike a line through it, X-ing entire tasks out once only they’re complete. This allows team members and stakeholders alike to see how far the project has moved. Most importantly, it helps people outside the project ask key questions about what’s holding the team back, providing insight and transparency into our work without formalizing the process.

How Do You Build One?

The creation of a storymap depends largely on what type of work you'd like to map out.

Start by breaking down your larger project into tasks (e.g. user stories or simple “to do” items) and translate them onto cards. Each task should be easy enough to accomplish within a reasonable amount of time (I try to keep tasks to a maximum of two weeks).

As Andrea Gigante reminds us, story maps are very much alive, so we shouldn’t try and plan tasks that might take us into the ensuing years. Keeping them capped at about two weeks helps keep us honest with ourselves, and our stakeholders.

Next, sort your tasks into categories. There are two ways to do this: an open card sort or a closed card sort. Card sorts here would be essentially grouping your units of tasks into logical “activities” based on similar properties.

An open card sort allows you to figure out how things fall together randomly, while a closed card will help you align activities to business terminology. I prefer to use open card sorts as it allows me to define the grammar that shapes the project I’m working on. Designer Mike Long noted in his blog post on activity maps that mapping is great in this way, helping teams “create a precise and elegant lexicon that will sharpen [our] understanding about what [we] are trying accomplish.”

Lastly, organize your cards onto a wall in a clean and visible format. Jeff Patton and Steve Rogalsky put tasks under activities vertically, while others prefer to use a horizontal format.

I'm fond of the horizontal variety because you never know how big a story map will get. I tend to keep up all old tasks for an entire project, as it shows just how big a piece of work is actually becoming.

There's also an opportunity to add personal touches: I've had colleagues who insist on using sickies as a visual key to track cross-functional requirements, while others swear by using different color cards so that we don’t get confused by which tasks are assigned to which activity.

Again, the styles for building a storymap are endless. Improvise and adapt the technique to your own benefit.

A Word to the Wise

While storymaps are a fantastic technique to focus on outcomes over outputs, they're only successful if a wider stakeholder group has adopted them. I've had experiences trying to implement storymaps where I made the mistake of not including key team members in the creation process. Without this buy-in and participation from across different parts of the organization, the storymap was a useless artifact.

Check out Steve Rogalsky’s “Tips for Facilitating a User Story Mapping Session” to learn more about introducing storymaps to your teams in effective manners.

Bottom Line

Storymaps are only one tool to track the bigger picture as a team. When all is said and done, you should find a technique and style that suits your team best. As Laura Busche shared in her recent Smashing Mag article, any sort of working wall is "an invaluable tool for design thinking.”

Image of sticky notes courtesy Shutterstock

By David Peter Simon • UX Magazine

#Agile #UX Design #storymapping #User story #David Peter Simon #UX Magazine

With growing numbers of businesses taking their products and services to the web, offering greater reach and accessibility of their wares to their existing and potential clients, we as web designers need to be ready to deliver on their e-commerce web wants and needs. Across the Web we see numerous examples of both ends of this spectrum, e-commerce websites done extremely well and, unfortunately, some extremely poorly.

Here we’ll shine a light on what makes an e-commerce website really work. We discuss the basics that are required for success and highlight them with some sites that exemplify the points in focus. Overall, much of the weight of a successful e-commerce site falls under the UX umbrella, with functionality being key.

And while it is true that could be argued for every site on the Web, given the very nature of them, e-commerce sites’ success rely so heavily on usability and function, that any choice which would strain either of these aspects of the site should not ever be considered.

Searchability

Not only do you need at least one very prominant search box on the site, it also needs to work impecibly. Visitors are going to be searching for the items they wish to purchase from the site and if the search function is below par, and they have any kinds of issues whatsoever finding exactly what they’re looking for, it could cost users and potential buyers. In fact, chances are, with the high number of both local and national chains operating in the same markets the users will end up going to a competitor where they don’t have as many issues.

So be clear not only with how they can search the products and services on offer, but also be sure that you give them a trail of breadcrumbs that highlight where in the shop the item they were searching for hides. This way they can easily browse related items in the same category. It is all about giving them as much flexibility to access the store items as possible, while doing it subtly enough as to not overwhelm them. It is a fine balance to strike indeed.

Shopping cart

Like the search box, visitors not only need an easy and apparent way to get to their shopping cart from any page on the site, the cart itself needs to be highly user friendly and functional. Users have expectations that need to be looked after if they are expected to stick around and spend their money at any particular site, and the shopping cart is one area where dropping the ball on meeting those expectations can be unneccessarily costly.

Customers need to be able to easily delete items from their cart as well as change the quantities of items in there. Meeting these expectations is good, but exceeding them where you can is even better. Go above and beyond by offering an estimate on shipping based on the customer’s zip code and offering multiple shipping options when available. Make the entire check-out process completely intuitive, an absolute no-brainer, so as to remove any chance of customer confusion.

Product showcase

Naturally you want to showcase the product line in the most effective and attractive way possible. The photographs of the products is the last place any client needs to try and save some money, so you may need to convince them to hire the best photographer they can afford. Make sure the product images show them in their best light possible, and to do so, there needs to be a professional on the other end of the lens.

A gorgeous image with just the right light and composition versus a dark fuzzy photo will make the difference between a sale and a customer lost to a lack of professionalism on display. Almost as important as the way the products look is the way they are described on the site. Give as detailed a description as possible, covering everything the customers could possibly have a question about. Color choices, exact dimensions, weight, and so on.

Calls to action

Though they are often vital to the mission at hand, the prettiest pictures and best descriptions in the world won’t make a bit of difference if the customer can’t find the button to actually purchase the item. The various calls to action throughout will be the proverbial bread and butter of any ecommerce site. Make sure you highlight them effectively enough to find the users’ eye as they’re lead through the design and visually commands them to click.

