Effective UI – The Book

A big congratulations to my friends and colleagues at EffectiveUI for releasing a new book! Here’s some info:

As the gap between the high-quality experiences users expect from software and the mediocre ones companies actually deliver continues to expand, there’s no greater time to drive home the importance of building better UX for software.

Delivering on UX potential involves more than just innovative ideas and technologies. Building software centered on UX quality requires that the design, engineering, staffing and business considerations — as well as the overall art of software project management and development — be centered on users’ needs and grounded in the practical realities that underlie innovative developments.

At EffectiveUI, we apply UX development and technology each day for custom Web, mobile and desktop applications.  Over the years, we’ve learned through success and error what does and doesn’t work. Through these lessons, we have reached an approach that truly maximizes UX strategies for both the consumer and the developer.

We are incredibly fortunate to have a new book published by O’Reilly Media that will help answer many outstanding questions, or questions not yet pondered, for those embarking on better UX.  We only wish we’d had this book a few times throughout projects in the past.

“Effective UI: The Art of Building Great User Experience in Software” is written as a complete roadmap of how to successfully develop groundbreaking software when the quality of the user experience is critical. The book will help:
* business and product managers trying to build and fund innovative products successfully.
* software professionals who want to more easily advance the cause of better UX in their companies and with their clients.
* anyone striving to advocate and deliver on the promise of higher quality software.

“Effective UI: The Art of Building Great User Experience in Software” covers all aspects of how to create superior UX, from the initial concept to deployment. It also explores the business, project management, design, and engineering considerations that must work in tandem along the way.  By presenting real UX projects that EffectiveUI undertook with National Geographic and Herff Jones, the book demonstrates how the principles discussed can be applied to overcome UX challenges and to meet UX opportunities.

Authored by  Jonathan Anderson and John McRee of EffectiveUI, in conjunction with Robb Wilson, “EffectiveUI” joins O’Reilly’s animal series of books and features a Rainbow Lorikeet on its cover.

The book costs $44.99 and is available at major retailers such as Amazon.com (www.tinyurl.com/effectiveui) and through O’Reilly Media at oreilly.com. It is also available on iTunes for $4.99.

The Family Tree is an Outdated Model

I recently bought a baby journal to keep records of all of my baby’s firsts and histories, which I plan to give him when he has children of his own. But I’m stuck on the first page, in which I am supposed to put in my family tree. You wouldn’t think this would be complicated, just my mother, father, grandparents, brothers, sisters, etc. The thing is, my biological father died when I was seven and I was adopted by my mother’s current husband (who is an awesome dad). To make matters more complicated, my brother has a different father.

Then, a few days later, I was doing some research into interaction models and was going through Geni.com, an online genealogy tool. I quickly came across the same issue. There was no way to say I had two legal fathers.

Although my family is complicated, I know I’m not alone in this matter. As mothers and father remarry and have children with successive spouses, more and more people of our generation have complicated families. The family tree seems to be an outdated model for trying to capture this information. It seems like our families are more like spider webs or molecules.

As I have tried to figure out what to put in my baby’s book, I remembered a graphic my brother did of his immediate family, which really shows the complex nature of our families (see below). I may just draw up my own graphical version of my family history and tape it into the book.

My brother Aaron's family tree

Avoiding the Frankendesign OR Helping Clients through Design Reviews

Frankendesign (Create your own “Obamicon” at http://obamiconme.pastemagazine.com/)

One of the biggest complaints designers have about clients happens during the design review. Inevitably, clients want to mix and match elements from all of the designs they’ve seen into a Frankendesign. Unfortunately, a Frankendesign usually disappoints designers, creates a fractured experience, and short-changes users.

Why do clients do this? And what can designers do to avoid this?

