UX Thought of the Day by UIE

UX thoughts from User Interface Engineering to inspire you to do something differently in your design work.

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Cultivate A Love Of Learning

The tools, techniques, and knowledge that we apply to our work as designers is constantly changing and evolving. It can be hard for seasoned professionals to keep up. Most of the skills that designers need can’t be learned in school. So, what do entry-level professionals do if they want to achieve?

New professionals and students need to adapt their knowledge to an ever-changing field and develop a disciplined approach to staying on top of the industry. Skills are learned on the job, and some fields, like financial systems, government agencies, and medicine, demand industry-specific approaches and solutions.

Center Centre is a new UX Design school that tries to meet these challenges by providing workshops with industry experts, and hands-on work in real-world projects with companies and non-profits. It also offers a collection of the latest resources and tools that will be used on the job. It’s a school that focuses on practical, immediate applications in the design field while emphasizing the importance of developing a lifelong practice of being curious, asking questions, and learning along the way.

adapted from “Teaching UX Designers To Always Be Learning” by Jared M. Spool

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The Obstacles of Collaboration

Collaboration is far more complex than people realize, far more productive than they imagine, and much more about behavior and culture than tools and activities.

The three ways people misunderstand collaboration: They oversimplify what it is. They believe it to be ineffective and inefficient. They focus on the wrong aspect of it.

Collaboration is less skill and more habitual behaviors. Collaboration is a range of habits, dispositions, and techniques, and there’s something for everyone in a collaborative culture.

Team leaders may try to encourage collaboration but base their approach on one of these misconceptions. But don’t let the organization throw the baby out with the bathwater—use the failed attempt as a way to introduce values and encourage the team to review the tool or activity.

adapted from “Misconceptions about Collaboration” by Dan Brown

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Becoming Design-Infused to Gain Market Leadership

It’s one thing to say design is important and to put phrases like “delivering best-of-class customer experiences” into the corporate mission statement. It’s another thing to change a corporation to truly make design a competitive advantage.

Infusing design into the corporate culture means making hard changes. Cutting out traditional ways of doing business. Building the capability to seek out radical opportunities that will change decades-old thinking about how business gets done.

These are intentional activities. They are designed. Design isn’t just about manipulating pixels on the screen. It’s about rendering our intent.

adapted from “Becoming Design-Infused: 2 Necessary Mutations to Organizational DNA” by Jared Spool

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UX Team-of-one Situations

People may not say it directly, but there’s usually an expectation that having someone on a team who will focus on UX will result in changes to the product that will immediately wow everyone. This can be a tricky expectation to manage, since design improvements often happen gradually, over time.

To get a sense of what your colleagues do and don’t know about user experience, take them out to lunch and have a casual conversation. Consider a “Bathroom UX” campaign to promote a broader understanding of the roles and functions of user experience.

UX teams of one sometimes have to be diplomatic, informed, and well-meaning meddlers.

adapted from “A Typical UX Team of One Job Description” by Leah Buley

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The Role of Message Architecture in Content Curation

“A message architecture is a hierarchy of communication goals that reflect a common and concrete vocabulary,” says Margot Bloomstein, author of "Content Strategy at Work: Real-world Stories to Strengthen Every Interactive Project.”  Message architecture is core to her approach to content strategy and content curation.

Starting your content strategy efforts with a clearly defined and universally accepted message architecture ensures that all the content you deliver to your user is relevant, appropriate, and valuable.

“Message architecture is a yardstick that you can use as you’re auditing the content you already have and determining what content you want to pull from outside sources as you start curating it.”

Every piece of content, whether it's existing or new, should be viewed through the filter of your message architecture. You have to ask yourself, “Does this support my brand? Does it convey the appropriate qualities to my audience?” If the answer is yes, then you include it.

adapted from “Combining Curation with Your Content Strategy” a Virtual Seminar by Margot Bloomstein

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The Secret of a Successful Relaunch: Don’t Have One

Did your team launch an exciting, comprehensive redesign, only to experience...disappointment? It may seem counter-intuitive, but Flip-the-Switch redesigns turn out to be the most ineffective way to get major changes into a design.

Overburdened by corporate politics and huge expectations of amazing improvements the moment the new design is launched, large redesigns often promise too much to too many different shareholders.

But part of the problem comes with the attitude of having a single moment when you’ll launch the new thing. When we single out a particular date when all the changes will be realized, shareholders all jump on the bandwagon. This is bad for our workload and bad for our shareholder expectations.