Which also leads to the next point, be sure they all work properly. Again this is an area where lack of functionality can spell disaster for the site’s effectiveness and overall popularity. If the site is known to have issues with any of CTA’s, then what is the enticement for users to return in search of goods they possibly cannot access or procure. And it is always frustrating for a user when the design visually calls to them saying “Click Here”, and when they do, absolutely nothing occurs.

Security

If the potential customers are going to be giving their payment details through the site you want to make sure they feel as secure as possible in doing so. If there is anything on the site that gives them a less than comforting feeling, with regards to the security of the information required to complete their transactions, good luck getting this to be a successful ecommerce site. So site security has to be priority. Visably so.

Make sure the site have an up-to-date SSL certificate to start with. Also be sure that the site uses an approved and reputable payment gateway to offer users a sense of comfort when they begin handing over their payment information. And speaking of said info, it is good practice to never save credit card information being transmitted via the site. Not only that, but be sure to encript all communications with the credit card processor.

Contact information

Hopefully, if all the other advice is followed, the customers coming to the site will be able to easily find what they are looking for and make their purchase without impedence, but with so many factors influencing all user interactions with the site this is not always a guarantee. Should the users end up with a question they need an answer to, before they buy from the site, giving them a simple way to contact someone who can help is a must.

If someone cannot be on hand immediately to address the customer’s concerns, it becomes imperative to make sure and get back to them in as timely a manner as possible. Keeping them waiting around, is never any kind of solid plan. It can often backfire and cause them to seek out alternatives to your shop.

By Rob Bowen • Webdesigner Depot

#Web design #e-commerce #Rob Bowen #Webdesigner depot

What makes an infographic successful? As designers, we want it to achieve a balance of two main things:

Did the reader get the message we wanted them to get?

Was the message memorable?

Doctoral student Michelle Borkin of Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences worked with collaborators to collect, analyze and present 2,070 single-panel visualizations from a range of publications and websites.

In the “largest scale visualization study to date,” they asked, “What Makes a Visualization Memorable?”

Caveat

Memorability is very important, but still just half the recipe.

The researches did not look at how well viewers understood the images, just how well they remembered them. Borkin’s next steps are to measure comprehension: that new study is already in progress.

This study represents the first step in their research, as they explore what makes an effective infographic, but it already raises questions about what designers have believed so far.

What they did

First, the team created a “visual taxonomy” of the images, identifying them by qualities like chart types, number of colors and presence of human-recognizable objects. They also classified attributes like the presence of non-essential decoration and “visual density” (a.k.a. clutter).

“Redesign Your Place” infographic designed for DMC Bologna, by Jacopo Ferretti

Then they chose 410 images that evenly represented the range of their sources (like news, science and the infographics site, visual.ly) as well as the range of qualities they’d identified. Using that group, they ran an online experiment (using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk) in which participants watched a stream of images and clicked a button whenever they saw one they believed had been shown before.

What they learned

To the surprise of the researchers, bar graphs and charts did poorly. It turns out (news flash) they all kinda look the same. The most memorable images contained “human recognizable objects.” Think mundane stuff like photos or illustrations of bottles, animals and shoes, not to mention people.

“Who is Occupy Wall Street” infographic created for Fast Company, by Jess3

Other important points:

Color made a huge difference: the more, the better.

Images with more clutter were highly memorable. How much more memorable? A lot.

Images with lots of circles and rounded corner graphics also ranked high.

More about clutter

Plenty of psychology lab studies show that simple and clear visualizations are easier to understand. However, researchers have also found that “chart junk” (a term coined by Edward Tufte, so important it gets its own Wikipedia entry) can improve retention because it forces us to work harder at understanding a graph, resulting in better comprehension.

Again, understanding what makes an infographic memorable is only the first step to creating more effective presentations. According to Borkin, “Making a visualization more memorable means making some part of the visualization ‘stick’ in the viewer’s mind.” She emphasizes that we also need to learn how to make sure that what sticks is our intended message, and not the eye candy.

Find also 100 Premium Infographics from Ingimage

By Penina Finger • Webdesigner Depot

#Web design #infographic #Penina Finger #Webdesigner depot

Typography is, put simply, the arrangement of type in order to facilitate communication. As a craft, it’s been around for hundreds of years, but the web form is still very much in its infancy—no doubt typographers in a decade’s time will gasp at our lack of soft hyphen, or half space.

On the Web, typography is largely defined by its limitations. We simply don’t have the control that print typographers take for granted. To produce good web typography you have to get the basics right—because basics are all we have available.

Unfortunately if you google “typography” you’ll quickly find the Web is awash with poor advice that will lead you to produce inferior work. Collected here are some of the worst myths we’ve found in the guise of advice, and the reasons you should ignore them.

Featured image eye image via Shutterstock

“Sans-serifs are better than serifs”

There are numerous myths relating to serifs and sans-serifs, and their preferred roles in design. The most frequently repeated is that sans-serifs perform better on screen because serifs have too much detail to render well in pixels.

The flaw with this argument is that the human eye doesn’t read individual letters, it scans word-shapes; word-shapes that serifs help create. Whilst it’s true that a lot of detail is lost in a font displayed online at 16pt or below, it’s true of both serifs and sans-serifs. Georgia, Officina Serif, and Sabon are all excellent choices for body text on screen and are all serifs.

When selecting a typeface determine whether it has been designed for the job you have in mind, sans-serifs and serifs are available for just about any task and perform more-or-less as well as each other.

“Always use the typographic scale”

Anyone who’s studied typography will be aware of the typographic scale. It runs thus: 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 16, 18, 21, 24, 36, 48, 60, 72. Developed in the 16th century it’s still used in most design applications.

I’ve heard some very well respected designers refer to it as the musical scale of visual design, and that moving away from it is the equivalent of playing a bum note. However, to extend that logic, limiting our sizing to the typographic scale is the equivalent of only playing music using the C-major scale; kiss goodbye to your Dizzy Gillespie records.

