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Neilsen Norman Weighs in on the Usability of Apple’s iOS 7

iOS7

iOS7

iOS 7, Apple’s operating system for their tablets and mobile devices, moves away from the skeuomorphic design that characterized earlier versions of iOS.

The new look is drastically different from the previous operating-system iterations and it boldly parts with some of the conventions that Apple had worked hard to establish over the past 8 years.

But is the new design really better? Whether you like the new look or not, some of the new features are welcome usability improvements, whereas others are likely to cause pain.

Read the verdict: http://www.nngroup.com/articles/ios-7

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How to Make Happy Patrons: A Talk for the Canadian Library Association

Photo of Library Sign

Photo of Library Sign

On September 10, I spoke to Canadian Library Association on the science behind making good user experiences for libraries. Despite a couple of technical glitches, it was a fun talk and a great group. I’ve never spoken while sitting on stage with my legs hanging off before, but I quite liked it; it made the talk more personal and less formal. Here’s the slide deck I presented. Unlike the slides my audience saw, these are not green 😉

How to Make Happy Patrons: The Science Behind Good User Experiences with Libraries from Hilary Little
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Upcoming Talk on User Experience Design for Librarians

Photo of Library Sign

I’ll be giving a talk on user experience design at the Canadian Library Association Ottawa Kick-Off on September 10th at the Ottawa Public Library, 120 Metcalfe St.

We’ll be discussing how user-centred design methods can make happy patrons – whether they’re navigating the library website or the library itself.

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3 Design Resolutions for Your Website

Photo of fireworks

Happy New Year! Ahhhhh, yes. The time of year where we examine where we’re at and where we want to go… and the often lengthy bridge between the two. Instead of denying yourself second helpings and spending 4 hours at the gym, why don’t you consider making your resolutions website design related? Let yourself off the hook for the rest of your resolutions! You can thank me later.

All silliness aside, here are some design resolutions that will improve your website’s quality and ease of use. Each recommendation is based on research studies.

1. Improve your content.

  • Users don’t read, they scan. Make it easily scannable by chunking information and using short paragraphs.
  • Write in simple language and avoid technical jargon. Avoid cute terms and marketing lingo.
  • Place important content on the left – this is the area your end users focus on.

2. Improve your visual design

  •  It takes 50 milliseconds for users to form an aesthetic opinion of a website. A positive impression of order, novelty, beauty and creativity increases your user’s confidence in your website’s credibility and usability. Don’t trust your visual design to your neighbour’s teenaged nephew. Hire a professional to make sure it’s got visual appeal.
  • Use plenty of white space – it has a significant impact on readability. Create visual clues based on groupings; related items or links are grouped together while unrelated items are separated.
  • Use headings and subheadings to allow visual scanning of content. Font size should correspond to information hierarchy.
  • Avoid animations. Users have what’s called “banner blindness” and tend to ignore anything that looks like an ad.

3. Improve your site’s usability

  • The best way to measure and improve usability is to test your site with users. Testing with even one user is 100% better than testing with none. Have your users attempt to complete tasks, then fix the areas of the design where they run into problems.
  • Follow standard usability principles or heuristics. These are the “low hanging fruit” of the usability tree, and following them is of value. The most common list of usability principles was written by Jakob Nielsen, and you can find it here: 10 Usability Heuristics
  • Determine what your users’s top tasks are and make sure the site design supports them. For example, on an commerce site, a top task may be “search for a product”. Go through each step of that process and see where you can make it easier, simpler, faster and more enjoyable for your users. The Howto.gov site has a good summary on how to determine and design to support top tasks. Contact me if you’d like to learn more.

Good luck! Let me know how these work for you!

 

Sources and further reading:

 

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4 Reasons Your UX Investment Isn’t Paying Off

“EVERY DOLLAR SPENT ON UX BRINGS IN BETWEEN $2 AND $100 DOLLARS IN RETURN.”

We all know the business case for doing user experience work: investing upfront in making products easy to use really pays off. It reduces project risk, cost and time while improving end user satisfaction, efficiency and effectiveness.

(Don’t know the business case? Read this, or this. Or this.)

But what happens if you’re investing in UX work and not getting results?

There could be many factors behind an under-performing user experience effort. Anything from lack of tools to an impending zombie apocalypse could wreak havoc on your teams. Addressing those are outside my area of expertise.

Here’s where I know what I’m talking about. First, rule out the obvious: your UX folks are jerks, they don’t communicate well, they don’t understand business, they aren’t team players, they have such terrible body odour people stay 10 feet away…

Next, look at your organization.

