Informational Geometry

In my last post,  Don't Fear The User Part 1 - Empowering Software Development With Usability Techniques , we talked about what usability is. The practice of making software easy to use. And that you accomplish this by listening to your target end user. Incidentally there is a great post on Good Experience today where Mark Hurst mentions his tweet: Before you get customers involved, first you should probably check if the boss can handle bad news. This is important because before you try to do usability work your boss needs to be on board. If you're boss is fearful and can't handle bad news then it might be a futile effort. Instead usability should be empowering. It will resolve problems and can help an organization meet its goals.  Now I'm going to elaborate on how to do it. Step 1: Who is The End User? User Experience Designers when we go to work, we do this thing called "User Centered Design". And all this means is we try to focus on The End User w...

So... I'm on Pinterest updating a 'board' for my portfolio and I discover that other people have pinned my Experience Design Process graphic from my website. Apparently this graphic comes right up in Google Searches if you search on on Experience Design Process. Since the image on my site is small I'm re-posting the graphic here! Can anybody guess what this image was originally create for? I don't know what I was thinking about these colors! So what is going on here? In the middle of the graphic is a series of linear main steps to take in order to design an interactive digital product. The process starts with identifying a project's goals and ends with meeting those goals. In order to meet those goals you need to do some careful work... Surrounding the steps are a set of tasks (or methodologies) to perform in order to complete each step of the process. Over-arching the entire process are guidelines like "vetting" and "informed iteratio...

Wow, how difficult is it to update one's own portfolio? That only took about um... a year! Well I launched something, and it's not even done! At least some of my more interesting and newest projects are now represented in my portfolio. Projects like Veggie Trader , Path 101 , & Alaska Urological . Samples for older work, like Massify and Bounty Jobs are still available for anybody wanting to see more IA and interaction design, but you have to ask to see this work. In the next couple of weeks I'll be fleshing out Studioroom and adding more details to the portfolio and to my process. Since Studioroom does different types of design work there's more than one process. Right now we're emphasizing the User Experience Design process which is for software products more than for simple websites. If you or your organization is trying to design a web application and are strugging with the User Experience Design, please contact me . My UX process is illustrated below, and...

Human beings are at the very core of User Experience Design. In my line of work (designing websites and software) there is an almost constant conflict between engineers & designers. The tech industry is constantly trying to streamline the way it operates, trading programming efficiency directly for User Experience. I think everybody in tech is already aware of this imbalance and I was amused to see Google offering some user centered design lectures at their upcoming developer's conference . Here's a funny description of one session; Do You Believe in the Users? Too many programmers have forgotten about the lost art of customer service. All software has users, though most developers have forgotten how to respect them, trust them, or “sell” their software to them in an exciting (but honest!) manner. This talk will focus on anecdotes and strategies for keeping software design uncomplicated, making software fast, and putting usability above programming convenience. We’ll a...

Recently, I read this article about the Future of Web Design . It made me laugh (read final comment below). The most common question I always get, in one form or another is "How do you design something?". Since I usually design dynamic, interactive websites, my answer is to describe the web product design process. Design IS a Process Web product design is a process of refinement involving traditional design skills, merged with web development techniques. Web design is the balance of information and technology tailored to the right audience. And of course all websites should be adaptable, all web design teams should be very comfortable with the idea of evolutionary change, and build it into their business. You need to design it - try it - evaluate it - change it - and test it again and again. Always. When Problems Happen In my experience problems happen not in design but in the management of the design & development process. I can't tell you how many times I've wor...