In my experience, clients do this for 2 reasons:

1. Clients lack the ability to communicate about design
2. Clients want to participate, collaborate, and contribute to the design

And designers allow this for 2 reasons:

1. Designers haven’t set expectations for the design review
2. Designers don’t have research to back up design decisions

Helping clients communicate about design

Communicating about design is difficult. It can take designers years of schooling and more years of work experience to learn how to do it effectively. So why would we expect our clients – who often have no experience even working with designers – to be able to communicate about design? Mostly, we’ve forgotten how hard it is.

Clients are relying on a very limited design vocabulary and their ability to point at  design elements that they can compare and contrast to communicate to us the fuzzy idea they have in their head. That is why they say things like, “Can you make it pop more?” and “can you put those colors in the other design.” Additionally, clients tend to try to solve design problems instead of telling us what the problem is and letting us solve it using our design expertise. It is our challenge to help the client articulate the issue they have with the design so that we can provide a solution.

The best way to do this is to keep asking questions until you get to the heart of the issue and can propose a better solution. For example, if a client says the design needs to pop more, the issue may be that they feel the design lacks interest. Make sure the client feels listened to first and then suggest solutions.

Allowing clients to contribute designs

If clients wish to collaborate on the design, which they usually do, I think it is beneficial to let them do so. Beyond the usual benefits of collaboration (team building, shared ownership, etc.), visual designs are fun.  A lot of what we’ve been reviewing with clients before the visual design review is rather mind-numbing and tedious. When we finally show them some pretty pictures, we have their attention. This is something they can easily grasp and enjoy. Let’s let them have some fun.

This doesn’t mean we let them control the designs, rather it means we carefully listen to their feedback and propose solutions in a way that lets them own part of the final design.

Setting expectations for the design review

Before we show any visual designs to the client we need to establish a few things with the them:

1. The designs you’ve created are really great and you’re extremely excited to show them. This starts the review off with a positive feeling and gets clients looking at the designs in a positive light.
2. We are creating designs for their project based on our understanding of their users. Although we won’t outright say it, it means we are not designing to the client’s personal aesthetics. Many clients think a designer’s job is to pull the design out of their head, this is not the case. So you may need to educate your client about designing for the end user.
3. Each design stands alone and has known strengths and weaknesses (i.e. one design targets generation y really well, but not generation x). Mixing the designs will not remedy their weaknesses but will dilute their strengths. This means you need to present each designs strengths and weaknesses.

Backing up our design decisions with research

This may be the hardest part of our job, but backing up our designs with research is the best way to make the right design decisions as well as establish credibility for the design. We often don’t have research to draw from or the time or budget to conduct research. However, there is research out there and I would argue that it would be better to present one design with research-backed decisions than two or three designs based on our best guess. There are ways of quickly conducting research, but that’s another blog post.

Additional sources

Here are a couple of good blog posts and articles about reviewing designs with clients:

http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/design-designers-clients

http://ahussam.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/how-to-sell-your-design-and-get-it-signed-off/

Communicating with Clients

In my line of work, a lot of what I do is explain the importance of empathizing with users. Yet it is surprising how little empathizing with our users (a.k.a. clients) seems to occur in the way we communicate with them. For example, one company I worked for used a black background for all their PowerPoint presentations. While this works well for presenting on large screens, if the client wants to print out the presentation (which they almost always do), it is a major drain on their ink cartridges.

How we speak to clients is another good example. David Sherwin posted a good article about this on A List Apart. It’s well worth the read.

 

EffectiveUI Website Wins Awards

The last thing I did before I had my baby was launch the EffectiveUI website. Actually, I didn’t do this alone I worked with an awesome team of designers and developers to put this unique site together. The site launched the day before I went into labor.

I didn’t really think much about the site until I returned to work and found out that it’s won some awards. Sure is a nice welcome back:

W3 Awards http://www.w3award.com/webapp/winners/show/gold/4/E
GOLD Award: Self Promotion
GOLD Award: Visual Appeal
GOLD Award: Professional Services

Davey Awards http://www.daveyawards.com/awards
GOLD:Web Site: Animation category
BEST IN SHOW: Web Site: Self Promotion category

About the W3 Awards:
The W3 Awards honor creative excellence on the Web, and recognizes the creative and marketing professionals behind award-winning sites, videos and marketing programs. Simply put, the W3 is the first major Web competition to be accessible to the biggest agencies, the smallest firms and everyone in between. Small firms are as likely to win as Fortune 500 companies and international agencies.

