UIE Brain Sparks » Podcasts

SharePoint is a powerful tool, but the complexity associated with it can leave users overwhelmed. Users trying to manage content and share information through SharePoint often experience frustration. Seeing where UX fits within SharePoint isn’t always clear.

Scenarios are a powerful tool in the design process. They focus on the user experience in its entirety, giving the reason a user is engaging with your product or service. Scenarios allow you to think about the gaps between the experiences. They are great for crossing organizational silos.

Prototyping is an effective way to communicate design ideas. Static PDFs, PSDs, and wireframes can help get your point across but aren’t dynamic. Usually, any necessary changes are logged away as to-dos. They’re then taken back, fixed, and presented again. Nathan Curtis and the team at EightShapes are prototyping with HTML and CSS more in their design process. They find that employing these techniques leads to greater efficiency.

Context is an important consideration in designing a mobile experience. As new devices enter the market, designers have to contend with new form factors and consider things such as ergonomics. Even things such as Apple’s retina displays affect approaches to design.

Your content is visible practically everywhere. Content strategists need to structure content to allow for viewing on an array of devices. What does that mean for your content management system? And what do you need to build into your content to make it flexible and adaptable?

Structure aids collaboration and helps achieve consensus. If everyone is participating in a structured environment, you begin with a greater level of understanding. Using a design studio as a process can get everyone on the team communicating and moving in the same direction.

It’s difficult to predict how users will access your designs and your content. More and more, people are connecting to the internet through some sort of mobile device. Using the latest advances in HTML and CSS can leave aspects of your site incompatible with some browsers. How do you ensure that you’re providing a good experience to your users over a broad spectrum of scenarios?

It’s impossible to design something if you don’t know who you’re designing for. Developing personas through user research is a great way to create a portrait of your users. But once you have your personas, what do you do with them? That’s a question Whitney Quesenbery says she encounters more and more lately.

Critique is an integral part of the design process. Contrasting from feedback, critique is more focused and specific. Often, rather than a gut reaction, it is framed within the context of a dialogue. It is centered around arriving at an understanding.

Nathan discusses how the team at EightShapes brought their modular philosophy to creating rich interactive prototypes using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. He explains how, through modular thinking, they were able to write scripts that chunked aspects of their designs to repurpose and reuse across multiple pages.

Reputation is everything. On sites where users can rate and review products or services, the result is, well, reputation. But a problem can arise when ratings aren’t accompanied by a qualifying review. A user could have had a negative experience with service or shipping but the product itself could be stellar.

A data visualization, when done well, can be an incredibly powerful way to communicate information. It ultimately boils down to the choices you make in how to design and present the data. If you make the wrong choice you can run the risk of not accurately displaying the data or struggling to effectively tell its story.

Content is everywhere. With the amount of content users are confronted with everyday it can be challenging to garner their attention. Compounding this problem is the fact that designers and developers are often tasked with writing content that end users see. This can be an intimidating prospect if you’re unaccustomed to crafting copy.

Getting data from your users is a fundamental part of creating great user experiences. Surveys are a great way to get feedback and learn about your users. The problem is everyone has sat through a painful, monotonous survey that asked a series of frustrating and seemingly pointless questions. As with anything in UX, if your users sense they’re in for a painful experience they simply won’t engage with your survey.

A dashboard is often the first screen that a user sees in your UI. The importance of visual design and data visualizations is high. But good looks aside, the dashboard has to meet the users’ needs. Beautiful dashboards are futile if the presented information isn't useful to the user to accomplish their tasks.