So what’s the secret to a successful relaunch? Rolling out changes incrementally instead of “flipping the switch.”

adapted from “Extraordinarily Radical Redesign Strategies” by Jared M. Spool

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You Can’t Fake Useful

What’s the hardest part of designing dashboards? It’s not making them pretty. It’s making them useful. Understanding the information your users want and the tasks they need to to accomplish.

The best place for you to start is by defining your users’ starting points. What’s the first thing they do when they sit down to use their dashboard? If they spend the majority of their time on one particular activity, make sure that it’s featured on the dashboard. And if they’re clicking through to specific reports, incorporate some of the data from these reports into the dashboard.

Don’t settle for pretty. Think like your users and build something useful.

adapted from “Designing Dashboards: The Do’s Don’ts and D’ohs!” a Virtual Seminar by Hagan Rivers

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How Does Progressive Enhancement Serve Users?

Fostering the exchange of information should be a primary focus when constructing any web interface. Progressive enhancement ensures that all content is both available to and usable by anyone, regardless of location, device, or capabilities of the program used to access content. It may not be the same experience across devices, but it will consistently be a positive experience.

Progressive enhancement isn’t about browsers. It’s about crafting experiences that serve users by giving them access to content without technological restrictions.

Progressive enhancement doesn’t require that you provide the same experience in different browsers or stop you from using the latest and greatest technologies; it simply asks that you honor content (and users) by applying technologies in an intelligent way, layer-upon-layer, to craft amazing experiences.

adapted from “Progressive Enhancement and the Content-Out Approach” by Aaron Gustafson

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Responsive Design: A Technique Towards Better Content

When organizations decide to make their website responsive, they often run into a lot of problems. They find that current designs and content don't work well on smaller screens. Things that used to be easy now become difficult.

What they realize is that their website wasn't working to begin with. Images are too small. Designs no longer look the same. Content becomes truncated or disappears altogether.

A smart organization sees this as an opportunity to improve things, especially content. Find new and better ways to work with your teams. Ensure that you're meeting both user needs and business needs. Stop producing content that doesn't add value or bring in profit.

adapted from “Mobile Strategies for Your Content” a podcast interview with Karen McGrane and Jared M. Spool

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Just Say No

As organizations develop design-driven practices, how and when UX strategy teams are brought into the process is critical. Some product teams bring UX in early enough to make a difference, while others may not understand the full value of what a UX team offers. When UX is brought in too late, after a design is final, they are limited in what they can do.

Educate product teams on the value of bringing in UX early to troubleshoot solutions that inform the design and product development. If the product team is neglecting UX, or bringing them in too late to make a difference, UX teams should consider the value of saying, “No.” It’s a tricky thing to do, and teams will need support at the executive level to do it. But it sends a message to organizations that they need to practice what they preach if they want to be committed to creating better designs that focus on the user experience.

adapted from “Every UX Leader Needs A Unique UX Strategy Playbook” by Jared M. Spool

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Cultivate A Love Of Learning

The tools, techniques, and knowledge that we apply to our work as designers is constantly changing and evolving. It can be hard for seasoned professionals to keep up. Most of the skills that designers need can’t be learned in school. So, what do entry-level professionals do if they want to achieve?

New professionals and students need to adapt their knowledge to an ever-changing field and develop a disciplined approach to staying on top of the industry. Skills are learned on the job, and some fields, like financial systems, government agencies, and medicine, demand industry-specific approaches and solutions.

Center Centre is a new UX Design school that tries to meet these challenges by providing workshops with industry experts, and hands-on work in real-world projects with companies and non-profits. It also offers a collection of the latest resources and tools that will be used on the job. It’s a school that focuses on practical, immediate applications in the design field while emphasizing the importance of developing a lifelong practice of being curious, asking questions, and learning along the way.

adapted from “Teaching UX Designers To Always Be Learning” by Jared M. Spool

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Tips and Tricks for Better Web Page Design

After spending many hours doing usability research, Patrick Hofmann has assembled some tips and tricks for better web page design. Here are a few of them:

Size matters. Make sure your screen type is large enough to read. Make sure your images are big enough that users can read and interpret them. Although this sounds like common sense, Patrick has found in his usability testing that size is often a problem with websites.

Be brief. For text, keep your word count down. For images, remove unnecessary visual traffic. This helps your users read and process information more effectively and efficiently.

