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Positive Trends In UX: Educate Yourself and Learn What is a Myth and What is Not.
One of my favorite sites of late is a cool site called “UX Myths”. UX Myths is a pretty nice little site brought to you by Zoltán Gócza and Zoltán Kollin at Kirowski in Budapest, Hungary. They quite clearly detail the differences between opinion, fiction and fact, and they back it up with statistics and examples whenever possible. ROI baby, that’s where it’s at.
morePositive Trends in UX: A customer first attitude is critical
Recently I had the pleasure of working with a wonderful company called TMG on a few short-term projects. The company believed that time and again, you had to do whatever it takes to help a customer, to define yourself by giving “Hugs” to your customers. There’s also a company, called Headscape that espouses the same thing. Paul Boag, a Web strategist and a founder of Headscape is obsessive in his quest to deliver great customer service to his clients. It’s probably safe to say at this point that I believe in what both of these companies are all about — a customer first attitude. Delivering that “hug” to the customer that understands what you’re producing in a very human way of connecting to people and trying to make their lives easier. Their pain, their wants, their needs are all in the thoughts of any Web strategist, or user experience practitioner worth their salt.
morePositive Trends in UX: Integrating UX into Agile Development
I’m very excited by something I’ve just read at UX Matters, “Integrating UX into Agile Development“. A nice article where they discuss some of the expectations in maintaining an Agile team for UX, and it ironically keys into some things I’m working on right now. At any rate it’s a good article, I recommend it.
morePositive Trends in User Experience: Panel Navigation
I refer to Mega dropdowns as “Panel Navigation”. It’s much more descriptive. But I do think of it as a huge opportunity to inform the user about the content that lies ahead. You might know this UX pattern by another name. In March of 2009, Jacob Nielson summarized mega dropdowns as “Big, two-dimensional drop-down panels [that are] group[ing] navigation options to eliminate scrolling and use typography, icons, and tooltips to explain the user’s choices.”
moreSasha
Project: PeopleIQ
Objective
Build a Software as a Service (SaaS) Rich Internet Application (RIA). A client brought us an opportunity to help realize a product that would ultimately improve efficiency for employee review scenarios. The intent was to produce a Flash/Flex based interface that would allow employees to be graded against each other on a bell curve using 8-15 traits or “Dimensions”, such as accuracy, customer service, communications with peers, etc. All employees are asked to review 5-6 others from their same department or departments they interrelate with. moreInformation Architecture
Task Summary: Information Architecture (IA) Development
When designing the structure of any Web site, application or service, the categorization of information is pretty important. My job involves the categorization of information into a coherent structure, and if it’s done well or the opportunity presents itself, you can develop something that most people can understand quickly. The ultimate goal is for users to understand this inherently. The information we present is usually hierarchical, but you can have other structures as well. I’ve organized a few information architecture projects by project:Project: SAI Global Corporate Web Site (2009)
Task Summary: IA Diagramming, Format: OmniGraffle
This project was particularly complex with a focus on parsing together taxonomies in use across the world, two distinct business divisions (Assurance and Compliance) with a third (Publishing) that supported the other two and had their own business to run, (and three more not so distinct sub-product lines that could easily be business divisions themselves.) The bottom line, ensure a Web site that currently looks and acts like it’s organized by department and country and turn it into a Johnson & Johnson or General Electric class of site. The new SAIGLOBAL.COM has to route people to the services they need and having a solid Web strategy combined with solid support from the executive team to drive implementation helped quite a bit. This was a huge success for our Global CIO, Brett Lenthall (who I answered to directly) and the worldwide management team. IA Diagram Examples:
Task Summary: Taxonomy Development, Format: Microsoft Excel
As a part of developing an Information Architecture for SAI Global, we had to look at the Taxonomy being used across a variety of business divisions, regions of the world, specific countries and identify the original source of the Taxonomy reference. This is just an example of what we ran across when looking at the word training and the meaning across various sources of content within the organization.
Project: PeopleIQ Promotional Web Site (1.0)
Task Summary: IA Diagramming, Format: Microsoft Visio
In producing this light Information Architecture, we didn’t go too deep, not in our thoughts about the product nor in the design. We felt something simple, to the point would be useful. It’s a brochure site after all, and the real meat is in the application. The results were very successful.
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Workflows
Task Summary:
Establish a visual workflow showing a process. My focus tends to be on operational, task related or user focused workflows.Project: PBS: The Business Channel Learning Management System
Format: OmniGraffle
I was brought aboard PBS The Business Channel specifically to architect a method for bringing the video training content we were delivering via satellite straight to the desktop using video streaming. By doing this we would be saving millions of dollars in satellite airtime and increasing our reach to the marketplace for corporate training. Part of the concept of this product was not just delivering video to the desktop, but providing testing with remediation built in, and a 360-degree service approach to the effort. This meant workflows had to be developed for everyone participating in the service:- Instructional Designers – Responsible for course design and require knowledge of where courses are not effective, so they may be improved.
- Marketers – Responsible for establishing up to date copy and encouraging the sales of TBC courses.
- Course Participants – Require the ability to start and stop a course, where the course can be continued where they left off.
- Course Reviewers for Certification – They need validation that people taking a course will receive continuing education credits or certification.
- HR Departments – Requiring confirmation that the participant actually took the course.
Operational Process Overview
Process Detail (Operational): Copy Content into WYSIWYG Editor
Task Summary:
Iterate critical functional task flows for a service or application. This can be an important process tool for everyone to understand and improve on the underlying process for any task. This is usually presented as a portion of a larger site-mapped workflow, or an outline or task analysis grid of the process in question.Functional Task Flow Development
Project: PeopleIQ
Task Flow Development Example:
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Functional Specifications
Task Summary:
Develop a list of functional specifications that are provided to the client and developer for approval, development and sign-off.Project: PeopleIQ
Functional Specification Example
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And We’re Back…
I’ve recovered my posts, now I just have to re-format the posts, and re-tag the images. Whew. Hang tight folks.
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