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Dennis Wixon, my first "UX Boss...

Dennis Wixon, my first “UX Boss” at Microsoft and co-chair of my masters thesis committee, will be speaking at UPA 2012. Looking forward to hearing him speak!

I liked this article on Breakin...

I liked this article on Breaking the UX Status Quo. Some good thoughts on enlivening various design deliverables by integrating personas and related information throughout.

I like the subtle design change...

I like the subtle design changes to the banner area on LDS.org that have gone out over the last few months. This week’s Easter messages have been a good example. (I also appreciate that they got the title and alt attributes fixed, so the thumbnails on the right are more accessible to blind readers—and others who want some text to describe what they’ll get.)

I'm always amazed at people who...

I’m always amazed at people who can take such beautiful notes… These are Benjamin Norris’s notes from the LDSTech Conference last week.

Subjecting all designs to usabi...

"Subjecting all designs to usability studies before shipping is prudent risk-management.
Radical innovation is extremely risky. Yes, you might invent the next iPhone. But you’re more likely to invent the next Newton." ~ From a good article by Jakob Nielsen on
A/B Testing, Usability Engineering, Radical Innovation: What Pays Best?
The contrasts between A/B testing, usability activities, and just turning a genius loose to invent the next Big Thing are clearly drawn. I would temper Nielsen’s position a bit by emphasizing his final point—that there’s no reason you have to pick just one. If you have a genius on staff, subjecting his ideas to A/B testing and usability testing will only polish his or her brilliance to an even greater sheen…

We've found the most successful...

"We’ve found the most successful teams are those that spend as much time in each iteration measuring their designs as they do implementing it." ~ Jared Spool, in an interesting article on making agile iterations… agile! I have found the situation he describes over and over again—agile teams organizing a series of sprints, but never really iterating. They are basically doing waterfall planning, just on very short timescales. This article gives direction on how to get out of that rut. And no surprise, it relies on robust design and user research processes.

Here's a great article by Chris...

Here’s a great article by Christian Holst on an frequent need: designing country selectors. What I love most is that he’s gone beyond describing the challenges, to designing a working solution—which he then makes open source! You can try out his redesigned country selector and download the jQuery plugin.

The LDSTech Conference will be ...

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The LDSTech Conference will be held in Riverton, Utah on March 28, 29, and 30. We have several design projects this year that need your help. You can also attend remotely.

If you’re interested in signing up to help with a project, you’ll need to complete a quick bio, skill match and community involvement agreement.

Learn More About the Conference Project list and community sign up Conference Info and Registration for March 28-30

The problem with business today...

"The problem with business today isn’t a lack of innovation; it’s a lack of empathy." ~ Great quote by Dev Patnaik, cited in a UX Booth article called
Invisible Armor: Protecting Your Empathy at Work.
I enjoyed this (sometimes corny) article and related to a lot of the points.

Speed and agility are the most ...

"Speed and agility are the most important attributes any design team can have, even beating out creativity and innovation.
This is because a fast–moving process that iterates frequently gets to take advantage of the natural evolution of the design, whereas a slow moving process needs to discover innovation out of the gate, which is much more difficult." ~ Jared Spool, in
Prototyping’s Resurgence: Communicating the Designer’s Intent

The web is an ever-changing bea...

"The web is an ever-changing beast, full of flaws and imperfection and experimentation. And that’s why we love it." ~ Dan Cederholm in What I learned about the Web in 2011

I'm excited to be registered fo...

I’m excited to be registered for UPA 2012. Lots of great user research presentations, but also more on UX and Design in general than I’ve seen in the past. (It’s been a while…) Curious who else is going… Let me know: borenmt at ldschurch org !

BBQ, plaid shirts, and midnight...

BBQ, plaid shirts, and midnight networking at The Belmont. Yep, it’s that time of year again and we’re hosting our annual meetup at SXSW on Sunday, March 11th from 6-8 PM. If you’ll be in Austin, we’d love to meet you. We’ll be offering a behind-the-scenes look at several applications supporting the LDS Church’s global operations and over 13 million members. The event is invite-only, so please contact us for more information or find one of us for an invitation.

I love these new commercials fo...