Be consistent. Use the same wording across your design. Don’t say Click OK in one place and Press OK in another. For images, be consistent with your sizes, angles, and views. Repeat a common illustration and make slight modifications to it to emphasize change.

Test in a flash (or a blur). Test your design by letting someone to look at your page for just a quick second. Ask what the person saw. Was it the most important elements of the page? You can also test your page by squinting at it to identify the areas of high contrast. Are they what you intended?

adapted from “Essentials of Effective Visual Design”, a vitrual seminar with Patrick Hofmann

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Faster, Prototype, Faster!

Once upon a time, paper prototypes were amazing, radical tools that could predict the future. You could come in on Monday and start sketching and have a full working design in front of users by Friday. Don’t laugh. Until paper-prototypes came along, teams could take up to six weeks to get that far.

By 2004, developers had discovered—and embraced—agile. It gave them the ability to move quickly from one iteration to another, testing with users every step of the way.

Ten years later, responsive design rules, and there’s no such thing as “one design to rule them all.” Now that you’re working with gestures and touch interfaces, you can’t rely on a small collection of design patterns to handle every use case.

Quick prototypes have always been the answer. And these days, designers and developers have to work together in a way we’ve never seen before. Collaboration helps them get to a better design faster.

adapted from “A Bias For Making” by Jared Spool

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In Brand We Trust

The goal of every brand is to have such a positive association in users’ minds, they’ll pay more for it simply because, “It’s a brand I trust.”

What boosts a brand’s strength online? Just being able to buy the product they want can cause shoppers to have more positive attitudes about a site’s brand.

Design elements can also affect people’s brand attitudes. Shoppers who use size charts when they’re buying new clothes feel more positive about the site’s brand afterwards. But shoppers who use Search often report less positive feelings about the brand.

When we create designs that focus on ensuring that our users can accomplish their goals, we’re having a long-term positive effect on the strength of the brand. And over time, this increase in brand strength can boost our organization’s bottom line.

adapted from “Determining How Design Affects Branding” by Jared Spool

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A-B-C: Always. Be. Converting.

Every business chases conversion. Did you download the app or submit your email? You’ve converted. And, for your own product’s market launch, getting your visitors to convert—whatever that means for your business—into customers is a top priority.

And if they don’t?

Let’s start with your (hopefully soon-to-be) users. They’re not converting (yet) because they don’t get it, don’t want it, and or don’t think it’s worth it. If your customer isn’t focusing on you, shift the focus to them. Figure out what problems they are dealing with and how your product may solve them in a way that’s easiest for them.

Ultimately, you have about 5 seconds to impress upon a visitor why what you’re selling is important, they need it, and it’s worth it.

The good news is you can resolve all of these challenges. But, you have to change the right one. After all, for a product that is confusing, even giving it away for free won’t make a difference. Taking the time to understand your customers and why they’re not converting allows you to test and tweak with confidence to reach your goals.

adapted from “The Three Reasons Why Your Visitors Don’t Convert” by Laura Klein

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Game On!

We are a naturally curious species. We like a challenge and, it turns out, we really like a good game. UX designers can take advantage of those psychological traits to engage users and encourage specific behaviors that lead to desired outcomes.

This tactic isn't exclusive to gaming or YA sites. Everywhere from intranets to networking sites, designers are turning the processes that users might have otherwise ignored into a game. Designers have used tactics like hiding figurative and literal Easter eggs, awarding ‘points’ for contributing content, and rewarding users as they go deeper into the site. By utilizing these elements, designers are bringing users through a game and keeping them interested while helping their business meet its objectives.

Of course, it’s not the actual game that keeps users hooked, but the psychology behind it all. When we understand how users think, we’re better able to get them to “play.”

adapted from “Designing with the Elements of Play” by Jared M. Spool

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Wireframe Strategies: The Right Level of Detail

A question designers often have is how much detail should they put in their wireframes? Chris Farnum says "it depends on if there are a lot of factors that you want to think about."

Maybe you’re working with a client for the first time, or you’re building something new from the ground up. Go the extra lengths to show the framework and specs. Add annotations to clarify specific designs.

Or maybe you’re revisiting a finished project and you’re only tweaking the design. In this instance, showing enough detail to present the concept can be enough. "The level of complexity and detail you put into a wireframe is what’s going to make your project successful."

adapted from “Wireframing Strategies” a podcast interview with Chris Farnum and Adam Churchill