Using a typographic scale certainly aids in the creation of a visual hierarchy, but using thetypographic scale is a ‘rule’ left over from when fonts were physical things and variation cost money.

What’s more, with disparate measurements in different fonts—18pt Gill Sans is not the same size as 18pt Minion—the introduction of a second typeface normally breaks the scale anyway.

A typographic scale is an excellent tool to begin constructing a layout, but don’t ever allow mathematics to dictate your design work.

“Great typography is invisible”

Ask yourself, “Why should typography be invisible?” The answer, is that typography (or design in general) that draws attention to itself, takes attention away from its subject.

As with many myths, this one contains a grain of truth: great typography is invisible when designing for extended reading. There’s no doubt that if you were reading Moby Dick, you’d quit by page 4 if it was set in Futura.

However, extended reading is rare on the Web and the role of typography more commonly includes brand reinforcement.

The most famous example of a designer breaking this rule is David Carson’s 1994 layout for Ray Gun magazine in which he set an entire interview with Bryan Ferry in Zapf Dingbats. It’s often cited as bad design because Ferry’s words weren’t communicated to the magazine’s readership (in actuality it was reprinted fully legible in the back pages of the magazine). However, neither Ferry, nor his loyal fans were Carson’s client; his client was Ray Gun magazine, who had a rebellious image to maintain; twenty years later it’s still a controversial spread, I’d call that job done.

The lesson, is that in order to approach a typographic design, you have to first establish your goals. If you’re designing a blog then yes, readability—and therefore invisibility—will be central to your design, however for the vast majority of commercial websites brand reinforcement, and the qualities expressive typography imbues are far more valuable.

“Test your design with multiple fonts”

This myth has grown out of the ease with which design applications allow us to switch fonts. Considering the fact that it’s easier to switch fonts than it is to change leading you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a worthwhile exercise.

However, if you’re switching fonts “to see how it looks,” you’ve missed the point. The line-height, the tracking, the contrast and measure, et-al, is your design, and it’s critically dependent on your choice of typeface.

The time to switch fonts is 9:15am on day 1. Get it right, and then move on. If you’re revisiting your font selection once your full layout is in place then in all likelihood you need to start over from scratch.

“Professionals don’t use free fonts”

There is an inherent mistrust in most people living in a capitalist society, we tend to assume that everything has a monetary value and anything given for free has no worth.

I would be the first person to max out the credit card on a beautiful set of fonts if required, but it’s often not necessary. The way people choose to monetize their businesses varies greatly online. For example it’s not unusual to find type foundries giving away regular fonts of their typefaces, whilst charging a premium for “professional” fonts such as small cap variations. You’ll also frequently find large corporations such as Google and Mozilla giving away their corporate typefaces for free.

It’s certainly true that many free fonts are poor, but likewise, I’ve seen fonts priced into the hundreds of dollars that I’d be embarrassed to use.

You’re a designer, use your designer’s eyes to select the right typeface. Once you’ve found it,then check the price tag.

“You have to know the rules in order to break them”

This myth is applied not just to typography, or to design in general, but to every creative field. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s an accountant somewhere lecturing an intern with this very phrase right now.

Roughly translated it means: that if you’re going to break rules you have to do so knowingly and deliberately, in order to produce good work.

My problem with this is that too many designers accept rules, guidelines, suggestions and tips as being cast in stone, and follow them unquestioningly. How do we know that the optimum measure for a column of text is around 65 characters? Because that’s what worked before. How did designers know it would work before? Because somebody tried it.

As technology, and intentions develop, rules must inevitably change with them. Does 65 characters represent the optimum column width for responsive design? Should we even be imposing a column width? We can’t know, because we haven’t tried it enough yet. We, as a community, are learning as we go. So here’s how I’d like us to rewrite this last myth: You have to break the rules in order to know them.

Read also The best way to serve fonts to your website

Featured image download image via Shutterstock

By Benjie Moss • Webdesigner Depot

#Web design #typography #Webdesigner depot #Benjie Moss

There was a time—it’s hard to imagine now—when most businesses did not have a website. In the early days of the Web, almost every business that wanted to commission a website was taking its first steps into the online world.

As time moves on it’s inevitable that virgin ground is harder to find.

It’s rare that a startup is able to fully invest in design—even if they would like to—and the less they invest in design, the sooner they’ll need to redesign. There certainly are new companies, new projects, new promotions that need designing; but the vast majority of design work is redesigns.

Redesigns can be fraught with difficulty; the client may be carrying misconceptions left by the previous designer, the current site may be tied into the company infrastructure, most difficult of all it’s common that your point of contact at the company will be responsible for the earlier design.

As well as the problems, redesigns carry with them one intractable benefit: they provide an objective point of embarkation.

When is a redesign not a redesign?

Answer: when it’s a design.

Most redesigns, despite the name, are in fact simply designs. By this, I mean a designer has assessed the problem posed by a client and provided a solution.

Where redesigns differ, is that a designer assesses the problem posed by a client, and also assesses the existing solution, before providing his or her own solution.

Webdesign is a unique discipline in that we possess an unrivalled ability to monitor and quantify almost every aspect of our design decisions. Or, in the case of a redesign, someone else’s decisions. The benefit of a redesign (as opposed to a design) is that there is a focussed direction to take. Much of the legwork has been done. Even if the client’s current site is a total failure, you can get ahead of the game by finding out exactly why.

The aim of any redesign is broadly the same regardless of the project in question: a redesign seeks to reassess a problem and make improvements on prior solutions. A redesign is more extensive than a design, it takes account of more and it digs deeper. The essence of the redesign philosophy is that there is a problem underlying the project that is in a state of flux so that it surpasses any single solution.

A design tends to be less successful than a redesign, because a design takes one of two approaches: it either finds a solution to the original problem—in which case previous lessons learnt are ignored— or more commonly, it finds a solution to the existing solution—bypassing the problem altogether.