The W3 is sanctioned and judged by the International Academy of the Visual Arts <http://www.iavisarts.org> , an invitation-only body consisting of top-tier professionals from a “Who’s Who” of acclaimed media, interactive, advertising, and marketing firms. IAVA members include executives from organizations such as Conde Nast, Coach, Disney, The Ellen Degeneres Show, Estee Lauder, Fry Hammond Barr, HBO, Monster.com, MTV, Polo Ralph Lauren, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Victoria Secret, Wired, Yahoo! and many others.

About the Davey Awards:
The Davey Awards are the largest and most prestigious awards competition exclusively for the “Davids” of creativity. David defeated the giant Goliath with a big idea and a little rock – the sort of thing small firms do each year. The annual International Davey Awards honor the achievements of the “Creative Davids” who derive their strength from big ideas, rather than stratospheric budgets.

Top entries win a Gold Davey Award, the highest honor. Other outstanding entries win a Silver Davey Award. The Academy awards one “Best in Show” honor within each of the 10 mediums, chosen from among the Gold Winners.

The 2009 Davey Awards featured an outstanding pool of more than 4000 entries from the best small firms in the world. Being honored with a Davey Award is truly a great accomplishment. The awards are sanctioned by The International Academy of Visual Arts, an invitation-only body consisting of top-tier professionals from acclaimed media, advertising and marketing firms.

Groundhog Day Meeting

After a 4-month maternity leave, I was a little anxious about jumping back into work full-time. The interactive space changes quickly and I was worried about what I might have missed. Additionally, I wasn’t sure how long it would take me to get back into the groove of things and remember exactly how to do my job.

All my anxiety was for naught. In fact, I have never had more clarity about my job, and more importantly, how to be better at my job. Taking four months off gave me the space I needed to clearly see our project and client approach and processes.

On my first day I sat in on a meeting for a project that I would be assigned to. I expected to be lost, since this project was at least halfway complete. I didn’t know the clients, the politics, the expectations, desires, timeline, etc. But without any of the specifics I was able to see all the generalizations, which gave me an enormously eye-opening experience.

This meeting was a complete déjà vu. In this meeting I heard the same issues that I’ve heard in every project meeting I’ve ever attended. All of my past projects starting flitting through my mind as I listened to the team recount the current state of affairs and their issues, and I realized that most project meetings are exactly the same, regardless of client, project, budget, process, or timeline. Like that movie Groundhog Day, we relive it over and over and over again.

What most surprised me, was realizing that the main reason for this is because projects teams have unrealistic expectations of clients.

Yes, I know that the reverse is true too. Clients expect to get more than they can afford in less time than it takes to make dinner. My point is that everyone knows this is the case, yet we consistently act like it isn’t.  Seriously, we should know better. (Check out this awesome demotivational poster to get a good visual of my point).

Here are some examples of things that clients consistently do or expect, that we know they consistently do or expect, and yet we consistently act like this client will be different. Most of these are no brainers.

• Inadequate Budget: Clients always expect to get more than they can afford (unless you’re working for the defense department)
• Unrealistic Timeline: Clients will always want it now and really have no idea how long it will take to build.
• Clients Can’t Visually Communicate: Clients will nearly always want to combine elements of whatever designs you show them.
• Ownership: Clients often want to pull what you’ve made back in-house after you’ve finished it, whether or not they are capable of maintaining it.
• The Client Swap: The main stakeholder is completely inaccessible and won’t provide feedback, “delegating” the project to a few subordinates, but maintaining final say.
• Agency Competition: The client is working with a branding/marketing agency who wants to get into the interactive space and sees you as a competitor instead of a compatriot.
• Internal Divisions: Marketing hired you behind the back of their in-house design and/or development teams, but you’ve still got to work with those teams.
• Obama Effect: Clients know they need change and want change, but are scared to death of change.
• Bling vs. Bang: Clients want the biggest bang for their buck, meaning heads-down design and development, but actually need bling (meaning pretty prototype designs and vision demos) to sell the idea to their company, or vice versa.

