Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
RMH
Stranger Things
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Product Placement
Cosmic Funnies
izzy's playlists!
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"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
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he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Not today Justin
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trying on a metaphor
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@thatotherarch
I hate being wrong.
When making product decisions using limited user research and some assumptions, you will probably be wrong more than right. And I hate it. But this isn't to say I don't expect it. I would just rather be right than wrong.
But I love knowing that I'm wrong. Knowing I'm wrong gets me closer to figuring out what is right.
This what happens when you work near @ldrs1354 and @thursdayateight is running late.
User Experience - Weeks 8-10: Okay so I have not posted recently, class is over and Visual Design starts next week. But just to prove I was there, this is what we made. Check it out! www.tyml.it
“I haven't failed, I've found 10,000 ways that don't work.”
Thomas Edison
User Experience - Week 6-7
Someone up there likes me, because Weeks 6 and 7 (yes, I'm behind so I'm combing the posts) - which covered Wireframes and Visual Design, respectively, aligned perfectly with what I'm doing at work. At work I'm working on workflows and wireframes for a new website but due to timeline, we are looking at hiring a UX firm to help handle the load. So not only am I learning from Carolyn in the classroom, I'm able to easily and readily apply it to real life scenarios: How much "design" is need in wireframes? What does a UX team need from a client in order to begin the user-reasearch process? What team members from both the UX and the client sides are needed on a project?
It's early in the process, but being able to email or come into class on Monday nights to ask Carolyn real-life questions to help me solve real-life problems is awesome.
User Experience - Week 5
So yeah, I missed week 5.
This past Saturday I was at The Starter League Builder's Weekend, and this happened.
User Experience - Week 4
Week Four covered something I am well aware of from my time at Picis: user stories. User stories are a way of capturing software requirements by detailing who the user is, what they are trying to accomplish and why they are trying to accomplish it. Because user stories don't really define the "how" of the functionality, it is best used when practicing Agile, since the "how" can change as an iteration progresses. Leaving the open the "how" allows for more creativity when development occurs. I've worked with developers who feel more comfortable with more defined requirements but I have also had the luck of working with developers who love this freedom and use it as a chance to find great and interesting solutions. I think being open to solving a problem with the best solution - no matter by whom or when in the process it is realized - always leads to the best results. I've never been a part of a waterfall process, but the thought of having to finalize requirements and design decisions early on and then "throwing it over the wall" to the developers gives me the same claustrophobic feeling I sometimes get when they close the door on an airplane.
Another trip to San Francisco means another chance to see how good Food Trucks can be when they are treated fairly by the city they serve. I've been wanting to try sisig - basically a plate of fried pork bits with onion and lime - ever since Anthony Bourdain drooled all over it when he visited the Philippines, and the Senor Sisig truck's version was awesome.
User Experience - Week 3
Week Three introduced us to User Personas. A user persona is a way to centralize all the information gathered from your field research into a typical, though fictional, user of your product. A user persona includes information like: likes, dislikes, goals, and frustrations. The end goal of this having persona is to help guide you in development of the product. If at anytime a design or development decision needs to be made and there is no clear answer, it can help to use this persona to answer the question: All opinions aside, what does the user want? At my previous job, most of the personas we had were clear. Since we were developing Emergency Room software, our users were: doctors, nurses, and other typical ER staff. But for products for a more general audience - e.g. music listeners, parents of young children, foodies - creating these personas seem to be much more difficult. The importance of having done good field research increases, otherwise you may end up building something for the wrong people, or the wrong thing for the right people. I'm beginning to realize that UX is not just the obvious, like making simple tasks two clicks instead of four, but it is also the foundation for successful products. Things we build need to solve real problems in meaningful ways, and a UX person can help ensure that.
Moving On
So, after 10+ years with the same company - which adds up to approximately two offices, three or four company names (I lose count), five job titles, trips to everywhere from Anchorage, AK to Effingham, IL, endless stories from the road that are best kept on the road, and too-lazy-to-try-and-count versions of ED PulseCheck - I've decided to move on.
It wasn't an easy decision to leave. The work is still challenging, the money is fair, and more than a few of my co-workers I consider friends. So why am I leaving? There was one thing that working there couldn't give me: a chance to not work there. What I mean is that it just felt like time to do something different, work on something else.
