Podcasts – UIE Brain Sparks

Have you seen style tiles, element collages, or pattern libraries? These are just a few examples of how designers are reacting to the explosion of devices and interface sizes. After all, thinking about the parts of a “page”—not just the sum of those parts—helps us create smart, scalable, maintainable designs for all those newfangled technologies.

The so called Digital Divide is increasingly being filled with mobile devices. Because of that, you need an understanding of how your designs are appearing and behaving on smaller screens. Cyd Harrell is an expert on user research, and the one we to turn for mobile research. She says that it’s not just how your designs display on these devices but also the behavior of your users as they interact on these more personal gadgets. Users consider their mobile phones to be a much more private device than a desktop computer.

What’s going to make your whole company focus on mobile? How do people interact with their mobiles device? How can you design for this new reality and even create experiences that translate from mobile to laptop to TV?

Why don’t design students coming out of school know about responsive design or creating mobile apps? Why are our self-taught hackers and C.S. grads having a tough time keeping up with the pace of technology innovation? It’s not that schools or professional development programs are slow to adapt; it’s more complicated than that. But our tendency to focus on skills alone just isn’t sustainable. Instead, we need to start investing in the ways we create designers and fuel their growth.

Mobile phones are like research platforms in our pockets. With the right strategy, we can quickly understand our users’ behavior, wherever they are. And given the ubiquity of mobile usage — even among hard-to-reach populations — we as UX designers are especially poised to make our lives easier while designing better products. That is, if we actually do the research. Fortunately, Cyd Harrell knows how to gather data without breaking budgets or extending timelines.

By now, companies know they need to be “on mobile.” But should that experience be a native app, a mobile web app, or something in between? The answer rarely is such a simple choice. And if you’ve ever entered into mobile discussions with a series of stakeholders, it may seem impossible to reach consensus.

Many teams follow a linear design process with a big reveal—ta-da!—once the aesthetics, layout, and flow are “ready” for client feedback. Weeks later, the front-end developer enters to turn an approved design into a responsive site that functions perfectly across devices. Now imagine showing clients your work in Week 1. How would everyone respond to unpolished designs?

Integrating UX into an Agile workflow has historically been a bit of a challenge. This could be due to a general lack of communication with the development team, or not feeling like the proper time or value is given to UX within the organization. Through her research, Aviva Rosenstein discovered that many problems people were having are commonplace. Additionally, she found that others had actually already worked out solutions to some of these.

WordPress powers over 25 million sites with more than 14 billion pages viewed each month, making it one of the most popular web publishing platforms. Imagine if every one of those sites was accessible. Joe O’Connor has been a leader in making that happen, through the WordPress accessibility team which works from the inside to make WordPress into a web publishing platform for everyone.

The concept of strategy can be fuzzy at best. And the word strategy tends to hold a different meaning depending on who you’re talking to. Jim Kalbach says that strategy needs to show causality. He defines it as a hypothesis of a desired position, and a belief about how you’re going to succeed and overcome challenges.

Product roadmaps are a useful tool for managers and the development they oversee. Usability testing and research informs user experience decisions. Both of these goals, in the end, benefit the users. So why can’t your process contribute to both of these goals?

The web is everywhere. It’s on our desks, in our pockets, and on screens of all sizes. The complexity involved with building a website grows with each new device it must support. This cross-platform consistency requirement makes a concrete, static design process unsustainable. As flexible and responsive as the sites we’re building have to be, so too does our process for building them.

Web accessibility takes place on a foundation of technologies, the most common of which are developed and maintained by the Worldwide Web Consortium, or W3C. Its success is dependent on how well these underlying technologies support accessible user experiences. Fortunately for us, people like Steve Faulkner devote much of their time to ensure technology specifications, such as HTML5, include the hooks that make it possible to build an accessible and enjoyable user experience for everyone.

Lately, Jared Spool has been mulling over what he defines as deliverables and artifacts in the design process. The idea is that deliverables are more authoritative and complete, whereas artifacts are more conversational and exploratory. Scenarios are an important part of the design process and Jared was curious where they might fit in. So he enlisted Kim Goodwin to chat about it in this podcast.

User experience is rarely something you do completely alone. Even if people on the team don’t necessarily focus on UX, they could be indirectly acting in favor of it. Sometimes it comes from a lack of understanding exactly what user experience is or means. People with different approaches and skillsets can be valuable assets when incorporated into the larger human centered design focus.