Ted’s redesign

Last month, ted.com, the Web’s supremo site for innovative presentations released a redesign.

Ted talks are one of the premier sources of cutting edge ideas and in the last seven years Ted has grown from half a dozen videos to more than 1600. For many people, delivering a Ted talk is the pinacle of public speaking and Ted’s brand reflects the forward-looking nature of the organization.

However in the last few years, the hub for cutting-edge ideas has started to look distinctly dated. Confined to a restrictive grid too small for desktops and too rigid for mobile. A redesign was essential for Ted’s continued progression.

ted.com’s old homepage (left) and the redesign (right).

The redesign that is currently in public beta is a superlative example of intelligent and sophisticated design, produced by a team that clearly has an in-depth understanding of both of the history of Ted’s site and a vision of where it might proceed.

ted.com’s old talks page (left) and the redesign (right).

The first thing you’ll notice is that the restrictive 960px grid is gone. In its place is an expanding slider that fills the available screen real estate, whilst maintaining the egalitarian approach to content hierarchy. The site is now fully responsive and vitally its content is accessible on mobile devices, maintaining pace with technology and in-keeping with Ted’s brand image as a progressive force.

ted.com’s old ‘mobile’ version (left) and the mobile friendly redesign (right).

The ted.com redesign is an exceptional example of how a site can reassess not only its current problems, but the problems that lead to its current solutions.

Twitter’s ‘redesign’

It seems inevitable that every major website will eventually redesign—or more accurately, reskin—itself inline with the flat-design trend that has steam-rollered the Web over the last year or so.

Falling into line last week is twitter.com, whose designers have now rolled out the latest version of the insanely popular social network, worldwide.

A quick glance will tell you that little has changed: the basic layout is still in place; there’s a main panel containing a timeline of messages, and a column on the side featuring various information panels. Infinite scrolling is still in use, as is the sticky header. The only appreciable change is on the header, which has lost most of its gradients and adopted a flat-friendly color palette—purportedly to bring it inline with Twitter’s mobile offerings.

The design is a let down at best, at worst a half-hearted gesture made for its own sake. It fails spectacularly because rather than reassess the original problem, the team have mistaken the previous solution as a problem in its own right.

The new twitter.com.

Instead of asking, “How can we solve this problem?” the team at Twitter asked, “How can we modify this solution?” They have, in effect, provided an answer to an answer, a superficial process of restyling elements best reserved for Dribbble rebounds.

Despite the fact that the majority of users access their Twitter timeline via dedicated applications such as Tweetdeck and Tweetbot (in 2013 75% of users chose to access Twitter via a smart phone) the team have retained the focus on the user’s timeline, a feature no longer central to the site’s main usage (account management).

99% of good design is redesign

Design is about solving problems, but it’s rare that your first solution is your best. Quality is achieved through iterations: designs are redesigned and redesigned; concepts receive incremental improvements; solutions evolve.

Ted.com redesigned by focussing on their core problem—the need to display videos on the devices their audience favors—and then assessing where their existing solution fell short. Twitter.com redesigned by focussing on their existing site, and applying a new skin.

The single largest error you can make when redesigning is to mistake the current solution for a problem to be solved.

The secret of a really great redesign, is examining not just the existing solution, but the problem that it was devised to solve. That’s the only way to objectively gauge the changes that are needed and provide a measured and considered solution of your own.

By Benjie Moss • Webdesigner Depot

#Web design #redesign #Webdesigner Depot #Benjie Moss

Research wall, design wall, research board, ideation wall, inspiration board, moodboard, pinboard — Working walls are known by countless names. Underlying them all is a single idea: that physically pinning our sources of inspiration and work in progress, and surrounding ourselves with them, can help us to rearrange concepts and unlock breakthrough insights.

In their 2009 paper on creativity in design, human media interaction researcher Dhaval Vyas and his colleagues coined the term “artful surfaces” to refer to “surfaces that designers create by externalizing their work-related activities, to be able to effectively support their everyday way of working.” According to Vyas and his colleagues at the University of Twente (in the Netherlands), designers integrate these surfaces “artfully” and organize information in such a way that it empowers them to visualize and extend their work in progress.

Working Walls And Design Thinking

In this article, you will learn how displaying data and ideas on a large vertical surface can enhance your design thinking process. One of the first things to know is that the practice of using “working walls,” as we will call these surfaces from now on, is scarcely documented in scientific literature — hence, the need for a working definition of a working wall (redundancy intended). For the purpose of this article, we’ll define it as a large vertical surface on which ideas, data and work in progress can be displayed, rearranged and extended.

This design thinking tool being as powerful as it is, it comes as no surprise that a myriad of other fields have adapted and used it for years. But just how do working walls come into play in design thinking? Tim Brown, president and CEO of IDEO, defines design thinking like so:

“A human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.”

To further define this approach, The Institute of Design at Stanford (or d.school) has outlined five steps in the design thinking process:

It all starts with empathizing with the people you are designing for. Then, you define a clear perspective of the process by making sense of a large amount of information. You proceed with ideation, exploring a wide array of concepts and generating possible solutions. Prototyping involves building an object (or artifact) that a user can experience and give you feedback on. Testing is about triggering an actual response from your intended user.

Working walls can facilitate every step of the design thinking process, and they offer unique advantages to bolster creative thought. The tool can help us empathize with and gather input from users, define a focused approach based on a large amount of data, capture the ideation process, display a low-fidelity prototype that users can interact with, and keep track of the way we’ve tested our creative assumptions.

Hopefully, the following benefits and working wall templates will inspire you to create your own today.

1. Empathize: Enable Peripheral Participation By Users

Large vertical surfaces can be used to spark interaction with your intended users. Wall-sized displays allow for easy visualization and intervention, which makes them particularly useful for consumer research.