I guess I’ve finally had it and don’t want to put time and energy into over-managing these issues, the drama is losing its appeal. I want to have more fun with clients, and I imagine they want the same. But these issues aren’t going away; clients will be clients. So I’m going to dedicate the next few postings to creative ways with preemptively managing them.  And I’d love to hear more consistent issues and creative solutions ideas any of you out there in the trenches.

World Wide Web War II

As of this post, Internet Explorer (IE) has 73% of the market place, Mozilla’s Firefox has 19%, and Apple’s Safari has 6%. Whether or not Firefox is a credible threat to IE is still debatable, but it has been gaining in popularity over the last few years. However, with the recent announcements of Internet Explorer 8 and Google’s Chrome browser, it looks like the browsers wars are back in full force.

Both Chrome and IE8 provide better support for Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and mark a new era in cloud computing. The interesting thing about this war, is that many of the benefits of Chrome and IE8 are hidden from the user. This opens more questions than it answers: Will users adopt these new browsers if they can’t SEE the benefits? Will new RIAs be able to take advantage of the new browser’s capabilities while still supporting other browsers?

As someone in the trenches, it’s hard to see how this will pan out. But I’m definitely intrigued by how the post-war world wide web will look.

11/4/09 UPDATE: I just saw a commercial for google Chrome while watching Heroes on Hulu. A commercial for a browser, I didn’t expect that when I wrote this article.

Many Eyes are better than two

Visualizing data is a powerful method for understanding data. Often, data visualized in a couple different ways can expand one’s understanding of what the data means. Enter Many Eyes.

Many Eyes allows users to upload their own data and then choose how it is graphically rendered. But more than that, it is a community resource as well. That means you can upload data, create a graph, and get feedback and assistance from other data-heads.

In short, Many Eyes is a great way to test your data visualizations.

Gapminder takes graphing to a new high.

Graphs and charts have always been a powerful way to visualize data so that it is more understandable. But they have also been limited to showing a set amount of data before their effectiveness becomes diminished.

With Gapminder, graphs are becoming even more powerful. Through animation, these graphs show the transitions of data through time. So trends and even more important, abnormalities become even more apparent.

Hans Rosling presented his creation at the TED-conference in 2007 highlighted just how powerful this additional dimension of information is. Go see it for yourself: http://www.gapminder.org/.

The end of the Internet as we know it?

I ran accross this in the NY Times last night:

Comcast, one of the country’s largest Internet providers, said this week that it would place limits on customers’ broadband usage.

Beginning Oct. 1, Comcast will put a 250 gigabyte-a-month cap on residential users. The limit will not affect most users, at least not in the short-term, but is certain to create tension as some technologies gain traction.

A Comcast spokeswoman, Jennifer Khoury, said 250 gigabytes was about 100 times the typical usage; the average customer uses two to three gigabytes a month. Less than 1 percent of customers exceed the cap, she said.

…

But on the Internet, consumer behavior does not stand still. As the technology company Cisco stated in a report last winter, “today’s ‘bandwidth hog’ is tomorrow’s average user.”

Some commentators were quick to characterize Comcast’s decision as having a chilling effect. Om Malik, the founder of the technology Web site GigaOm, called the cap “the end of the Internet as we know it.”

DSLReports.com, a Web site about consumer broadband information, said it indicated “a significant shift in the U.S. broadband market that won’t be reversible.”

…

“As media companies put content online, consumers can bypass the cable companies and get their content directly from the Internet,” Mr. Turner said. “A 250 gigabyte cap may seem very high — and it is for today’s Internet use. But it’s essentially the equivalent of four hours of HD television a day.

Here’s the full article.