Book :: Selling Usability
In a lot of companies usability and user experience are maybe known topics, but due to organization and processes there is not enough room for it. For me as a user experience designer I often feel that companies could make more out of their products and improve the customer satisfaction.
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Expression Blend: Adding Custom Properties to the Properties Panel
When creating assets for developers or building small prototypes I often ran into the problem, that I wanted to add properties to my control, which can be modified within my Expression Blend interface. To add properties you simply have to write a few lines of code:
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Font Management
When collecting fonts over time, it can get messy very easy. Often there are troubles finding the right fonts and also get an overview of the fonts you own. There is this very nice web based tool called myfontbook which allows you to browse and tag/organize all the fonts on your computer.
User Experience Deliverables
Looking at the user centered design process, the deliverables of a project can be divided into two pieces. The designer and the user researcher – these two groups collaborate to create rememberable experiences for the user.
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Learn About Your Target Audience
User Research is a very important part at the beginning of each design project.
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Research Results Presented as Dashboards
Presenting the outcome of a usability study or a research phase is always very difficult. On the one side you want to communicate all the findings you got out if this project phase, on the other hand it is a huge amount of data which is hard to understand for people which are not involved in the project.
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Conducting User Interviews
“& how research findings can be communicated”
To get a sense about what user do and think you have to get in contact with the people. User interviews helps you a lot to find out about user goals, motivations and their needs. Talking to them in their normal environment helps them to feel more comfortable and gives you the best position to observe them.
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Cool Visualization Ideas
The past weeks I cam across lots of different visualization techniques and artists. While reading an article about GPS applications I found this very nice visualizations from Jason Schulte Design. Nicholas Felton had a great idea and a very visual implementation of it. His topic was his own life seen in the time span of a year, and as every company does, he did an annual report of his life. Enjoy this crazy idea and it’s visualization.
More projects from Nicholas Felton
megafone & daytum (if you want to collect your daily data)
Other data visualization examples
Brainstorming
If you ask people if they had ever done brainstorming, lots of them would say: “yes of course, brainstorming – we do it at the beginning of every project”, but as long as you haven’t been in a real brainstorming session you can’t imagine the power of this process.
Animated Information
To provide statistical data in an easy to understand way, you can use animation to help create a small story around it. Try to keep you design as minimalistic as possible, the context of the images will help people to understand your probably large amount of data.
On www.good.is you can find very good animations dealing with statistical data.
Wireframes in Interaction Design
One of the first steps in creating new user experiences is to brainstorm ideas and therefore communicate your ideas to the other team members and your clients. During the brainstorming session most of the sketching happens on paper or on whiteboards and if the concepts are good, they will be turned into wireframes.
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RITE: Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation
RITE stands for Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation, a variation of traditional usability testing documented by researchers at Microsoft in 2002. In short, you test a design with five users on Day 1, improve the design based on feedback on Day 2, test again on Day 3, iterate on Day 4, and then test the final design on Day 5 with eight users.
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Concept Maps
Using concept maps to communicate the over all process or topic helps you to see the whole project at once. These maps can be beautiful artistic posters e.g. at www.dubberly.com you can see some examples.
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Photography in the Interface Design Process
In fact photography will not help you to design better interfaces but it can help you in the overall process. This starts with user research, were researcher capture the surrounding and people interacting with hard- and software products. It is used as a documentation tool and also helps you collect data during workshops and usability tests. Bring your camera and document what users are doing, as well as use it for collecting inspiration for yourself. Use pictures to tell your story.
For status meetings as well as documentation, photos make your document look polished and also more reliable. (Photograph the screen of your computer with some depth of field – you will see, it looks great). If you want to visualize concepts try to present them in a very realistic way – use photographs and photoshop to compose a great vision of your thinking!
Use Blogs to Organize your Ideas
As I am doing exactly this concept with this blog, you might see, that a blog can be really useful to organize all the information you collected to a specific topic. There might be some links, documents and draft scattered on your PC or desk. You started saving them because they interest you but after saving they were completely out of your mind. Blogs are an easy way organize your data and have them always presented in an good looking way. Blogs give you the possibility to create different categories to organize your data.You will look at the topics more often because they are easy to access.
If you plan to organize your ideas for future projects just be sure, that your blog is private and you are the only one that has access to it.