Vyas and his group spent over 250 hours studying design departments at universities and companies in the Netherlands and concluded that artful surfaces are “an important vehicle for peripheral participation in a project, allowing visitors to enter its context.”

They labeled this participatory environment a “creative ecology,” where users are free to interact via their inputs on working walls.

5 Guys Burgers and Fries, for instance, has been using working walls to invite customers to describe their dining experience.

Here’s a working wall template that you can use to gather input from your audience and to empathize with their wants and needs:

Try out some of these prompts:

Name one thing you love or enjoy about X?

Name one thing you hate or dislike about X?

What would you change about X?

How does X make you feel?

2. Define: Synthesize Key Findings By Detecting Affinities

Once you’ve collected information about your audience, pinning the raw data onto a working wall will help you to rearrange and make sense of it. This type of working wall displays what we call an affinity diagram. Although people have been grouping similar ideas under labels for thousands of years, it was Japanese anthropologist Kawakita Jiro who originally developed the affinity diagram in the 1960s.

The premise of an affinity diagram is that, at first glance, several points of our data might seem unrelated, convoluted or unclear. However, by grouping related concepts, we are able to detect patterns that will help define our design approach.

Consider private detectives. You’ve seen them in the movies and on television. The sleuth will often map out a suspect’s life on a sketching wall and proceed to make breathtaking connections. In this case, a working wall is used to find affinities along the subject’s journey (“What are some patterns we can expect this person to follow?”), to find affinities in the lifestyles of the subject and their peers (“What do we know about A’s relationship with B?”) and to solve fuzzy criminal cases in general.

Take the “gladiator wall” from Shonda Rhimes’ award-winning television show Scandal:

(Image: Scandal Moments)

(Image: Esther James)

Here’s a working wall template that you can use to identify affinities in a fuzzy dataset:

These questions will help you get started with the template:

“How is data point A similar to data point B?”

“How are both A and B different from C?”

“Is there a category (i.e. label) that describes these data points well?”

“Why does a certain data point look isolated? Does this ‘outlier’ yield an interesting insight?”

3. Ideate: Stimulate Divergent And Holistic Thinking

Psychologist J.P. Guilford coined the term “divergent thinking,” which the Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology defines as “the ability to develop original and unique ideas and to envision multiple solutions to a problem.” This essential design skill is the key to ideation.

We could design several types of working walls to brainstorm, gather inspiration, and fully map out concepts and their relationships.

When brainstorming individually or in a group, stick notes at the top of the working wall to show all ideas. Then, using the affinity diagram method described above, identify which ideas are related, and categorize them accordingly.

To maximize inspiration for ideation, set up a “moodboard” layout on the working wall to collect ideas from different sources. Fashion designers, for instance, observe a phenomenon called “planned obsolescence,” which basically means that they design garments knowing that those garments will eventually become unfashionable.

This instability demands a disciplined creative process in which (almost) everything can become a source of inspiration. Fashion designers everywhere use inspiration boards to capture seasonal trends, textures, accessories, sketches and muses when ideating for their next collection.

Fashion designer Christian Siriano poses with the inspiration board for his spring/summer 2014 collection. (Image: The Derek Daily)

Here’s a working wall template you can use to get inspired with ideating:

Ask yourself these questions to get started with the template:

“Does this finding relate to the overall structure (such as the layout or grid) that I am trying to implement in this project?” (If so, include it as a source.)

“Is this particular aesthetic treatment (such as the use of color or typography) similar to the one I am trying to convey in this project?” (If so, include it as a source.)

“Is a particular functional feature associated with the utility I am embedding in this project?” (If so, include it as a source.)

“Does a certain mood (such as an atmosphere or emotion) in this source inspire what I am trying to convey with this project?” (If so, include it as a source.)

The working wall style we’ll explore next can help you map out a given concept and find important relationships between its subconcepts. Think about it: Doesn’t working on a large surface help you to visualize the big picture? What if you had enough space to add more concepts related to your subject? Working walls get it done.

This kind of big-picture reasoning has been called “holistic thinking.” According to psychologist Richard Nisbett at the University of Michigan, holistic cognition involves “an orientation to the context or field as a whole, including attention to relationships between a focal object and the field.”

This is the opposite of analytic thinking, whereby we pay attention primarily to the object and its categories, using rules (i.e. formal logic) to understand the object’s behavior.

East Asians tend to be more “holistic,” while Westerners are more “analytic,” according to Nisbett and his colleagues at the University of California (Berkeley), Seoul National University (Korea) and the Ecole Polytechnique (France) in a 2001 paper titled “Culture and Systems of Thought: Holistic Versus Analytic Cognition.” This groundbreaking research earned the team a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Evidence suggests that if you were raised in a society influenced by classical Greek thought, holistic thinking might not come all that naturally to you. However, product and service design is holistic by nature and, thus, requires stepping out of our comfort zone and transforming our mindset. Working walls are invaluable tools in this process.

Wartime generals, for example, have been using working walls to map out large-scale military intelligence strategies for decades. Winston Churchill kept some nifty underground chambers covered wall to wall with maps, thousands of color-coded pins and tiny annotations. These maps helped Churchill and his administration plan military advances, ideate different scenarios and think collectively about the best tactics to pursue.

Failing to see the big picture could mean the difference between victory and defeat in war and design.

“The Map Room” in the Churchill War Rooms. (Image: Kaihsu Tai)

Use the template below to map out a concept and its relationships. The width and marker of each arrow represent the strength and direction of a relationship, respectively.

Ask yourself these questions to get started with the template:

“Does concept A influence concept B, or is it the other way around?”

“How strong is the relationship between concepts A and B? Is there one?”

“If concept A influences B, is the effect reciprocal? Does A exert a stronger influence over B, or is the strength of their force upon each other equal?”

