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A main component of natural interactions is Direct Manipulation. Traditional interaction methods (keyboard) are very efficient but often very unnatural because what you do and what happens on screen aren't necessarily very logically connected. This was a classic problem with command line interfaces (or worse, punch cards). The Graphical User Interface was ...
21
Place demographic questions at the end of the survey. If you place them at the beginning, you will induce a phenomenon called stereotype threat.
Stereotype threat says that if you remind someone of a stereotyped attribute of themselves, it will impact their performance even if they don't believe that stereotype. For example, suppose a girl has heard a ...
20
The general rule of thumb for usability is to start off with no feedback, but to then display some busy indicator after 200ms, and if the process normally takes 5 seconds or more to present a larger feedback element (usually with a time elapsed timer, but preferably not with a progress bar unless you're very sure how long it will take). If something is ...
18
Humanized interfaces make use of heuristics, emotional design and humanized copy to make an interaction with a computer feel as natural as possible.
Heuristics
Humanized interfaces try to explain errors in a helpful way, and prevent users from causing them whenever possible.
Instead of a message like "504 gateway timeout" twitter throws out this message:
...
18
I have read up on this a bit, and it seems that my answer will contradict some of the things that have already been mentioned. My sources are all academic, and as such reflect the use of on-line surveys for conducting experiments. Feel free to read the sources that I link to, and draw your own conclusions. I mention some peripheral work as it relates to on-...
17
After some years of fighting I got used to it. There are various ways to struggle with it, you can play as an authority often saying "no", or actually "NO!", but you will lose your followers, because there are always decisive people who will maintain that they know better. You can try to establish processes, but there are going to be people who will not ...
17
I assume you're referencing this diagram of Garrett's.
If you read Garrett's book about that diagram, you'll find that he has already aligned that diagram with another showing the stage at which strategy occurs:
...so strategy is the first step, occurring when you're determining user needs and laying out objectives.
16
If you looking for different processes rather than methods, there are
User Centered Design / Goal Directed Design
Usability Engineering
Design Thinking
LeanUX / LeanStartup
Data (or Metrics) Driven Design
Open Innovation / Participatory Design
Lead User Design / Design-driven Innovation
Four of them did I examine for innovation capabilites in a past thread ...
16
I've only known a few folk who've worked at Apple. These are a few things that seem relevant from what they have said:
They say "no" a lot. New projects, and current projects, get killed. Even if they're fairly far along in development. They don't seem to fall into the sunk cost fallacy.
Design input starts early, and carries on throughout the entire ...
15
I think it has nothing to do with plasticine :). Hold up your hand and show "a small amount of something". You're probably pinching. "A pinch of salt" is a small amount of salt. I assure you that both the gesture and the expression have existed long before multi-touch :). Ask a person to demonstrate something large, and he will spread his hands. Ask him to ...
15
User Experience is not devoted to suppress revolutionary ideas nor innovation. In fact User Experience is the opposite: making sure new ideas and innovation works the way users expect. User Experience has nothing to do with the business plan of Foursquare, but rather how to make the check-in User Experience as simple, easy to understand and joyful as ...
14
This article cites some studies about it:
Some recent research in the Journal of Business and Psychology
reveals that placing demographic items at the beginning of a survey
increases the response rate to those items in comparison to
demographic items placed at the end. And more importantly, it did not
affect scores on the three noncognitive ...
14
Although I am a staunch supporter of agile and lean methodologies in UX, it's important to remember that they are just methodologies. UX is not about how you create a great user experience, rather it is about what the user experience is.
So there are many different UX methodologies that can achieve good results. Often one methodology is more suited to a ...
14
In terms of navigation and hierarchy, Open Card Sorting should do the job.
Open Card Sorting: Participants are given cards showing site content with no pre-established groupings. They are asked to sort cards into groups that they feel are appropriate and then describe each group. Open card sorting is useful as input to information structures in new or ...
13
UX - User Experience is the field of design enlighting and useable software.
UCD - User Centered Design is a process of how to achieve this.
So, UX can't be about hygiene factors by definition, because it is no process like agile, waterfall or UCD is. It's not about how to reach your goal, it's an area where you work.
