Group items tagged

"Recently I wrote about User Stories and how card based software development can help identify 'clear, brief descriptions of functionality as described from the perspective of a user'. Today I want to look at how User Stories or 'Stories' can impact the user interface (UI) design and user experience (UX) of a software product."

A good perspective on UX methods from an 'Agile' guy

"Hey Spool, Mike and Steve, Nice post! Krug's Rocket Surgery book where I learned about developing good tasks. Basically, he says to test the participants interaction with the site not their ability to read. "buy a bookcase" tests the participants ability to read and, in this case search. That's not bad! It gets at the usability / mechanical functionality of a site. But, you don't need to go through the trouble to recruit users to collect this type of data. Anyone hanging around the hallway will do. However, if you want to dig down to the other parts of the experience (findable, desirable, Morville's honeycomb types), then a more authentic, believable, contextual task is important. By changing the directive command - "Find a bookcase" - to a more contextual based question - "How would you do that?" - you were able to get a different and possibly more insightful / actionable result. As a matter of fact, from now on, I'm using this format for all my user tests. Done and Done, Mr. Spool. @Mike - (A/B) test your (user) test? I smell recursion and an out of memory error. :) cheers! newman"

"How did you get into the field of user experience?" is a question we get all the time. While the AnswerLab team members all share a passion for improving the digital world, we each have a different tale of what led us here. We're sharing our stories in a new series of user experience expertise blog posts where the AnswerLab team reveals what feeds our curiosity and what led us to UX research.

The origin story of a UX superhero!

A good definition of 'User Experience Design' and it's sub sections - visual design /// information Arch, Content Strategy, Interaction design /// User Research, Product Discovery

User-testing budget considerations

Usability.gov's "What is User-Centered Design" page

"Startups frequently use surveys as a cheap and easy way to get feedback from users. But the resulting data will only be as good as the survey itself. I often see products with surveys that have easy-to-fix mistakes like misleading questions, improper sampling, and skewed rating scales. That's a shame - these teams could be collecting better data and making better decisions if they just paid a bit more attention to survey design."

You can screw up making a survey. Read this to avoid that.

Getting to know Mike Hughes and so should you

"3 fantastic days with User Experience Professionals from all over the world. 16 workshops to develop your skills, 10 talks to inspire you and 16 slots open for you to share your experiences. All this coupled with lots of parties and meetups in sunny Lisbon."

A nice post explaining how you can screw up a user test. Along with a helpful list of tips!

simple primer on user centered design

Landing pages and scrolling. Good article and tests about the 'whatnots and whathaveyous' of page scrolling.

A UX designer community forum. Brilliant idea

A stackExchange or StackOverflow message board. Great discussion going on here

Jeff Sauro is a boss.

Tristan Weevers writes about organizing and developing new UX methods and patterns.

"Storytelling for User Experience,"

Nice interview with a UX writer and practitioner by Craig Tomlin

Yellow brick road' is like highlighting what we call the critical path with color. Check document for notes

"1. Assuming you know what the customer wants First and deadliest of all is a founder's unwavering belief that he or she understands who the customers will be, what they need, and how to sell it to them. Any dispassionate observer would recognize that on Day One, a start-up has no customers, and unless the founder is a true domain expert, he or she can only guess about the customer, problem, and business model. On Day One, a start-up is a faith-based initiative built on guesses. To succeed, founders need to turn these guesses into facts as soon as possible by getting out of the building, asking customers if the hypotheses are correct, and quickly changing those that are wrong."

Start-ups are getting user-centered FIRST, before going thru all the pain of starting up. I'm pretty sure this is what the whole Lean Start - up , Lean UX is all about.

Paul from Usabilla draws the connection between Learning and UX - Awesome!