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I love these new commercials for the 2012 Kia Optima with Blake Griffen. I can’t remember the last time I saw an NBA player do so well in a commercial. Somehow Blake Griffen is able to give a performance that fits the overall mood of the commercial perfectly. So if Fantasticnous is tied up in someone’s basement I’m pretty sure Kia came and kidnapped it from that basement and has unleashed it in this fantasticly brilliant campaign.

SOURCE: 2012 Kia Optima Blake Griffin Commercial “Easy to Fold” (by KiaMotorsAmerica)

We are becoming symbiotic with ...

"We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools, growing into interconnected systems that remember less by knowing information than by knowing where the information can be found." ~ Betsy Sparrow, quoted by Tim Minor in an interesting article on
memory and design on UX Booth.

A king brings six men into a da...

"A king brings six men into a dark building. They cannot see anything. The king says to them, “I have bought this animal from the wild lands to the East. It is called an elephant.” “What is an elephant?” the men ask. The king says, “Feel the elephant and describe it to me.” The man who feels a leg says the elephant is like a pillar, the one who feels the tail says the elephant is like a rope, the one who feels the trunk says the elephant is like a tree branch, the one who feels the ear says the elephant is like a hand fan, the one who feels the belly says the elephant is like a wall, and the one who feels the tusk says the elephant is like a solid pipe. “You are all correct”, says the king, “You are each feeling just a part of the elephant." ~ “The story of the elephant reminds me of the different view of design that people of different backgrounds, education, and experience have. A visual designer approaches UX design from one point of view, the interaction designer from another, and the programmer from yet another. It can be helpful to understand and even experience the part of the elephant that others are experiencing.”

The Psychologist’s View of UX Design by Susan Weinschenk on UX Magazine.

Usability problems usually fall...

"Usability problems usually fall into two categories; either it’s not clear how to do something, or something is too cumbersome to do. The latter is fixed by a better understanding of what the key tasks are, and the former is usually resolved by adding clarity. Often the best way to do this is through the writing of the interface." ~ Des Traynor: “Writing an Interface” a post about a presentation he gave at Content Strategy in London (Sep. 5, 2011). If you have 25 minutes I highly recommend watching the presentation.

Colleague Carrie Fox called thi...

Colleague Carrie Fox called this a “wordle on steroids.” Interesting interactive word cloud from CNNMoney on the best places to work and why employees think so. Make sure to click around a bit… I like both the presentation and the data…

The most profound thing is that...

"The most profound thing is that when something crazy happened, they paid attention. They didn’t throw the idea away as most of us would." ~ Scott Berkun on the “accidental invention” of Post-it Notes, Nutrisweet, and other cool stuff, in a really good post on the importance of working hard and paying attention.

Innovation is not Luck, even when it seems like it.

A designer above all should be ...

A designer above all should be a problem solver. I love Matthew Smith’s thoughts on the subject that he contributed to “The Pastry Box Project.”

Any reference to constraints th...

"Any reference to constraints that limit creativity is just another way of equating creativity with self-expression, an erroneous and irresponsible idea. Except for personal projects, self-expression has no place in design, but constraint is vital to design. No component fuels creativity more than constraint. Indeed, without constraint, creativity (and design) is irrelevant. The discovery process is mostly about finding constraints, which is why we must do such a thorough job of it.

Constraints are a designer’s best friend. They’re signposts, not shackles. In a sense, constraints amount to the solution half-built. It is merely up to us to then realize the other half according to what these signposts indicate is appropriate. Nowhere in this concept does self-expression find any valid foothold." ~ Taken from an article written by Andy Rutledge on March 4, 2008 titled, “On Creativity” on A List Apart. As I read this article I didn’t realize that it was written almost 4 years ago, yet I found it completely relevant to today.

Google is taking action against...

Google is taking action against SOPA and PIPA. Quote from Google, “Millions of Americans oppose SOPA and PIPA because these bills would censor the Internet and slow economic growth in the U.S.”

Research strongly suggests that...

"Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist." ~ An opinion article titled, The Rise of the New Groupthink by Susan Cain on NYTimes.com

Count this "guru" as caring les...