It's a little scary leaving the comfortable for the complete unknown, but that’s also the appeal. I don't know if I will succeed or fail, but, to use a bad sport analogy: You never make the shot you don't take. Or something like that.
We were made to be awesome. Duh.
User Experience - Week 2
Most of my past work as an art director and graphic designer was based on instinct, what just felt right. The rest of it was done off the fumes of inspiration from looking at others' validated work from the pages of Communication Arts or One Show Award Annuals. This would be a great beginning to a story that described my rise in becoming the best art director in the universe ever, but, not surprisingly, it's not. My story starts and ends with frequent struggles to get something onto paper, and ultimately, another career.
Week Two's class introduced us to, among other things, visual design principals and how they can be applied to web design. In other words: there's a science to it. Specifically, we covered:
Unity/Variety can determine how much (or how little) the elements of your design feel like they "belong" together through things like color or font.
Hierarchy and Dominance refers to the prominence of the elements in your design and how this prominence will determine the path a user's eye takes when viewing the page or make an element seem more or less important than another element. This can be established through things like size and color.
Economy of Elements is the idea that everything on the page should have a purpose and a purposeful place within the hierarchy.
Proportion and Balance refers to the size of each element relative to the other elements within the design, as well as to the dimensions of the overall design itself.
I'd known about all of the above peripherally or unintentionally, but never really was smart enough to apply any of them to the work I was doing. Maybe it was the thought of applying something so concrete, like science, to the abstract. But being able to come up with great ideas within constraints is sometimes harder to do than having free reign. So in the coming months as I redesign the websites I've worked on in the past, I plan to apply some science to them. This means I can charge more, right?
User Experience - Week 1
I imagine that right now, you're feeling a bit like Alice. Hmm? Tumbling down the rabbit hole? - Morpheus, The Matrix
This past Monday, I began my User Experience Design class at The Starter League, taught by Carolyn Chandler of Manifest Digital. In an attempt to help me remember all the stuff I'll be learning and all the new things I'll be experiencing, I plan to keep track of a few thoughts here in this blog. (I won't attempt to summarize each class; others are doing that and doing it much better than I could hope to. For example, check out Melissa's blog here and Becca's blog here.)
First up: Week 1.
One of the things I learned in the first class and through this week's assignment is that my general dislike for certain websites is such an easy thing to have. It's simply a reaction to bad usability - a reflex - and it requires no effort. The real work is in figuring out why a website is bad and how to not just fix it but make it better. One method that can be used is a heuristic evaluation, which includes, in part, an analysis of the website's or app's or anything's ability to prevent user error (e.g. united.com's calendar widget which prevents the user from booking a flight for any time previous to today), it's ability to give the user with feedback so they know what the site or application is doing and how long that task might take (e.g. the "Listening" status bar in Shazaam) and it's simplicity (e.g. Apple product packaging). Of course, understanding your target audience's needs prior to building your website will probably help in avoiding some of these issues, and I suspect there will be more on that in the weeks to come.
Towards the end of class, Carolyn warned us that taking this UX class is a lot like taking the red pill Morpheus offers Neo in the Matrix. In other words: with the knowledge we'll gain from this class, we'll no longer be able to look at anything - digital or otherwise - without considering it's (poor) design. This seems to be true already. Here are some examples of things I've noticed this past week:
The keyhole on the front gate to my apartment turns to the left, the one on the back gate turns to the right. Consistency would be nice.
My cursor does not automatically go to the User ID field on the chase.com website, so logging in requires an extra, needless mouse-click.
All winter coats should have a double zipper.
So that's it for Week One. I'm looking forward to learning more about how to uncover the usability issues that might not be too obvious, how to elicit this information from users and, above all, how to fix them.
Oh, and looking forward to using this as well:
Let's make stuff. #starterleague
Did it! The year 2012, inked. Stats: 366 sketches, only 2 pens harmed.
Coming 2013. Probably.
For 2013, I have officially decided to plug in. This means finally tweeting, a return to facebook (maybe), more instagrams, and the start of this, my tumblr. So set your bookmarks, this is going to be awesome.
Probably.