UX Magazine

Wireframing in Powerpoint? It Works!

Andreas Wulf — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 09:48:06 GMT

It’s important for designers to translate the ideas in their heads into a tangible form that stakeholders can relate to. Prior to writing any code, wireframes are a great way to quickly map out the functionality and flow of a website or application. This helps anticipate conflicts (“That's not what I had in mind") early in the process, at a point where they are painless to correct.

Dedicated wireframing tools are in abundance, so you might be surprised that my weapon of choice for sketching wireframes is Microsoft PowerPoint. PowerPoint makes it possible for stakeholders and non-techies to participate in the design process. When exchanging PowerPoint slides over email, you can be fairly certain everyone will be able to view and edit them. The software’s widespread availability and low barrier to entry make it an excellent communication tool, able...read more
By Andreas Wulf

How Chief Customer Officers Are Driving Change

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:57:02 GMT

An increasing number of companies are appointing a single executive to lead customer experience efforts for a business unit or the entire company. Whether firms calls these executives chief customer officer (CCO) or give them some other label, these executives are driving change at organizations as diverse as CEMEX, Fidelity, General Motors, Maersk Line, and The Washington Post. And as diverse as the companies are that they work for, these leaders come from a wide range of backgrounds. To better understand the profile of a CCO, we recently gathered data on 165 executives in charge of enterprise wide customer experience. What did we find?

Title: "chief customer officer." Similar to last year, "chief customer officer" remains the most popular title at 30% of firms, followed by "chief client officer" at 15% and "chief experience officer" at 10%. The remaining 45% go by a wide variety...read more
By Paul Hagen, Forrester Research

Announcing UX Magazine's New Jobs Board

UX Magazine Staff — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 11:56:30 GMT

Over the past few years, we’ve heard from a lot of business and hiring managers that they find it hard to find qualified UX professionals and UX-minded businesspeople to fill vacant jobs in their organizations. We’ve also heard from UX pros who say that, in a world where anyone can claim to be able to “do UX,” it’s hard to stand out from throngs of job seekers on high-volume sites such as Monster.com and Indeed.com.

We’re therefore pleased to announce that we’ve launched a new jobs board exclusively for the UX community. We believe that UX Magazine’s strong reputation in and focus on the UX community, coupled with the very high traffic volume our site receives, will mean our jobs board will be valuable to job seekers and employers alike.

You can find our new jobs board by going to uxmag.com/uxjobs, or by clicking “UX Jobs” in the nav bar from anywhere on UX...read more
By UX Magazine Staff

App Review: Weathermob - Express How You Feel About the Weather

Sachendra Yadav — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 10:32:42 GMT

Weathermob is a niche social networking service for sharing information about local weather, much as Instagram is a service for sharing pictures. It lets you share what you’re feeling about local weather and see what your friends are saying about theirs. A lot of weather apps allow users to share the weather report with Facebook, Twitter, and so on, but what’s interesting with Weathermob is the manner in which it helps the user put together an engaging story.

This is a great example how to make a utility application engaging. It takes a basic function—viewing a weather report—and helps users create whole stories around local weather to express themselves.

Inviting, Conversational Language

...read more
By Sachendra Yadav

Raising the Bar for Mobile Standards

Megan Geyer — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 11:03:50 GMT

During a break in a long research day, I was speaking to a client about a project I was working on to develop iOS standards for a global financial company. Their initial response was, “What, you’re creating something beyond the Apple iOS Standards? What else is there to it?” We ended up having a lengthy discussion about mobile standards—what they are, what they are not, and what they should be. Apple, for instance, does a great job of explaining their touch interaction model and the individual UI elements of iOS, giving examples of when and how they are used. But there’s more to it than that.

From this conversation and other experiences I’ve had with creating standards, I realized that most companies approach standards from a branding perspective. Some may even...read more
By Megan Geyer

Trend Guide for 2012 CES

UX Magazine Staff — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 11:12:30 GMT

For anyone interested in trends in consumer electronics or in this year's Consumer Electronic's Show (CES), the folks at Upstream have put together an interesting trend guide. In their words:

In advance of this year’s show, we’ve created a trend report. We hope it will serve as a valuable guide for visitors, placing the products, services and experiences they see into the larger context of 5 macro-trends:

QUANTIFIED SELF & M-HEALTH

Personal biometrics and digital enabled behavior analysis will increasingly let consumers discreetly track and manage their lives more effectively.

GESTURAL INTERFACES & AUGMENTED REALITY

New natural interfaces based on movement will allow more intuitive control of tech, increasing access to information and digital content.

SoLOMo...read more
By UX Magazine Staff

Paying Attention: The Most Valuable Skill in UX Research

Juliette Melton — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 10:02:31 GMT

When you read about UX research you find lots of emphasis on the planning and structure of the research sessions. Where will you do research at a person's home or in a research facility? Will you go through a recruiting agency or recruit from your own network? Are you looking for target users? Can remote methods play a part?

These questions are all important in developing a solid research plan, but they don't speak much to the actual experience of asking people questions and listening to what they tell you.

You might not hear many people admit that user research can sometimes be boring. Especially when you're doing something like classic ...read more
By Juliette Melton

Seven UX Best Practices of Community Design

Kristin Zibell — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 10:25:26 GMT

Business strategists have long preached the advice, “Adapt or die.” Adaptation is happening in the social pond with a user’s social graphs influencing online and offline decisions. A user’s community is more important than ever. Businesses are mining online communities for valuable consumer information that can influence every phase in their go-to-market cycle, from product innovation to fostering repeat purchases. The definitive tome on the social movement, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, foretells, “Within a few...read more
By Kristin Zibell

5 Practices for Securing User Confidence

Toby Boudreaux — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 09:33:21 GMT

As UX designers, we are customer advocates. We design systems, products, and tools that are as beautiful as they are usable. We bend technology into new forms to compensate for gaps in human abilities. We act as a creative buffer between technical complexity, unreliability, and inelegant processes or patterns. We turn bad mechanics into better forms. It’s downright noble.

Products and services are always vulnerable to customer attrition, and users bail for many reasons. Much of UX design and product optimization focuses on acquisition and retention through continual improvements. We focus on usability, elegance, simplicity, functionality, and brand value. Typically, UX designers spend less time improving...read more
By Toby Boudreaux

Desire Is A Universal Language

Nathan Hendricks — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 09:47:57 GMT

No matter how motivated we are or how much effort we invest in our work, it doesn't change the fact that we devote a sizable chunk of our careers to working on brands no one truly cares about. In the 25 years that I’ve worked as a designer, brand consultant, and creative director, I've experienced the good, the bad and, most often, the mediocre. There are myriad reasons for mediocrity, but unfortunately, the one that’s the most detrimental is also the most prevalent.

Mediocrity thrives on misalignment—the misalignment of a brand's equity, offer, design, or consumer. If any one of these components is out of whack, the brand suffers mediocre performance. Whether we specialize in graphic design, branding, urban planning, architecture, or user experience, most companies we encounter have two or three elements of their brand that seem to have wandered off.

With so many smart people...read more
By Nathan Hendricks