UIE Brain Sparks

Technology changes quickly. A lot of organizations struggle to keep up with this change. It’s not just mobile design that’s throwing a wrench in the spokes. Content strategy and information architecture are more important than ever in this changing, multi device landscape. Karen McGrane believes in the not too distant future IAs and UXers will be leading organizations in the face of these changes.

In considering your user's experience with your design, keep in mind that there's a difference between something looking good and being good. But how do you determine good? How can you measure it? If, for example, you’re a print company building a digital presence, do you focus on retention or acquisition based on the shifting experience? It’s easy to ask for something that already exists, but much harder to describe something that one might want or need.

Given the amount of communications a user takes in on a daily basis, how you speak to them is incredibly important. The “voice” a company uses contributes to the establishment of the brand as well a creates a distinguishing identifier that sets it apart within the daily deluge of content users encounter. A consistent voice can help a user feel comfortable and familiar with your organization.

Creating visualizations from data can be a powerful and intriguing way to present findings. But way too many design teams sit on vast amounts of data. They also spend entirely too much time making static images rather than interactive tools.

Getting two people to agree on something is a difficult task in any aspect of life. Getting a whole team to agree on a design, where underlying feelings, ownership, and organizational hierarchy are involved, can be an even greater challenge. That’s not even counting the dreaded “swoop and poop” scenario. The trick is to get everyone involved early in the design process and a design studio is a perfect tool for just that.

Dan believes that collaboration and conflict—that’s right, conflict—are the basis for good design. The book itself evolved from his Surviving Design Projects card game. Dan joins us for this podcast to discuss his book, and his thinking around collaboration and managing conflict.

Steve’s book is a distillation of his years of experience conducting research with users. Somehow existing as both a handbook of sorts and as a casual conversation with one of the sharpest minds in the field, it’s a must-have for anyone thinking about the research side of things. Steve breaks down interactions with users to illustrate when, and how, to ask the right questions to uncover valuable insights.

In some scenarios, getting a user to convert or react to a call to action is the desired outcome. It means your design and experience work. But if users are coming to and then quickly leaving your site, what are they really experiencing? If they don’t take the time to explore and discover they may not have any loyalty to you or the experience. And if you’re dealing in complex decisions, you want your users to take the time they need to fully understand and commit to their choice.

UX folks often have to sell the importance of the field to stakeholders. That’s also the case with user research. The costs and time associated with starting a research program, and actually interacting with users, are sources of a lot of friction. Organizations are now seeing the value in user research but it’s daunting to know where to begin. It’s also difficult to fit research into an already established process.

Critique is often confused with being negative and critical. However, the basis of critique is communication. Having strongly grounded communication is necessary for any relationship in life, work related or not.

Culling through massive amounts of data is a headache. A dense table of aggregated data points can be useful in theory, but the manner in which it’s displayed is often a hindrance. Even more than that, showing that data in a chart or graph is confusing if it’s not effectively labeled. Data is useless when you can’t make good decisions from it.

Everyone wants to be innovative, to be the next iPhone, or Google. Innovation in itself is a tricky proposition. There’s really no way to aim for it as a goal and it’s not something you can declare you’re going to achieve. Many companies and products have been innovative though, so there must be some way to do it.

It’s common in the current technological landscape for teams to have remote members. Firing up a Skype session to join the whole team in a meeting is easy. However, having a remote element to your team is not without complications. There can be hurdles in terms of collaboration, not to mention the possibility of technical issues. In the end, co-located or remote won’t matter if the meeting itself is poorly designed.

Scenarios can represent the ideal picture of a user’s experience with a product or service because you can see how and when they’ll interact. However, a scenario is often missing the details of what's going on at this moment in time and that can be a sticking point. This is where the value of the journey map emerges.

Do you think about the ringer on your phone and the ability to turn it off? Dan Saffer uses this example to kick off his book Microinteractions. Silencing the ringer on your phone is a common feature. If that feature is clunky or hard to find it interferes with needing to silence it quickly, in a crowded movie theatre for example. These tiny interactions that surround the main functionality are integral to rounding out the entire experience.