User Centered Design
You said there ...
13
Standard Progressive Disclosure should start at the simplest, least intrusive information first. Maybe even consider allowing users to put off answering some parts of the form (this will probably reduce completion rate of the "extra" fields but increase the completion rate of the start of the survey). But if you must do it all in one go, I'd generally ...
11
You could think of Customer Centered Design as an inherited subset of User Centered Design. That means that you do not address only user in an anonymous way, but the user is also a customer. A more targeted user group always have the benefit that you can more fine grained find out the actual target, such as task completion, in this case finding things to buy,...
10
Similar to: What are good questions to ask when interviewing intranet users for persona development?
I had the same problem and didn't know what to ask users. After some research and thought, I came up with the following:
Guidelines
Use Primarily Open-Ended Questions
Ask Naïve Questions
Ask People to show You, not tell you, when possible
Ask for specific ...
10
The big difference is where your focus lies, as with this purposefully extreme example about a short form:
Task Analysis
Start > Enter value > Enter value#2 > Confirm input > Exit
User Journey
How does the user get to this form? > Where does the user know the
value from? > What format does the user have the value#2 in? > Does
the user know what ...
10
It's a good but difficult question, without any universally good solution. However I will try to give you some things that you can do to help with this.
Firstly, recognise that the role of a UX designer is to say no a lot of the time. That doesn't mean that you say "no" whenever someone suggests something that you don't particularly like.
Secondly, you ...
10
I agree with Steve Psomas in The Five Competencies of User Experience Design. Visual design is one of the competencies. Still, you shouldn't be perfect in all of those.
9
Both answers above would be sufficient to help anybody understand the differences and the relationship between user journey and task analysis. Just wanted to add a few things that might be interesting and helpful:
Task analysis follows the specific steps users need to go through to complete a defined task - like making a purchase. CPM (Critical Path Method) ...
9
Goals and vision are the question. User experience is the answer.
User experience is not just about what users need. It's about meeting the product owner's goals or vision, while taking user needs into consideration. These goals or vision might be revolutionary or conservative. In addition, if you research both the owner requirements and the users' needs ...
8
Much of the mystery behind Apple’s design process is due to Apple being deliberately secretive, and sometimes even engaging in active deception. I believe this notion that they don’t do user research is part of their disinformation campaign.
Perhaps the clearest publicly-available view of how Apple works is from a study by UIE on what makes a successful ...
8
User Experience strategy is about taking the information about the user and information about the business and turning that into an approach for the User Experience. It overlaps with the role of a good Business Analysis and will often involve:
Business Strategy
Existing best practice / competitor reviews.
Existing behavior analysis from stats and from one ...
7
I follow a similar process but with an extra step - flow design.
I prefer, as I'm the UX person, to know what it is the user needs to achieve. I like to either use pre-written (or I write them myself) use cases based on what the stystem needs to help the user achieve.
To use a website example:
As a customer I want to be able to add an item to my basket, ...
7
I would guess that anyone actually working in UX would not have the time to do a full transcript for each interview.
I typically get permission to record the interview with my phone and make a few short notes from time to time as i go. I will listen to the full recording later in case I missed something important. I find a simple spreadsheet document with ...
7
You might be referring to Google Venture's "Design Sprint" process: http://www.gv.com/lib/the-product-design-sprint-a-five-day-recipe-for-startups.
They've basically created a highly condensed, 5-day "sprint" where they help clients:
Understand a design problem
Develop as many potential solutions as possible
Pick the best solutions and start creating user ...
7
As you already mentioned, even if you might find Wiki entries, the borders of what is included and what not are kind of blurry. I re-ordered the items because of context - this is the consensus that I use for my day-to-day worklife:
Use Cases: A feature- or part-of-the-site- usage scenario. If you take use cases for a shopping cart, these would be: 1) Save ...
6
I think you got start explaining the macro picture of what UX does in day-to-day life, and then zero it to the particular area, it goes like this -
"An UX specialist actually deals to understand products and interfaces from user perspective. Users are the predominant drivers for a product - and as an example (provide metaphors/example always) - imagine you ...
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