4. Prototype: Create And Change Prototypes Easily

You could combine elements on a working wall to create a prototype of a design solution. This low-fidelity version of the solution could make use of mixed media such as the following:

magazines;

books;

sketches;

screenshot printouts;

3-D material, such as textures;

photos;

wireframes, blueprints and diagrams;

evidence from primary research;

evidence from secondary research;

text quotes that capture a mood;

other artifacts.

Interior designers combine elements on a working wall to create a scheme for a room. In the absence of a finished space, these boards serve as a low-fidelity prototype that gives the client sufficient clarity.

Working wall for a cabana design in Vero Beach, Florida. (Designer: Erin Paige Pitts)

Here’s a working wall template you can use to create a low-fidelity prototype that users can give you feedback on:

And here are the questions to get you started:

“Into what major components can this product or service be broken down?”

“How can I show the user what the materials for a particular component will look like?”

“How can I show the user the flow of their interaction with the product or service once it is finished?”

“How can I give the user a glimpse of the final outcome? Would mockups, wireframes, sketches or blueprints help them to visualize it?”

Prototypes evolve, and unless we have a quick way to access previous versions of our own work, that sense of progress will fade and we’ll lose sight of the design decisions that took us from A to B in the first place. Second thoughts, insecurities and analysis paralysis take over. Understanding and being able to visualize our process give us the confidence that we are building on a strong foundation and give us the strength to justify our design choices.

Interaction designers, for example, must somehow navigate a dense jungle of user experience design, visual style, branding, layout, grids, typography and function changes. Working walls are an essential asset for succeeding in that.

The BBC UK published an amazing article explaining how it redesigned its website. It printed out every single screen of the old website and pinned it up on what the team now calls the wall of shame. The team gathered around this large vertical surface to prototype and pin new versions of its website. The result is a triumphant wallpaper-sized timeline of where the BBC used to be and where it stands now.

“A New Global Visual Language for the BBC’s Digital Services,” BBC Internet Blog

Here’s a template to visualize prototype changes over time:

And here are the questions to get started:

“Into what major features can this product or service concept be broken down?”

“How does each feature currently look?” (Include this in the column for the version you are currently working on.)

“What elements will we add to this feature going forward?” (Include them after the plus sign in each of the arrows pointing to the next version.)

“What elements will we remove from this feature going forward?” (Include them after the minus sign in each of the arrows pointing to the next version.)

5. Test: Visualize And Validate Design Assumptions

Researchers in every field experiment and iterate on their results. In the previous step, we saw how to use a working wall to create and refine a prototype before introducing it to our target users. Stage five of the design thinking process, testing, can also be facilitated using a different type of working wall.

Startup founders use a “validation board” to visualize their prototype tests. The free canvas created by Lean Startup Machine helps you to display the different iterations (or pivots) that your design solution hypotheses have undergone. You can also classify your assumptions depending on whether they’ve been validated. As on other working walls, elements may be moved around as the process unfolds.

Image: The Validation Board: A Free Tool for Testing New Startup Ideas From Lean Startup Machine,” Harrison Weber, The Next Web

Use this working wall template to visualize and validate your design assumptions:

Here are the questions to get started with the template:

“Which assumptions haven’t we tested yet?” (Include them in the first column, labeled “Untested.”)

“How do we go about testing this assumption? How will we know whether it is true or false?” (Include this “experiment design” in the second column, labeled “Testing”.)

“Has this assumption proven to be true or false?” (Move the original sticky note in the “Untested” column to either the third or fourth column, depending on the result of the experiment.)

Takeaways

Working walls are invaluable tools for design thinking. They empower research, sense-making, ideation, prototyping and testing. Using wall-sized displays in our design process empowers convergent, divergent and holistic thinking — all essential creative skills.

By Laura Busche • Smashing Magazine

#UX Design #Ideation #Laura Busche #Smashing Magazine

What is “User Experience Design” exactly? Should you not start it unless you are fully dedicated, or should you embrace it in the process as soon as possible?Are all designers also user experience designers, or is it a separate expertise?

The debate is as old as the discipline itself, and while picking up a bucket of popcorn, sitting back and watching the drama is sometimes fun, let’s try to figure out which user experience techniques are useful for startups, in-house teams, big corporations and anyone who wants to improve their website, product or service.

MULTIPLE DEFINITIONS OF UX

User Experience Design is a very broad and vague field, and most commentators say that it’s a superset of all of the other disciplines. Is there one definition to rule them all? In my opinion, no. Do the definitions provided below describe some aspects of your day-to-day activities? Most likely, yes.

Christina Vodtke, author of Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web, recently tweeted the following:

There are three core disciplines in UXD: Visual/Interface designers, Interaction designers and Information Architects.

— Christina Wodtke (@cwodtke) November 14, 2013

Steve Psomas offers “The 5 Competencies of User Experience Design,” which encompass information architecture, interaction design, usability engineering, visual design and prototype engineering, with a list of activities and artifacts produced by each activity.

In “The State of User Experience,” Jesse James Garrett, author of The Elements of User Experience, defines experience design thus:

“The design of anything, independent of medium or across media, with human experience as an explicit outcome and human engagement as an explicit goal.”

Peter Merholz, author of Subject to Change, argues that UX is strategy, not design:

“A UX designer is coordinating, orienting, helping all of the other folks [designers] achieve some common goal, a singular intent… UX designers lead organizations to ensure that great experiences get out into the world.”

Dr. Leslie Jensen-Inman and Jared Spool established the Unicorn Institute to identify which skills UX designers need. They’ve found that managers need UX designers to have a holistic skill set, including front-end development, visual design, mobile integration, project management, information architecture, interaction design, copywriting, content strategy and user research. According to this definition, UX design is the Swiss Army knife of Web design.

BECOME A UX PRACTITIONER

If you can remotely recognize yourself in any of the definitions above, then there’s a good chance you are already practicing UX design and that you could become a seasoned UX designer with a little more strategy, a dozen of relevant books (check out the links at the bottom) and 10,000 hours of practice. While that’s a compelling proposition, it obviously takes time.

