Monthly Archives: September 2016

UX Pros Never Sleep

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I found this blog from UX professional Jennifer Aldrich, a UX maven working at InVision and other places. Wherever I am, I am aware of the experience. It’s the same way I am aware of music production, film editing, writing, the way people walk and gesture, accents and a bunch of other things. This is because I play drums and record music, make short films, write books and screenplays, cartoon and animate. I take a professional interest in how things are done to see if I can replicate them and maybe do them better. UX is no exception. Don’t get me wrong– I dig the slick UI tools that are out there. Lately I’ve been going nuts with Sketch and Flinto making bouncing snapping mobile interfaces, and I’m looking into a couple other great new tools that code as well as give you GUI controllers(I’ll post my thoughts sometime soon). But UI is just UI unless it’s underpinned by a deep understanding of the user in context. As a designer, I need to understand who a person is, what they want, and how they usually do things. I need to know what else they use and what their expectations are. The key to all this is observation and attention.

Besides, in this world of continuous and continual micro-distraction, it’s an excellent discipline.

Here’s Ms. Aldrich’s piece:

UX PROS: ALWAYS ON THE JOB

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I used to think it was just me, but it turns out tons of UX pros suffer from the same affliction: we can’t help mentally redesigning everything around us. And you know what? It’s not really an affliction, it’s a gift. It’s what makes us awesome at our jobs. We see the world in a completely different way. We view the world with the mentality that everything around us can be improved, and we are able to visualize those phantom improvements. We want to fix all of the things. It’s actually pretty awesome when you think about it. We see what no one else can see: the potential for a better world.

I was on vacation with my daughter when I walked into the hotel bathroom and exclaimed, “This shower head design is horrible!” My daughter called from the other room without missing a beat, “Mom, we’re on vacation, stop analyzing the usability of the bathroom fixtures so we can go to the pool.”

Seriously though, worst shower head design ever. I took pictures to prove it. haha

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So the next time you’re sitting in a restaurant explaining to your significant other why the font choices for the menu are terrible, or staring in disgust at the kerning in your child’s holiday play flyer, or you’re explaining to a miscellaneous stranger at the bus stop why the bench should be turned at a 45 degree angle so that passersby won’t bang their kneecaps on it; know that you’re not alone. There are many others who, like you, can’t help wanting to make the world around them a better place, one experience at a time.

The Next Five Years of UX

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FSA image c. 1943

 

I ran across this article in Forbes. I know, right? Since when has a money magazine ever cared about design thinking, about promoting user experience, about rethinking the way we do things?

Since somebody figured out the cruel fact that if you don’t care about this stuff, you’re dead. Sure, depending on your cash flow you might be able to take a few years to bleed out while your engineers and developers spar with your market research people about what the users REALLY want. You might even have some UX people working for you. At my last cube job, I was in more than a few meetings where I was presented with a nearly-finished (and badly designed) product and instructed to “do some UX magic on it.” You got your bases covered. Except you don’t. You’re actually dead. You’re dead, but you don’t know it.

In the coming years, user experience will need to be a central component of every product and service. UX maturity will be the hallmark of a successful company. The UX department will have an equal status with Marketing, Legal, “Creative,” and even C-level.

And your company had better be ready. Or else.

How do I know this? Forbes. Here’s their short article (with my italicized comments below):

Currently, good UX design focuses on obvious navigation, uncluttered content and knowledge of your audience. But as technology advances, so does UX and UI. Below, 10 technology experts from Forbes Technology Council offer their insights on how these current best practices will change in the next few years, and what companies can do to prepare for the shift.

1. Natural Language Processing (i.e., Chat Bots) Will Redefine Navigation 

Currently we think about interface design from the perspective of discovery and action, using color, copy, placement and information architecture as our tools. We live in a static world where information and function is neatly organized, but NLP and things like Chat Bots change that. NLP redefines the discovery part of UX, allowing more focus on content and function over navigation. – Dmitry Koltunov, ALICE 

Remember Ask Jeeves? The idea was ahead of its time. But now, we have enough cloud muscle to actually begin to use the free association way most of us think of things as a way to create context for things like searches.

