Group items tagged

"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."

If you are a designer and must submit / defend creative work to others in meetings, this article is for you.

analysis of your twitter account

This is a good way to get a bead on your audience... shhhh, helpful for persona creation.

"Six Thinking Hats® is a simple, effective parallel thinking process that helps people be more productive, focused, and mindfully involved. And once learned, the tools can be applied immediately! You and your team members can learn how to separate thinking into six clear functions and roles. Each thinking role is identified with a colored symbolic "thinking hat." By mentally wearing and switching "hats," you can easily focus or redirect thoughts, the conversation, or the meeting. "

I've been meaning to get this in the group. Edward de Bono not only has a kick ass name, he may have a solution to our 'Design meetings suck' problem. Our problem is easy to define: Too much pressure is but on the designer. They become either aggressive or passive aggressive. The solution is obvious. Someone needs to 'step-up' (not man-up, you gender bias asshole) and 'set the tone' of the meeting and relationship. Easier said than done. But, along comes de Bono. His 6 hats, parallel thinking process does exactly that - it sets a tone and create enough structure to the sessions. It nurtures the productive and chokes the counter-productive. Of course, I've never tried it. I think hats are for keeping the sun out of your eyes. Otherwise, they are stoopid. But, I'm willing to try these.

"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.

"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"

More on Arguing and design meetings. Could Brainstorming be bad? counter-productive and fear inducing? ... hmmm.

Navigation is like a mini-first date with each of your visitors. This article gives some straightforward insights and tips to make sure yours is not a speed-dating wash out.

Author talks about using screencasts along with his mockups ... sounds alot like our idea of the CoDec. A mockup doesn't give enough information to the sender. IT's all there, but they don't know how to access it. They don't know the story. The backstory. The 'behind the scenes'. If they don't know, they will make it up. And, what they make up depends largely on impressions of you, personally, not your work. This is a bad way to be, even if it works out in the short-term. In the long run, you want to communicate effectively and rely on solid work, not just 'good feelings'

"247 web usability guidelines Although designing usable systems requires far more than simply applying guidelines, guidelines can still make a significant contribution to usability by promoting consistency and good practice. We use this list of guidelines in our consultancy work. For best results, remember to interpret the guideline in context - this requires a bit more thought but ensures you will get a lot more from your review."

an oldie... no, a classic and classics never go out of style.

example of a script. The theme is sound, but they aren't doing it right. All kinds of errors and badness going on

a reason to get involved with personas... And, another way to screw it up. The customer buying cycle is the ... yes, THE most important attribute of their persona in relationship with you and your site. Who cares if they are 34 years old or rides a scooter - you are about if they are ready to convert.

this is a snappy little website with directory of UX conferences. Great idea! What can you do there? Answer: Find UX events in your neck of the woods