Disregarding the fact that it takes time to become a good UX practitioner, firms should still consider adopting UX techniques for their business in the meantime. (Image credit: baldiri)

Most businesses — especially small companies and startups — can’t afford to hire a dedicated UX designer, but that shouldn’t stop them from adopting some UX techniques. Trust me, it’s much easier than you think.

A NOT-AT-ALL-DEFINITIVE LIST OF UX TECHNIQUES

I like to divide the techniques into two main categories: learning about the website or application, users needs, business goals, the industry and the competition, and generating ideas, solutions and communication artifacts that will help to align the team and shape the product.

Learn

website analytics

cognitive walkthrough

heuristic evaluation

stakeholder interviews

SWOT analysis

user interviews

usability testing

ethnography

contextual inquiry

card sorting

affinity mapping

Generate

personas

brand persona

voice and tone

microcopy

navigation patterns

search patterns

content strategy

customer journey map

ideation workshops

tasks and use cases

workflows

page priorities

prototypes

UI patterns

Everyone wants to see the results immediately. Taking urgency into account, how do you decide which technique to use? There’s no definitive answer, but in my experience, usability testing, interviews, journey mapping and microcopy tables are all very effective for quick and dirty experience improvements.

I’ve chosen these particular four because they don’t require you to create polished artifacts. Use them to improve the user experience, not to create unrealistically perfect candy for your portfolio.

START WITH EMPATHY

The most important skill one needs to develop as a user experience designer isempathy. Empathy, however, cannot be practiced behind closed doors. To truly understand users, their challenges, their pain points as well as their dreams and desires, you need to go out and learn about them. Observe them while they live their lives, discover their habits and watch them use your design.

USABILITY TESTING

Test every project on every major milestone. For best results, conduct before, during and preflight testing.

Usability testing is essentially watching people using your design.

Before

With redesigns, knowing what’s wrong with the old design is helpful. Secondly — and people rarely do this — test the competition. Create an equivalent set of tasks for a competing website or application and test it. Running a usability test on the competition’s product will reveal a lot of opportunities to delight users and seize competitive advantages. Just by avoiding the errors discovered there, you will automatically provide a much better UX.

During

Transitional tests are usually done with prototypes. Have a fresh pair of eyes look at your concept and make sure you haven’t overlooked something. Expect this to be not the final confirmation, but rather a prevention of the kind of forehead-slappers that usually slip by if only insiders with domain-specific knowledge are involved. If you have the time and budget, conduct these at each major turn. These are the most important and the least used tests.

Preflight

The most commonly requested yet least effective are preflight usability checks. A pre-flight evaluation is effective if the main concept is already tested and proven. Test the design before going live to reveal the last few bugs or typos that might have been overlooked.

If this is the first test on the project, it will probably reveal deeper issues. Much deeper than an easy to fix button miss-alignment or a typo.

We’ve conducted quite a few preflight usability studies and many times we discovered a core problem. On one occasion, the registration steps hadn’t been ordered in a sequence that had been logical to the user. On another, the touch-screen equivalent to drag ‘n’ drop with a mouse was missing.

Fixing a broken experience that’s discovered only a day or two before launch is usually postponed until the next release. Many more times still, there’s no clear roadmap after the project delivery, so the issue is never repaired. The solution? Test your designs early.

Usability testing techniques are well explained in Steve Krug’s classic “Rocket Surgery Made Easy“, the sequel to the legendary “Don’t Make Me Think“.

Need recording software? Just use Silverback, which is dead simple to use and quite reliable. TechSmith Morae for Windows can be a considerate investment, so if you are on a tight budget, try CamStudio. But don’t fuss about the software. If you don’t have any, test anyway and write down your observations.

Remote viewers can observe sessions with Google Hangouts. In such cases, installMouseposé to track mouse clicks and keyboard strokes. For offscreen recording, a set of GoPro cameras or a set of smartphones should work. If you opt for smartphones, make sure there’s enough space for an hour-long recording.

Recording and sharing touch interface testing sessions is effortless if you have a laptop with a camera nearby.

An easy way to record sessions on touch devices is with your laptop camera. Turn on the recording software, angle the laptop screen at about 45° and place the device next to the laptop’s trackpad. Another way is to strap a GoPro camera to the user’s chest or forehead, which is especially handy if you need to test in an unusual context.

INTERVIEWS

By “interviews,” do I mean user interviews? Not exclusively. Apart from interviewing (in plain language) users and customers (the ones who are spending money on us), we should also interview stakeholders, managers and other team members, as well as domain experts.

Discussing your product is pointless, especially by asking “Would you use [our product]‘s feature XYZ?”. That’s an interview gone wrong. But let’s forget about youfor the moment. Be genuinely interested in the person you are interviewing. Get to know them and understand them.

Unbiased interviewees

When the user doesn’t know what the interview is about, you’ll get the most honest and least biased insights. No matter how disappointed they are in your product or service, the user might sugarcoat their answers if they know the purpose of the interview. The opposite could happen, too! On one occasion, we interviewed a user who was recruited by the very company we were redesigning for. Because he knew who we were, he couldn’t stop complaining about the price and value, so we wasted the interview listening to mere rants.

Even worse, you could end up writing down a lengthy list of feature requests. Back in 2007, I worked on a redesign of Croportal.net, at the time one of the 10 most visited websites in Croatia. One of the first usability test-interview hybrids we conducted ended with a couple of users recommending a Gmail log-in form right there on the home page. The craziest part was that the product team actually debated whether to do it. It was a nightmare, but we learned our lesson. Inviting users to specify the product is the highway to feature-creep hell. Our responsibility was to uncover users’ problems, habits and motivations and then design the product to match those findings — not to ask users to design it for us.

Milica and Janko Jovanović explain how to translate user needs into product features in “Get Your Hands Dirty“.