2. Voice Experiences Will Become More Pervasive 

Having an Amazon Echo and a voice-enabled TV has taken me from being skeptical of voice interfaces to forming a new mindset about their natural intuitiveness and simplicity. Voice is now maturing in a way where it will become an unparalleled part of the user experience, and we will need to consider how we ‘design’ voice experiences more and more in the coming years. Start making and playing today. – David Rajan, GlobalLogic – Method 

Siri is notorious for getting it wrong, and Google Lady is worse (I switched mine to British English, and I swear to god she sounds like she;s drunk). But with more learning based on context, e.g., your voice sounding different in a subway tunnel than in your office, this will only improve. Combined with NLP, this can make dealing with a computer much more like you see in Star Trek.

3. Dramatic Shift Coming Based On The IoT *

Over the last several years, UX and UI developers have had to pivot from a web-first to a mobile-first mindset. As a result, companies that have been conducting business for many years have had to redesign and reconfigure to meet the changing consumer landscape. Similarly, a dramatic shift in consumer behavior is happening towards the IoT, which will require UX and UI developers to pivot once again. – Scott Stiner, UM Technologies, LLC 

*That’s the Internet of Things, Einstein. Brush up on your acronyms. LEAN is a dead term. There’s a story that when electric motors came out, you only had one per household. It had a spindle on its side and you brought different things to it. A meat grinder, or perhaps a mixer. Now we’re surrounded by so many task-specific motors that we’re not even aware of them.

4. Data Views And Manipulation Will Change 

In the next five years, personal customization of controls through gestures will affect UX and UI best practices. Each person will have a preferred way of looking at and manipulating data, and devices and sites will allow for that level of customization. I imagine in the future that a website will look different to people based on their preferred UX/UI elements for manipulating the same data. – Chris Kirby, Voices.com 

Data visualization is about to have a renaissance. No more will we be relegated to static presentations; instead, it will be vivid, specific and endlessly manipulable.

5. UX Is About To Fracture 

We are in the early days of Amazon’s Echo, Google’s GOOGL +0.00%Soli, Facebook’s FB +1.03% bots and Microsoft’s MSFT +0.09% HoloLens. Each medium provides a wildly different UX for which best practices must be developed. This fracture in UX will be an order of magnitude larger than the mobile revolution. Companies that don’t build competencies now will face even harsher disruption than those that neglected mobile. – Nicholas Thompson, Grit 

This is the big one. Industrial design will be a larger influence on UX than in the past, since its utilitarian underpinnings are all about context. There are different flavors of UX–– HFI, NN/g, Cooper–– but they all have something in common: the idea that no matter what, we must never design for ourselves.

6. Depth And Detail To Focus On UX

Increasingly, the UI as we know it will be commoditized and the depth and detail will be focused on the UX. Look at the UI-less innovation going on around Amazon Echo. It had 120 skills in January and more than 15,000 as of May 2016 — that’s incredible growth. Interface between human and enterprise software is always behind the consumer, but expect it to follow in this consumer trend shortly. – David McCann, CLEAResult Inc 

Yes, UX is a real thing. It’s not market research. It’s not graphic design. It’s not “creative.” It’s got solid underpinnings, a sound and flexible methodology, and tangible results. If the best UI is no UI, then the best UX is everything is UX.

7. Real-Time Evidence Based UI Improvements

The trend in the tech ecosystem is that we have the ability to generate and interpret huge swathes of data. The roles of the UX/UI groups will be to ensure they are tracking the correct data points and desired outcomes. Machine learning will then determine the patterns which lead to the most successful outcome. – Brian Chiou, Orbose 

As I say, this stuff is measurable. At Nielsen Norman, they have an apocryphal story about a guy who went to the help desk and asked what they got the most calls about. He took a look at the thing, redesigned it and redeployed it, then did the analytics of how many fewer calls they received. He ran the numbers and found that the company would almost a million dollars over the course of a year from this single improvement. The C-levels loved that. NN/g always cackle when they mention the best part: this guy did all of this without permission. Instead of getting fired, the guy got a raise and more headcount.

