I was asked to explain UX to another team in the online banking department. The department had a fancy dress day for Halloween. So I made a little website to describe a few aspects of the discipline of UX with a Pumpkin of Truth theme. A bit like a magic eight ball, but a pumpkin. Embarrassingly I also spent the whole day wearing a blue homemade papier mache pumpkin on my head.
Are You a UX designer?
Yes
Talking to a colleague about the gamification of pervasive data to create a polyhierarchical infornography of the users service ecosystem. Whilst sipping a grande wet skinny cappuccino. And if you are a contractor a shot of caramel because you are worth it, and on your day rate you’ve got to spend it.
No
You are the colleague on the other end of the phone. Probably a PM, a Project Manager, a Product Manager, a Performance Manager, a Procurement Manager, a Procedures Manager, a Practice Manager, a Platform Manager, a Process Manager or a Proposition Manager, and you just want to know wether the button should say submit or send.
Really? What type of a UX designer are you?
Retro
With that post war quiff that cost 40 quid at Murdochs, skinny jeans, and if you are really ‘au courant’ the full beard you are wondering if everything should zoom like ios7, if parallax shifting didn’t make the users sick zooming will. But it must be right, its apple.
Modern
Worrying about wether the button should say submit or send. What would Dieter, Otl or Josef MB be thinking? It seemed so much easier when buttons clicked and there wasn’t haptic feedback. (the stupid thing vibrates) Anyway at least the button can be placed on an baseline grid.
Uh-oh! Are you a Director or a Manager?
Customertainment Director
Digitally connected and instrumented, lifestyle driven, and inspired by unique experiences with the brand simultaneously across all of the available sales channels and customer touch points. He will require companies to transform their businesses from product-centric and services-centric to new customer experience objectives and performance management transformations.
Omnichannel Manager
Performance managed transformations and objective experiences inspired by service-centric and product-centric buisnesses to require company transformation. Customer touchpoints and simultaneous sales channels will inspire unique experiences for the lifestyle driven connected and instrumented digerati.
Saint Dieter Rams
Less But Better
My aim is to omit everything superfluous so that the essential is shown to the best possible advantage.
Dieter Rams
Dieter Rams Ten Principles of Good Design
Good Design Is Innovative : The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.
Good Design Makes a Product Useful : A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product while disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.
Good Design Is Aesthetic : The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products are used every day and have an effect on people and their well-being. Only well-executed objects can be beautiful.
Good Design Makes A Product Understandable : It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product clearly express its function by making use of the user’s intuition. At best, it is self-explanatory.
Good Design Is Unobtrusive : Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression.
Good Design Is Honest : It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept
Good Design Is Long-lasting : It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years – even in today’s throwaway society.
Good Design Is Thorough Down to the Last Detail : Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the consumer.
Good Design Is Environmentally Friendly : Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimises physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product.
Good Design Is as Little Design as Possible : Less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity.
Saint Delight
Measuring
Many of the things you can count, don’t count. Many of the things you can’t count, really count.
Albert Einstein
Lovely design
Usability removes friction, what do you do to increase motivation, and engagement. What is going to make the user experience lovely and delightful. Is there a sense of playful discovery, does the user want to come back for more.
The LinkedIn meter above the user’s information, showing their profile’s “percentage completed”. More users started to fill out their profiles. The feature didn’t have a clever interface, a sophisticated information architecture, it was just a little prompt.
Now they have moved profile filling away from the individual towards his/her connections with endorsements.
Create useful functional modules, little bit of user experience that can be displayed across your websites. From promotional content, to application forms, to social media feeds, real-time chats, all interactive useful tools that provide accurate real time helpful advice.
Faithful User Centered Design
Technology
It’s interesting that as so many things change around us, the evolution of technologies and social relationships and so on seem to change so fast. But that principle, start with people, you can rely on it.
Bill Moggridge
Everyday Things
If there is a simple, easy principle that binds together everything I’ve done, it’s my interest in people and their relationship to things. … I’m interested in why people like things, and what gives them a feeling of long-term reward, what gives them pleasure, and what excites them. Ultimately, my interest centers on the effect that design has on someone.
Interdisciplinary Teams
At the crux of interaction design, which Moggridge helped pioneer, lies a deep understanding how necessary cross-disciplinary collaboration is to innovation and creative progress. Moggridge reflects on the crucial role of leadership in fostering that:
I’d like everyone to have the mind-set that whenever you have a challenging, seemingly intractable problem, then you need to solve that problem with an interdisciplinary team. No individual can succeed alone. In order to help business leaders succeed, we need to put together those interdisciplinary teams, and they need to use design processes. We can help explain that and help make leadership aware of it.
Brand Thinking
Debbie Millman interviewing Moggridge in 2010
Matyr Wireframes
Work
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important
Bertrand Russell
1. The Experience Belongs to the User: Designers do not create experiences, they create artifacts to experience. This makes all the difference. Since experience is subjective it cannot be designed in quite the same way that a physical product can. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t design the framework within which people experience our product/service. If our framework is solid, then great experiences will be a common occurrence.
2. UX is Holistic: The experience is not just the product anymore. It is made up of all touch-points of a larger system, from the product to the support to the way your neighbor talks about it. Not all of these things are designable in the same way, but all can be designed for on some level.
3. Great User Experiences are Invisible: When people are having a great experience, they rarely notice the hard work that has been put into place to make it happen. This is as it should be … our job as UX professionals is to be so successful that nobody talks about us.
4. UX is a Lifecycle: People experience the world over time … nothing happens at once. As such, people don’t immediately have a good experience with most things. There is a lifecycle that must be gone through, starting with awareness, building up to first-time use and going into regular use and even decline. These steps are relatively stable.
5. Context is King: In an age when it is easy to create products and content quickly, the missing piece becomes context: how does what we create fit into the lives of the people we create it for? Discovering the ins and outs of context is why UX professionals do so much user research, as the subtleties of context are a sharp blade.
6. Great Experience is about Control: The worst feeling in the world is to feel out of control. When people feel out of control, they simply don’t have a good time. This doesn’t mean that you can’t surprise people or provide serendipity for them, it means that users need to feel like they are always able to take the next step (or bow out) at their request.
7. UX is Social: Time was when a person’s experience with a computer was a solo affair. The most they did was to email someone and get a response. Boy have times changed! We are not dealing with individuals any longer …we’re dealing with entire social lives. Not only are we dealing with how a person behaves on their own, but we are dealing with how someone behaves in an ever-changing landscape of public to private, where each shade of gray affects their behavior differently.
8. Psychology is Primary: Software is getting easier to use all the time. The one with the psychological edge will win. This means that we have to dive deeply into the psychology of use, play, product adoption, and social interaction to create the best experiences.
9. UX is a Conversation: UX, like marketing, is a conversation. As UX professionals we are creating a dialog with users in which the goal is to find out how we can best help them do what they want to do. Therefore, UX becomes a service, not a one-off product, that is constantly reacting to the changing needs of our audience. The conversation is both how we deliver and how we find out how to make it better.
10. Great Experiences are Simple: Simplicity is much more than the trite “less is more” we so often hear. Simplicity is not about volume; it’s about clarity. If people can understand or use something with little difficulty, then you’ve made something simple. It may have been a Herculean effort to make it so, but simple is not always easy to design …it only appears that way.
10 Principles of UX from week 12 of 52weeksofux.com March 26, 2010 by Joshua Porter