Namely: “We started beginning our sessions by informing the participants we had nothing to do with the company who built the form being tested. This puts the users at ease by assuring them that we have no personal attachment to the work being tested and any criticism would not offend us at all.” ~Michael Wilson http://www.uxbooth.com/blog/encouraging-negative-feedback-during-user-testing/

I see this all the time with Game testing at Microsoft, people really need the reassurance that they can freely criticize.

How can we determine which projects are fit for such cases. And can you also post some samples of your sketches?
I guess this site must be a simple site with few pages and not a lot of interaction from user’s side?

Your ability to translate ideas into reality never ceases to amaze me.

Taken at face value, simplification is a worthy tenet to embrace.

Maybe you should apply simplicity to your writing.

Can you advice me?

Hopefully I can use these techniques to ease the conversation because at the moment it’s a battle.

I didn’t say “please the client”, I said “approve” just like you did :)

Just thought I should clarify. We both obviously agree.

I’m curious how you conducted your collaborative sketching session? Did you use a wireframing software like Balsamiq? Or did you whiteboard? How would you change up your approach to sketching if the client was off site?

I assume this was a smaller site--did you sketch just key page types or did you sketch out all pages?

With the kinds of clients I work with, content structures or application interactions can be complex, and clients often don’t have the necessary experience thinking abstractly about how to model content or apply patterns to an advanced search, for example. It seems this approach is useful in a situation where the client can be onsite and the project is relatively small and simple, but I’m not sure I would apply this approach to larger projects.

@Joel Sutherland - RE: “The goal of any design project is to arrive at a successful design that the client approves of.”

That’s a slippery slope. You’ll become a production artist. If your goal is to please the client, then you won’t necessarily be solving design problems concerning client needs and user needs that are identified at the outset of a project. It’s a designers job to keep the scope of a project focused on those problems and ensure that the final design can be approved by the client based on the goals outlined in the design brief.

The goal of any design project is to arrive at a successful design that the client approves of. If the best path to that design doesn’t include some of the steps, then it doesn’t make sense to do them, particularly when working with a client that it is easy to communicate with.

I often look at creating wireframes and process-flows in OmniGraffle, or Illustrator, or what-have-you in the same light as when I used to have to type essay papers in school (because the instructor won’t accept my chicken-scratch): “This is going to be time-consuming and basically a pain. I could be doing other things right now if I didn’t have to do this.”

However, just like all those papers I wrote, creating a “polished” wireframe is about more than clean lines to omit the subjective or the stray thoughts. It’s in the process and the many iterations that you see a better way to organize content, shift the layout, or re-sort the information — something the hand-made version might not have yielded.

My two-cents :)

On the homepage or primary landing pages where they may want to stray off-message, it’s easier to start the discussion by referring to the page’s strategy/conversion goals and focus. At the very least, it gives them ammunition to try to defend the design decision if the request came from outside the project team.

For content pages, many clients are more willing to “combine” than to “remove,” even if the end result is just moving one key point or a short sentence/paragraph to the new page and deleting one of the old pages. “Combine” is definitely my favorite way to say “delete this page.” ;)

Goals met and then exceeded as a result of the guidance.

Finally, as the name suggests, as curators, we have distinct responsibilities, to our users, to ourselves and to our profeession. To challenge. To guide. To introduce new ways of thinking and solving problems. To apply our professional skills and talents to the deliberate development of a holistic, satisfying experience in line with business goals.

It’s a good time to be doing UX.

i specially agree on the “behind-the-scene” part and on showing your thought process to the client. As a UX consultant, i think this is what they pay for.

To add another perspective to it, i think that with the coming of RIa, it’s also important to wireframe even the rich interactions that are now an intrinsic part of the user experience.

http://blog.justinmind.com/wireframing-rich-internet-application-ria/

http://www.justinmind.com
@just_in_mind

The guys at Fuzzy Math put out a great Omnigraffle script that allows you to use the Run a Script feature to go through an entire .graffle document and automatically hide Notes/Annotation layers. This lets us create a fully annotated wireframe doc for developers, but we can quickly run the script to hide all annotations and repurpose the doc for prototyping. A huge time-saver!

At any rate, keep up the great work. You guys are amazing!

It’s important that both of them have due attention paid to them, in order for your website to be ‘the full package’ as it were.

For example, working on a .edu site recently it became a challenge to show the information that needed to be addressed without the site map becoming unreadable: primary, secondary, & footer navigation, news & events feeds, contextual section-wide footer links, etc. Any chance you might post a “part 2” to this post that addresses a hypothetical website with examples of how to handle increasing levels of complexity?

I consider black hat marketing SEO as much as I consider a 100% flash website UX. I think it would be disingenuous to your purpose if you don’t design websites to be search-engine friendly.

If people find your content valuable and have a good user experience, then they will link to your site and your search engine rankings will rise. If you just rely on “keyword-rich” content, it will suffer.

(beautiful blog, btw)

What have I missed?  What have I mis-represented?

As for format, we usually deliver the final result as a digital PDF. Since site maps grow unwieldy quick, we usually break them up over multiple pages. With a PDF, it’s trivial to hyperlink the sections together. That makes navigating the document easier.

How are these typically presented to clients? Printed out on a big board? One-on-one with a small print out? Digitally? Interested in the next step.

Great post. Thanks & thanks for the stencils.