Focus on facts, not opinion. Pride and resentment are easy to spot and, depending on the situation, can be a pleasure to hear, but behavior patterns are gold. Of course, write down everything, but sport a poker face when users start talking about the bits that you find the most valuable to the project. This doesn’t mean being serious and cold. In fact, be enthusiastic — but equally enthusiastic — about everything interviewees talk about.

How to start?

Prepare more questions than you’ll be able to ask. This way, the conversation won’t end prematurely. We usually split our questions into two major groups: general questions and those that are more specific to the domain.

General questions Learn about their daily life, general schedule, tedious and enjoyable errands, habits and patterns. You are looking for potential pain points, so the strokes should be broad. A good way to start an interview is to ask, “What does your typical day look like?” Depending on the context, the questions could be about life in general or just business.

Domain specific Start with general questions, and then get more specific when you see there’s room to probe. For instance, ask, “What have you bought on the Internet lately?”… “And before that?”… “And before that?” Then ask for more detail about each experience, such as onboarding, findability and the checkout process. Remember to give every experience the same level of attention. Don’t focus too much on one particular experience; rather, try to identify patterns. With business interviewees, start with, “What was your most recent project?”… “And before that?” Then, unearth the patterns there.

Once you have spoken with users, use that data to create personas, journey maps, workflows and microcopy.

CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAPPING

Customer journey mapping is a collaborative activity to discover pain points and opportunities with a product. It’s conducted as a half-day or full-day workshop, with participants from all over the company. If your startup is small, then gather all of your advisors and mentors. If you are big, then bring in a person or two from customer support, billing, retail, marketing and strategy.

Everyone should participate in the workshop, because it could be the perfect opportunity to synthesize all internal goals, connect different roles and give everyone a sense of ownership of the product, making for a cohesive UX.

A customer journey group exercise. This picture is taken at a public workshop, but you can easily conduct it in-house as well.

Again, depending on the purpose and the goal, the maps may be more or less detailed. Be as objective as possible by gathering enough data about users (via website analytics, pools, surveys and interviews). By the time you become skilled in UX design, you will have used personas extensively in your customer journey mapping.

How do you do it? As an exercise, do it on your own first or with one or two colleagues who won’t roll their eyes the moment you introduce something new to the process. Take a sheet of paper big enough to accommodate a 9 × 6 grid of sticky notes; the paper used on flip charts is a good size. Gather a bunch of sticky notes and a marker or two and you’ll be good to go.

Draw a grid of three columns and six rows. It doesn’t need to be perfect, but if you find drawing straight lines to be challenge, I learned a trick at one of Eva-Lotta Lamm’s sketching workshops: Draw the lines by pulling the marker towards you, instead of from side to side. Label the columns “Before”, “During” and “After,” to represent time. The rows represent different aspects of the journey. Label them, too:

Activities For example, planning a family trip, asking friends, Googling top destinations, visiting websites, taking the trip, sharing photos, etc.

Thoughts For example, “Is this the right product for me?”

Feelings Frustration, delight, anxiety, relief, etc.

Touch points A friend, an AdWords ad, a TV commercial, the home page, a product page, a 404 page, etc. Be as detailed as needed.

Pain points Landing on the wrong landing page; not finding shipping details; etc.

Opportunities For example, populate the form with data that you can assume based on the visitor’s session data, such as location and currency.

Start using the sticky notes with just two simple rules: first, only one idea or comment for each sticky; secondly, stickies are expendable and affordable. Just add anything you can think of, and edit later once you’ve mapped all aspects of the journey.

Tweak this template to suit your needs, but I strongly suggest keeping “Activities,” “Thoughts” and “Feelings” because understanding what happens beyond our reach will lead to a better user experience.

Experience evaluation will reveal opportunities to fix issues as well as to delight users.

Once the experience has been charted, use the pointing system of your choice to evaluate each step of the journey and generate a graph. If you need to present the map within the company, make a poster of it, focusing on storytelling. In this case, your notes and data will just be there for support.

MICROCOPY

How many times have you encountered an error message that basically means that recovery from the error is impossible? These things don’t happen because no one involved gave it a thought. They happen because it was on no one’s to-do list.

Prevent such situations by adding a microcopy table to your project checklist. Microcopy is all of the instructional copy, small print and labels on a website. You want to communicate with the same voice, but adapt the tone to the audience, brand and context.

Workshop attendees learning how to write better content with a microcopy exercise.

Ensure consistent communication — and leave no critical bit behind — by creating a cheat sheet. I like to call such a guide a “microcopy table”. The industry exemplar is MailChimp’s “Voice and Tone,” created by Kate Kiefer, but yours need not be so sophisticated. Never mind the form at this point; focus on the content.

Create a list of interactions

For starters, open a spreadsheet in Google Docs or on your computer and start entering user tasks, each on its own row. Start with common ones, such as registering, logging in and recovering a password, and then get more specific, such as uploading a photo and updating a status. Lastly, break down basic tasks into smaller bits, such as first name, phone number, VAT number and small print about shipping and handling costs. Where applicable, create two rows for each task, a success row and an error row.

The following columns are typical:

Tasks For example, logging in.

Type of communication For example, success or error.

User thoughts For example, “Why do I need to enter that?”

User feelings List the emotions that the user has or might have.

Communication tips What needs to be explained, and in what tone?

Draft copy For example, “We need this information so that we can suggest products that are relevant to you.”

Where does the user go next? Or what should they do? If you want them to take an action, include instructions in your confirmation message.

Once you start to think about microcopy, listing all scenarios is a quick and fun way to think about how people will use your interface, to prevent misunderstanding and to delight users by anticipating their reactions. For best results, make it a group exercise!

Don’t worry if you are not good at writing copy. Describe all interactions and hand over the table to someone who is comfortable with it.

By Marko Dugonjić • Smashing Magazine

#UX Design #Smashing Magazine #Marko Dugonjić

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