Some years ago, I noticed a funny thing happening in the Web-design industry almost overnight: quite a few Web designers had changed their title to UX designer. This seemed to me to be an obvious attempt to cash in on the growing popularity of the term User Experience. Even worse, their seeming to assume that User Experience might merely be a better version of Web design demonstrated their fundamental misunderstanding of what User Experience actually is.

This trend to append UX to titles has continued. We now have UX librarians—a particularly clumsy construction as I see it. While I accept that information architecture is largely a reapplication of information-science concepts, as far as I can tell, a UX librarian is essentially a UX professional who likely has an MLIS degree and happens to work in a library. Read More

Too often, UX professionals and our stakeholders and multidisciplinary colleagues think of project outcomes in binary terms. The work is either a success or a failure. We judge its merit by how well it aligns with whatever metrics our team put in place at a project’s outset. More subjectively, we might deem a project a success or a failure depending on our emotional response to what the project accomplished or failed to achieve.

I’ve worked with federal agencies, nonprofit organizations, and a Fortune-500 retailer. My experience in all of these sectors has taught me that most projects actually fall somewhere in the middle. Few projects are complete failures. Equally few are unequivocal successes. UX work can be messy because human beings are messy. Read More

In Part 1 of this series, I discussed some outdated UX design strategies and their limitations. Primarily because of a lack of information, those strategies have often resulted in flawed user experiences that hurt businesses.

Leveraging Big Data to Improve UX Design Strategies

It is imperative to understand one thing: no tool can tell you the exact solutions to the problems with a platform user experience. But, having said that, the rise of big data has given many businesses the opportunity to gain access to data that can be helpful during strategy development.

Big data gives businesses the benefits of informed decision making. Product development used to be an art, but with big data, it has become a science. Thus, Part 2 of my series explores some different ways in which businesses can acquire relevant data to improve their UX designs, as well as some key points to remember when designing a platform user experience. Read More

This month in Ask UXmatters, our UX experts continue their discussion on how prioritizing the use of agile or Lean development methodologies affects the practice of User Experience. (Check out Part 1 of this conversation.)

Now, in Part 2, our expert panel discusses how a company’s interpretation of the term agile can impact all of the disciplines on a product team—including User Experience. Product or development teams usually drive the adoption of agile or Lean. However, despite agile’s focus on development, our experts emphasize how crucial it is to perform discovery research and design before development sprints begin. Plus, UX designers sometimes find that, because of the frequency of sprints, agile can offer them more opportunities to have greater influence on a project. Read More

Many of our colleagues still do not understand the function of UX design. This problem is systemic in many companies, cascading from a C-level where there is a gaping User Experience void—and no leader to fill it adequately—and fueling misconceptions at every level of the organization.

As a UXmatters reader, you probably don’t need me to educate you on the differences between User Experience and user-interface (UI) design. But many of the people with whom you work probably do need to better understand the differences—so they can more effectively engage your efforts and you can engage with theirs. Do you have time to sit each of them down and explain to them the fundamental differences between User Experience and UI design? Not likely. So, in this column, I’ll describe some ways in which you can progressively educate your colleagues on the differences between User Experience and UI design, as follows:

• tactfully responding to misinformed comments
• advocating for user-centered requirements
• producing deliverables that reveal the why behind your designs Read More

With luck, the ads that are promoting your app will reach out and grab people’s attention. Hopefully, once visitors are on its landing page, they’ll appreciate your app’s value proposition and immediately download it. Then, once people download your app, with luck, they’ll fly through your onboarding process. What do all of the steps in this scenario have in common? Luck. Plus, they’re part of a process in which visual salience determines whether your app gets ignored or people download and adopt it.

If users don’t notice what matters, our design work fails. Instead of relying on luck, it’s important to design for attention. By using the right techniques, you can control what users notice—and the order in which they notice things. In this article, I’ll look at how to design to command user attention. Specifically, I’ll cover visual hierarchy and salience and discuss how to blend these concepts with color psychology. By better understanding these techniques, you’ll be more empowered to design intuitive processes, clear page content, and persuasive technology. Read More

Design thinking. It’s probably something you use in your job every day to tackle thorny design problems. But have you ever thought about using it to design your life?

In their book, Designing Your Life, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans outline a step-by-step process, using design thinking, to help people build lives in which they can find fulfillment and joy. This review highlights some techniques from the book that people have used successfully in achieving their professional and career objectives. To get a complete understanding of the Life Design process, though, you need to read the book. Read More

In both private and public sectors, people are realizing that design is a competitive advantage. Good design can have a huge impact on the customer experience and operational efficiency—not to mention the success of products and services. But what makes an effective design team? How do leading organizations maximize the impact they get from their investment in design?

To answer these questions, my company Clearleft recently ran a study during which we surveyed 400 designers in 37 different countries across six continents. We wanted to find out the current state of design and determine the conditions under which design can make maximal impact on an organization’s goals. Almost every industry sector is represented in the survey, including health, education, entertainment, travel, utilities, and government, as well as charities, private companies, and public organizations. Read More

This is an sample chapter from Josh Clark’s book Designing for Touch. 2015, A Book Apart.

Chapter 4: Gestures

Hands are wonderfully expressive. We talk with our hands all the time: they ask questions, show intent, command attention, reveal emotion. A backhanded wave dismisses an idea; a jab of the finger accuses; a thumbs-up enthuses. If hands are excellent at communicating with people, they’re even more effective at communicating with objects. From the delicate operation of tying a shoelace to the blunt-force strength of opening a pickle jar, our hands and fingers constantly improvise in grip, pressure, position, and sensitivity.

How can we bring similar expression to manipulating digital information? Touchscreens put data literally in the user’s hands, and it’s the designer’s job to enable and interpret that interaction. Unfortunately, while our hands have a robust vocabulary for speaking to people and objects, we’re still in the grammar-school stages of a gestural language for touchscreens. A richer lexicon lies ahead, but it will take time for a more sophisticated range of touchscreen gestures to become common knowledge. Read More