Raise Your Voice

If you are a UX professional, you’ve probably struggled at times to get your voice heard. Between ladder-climbing product managers, cowboy engineers, and a workload that leaves you out of breath every day, rising above the shenanigans of corporate life can be a challenge.

All you really want to do is design truly amazing experiences for your customers, but the politics and red tape of your workplace get in the way. Or do they? It’s easy to blame the “system,” but in reality, we all control our own destinies.

The following tips will help you take control, especially if you work on a product team in a corporate setting. Using any combination of these strategies will help you push past your day-to-day challenges to have an even bigger impact on your team.

December 09, 2011
Alan Tifford
5 Sketching Secrets of Leonardo Da Vinci

You can improve your sketching and paper prototyping abilities by adopting some of the methods used by Leonardo da Vinci in his sketchbooks. Leonardo was a prolific sketcher, filling his journals with over 13,000 pages of notes and drawings. These five sketching lessons drawn from his practices will make you a better thinker.

Lesson #1: Sketch Your Ideas Out 4-5 Times

Flower Sketch

Leonardo frequently sketched things multiple times, showing an object from different perspectives or different stages of development. His different sketches of flowers show some with leaves and others without leaves. Some of the flowers are budding, while other flowers are mature.

December 07, 2011
Brian Sullivan
Human Computer Interaction

In this course, you will learn how to design technologies that bring people joy, rather than frustration. You'll learn several technique for rapidly prototyping and evaluating multiple interface alternatives — and why rapid prototyping and comparative evaluation are essential to excellent interaction design. You'll learn how to conduct fieldwork with people to help you get design ideas. How to make paper prototypes and low-fidelity mock-ups that are interactive -- and how to use these designs to get feedback from other stakeholders like your teammates, clients, and users. You'll learn principles of visual design so that you can effectively organize and present information with your interfaces. You'll learn principles of perception and cognition that inform effective interaction design. And you'll learn how to perform and analyze controlled experiments online. In many cases, we'll use Web design as the anchoring domain. A lot of the examples will come from the Web, and we'll talk just a bit about Web technologies in particular.

November 23, 2011
Thinking Inside a Smaller Box

Crafting truly inspired user interface designs is hard. Any schmoe can slap a listbox and a couple of buttons on a screen and meet a user need (although sometimes a couple of buttons and a listbox is the optimal design). However, as modern software development tools such as WPF unshackle developers to let them efficiently realize any design they can dream up, we have a responsibility to more vigorously challenge our design proposals. While I do not advocate complexity or innovation for their own sake, there are cases where challenging conventional design metaphors can lead to much more elegant and pleasing solutions for users. If we are to create user interactions that transcend from the ordinary into the sublime, we need to invest significantly more energy and creativity. Modern tools let us ask, “Maybe this listbox should be a solar system”, but these questions do not ask themselves.

September 14, 2011
Mike Heydlauf
Paper-in-Screen Prototyping

In many industries, prototyping is an effective way of modeling a system to test it and gather feedback from engineers, other designers, stakeholders and, most importantly, end users.

Practitioners in the UX field are familiar with prototyping when designing physical devices, web, and mobile applications. UX designers can use Flash, HTML, or other robust programming languages to build prototypes that closely resemble the final product, allowing test participants to interact with the prototype more realistically to generate valuable feedback for designers.

Unfortunately, these types of prototypes aren’t generally used early in a product's lifecycle because they can be difficult and slow to produce. UX designers trying to build these prototypes may need the help of software engineers or developers in the team. Besides taking considerable time and effort to create, implementing any changes on these type of prototypes can also be time-consuming.

April 12, 2011
Diego Pulido
Star Power in Mobile UX Design

A flood of 5-star ratings in the app store is what every developer hopes to see when they check in on their apps every morning. Positive word of mouth is the primary way great apps climb and sustain themselves at the top of the charts. Of course, feature placement from Apple (if you're lucky) doesn't hurt either.

As it turns out, you only have to do one thing well to get those 5-star ratings: delight your users. And how do you do that? You have to work harder than your competitors and stay singularly focused on that mission to delight. This is, of course, not so easy to pull off. You have to dig pretty deep in your smartphone's app store to find any 5-star apps. When you stumble across one, you'll notice that the app has very few downloads and reviews. Chances are it wouldn't be a 5-star app if more people were using it. Most apps at the top are 4 and 4½ stars. The vast majority, however, fall at the 3-star level or below.

February 28, 2011
Alan Tifford
How To Prototype And Influence People

One of the points I make in So You Want To Be A Designer is that the hardest part of software isn’t the process of creating software, it’s changing culture and influencing organizations. One of the strongest tools we have our repertoire in convincing others is prototyping and video: turning ideas into high-bandwidth communication artifacts. The goal of a prototype is to sketch an idea and to inspire participation: you are creating a narrative.

To put it another way, the value of an idea is zero unless it can be communicated. Below is the video of my talk on How To Prototype And Influence People. Not only that, but the video also includes a demonstration of live rapid prototyping! Now is your chance to see me code and debug in front of seventy-five people. It’s like pair programming with an entire room.

November 16, 2010
Aza Raskin
So You Want To Be A Designer: Top 5 List

Getting started in user experience can be difficult. Our profession has an identity crisis. You need look no further than swarm of acronyms that we hide behind: CHI, HCI, UI, UE, UX, IA, ID, IxD, IxSD… the list goes on.

Our identity crisis means learning our field is like trying to inhabit the mind of a multiple personality disorder sufferer. For an aspiring interaction designer, figuring it all out is daunting. For anyone, it's daunting.

This is my top-five list of what I've found to be most important to do and master if you want to get into design.

1. The Hardest Part Of Software Is Culture. Get A Book On Negotiation.

The hardest part about creating software isn't software. It's people. Creating a killer interface is meaningless unless you can convince the rest of your team, client, or company that it is worth the investment. Your job as a user experience person is to cultivate a culture where good design has a leading voice at the table. If you cannot communicate, you will fail. If you can not convince, you will fail. If you cannot listen, you will fail.

October 28, 2010
Aza Raskin
Playing in the Sandbox

A number of years ago, the design team at GE Appliances showed me a collection of sculptural objects they had recently constructed during an afternoon work session. As explained to me by Marc Hottenroth, leader of industrial design operations at GE, these sculptures made from steel, wood, wire, and found/repurposed components were material studies used to spark new ideas and reinvigorate the activities of the design team. Each object raised questions and elicited a rich dialog among the designers who were using experimentation as a means to discover new possibilities rather than validating existing ideas and honing concepts.

I was a bit surprised that professional designers would continue to engage in such "academic" endeavors. What I was most impressed with was that experimentation was embedded into the design culture at GE and the designers were using these activities to ask, "What if?" After all, this is what we're taught to do in design school—to play with "stuff" to discover potential without immediate application. But what function does experimentation like this serve in professional practice today?

October 07, 2010
Mark Baskinger
Shades of Grey: Thoughts on Sketching
Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can’t invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.
     - D.H. Lawrence

In designing mostly interactive systems (spaces, processes, and artifacts for people to use), I must increasingly stretch the limits of communication tools to explore and document what it will be like to interact with the things I create. Artifacts used in communicating design create an inherent frame of experience between the subjective response of the person for whom I design, and my expectations of their response. There is a divergence of meaning in that the audience can only experience the communications artifact, not the object being communicated.

Will Evans sketching

June 24, 2010
Will Evans