I’ve based the following list on observations accumulated over my years as a UX professional. These are some common organizational “behaviour” patterns that can make even the best UX efforts ineffective.

1. You hired the wrong people.

User experience design is getting a lot of attention lately and UX is a buzzword many want to add to their resumes. But the field has been around for many years now (although under different names) and is fairly mature. Until a person has done full-time UX work – not as an aspect of their job, but as the job) for at least 2-3 years, they are generally not yet at a professional level.

How to spot a UX pro:

  • He displays high empathy, excellent communication skills and lots of curiosity.
  • She doesn’t design based on personal preference or opinion, and will try to make sure you don’t either. She bases her design decisions on user research, heuristics, test data and UI design patterns.
  • He is not attached to his designs. In fact, he starts with sketches and wireframes and happily crumples up many iterations before progressing to a detailed level of design.
  • She starts with concept, structure and information design before progressing to interaction and visual design. If the first thing she shows you looks like it could be the final product, she’s probably not a UX pro.
  • He is very interested in measurable success metrics and uses them to drive design direction and test protocol. If he speaks of making something easy, but can’t say how he’ll measure how easy it is, he’s not a UX pro.

2. You’re not letting the right people do their job.

Great! You’ve got a solid UX pro or team and an exciting project kicked off.  I hate to say it, but sometimes the very organization that values UX and hires us to do UX work is also the biggest impediment to their UX team’s success. Here are some rules of engagement that will enable them to do their best work.

  • They really do need to talk with and observe end users before the design gets done. This is the underpinning of what UX does. Give them reasonable and timely access to end users.
  • Don’t provide subject-matter experts in place of users. Your team will tell you they’re not appropriate substitutes, and they’re right.
  • Give designers authority (within technical constraints) on design decisions, and researchers authority on test protocol and data interpretation.
  • Never do design by committee. It’s a quick way to degrade a design.
  • You’ve hired your team to make your product successful. Be ready to make design changes – sometimes big ones – following user research and usability testing.  The more usability recommendations are declined, the poorer quality the product’s user experience will be.
  • Don’t nibble the design to death. Making a series of minor changes here and there, or picking and choosing which aspects of a design to keep or omit almost always creates new usability issues.
  • Clearly define roles and responsibilities for all team members at the beginning of project work.

3. UX work is done in a silo.

User experience work touches almost every aspect of an application or website project. Your UX resources will need regular check-ins with a multi-disciplinary team. At the very least, a development resource must be available to vet designs for technical feasibility, and a business resource needs to make sure you’re aligned with their goals.

The risk of not having a technical resource aware of the design direction from the beginning is that time gets wasted working on a design that the coders can’t build. The risk of not having a business resource is that your design will not meet business needs, making it a waste of time and effort.

Although there is a UX team responsible for designing your product, many other groups contribute to the final user experience. Establishing a shared vision across all the groups involved in a project can go a long way towards effective teamwork a coordinated effort, and a great design.

4. The UX team is brought in too late.

Ironically, many people view UX work as something that is done after coding to “make it look good”. They couldn’t be more wrong.  We not-so-secretly call doing this “putting lipstick on a pig”.

The best time to bring in your UX team is at the initiation phase of the project lifecycle. The role of UX at this stage is to help define requirements and structural design based on user needs. This is where we have the biggest impact.

Because user experience pros follow a methodology called User Centred Design, they need to stay consistently ahead of the development team. For product design to be user-centred, the design should be iterated and validated before it’s coded.

Thanks for reading this post. Have you observed other reasons UX teams might fall short? Please share your own experiences and thoughts by commenting.

More information:

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Designing User Focused Solutions: Confessions of a Former Worm Rescuer

Rainy Day

As a little girl, my favorite rainy day activity was heading outside to rescue the worms. A sensitive kid, I felt sad to see these distressed creatures bravely escape their flooding burrows, only to find themselves languishing as they drowned in puddles. So, on went the rain boots and the rescue mission began: bring them to dry land.

I was proud to have rescued many worms over the years.

Not too long ago, I learned something that shocked me.

I hadn’t helped those worms. At all.

In fact, I had single-handedly impeded the progress of scores of unsuspecting megadriles.

You see, it turns out that the worms were not in danger of drowning – they can stay fully submerged in water for several days. They flee the soil because they can. Worms breathe through their skin, and it must be moist for oxygen to pass through it. The wet conditions give worms a chance to move quickly and safely to new locations without dehydrating.

With the best of intentions, I had designed a faulty solution for a situation that I completely misunderstood.

