Podcasts – UIE Brain Sparks

Organizational change must be top down and bottom up. How do UX and design leaders influence the way executives make product and technology decisions? What defines true support as opposed to just lip service to a great experience?

Does moving to a design-infused culture mean that outside agency support is no longer valuable? What need does an outside viewpoint fill for design-led organizations? Or are agencies shifting to being an acqui-hire talent pool?

Global organizations can no longer project their corporate views of a customer experience upon a multitude of cultures. How do you embed the nuances and subtleties of each culture into a familiar experience regardless of where you are in the world?

It’s no secret that the content on your site needs to adapt to a variety of viewing environments. Responsive and Adaptive Design have been wonderful for ensuring your design flows and displays appropriately for the multitude of devices out there. But what about your content? How can you be sure your content is in the right place, or even makes sense in these different contexts?

What does it take to create a culture of design? How does putting user experience first change the way organizations work? Those are the questions being addressed at the UX Advantage conference. Jared Spool and Karen McGrane will be your hosts as they delve into a series of topics with top design executives. In this podcast, Jared tackles two of those topics, Inventing the Yes Lawyer and Restructuring Incentives and Rewards.

Animation in interfaces has traditionally been seen as purely decorative and unnecessary. There are real accessibility and usability concerns associated with a heavy reliance on Flash. Advances in CSS have allowed for sophisticated animations and transitions that actually add to the experience. In fact, a well timed transition can help alleviate the cognitive load on users.

With the widespread adoption of Agile development methods, Lean UX has grown in popularity in the user experience world. It’s built around small, collaborative, cross-functional teams and is an extremely useful approach for startups and smaller teams. However, challenges arise when trying to adapt it to a larger, enterprise organization.

A website can be made up of relatively complex pieces. You have multiple pages, images, maybe some JavaScript, and it all needs to come together to create this larger experience. But as with things in nature, it can be broken down even further than that into more “atomic” elements.

A customer’s journey may begin on your website or maybe it begins in a physical retail location. But it more than likely won’t end there. Many organizations have a variety of touchpoints where their customers can interact with them. Understanding where, and also when and how a customer is interacting with your product or service is essential to providing them with a great experience.

Offering a mobile design is essential in today’s web. Having an app, however, can be a hotly contested issue. The cries of, “we need to be in the app store!” are heard coming from corner offices. While having a presence there can be beneficial, you have determine how to best serve your users, and whether a native app or a web based product is the ideal.

Responsive web design's combination of fluid grids and media queries has really changed the design and development process. It’s an elegant way to ensure that one set of code can display appropriately across devices. It is, however, a bit of a problem with large legacy products and waterfall strategies.

Media queries shape and form a web page to display on multiple screen sizes. That’s the core of responsive web design. Users can maintain the same level of experience that they get on the desktop even when they switch to a smaller device. The theory of responsive web design is great, but it’s not a silver bullet. When real world constraints and use cases arise it makes responsive design a bit trickier.

Responsive web design is widely regarded as a must when designing for multiple devices. With just one code base, instead of multiple sites, you can more efficiently make use of your resources. But, how your design looks is only a piece of the overall experience for a user. Having it be able to adapt to different browsers and technology can fully round out the interaction.

Accessibility is often focused on how to design and build digital products or physical spaces. But understanding the people with disabilities who will use those products is just as important. Enter ethnography and the importance of research that goes “face to face” with real people in the real world.

User experience, as it has come to be known and understood, is generally associated with the digital space. Designers and developers working in concert to make a site, app, or digital product more usable and well designed. However, a user’s interaction with you as an organization isn’t necessarily confined to just your digital identity. This user experience design can be applied across all channels, such as a call center or physical location.