UX Magazine

Determining an Hourly Rate: A (Sometimes) Necessary Evil

Devan Goldstein — Mon, 17 Jun 13 19:43:32 +0530

June 17, 2013

In a perfect world, freelance UXers would charge by project rather than working up hourly estimates and invoices.

Unfortunately, this approach can’t always work. I sometimes find myself facing strong expectations about how (and what) I will charge, especially when I’m subcontracting with marketing agencies.

Setting a rate for new clients isn’t easy, so I thought I’d offer a view of the pricing model I’ve arrived at after many years of freelancing, as many years of wincing at agencies’ crazy schemes, and perhaps one philosophy class too many.

I’ve broken my model down by the most important factors I weigh when making my bids:

The going rate
My replaceability
The value I add

I also touch on a pair of considerations I avoid taking into account at all, despite their allure:

How much I want the job...read more
By Devan Goldstein

Win This Book! Design for Care: Innovating Healthcare Experience

UX Magazine Staff — Fri, 14 Jun 13 21:35:23 +0530

June 14, 2013

Yesterday we gave you a sample of Peter H. Jones' new book from Rosenfeld Media, Design for Care: Innovating Healthcare Experience.

Today, we're launching a contest to give away three digital copies.

We're still in the thick of our campaign to get to the bottom of what information architects do, so to enter, all you need to do is answer a question for us:

What does an IA do?

Just to be clear, even though our campaign is aimed specifically at information architects, for this contest we want to hear from everyone.

There are three ways to enter:

Via Twitter

Make sure you're...read more
By UX Magazine Staff

Book Excerpt: Design For Care

Peter H. Jones — Thu, 13 Jun 13 22:18:19 +0530

June 13, 2013

Design Research for Healthcare Services

Service design potentially represents a significant change and challenge to experience design and technology infrastructure design orientations.

A comprehensive presentation of service-oriented design methods would fill its own book.

Because the health sector is vast and by necessity conservative, a selection of methods for service innovation is meaningless without establishing a specific context.

The integrated service design framework in the table below identifies the contexts in which the participatory scenario design method stands.

Participatory Scenario Design

The participatory scenario design process elicits multiple perspectives and experiential knowledge from people with a deep...read more
By Peter H. Jones

Hosting a Page Description Workshop

Colin Butler, Andrew Wirtanen — Wed, 12 Jun 13 23:58:05 +0530

June 12, 2013

You’ve met with your stakeholders, created personas, and developed some user stories, but you still find yourself having a difficult time starting the process of sketching layouts for your web project. Sound familiar?

It can be quite challenging making that last step from goals to content in a way that addresses your stakeholders’ needs well. You can build a Page Description Diagram (PDD) independently to help you determine the priority of each component on a web page, but you are still potentially missing some valuable information: input from stakeholders.

In our efforts to improve the requirements gathering process, we’ve had considerable success involving stakeholders by using what we call a Page Description...read more
By Colin Butler, Andrew Wirtanen

Embracing the UX Spectrum

Jordan Clayton-Hall — Tue, 11 Jun 13 22:56:42 +0530

June 11, 2013

As an industry, we have the tendency to think and talk about user experience design in either a Web or a software context, where the demand to humanize complex interactive systems has been the highest.

But if we define a user as a person who uses a thing or a system, then the Web and software contexts represent just one space in which people have a “user experience.”

Other equally important contexts abound, including products and services, advertising and marketing, gaming, and events and environments.

In all contexts and throughout history, empathy, creativity, and systems thinking have played important roles in designing user experiences. But until the creation of complex software systems, the role...read more
By Jordan Clayton-Hall

Designing Down from Science Fiction: A Staged Approach

Dan Turner — Mon, 10 Jun 13 21:58:28 +0530

June 10, 2013

Aspiration and inspiration are big parts of the UX racket, both for users and designers.

Science fiction can be a powerful source of both things, in part because SF interfaces have the unfair advantage of being untethered from pesky constraints such as possibility, testing, efficiency, cost, or even the laws of physics.

As Nathan Shedroff and Christopher Noessel write in their book Make It So, "... if an interface works for an audience, there's something there that will work for users."

Our goal here is to think about a coherent and useful framework to help "design down" from science fiction. Does fantastic technology offer value to the user? If so, what is that value? And can we keep...read more
By Dan Turner

Hey, Information Architect, What Do You Do?

UX Magazine Staff — Thu, 06 Jun 13 23:21:06 +0530

June 6, 2013

In our recent article "Who Are We and What Are We Doing?" we noted that our research has exposed the immaturity of the UX field, and that "for all the growth, interest, and importance surrounding user-centered ideas and practices, our professional milieu is still a disorderly jungle.”

We received a great deal of input from the UX community in favor actually doing something to detangle this disorderly jungle.

So we’re daring to be bold and are doing something that will let us see out over the treetops. To do this, we need your help.

At one point in the article, we asked: “Is a self-described information architect at Amazon in Seattle the same person as an information architect at a marketing and interactive agency in Omaha?”

The answer is “no,” but that doesn’t mean that the term “information architect” is meaningless. While no two IAs will do the exact same things in the exact same ways, it should be...read more
By UX Magazine Staff

The Evolution of the Online Dating Experience

Jayse Lee — Wed, 05 Jun 13 23:24:56 +0530

June 5, 2013

For those seeking the “happily ever after” of coupledom, the question isn’t whether or not to date online, but how.

If the user believes what he or she sees in popular media, this might seem rather easy: you sign up, make a profile, and find your soul mate. That’s the simplistic experience dating sites would like you to believe exists.

However, despite the claims these websites make, not even science has solved how love really works, which makes the experience of looking for it in a digital setting very complex, indeed.

The Business of Love

We tend to have a hopelessly romantic view of courtship. Movies teach us that love begins with a meet-cute and ends with a storybook proposal. But, in real life, dating rarely plays out so romantically.

This is especially true of online dating because even though the purpose of these sites is to help people find love, the bigger purpose is to thrive as a business: an activity that is driven by metrics like...read more
By Jayse Lee

How Chief Customer Officers Orchestrate Experiences

Paul Hagen — Tue, 04 Jun 13 22:06:40 +0530

June 4, 2013

While not yet mainstream, the Chief Customer Officer (CCO) position continues to gain traction.

Over the past seven years, Forrester has observed an increase in the number of companies that have a single executive leading customer experience efforts for a business unit or an entire company—this year, we identified 730 such leaders, which we believe is a small fraction of how many actually exist.

Despite the relative youth of this position, our observations of the group highlighted several trends and commonalities that help us put together a profile of the CCO in 2013:

Title: “Chief Customer Officer.” Chief Customer Officer is now the title used by 45% of these types of executives, up notably from 30% last year. Apart from that, the only two titles with any real traction...read more
By Paul Hagen

Packaging as Media and the Future of Customer Experience

Bryan Goodpaster — Mon, 03 Jun 13 19:54:37 +0530

June 3, 2013

The world is becoming increasingly virtual, and mainstreaming technologies, the trajectory of retail, and a culture of change will radically impact the future of product packaging. Packaging as media will take on a new role in a radicalized retail context where space, shopping experience, and currency are dramatically evolved from today’s paradigm.

We need to think of packaging not merely as a functional distribution tool, but as media—with all the engagement and disruptive potential of other dynamic brand touchpoints. Already, GPS-enabled devices allow retailers to locate shoppers in their vicinity and offer rewards, digital extras, and product samples in real time—a technology that is only in its infancy.

Technology in Action

In geo-positioning scenarios, as customers...read more
By Bryan Goodpaster