Fit and Finish: Insight from the Ironworks User Experience Group

Trim your Mobile Strategy to Avoid App Rot

2013-04-26T16:28:18-04:00

App rot noun 1. When an app is published and nary a soul downloads it. An all-too-common problem for brands and app developers in today's overcrowded app marketplace. 2. When an app is downloaded by a consumer but is rarely interacted with by said consumer. I've got 50 apps on my iPhone4. Another 50 or so on my "vintage" model - a 2G iPhone I still use for gaming with the kids. Many of the apps do fantastic things, like turning my phone into a videoediting bay, and enabling me to record R&B tracks in autotune. (What could be more...

Achieving Balance and Harmony on Your Next Digital Project - Introducing "The UX Chakra Model"

2013-01-30T14:01:38-05:00

As the Interactive Practice Lead for the ICF Ironworks' Tysons Corner Office, I have the good fortune to manage and work with some very talented digital strategists, information architects, interactive art directors, content strategists, research analysts, and front-end developers. I was thrilled to learn this week that The UX Booth, "a publication by and for the user experience community," accepted and published an article by our own Colin Eagan. This is something that started out as a whiteboard sketch, and evolved as Colin bounced the idea off of other peers, and incorporated their feedback and input. Colin introduces a new...

The Dubious Waves of Error

2012-12-19T13:40:53-05:00

From the customer’s point of view, an error message is a crisis. When you’re hit by an error on a website, you’re in trouble – by definition. To make things worse, the message can be so cryptic it stops you dead. A poorly-designed error message drives you to a competitor’s site, on the phone with the call center, back to paper-based processes, or just giving up. Don’t let this happen to your users! It’ll take work, but make the effort to establish consistent and effective messages and standards for your websites. The end result should be simple; the error message...

Early Reactions to Getting a Windows 8 Phone

2012-11-29T17:16:49-05:00

New OS makes good use of “Mobile-first” interaction design As people I work with will tell you, I’ve always made it a point to use PCs over Macs to do design work (yes, Adobe software works on Windows) so you’d think I would have had a Windows phone for a while now. Unfortunately, like most Information Architects, I’m also a perfectionist, so it has taken me forever to find a non-Apple phone I like. But given that my previous phone still had something called a “physical keyboard,” I finally made the plunge with Windows 8 Mobile. Apparently I'm not alone,...

A Summer in UX Events: Putting Pointers Into Practice

2012-09-19T18:22:24-04:00

Back in the shop, the interactive team revisits some of this season's “stickiest” User Experience topics from An Event Apart It’s been a busy few months for User Experience events, with UXWeek out in San Francisco in August and several recent iterations of An Event Apart. While big conferences are great for building excitement around new ideas, the real challenge is always translating this energy back to project work. We find it’s useful to rehash event learning a while after the fact to see what’s been most memorable in practice. Here are a few practical highlights looking back on An...

Google Analytics Tip - How to Delete Profiles and Web Properties

2012-08-13T15:35:57-04:00

Google provides some pretty clear guidance on how to create or edit a web property and add or remove profiles within that property, but nothing on how to delete the web property itself. Fortunately, we had a test GA account with which we could try some things, and were able to figure out the answer.

Ensuring Equal Web Accessibility for All Is Our Specialty

2012-05-22T13:02:22-04:00

Americans are more reliant than ever on the Internet as their primary source of critical information and communication. When disaster strikes, news happens or inclement weather is on the horizon, the quickest access to the most information is just a mouse click (or finger tap) away. Thanks to a 1998 amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, millions of Americans with disabilities will always have equal access to digital information when they need it most. Section 508 mandates that ...

Getting Smarter About Brainstorming: This Month from the Idea Forge

2012-05-16T12:17:57-04:00

Discover How the Gamestorming Technique Adds Structure and Fun to the Ideation Process Are your team Brainstorms suffering from idea drought? In our latest Idea Forge, we take a look at some of the practical implications of Gamestorming – a technique that ups the ante for the process of generating big ideas. We caught up with UX Architect Larry King at a workshop where he explained this technique and how he’s used it in the field. Watch to see how Gamestorming harnesses the power of Structured Play and learning theories like Distributed Cognition to help you seek out unexpected solutions...

Introducing Idea Forge

2012-03-14T09:16:11-04:00

This is the first in a series where we discuss practical applications of big ideas in user experience design. In this episode we share a few thoughts on Findability. You may be asking yourself what this means to me? Watch our video and find out!

Celebrating Social Media Week!

2012-02-17T17:00:24-05:00

With Social Media Week 2012 coming to a close we like to share a few thoughts on how we’re shaping our digital strategies today! We’ve addressed social media on Fit and Finish before but for this post we want to share three focal points to identify before putting together a digital strategy. 1- Know your audience: Who is your audience? What hours of the day do you have their attention? What actions do they commonly take (retweeting, clicking links, commenting, asking questions, etc)? Which instances are they comfortable taking action? We can start by examining your site’s analytics. We want...