 

Interactive Sarcasm

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Surfing through various UX posts, I found this handy (and profane) tutorial on common UX tools. He’s pretty dismissive of the tools in an offhand way, but at least he leaves Fireworks alone. RIP Fireworks, my longtime go-to. For the record, I use paper, Fireworks, Axure, Flinto, Adobe XD and Sketch. Not in that order.

 

The Ideal Design Workflow

Go to the profile of Keaton Herzer

Keaton Herzer

Human. Product Designer @gophilosophie. Fan of tacos.

As designers, we are constantly experimenting with tools and processes in an attempt to find the one that works best. After a great deal of experimentation, I’ve discovered the perfect design workflow, and I’m going to share it with you now. Design is a process and the process I’m going to share is the one I’ve used on all my projects to build habit-forming products that people love.

1.) Sketching (paper and pen) — every great design begins on paper. Get out that paper and pen and start drawing some shapes.

.>Flawless.

2.) Your next step is to take photos of your sketches on your smart phone and throw those babies into POP so you can test your prototype.

3.) Your next step is to make wireframes. Having sketches is never enough. Wireframes are a must 100% of the time. There is simply no way around it. Go ahead and open Omnigraffle and make your wires.

4.) Now realize you need a dropdown menu so re-do those wires inBalsamiq.

Good when designing for 3rd graders.

5.) Next, realize you f***ing hate Balsamiq and redo them in Axure.

6.) Next, realize you f***ing hate Axure so switch over to Adobe Illustratorand use that UI Wireframing kit you bought for $89.

7.) Now export those wires to PNGs and import them into Invision so you can share them with your team.

8.) Wake up the next morning and cry into your bowl of Honey Bunches of Oats because of all the mean comments that Jonathan left on your Invision prototype.

This shit’s delicious.

9.) Agree to never use Invision again ever. Because f**k Jonathan.

10.) Redo your prototype in Marvel and hope that Jonathan can’t figure out how to leave comments on Marvel.

11.) You succeeded. Wireframes are finally approved. No thanks to Jonathan. Time to start working on a higher fidelity prototype.

12.) Grab the same stock photos that everyone else uses and then usePhotoshop to optimize them.

Looks pretty optimized.

13.) Now, open up Sketch and start creating the UI for your app. It’s starting to look like a real product now!

14.) Now export these as PNGs and import screens into Flinto Lite.

15.) Realize you need gestures so pay $99 for Flinto for Mac so you can add Gestures.

These are different people! Very important!

16.) Your CEO/Stakeholder/Client “doesn’t need another app on his phone” and refuses to download the Flinto app for iphone.

17.) Import your designs into Principle and add the interactions.

18.) Realize Principle exports as a f***ing video? and give up for a brief moment. It’s going to be OK, right?

19.) Download Pixate because its free and why not?

20.) Try to learn how to use Pixate. (good luck with this one.)

21.) What you’re going to want to do is bash your computer. I would say, if you can, resist the urge to do this. It’s all part of the creative process. You need to get knocked down before you get back up again. They’re never going to keep you down.

22.) Once Pixate has driven you to the brink of insanity, switch gears and download the free trial for Framer.

Looks promising!

23.) Now go get some lunch. You’ve earned it.

Tacos sound good.

24.) Come back from lunch and realize your Framer trial has expired. (Seriously, they give you a 32 minute trial)

25.) Rebuild your prototype in Justinmind.

26.) Get roasted by your teammates for sending them a Justinmind file that no one can open because no one knows what the f*** Justinmind is.

27.) Consider jumping off the building, but realize that it’s ok because your friend tells you about a brand new awesome prototyping tool they heard about at that meetup/conference/blog post/TED talk/Product Hunt.

That’s you.

Thanks for reading. I hope this helps my fellow designers out there.

Shoutout to Krishen Kotecha for inspiring this post and putting up with my sarcasm in general.