From designing in silos to designing as a community

Do you have any of these symptoms? - You are the sole designer in your time - You have been assigned to support a business vertical as an individual designer to do UI design, HTML fixes, javascripty stuffs - You spend time browsing the net to know whats hot and happening in your domain - Occasionally you try your hands on prototyping or brainstorming and try to sell it to the development team If you answered YES to the above questions read on.... You have been identified as a 'Designer in a Silo' So what are its major drawbacks? - You get to make your own decisions - No peer reviews of your designs - You never think of trying ur designs with users and even if u think so they are shrugged off by your Dev manager for the reason of time and resource crunch - You end up learning Java and think of switching careers or switching company What can be done now? Wait...Dont lose heart. You are not alone and there are many of your counterparts who have tried and failed. Some have tried and got through this tough channel with a lot of difficulty. Lets see what could have been a good way to champion usability in your organization. Try these small nuggets of information to champion user experience in your company - Make small little interesting activities and presentations to the developers and others on the benefits of usability. If you are good at video making, try your hand on making a 5mt clipping that tells a story of a struggling customer/user/fellow collegue with any application(could be an intranet payroll/tax application) - Try teaching your manager on the importance of user experience and usability. See if you can get the buy in from top management on the importance of a team for the company. Share papers from Gartner, IDC, Nielson Norman, etc that speak about benefits and ROI(important) of user experience and Usability - When you get an approval, try to recruit a small team of an interesting mix - ethnographer or anthropologist, interaction designer, usability engineer(HFI) - People can play multiple roles (read 'Ten faces of Innovation' to understand various roles of people needed for a Design team) - Start small projects with good ROI. Spend quality time on following the UCD(when u have time) - Share results in industry standard formats(CIF). Spend quality time on this - Take up company's ailing online projects and make a change Its easy said than done. But it works fine after a few initial hiccups(budgets, time, client requirements) Share your thoughts with me.

Heuristic Evaluations(a.k.a ....Expert reviews)

Expert reviews or Heuristic Evaluations as they are called are the quick and easy means to evaluate a User Interface. All you need is a problematic interface and of course an expert reviewer to identify the problems.

So what are the famous jakob nielson heuristics. They are listed here in his website. http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html

Briefly the broad areas that are covered in the evaluation are: - System Status - Match between System and Real world - User Control and Freedom - Consistency and Standards - Error Prevention and recovery - Recognition rather than Recall - Flexibility and efficiency of use - Aesthetic and minimalist design - Help and documentation

Product UE teams Vs Project UE teams

The big debate: What is the difference and how greener is the other side? Having had worked for both the sides of the game, my personal experience has been very different. Hope thats not the same for everyone. Project Companies Experience: Project Companies first have a short term look at user experience or design. Its more on how the resource(you) are getting billed, whether the client is ready to pay for the resource, what processes will be followed(definitely not a complete UCD) and what are the deadlines and deliverables. So whats good at project or service companies? - Get to work on a variety of domains - Can innovate a lot to create new processes and be the torch bearer for UCD(quick UCD or Complete UCD) - Gets to work as an individual(which is not always good) - Gets the bouquets or the brickbats all for urself :) - Fast cycle times and can see deliverables implemented faster Product Companies Experience: Product companies are not worried about the budget. They have quite some fat to spend on UI testing and usability. They arent worried about billing. They arent worried about the product as well. Stakeholder buy in is the greatest challenge. Very politiking :) Innovation is not appraised. How you present your design is more important than the actual design or interaction So whats good about working as a UE designer in a product company? - Gets to work on a single domain (eg., ERP) - Gets to see the product from end to end(Requirements to Release) - Follow a thorough UCD process - Gets to attend good conferences and gets to meet quite some senior HCI people - Good budgets for books, resources for team, etc Takeaways: Both have their red and green palettes. Design awareness and User centric or task centric importance is maturing in countries like india. New frameworks like AJAX, XAML etc are caring more for customers' time and productivity. So user is getting the focus. So wherever you are, if you can leave a stamp of authenticity in your work and prove your mettle, you can win

Gestalt's principles of Form Perception

Gestalt is a German word literally meaning shape or form. Gestalt theory is a theory of mind and brain. Gestalt psychology (also Gestalt theory of the Berlin School) is a theory of mind and brain that proposes that the operational principle of the brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies. The classic Gestalt example is a soap bubble, whose spherical shape (its Gestalt) is not defined by a rigid template, or a mathematical formula, but rather it emerges spontaneously by the parallel action of surface tension acting at all points in the surface simultaneously. This is in contrast to the "atomistic" principle of operation of the digital computer, where every computation is broken down into a sequence of simple steps, each of which is computed independently of the problem as a whole. The Gestalt effect refers to the form-forming capability of our senses, particularly with respect to the visual recognition of figures and whole forms instead of just a collection of simple lines and curves. The key laws of gestalt's theory are: 1. Law of proximity 2. Law of similarity 3. Law of Prägnanz(figure-ground) 4. Law of symmetry 5. Law of closure The following links depict in more detail on some of these laws with perfect examples for each law. Gestalt's theory is one basic interaction design principle that should be followed while designing the UI. http://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/gestalt_principles_of_form_perception.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology

Remote Usability Testing - Gains and Pains

Remote testing - now our bread and butter for cheap but productive means of testing users from various corners of the world and in any time zone. It ties up multiple geographies, time zones, people, and saves much on administering a usability test compared to the real test. Method to administer a test: - Users sit in a remote location, sometimes in a remote geographical location - We share the test application over the internet using webex or some other software - Users are given access to the application and they start using the application - Morae or a similar recording and annotating software runs locally in the base machine - Users are asked to perform a set of tasks and they are timed for those individual tasks - At the end they will be questioned on satisfaction and usability(use any satisfaction questionnalire like SUMI, QUIS etc.,)

Multiple challenges of a remote test: 1. The software that we use to share/record the desktop eats up humongous memory and slows down the system. 'Webex' is pretty good. 2. Users face huge system lapse and hence data input is delayed thereby skewing the actual time 3. Many users are not happy to work on 50 questions for satisfaction. Something simpler is what they expect The odds always exist and the workarounds get better everyday. So hope we find better solutions to get great usability test results.