These worms were not reacting to mortal danger. They were reacting to a most excellent opportunity to really truck it across the yard. And spending the day in a puddle was really no big whoop. Drying out in the evening sun, however, would prove fatal. 

User experience design is about, at its most fundamental level, not presuming we know what’s best for our users. Sure, we know heuristics and best practices and cognitive psychology principles that help us get to better solutions faster. But we also regularly confirm that our proposed solution works for users as it evolves, from conception all the way through detailed design. And that is what is most important.

Discovery and definition

At the early stages of a project, the role of user experience design (UX ) is to make sure that we’re understanding the problem space from the user’s perspective. If we have not identified the right problems, no solution we dream up will succeed. As advocates for our users, we must make sure that we not only observe them in context, but that we understand their goals and priorities.

In addition, we must make sure a solution is at least useful if not also desired. Even the most elegant design and easy to use solution will fail if it doesn’t offer any real benefit to users.

Analysis and design

As we move into the design phase, the role of UX is to validate rough concepts with users. Not by asking if they like them or not, but by walking through flows and evaluating how well the proposed solution matches the way they understand things and approach tasks. We won’t be successful unless the fundamental design structure supports how users already think about their tasks.

By the time we start detailed design, we’re evaluating how well our users can actually use the design to complete tasks. We create realistic mockups and observe users interacting with them. We measure speed and accuracy, task completion rate and satisfaction. By this point, we know how well we’re meeting their needs – or not.

With this process of regular check-ins, it’s hard to get too far off course. That course being (of course): designing user-focused solutions.

I know I’ve benefited from applying user-focused solutions design in both work and life. What about you?

As for worm rescuing, I still pluck one up now and then.

But only if it’s dry.

 

 

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10 Things User Experience Design Taught Me About Life

Vintage toned picture of tourist binoculars pointing at mountains.
  1. Empathy goes a long way. What motivators, challenges or pressures are the people around you experiencing? Nothing is done in a vacuum. Stay aware of how your actions might impact others.
  2. Before anything else, define what success is to you. Otherwise you’ll have no idea if you’re headed towards it or in the opposite direction.
  3. Don’t sweat getting off course; it’s natural to stray now and then. As long as you regularly check in to correct a path that’s not headed in the right direction, it’s not a big deal.
  4. Figure out your most important goals and use them to guide daily decisions.
  5. Life, like design, is full of trade-offs. There will always be difficult decisions. Maybe you can have it all, but probably not all at the same time. Prioritize wisely.
  6. Iterate constantly. Being too attached to your current way of thinking is a rut in the making. Identify what works and what doesn’t and be prepared to scrap something and start over. Be open to new approaches and possibilities.
  7. How well something works is important, but never underestimate how much a visually pleasing space can impact mood and emotions. Clear out clutter and let the sun shine in.
  8. People often express needs as solutions. Taking the time to identify the underlying need first always pays off by providing both a better understanding and a better solution.
  9. Get comfortable rejecting the status quo. Think things through and ask “why?”
  10. Perfection is elusive. Find and befriend your good enough“.
 

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CapCHI Usability Bootcamp

Making Your Websites and Software Easy to Use

An Introduction to Usability, featuring Gitte Lindgaard, Amy Dillon, Dr. Helen Maskery, Mike Atyeo, and Hilary Little

Tuesday November 22, 2005 from 9:00 AM – 5:30 PM at the Crowne Plaza Ottawa Hotel

In celebration of World Usability Day, CapCHI was proud to announce a Usability Bootcamp to be held on November 22, 2005.

What?

CapCHI, the Ottawa Chapter of the ACM Special Interest Group on Human Computer Interaction, was proud to present a full-day workshop on an Introduction to Usability. This program was designed for developers, web architects, managers, executives, and anyone else who needs to learn about usability.

The Usability Bootcamp was developed for participants to:

  • Understand the skills, processes, tools and techniques required to design usable web sites and applications;
  • Have had hands-on experience of the key usability design and testing activities;
  • Come away with some tools and techniques to help you back at work;
  • Have networked with other people interested in usability;
  • Have had fun!

The workshop featured presentations by:

  • Gitte Lindgaard (Keynote)
  • Amy Dillon
  • Dr. Helen Maskery
  • Mike Atyeo
  • Hilary Little

Where and When?

This all-day event was held at the Crown Plaza Hotel in downtown Ottawa on Tuesday November 22, 2005 from 9:00 AM – 5:30 PM with breakfast and registration at 8:00 AM.

via CapCHI . ACM SIGCHI . past activities 2005-2006.