Podcasts – UIE Brain Sparks

User Experience is really all about delighting your users. You want them to accomplish tasks with ease and not encounter any roadblocks that are a direct result of your design. Many of the delightful things about an app or interface go unnoticed because they are the tiniest of features. These microinteractions can set the tone for your users and dictate the feel and performance of your design.

Oftentimes really simple changes can have dramatic effects on a user’s ability to interpret data. Stephen cites the many examples of designers taking stabs at airline boarding pass redesigns and the evolution Target’s Pharmacy prescription bottle went through. Presenting the information in a much clearer way reduces the cognitive barrier.

When you break down written language, it’s really just a carefully crafted set of tiny symbols. It’s easy to dismiss these meticulous creations in daily life as simply, reading. The shape, readability, and size of these symbols are all factors in effectively communicating ideas, and have been for thousands of years. In essence, typography itself is more than just picking a font.

In traditional website design and development it’s common to start with the design and add your content later in the process. You may even use “lorem ipsum” as a placeholder to know where the content eventually needs to live. This causes the content creator to craft words to fit the design instead of building a design to fit the content. Without the right content your users will likely have a lackluster experience no matter how good-looking the design.

In the realm of user experience, disciplines and titles can take on different meanings. Determining buzzword jargon from actual, useful distinctions and processes is sometimes a bit tricky. The term Service Design has been with us for a while now. Some see it as just plain, good UX. Marc Stickdorn sees it as more than that.

Luke says it’s necessary to look at how your service or product is framed in the broader picture. Most are built upon tradition web structures, and then “mobilized” now that smartphones and tablet growth has exploded. He compares the difference between mobile and PC to that of television and radio. You wouldn’t just drop a radio program onto TV without optimizing it for that platform. The same should be considered for mobile as a medium.

In traditional development environments, requirements are what you base the project’s direction on. However, requirements assume that you know what you’re doing and why you’re building it. Substituting your thinking to adopt a hypothesis approach allows you to examine where you may be wrong. Lean UX itself embraces hypotheses to quickly determine what is and isn’t true about a project and which is the right path to go down.

Accessibility research can help us better understand how people with disabilities use the web and what we in product design and development can do to make that experience more successful and enjoyable. However, accessibility research is often carried out in academia. The valuable insights gained through research are shared and built upon among scholars, but often do not make their way into the practice of people who are designing and building digital products and services.

The goal of any site is to have great, compelling content. But what constitutes great content? How is the success of a blog post or a video measured? How can you be sure the time and effort put into crafting your content is providing an adequate return on investment?

If you work in user experience or accessibility, you probably spend part of your time on advocacy–making the case for a new design idea or a new way of working. Lawsuits are the ultimate way to get two sides to come to an agreement, but it’s also an extremely confrontational style of advocacy. A more collaborative process might be a better way to reach your goal with an agreement that is a win for everyone.

If you work in media broadcasting or telecommunications you have probably heard of the U.S. legislation called CVAA, shorthand for the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act. This law, signed by President Obama in October 2010, seeks to ensure that accessibility requirements keep pace with advances in communication technologies.

Sharron Rush heads the Easy Checks project at the Web Accessibility Initiative. These simple steps help you get an idea of whether a site meets some of the basics for good accessibility, without any special technology or tools. She joins Whitney Quesenbery for this episode of A Podcast for Everyone to answer some of these questions.

In this premiere episode of A Podcast for Everyone, Sarah Horton and Whitney Quesenbery speak with UIE's Adam Churchill about the book that inspired the podcast, and give a preview of what they will be talking about in upcoming episodes.

The notion that “wireframes are dead” has been coming up every so often over the past few years. In truth, wireframes are still a valuable way for teams to communicate. Building up scenarios through state changes helps to both show and define a user’s journey through your design.

Ultimately, your content is the reason users visit your site. Taxonomy can build a structure underneath that content, making it much more dynamic. By employing a layer of taxonomy, your CMS can better understand the relationships between the content. This allows you to easily surface related content, dynamically display bits of information, and improve your users’ experience.