UIE Brain Sparks » Podcasts

Mobile changes everything about how we conduct usability research. Not only has the way we design and build websites and apps had to adapt, how we study them has to as well. Traditional research methods won’t translate to a mobile environment.

The ultimate goal for user experience is that users enjoy using your product or service. Many companies use satisfaction as a metric for measuring their success. But satisfaction is really just the lack of frustration. You should be focused on what you can do to delight your users.

Responsive web design allows the notion of “one web” to be a reality. Designers are increasingly able to sell to their organization the idea of delivering content to multiple platforms. Putting it into practice is another story.

With so many teams and divisions within organizations, falling into a pattern of designing within your own silo is incredibly easy. Mobile teams are focused on the mobile products. Desktop teams are concerned with the desktop experience. But customers interact with your product or service from an increasing variety of touchpoints. They expect a seamless experience across channels and devices, but this is often not the case.

We’ve all sat through terrible meetings before. Part of what makes those meetings so bad is poor communication. Being present in a meeting doesn’t guarantee that your attendees will retain the important information from the meeting, or feel like they played any role in it. Improving the way that things are heard, seen, and discussed will go a long way to improving your meetings overall.

Websites are full of links. How useful these links are in helping users complete tasks is another story. Links have to guide users as they follow the scent of information. A vague or confusing link often leads users down a wrong path and in turn increases their rate of failure.

Most interactions have an underlying rhythm. For example, an application may ask you to scan a list of items, then click one, leading to another list to scan and click. Scan, click, scan, click. You can get into a groove. Systems increasingly have rhythm too: animated transitions, hover responses, and digital physics. Static is so last year.

E pluribus unum? Better yet, out of one, create many—many channels within a multifaceted but unified experience. That’s the challenge of experience design among constrained budgets, tight timelines, and unlimited interaction expectations. Content strategy’s communication foundation, the message architecture, can help you answer that challenge.

When smartphones and tablets first emerged, designers focused on channel differences like screen size in order to understand the basics in this new area. It’s time to set aside channel-centric planning and think of a user’s context first.

If we focus too much on content, we ignore what we know about how our associative brain comes to makes sense new information. Think about how many people respond before reading past the first sentence of an email, or how a magazine article doesn’t get the same reaction when displayed in HTML. Or consider how knowing the author of a publication influences your judgement of that content.

Science fiction films often take liberties with the technology that they display. After all, it is fiction. Though they can make up essentially whatever they want, technologies still need to be somewhat realistic to the audience. This influences the way that sci-fi technology is presented in film, but in turn, it's how sci-fi influences technological advances in the real world.

In the current multi-device, interconnected landscape, a user can interact with your product or service from a variety of touchpoints. At each, you must address the user’s needs at a particular place and time. Those needs will be determined by where they are in the experience.

Speed and performance are a critical aspect of mobile design. Using media queries to design your site responsively is a great way to ensure proper display on mobile devices. But just shrinking a desktop site to work on a mobile device can affect performance.

“Meetings are a waste of time.” “Meetings, ugh—I have real work to do.” Heard these? The perception of meetings worsens when you have an unproductive one. The entire team feels like their time could have been better spent.

In any website, there’s a lot of thought that goes into the visual design. But a great visual design is worthless if the site isn't useful. If the content is confusing, poorly constructed, or even just missing, your users are going to have a horrible experience. Karen McGrane suggests the solution was once much simpler. You'd determine your content, stick it into your design, and never worry about it again. With the web changing as drastically as it has over the past few years, content can no longer be static.