"Count this “guru” as caring less about what’s new and more about what works. (If it happens to be new and works better than what came before, then I’ll be the first to add my praise.)" ~ Mark Hurst, in
Using what you have (and when to change)

Very cool video I ran into whil...

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Very cool video I ran into while visiting cameronmoll.com. Reminded me of some of my old school projects.

10 New Year’s resolutions for designers

Here is a nice little article Mike Monteiro wrote in netmagazine.com on how to get the new year off to a positive start.

My current theory is that progr...

"My current theory is that programming is quite literally writing." ~ “The vast majority of programming is not conceptually difficult (contrary to what a lot of people would have you believe). We only make it difficult because we suck at writing.” Ouch. This came out a while ago, but it is still worth sharing. This quote came from slashdot user wrook, full post at http://bit.ly/knVOni

Do you rely on users setting up...

Do you rely on users setting up your software just so, and think defaults don’t matter much? Then you’d better read, “Do users change their settings?” (The short answer is No.)

Check out the World Usability D...

Check out the World Usability Day Bundle on UXPunk. Big savings on some good research and design tools.

An article describing a recent ...

An article describing a recent “true intent” study for LDS.org was just posted on LDSTech. It describes how we created an affinity diagram out of over 800 freeform survey responses to help discover why people came to LDS.org and what their biggest problems were. A very informative activity. Some of the high-level results are also reported there, with permission.

Myth #3: People don't scroll....

"Myth #3: People don’t scroll." ~ From an interesting “UX Myths” site. Some interesting user experience myths de-bunked. Thanks Christian Smith for pointing me to this!

I liked this illustration of th...

I liked this illustration of the Knowledge Gap in Jared Spool’s recent newsletter article, Riding the Magic Escalator of Acquired Knowledge.

To close the knowledge gap, you either ride the user up the escalator via training, or you bring the target knowledge down the escalator by simplifying the design. Those are really your two main choices, 99% of the time!

Managers are assigned; leaders ...

"Managers are assigned; leaders emerge." ~ From an interesting article by Kim Goodwin on the importance of developing UX leadership and taking initiative.

Although short on details (he w...

Although short on details (he wants you to buy his full reports after all), this post summarizing an updated e-commerce usability report by Nielsen/Norman is worth reading if you’re building an e-commerce site.

Nothing could prepare me for my...

"Nothing could prepare me for my first trip to Rome. It wasn’t anything like the pictures. I think this is exactly the same feeling that designers have when they visit their users for the first time." ~ Jared Spool, extolling the virtues of field visits while introducing his most recent newsletter. (The quote is from his email and doesn’t appear in the article itself.)

"Find the Twin Sumo" or "No, Your Client is Not an Idiot"

You’ve been there. You’ve felt the knot in your stomach. You’ve tightened your grip on your iPad ever so slightly after hearing your client say “You know, on that header? I want our logo to be bigger. Way bigger.” And you think to yourself Great. I just found me another do-it-yourselfer. He designed a newsletter for his student club twenty-seven years ago and now he’s ready to tackle his corporate website. He just needs me to run Photoshop for him.

The world slows down for just a moment. You stare down at your notes, half pretending you didn’t hear and half expecting your iPad to feed you your line or something. But nothing comes. Time picks up its lumbering pace again. The street noise outside your client’s office window wakes you up and you realize now you have to say something; something that acknowledges your client’s statement. Something that isn’t “You wanna do this thing yourself?”

But, what?

Newton, Sumo Wrestling, and Design Iterations

Newton’s third law of motion states that “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Of course the guy was talking about the physical world. You know, like the pull of gravity working against your overwhelming desire to dunk it, or the tension of your belt working against the fierce push of your expanding gut. But, of course, we can always twist his words to apply them to design. And it’s fun.

In the “very complicated act of faith” that is design, there are two main forces at work: the problem and the solution. Their relationship is a lot like the one between your beer belly and your belt: they mirror each other. One is the question, the other the answer. They’re twin sumo wrestlers in different-colored diapers, pushing at each other with tremendous force. They’re the yin and the yang: identical, but opposite.

This is a fact that designers the world over use to their advantage. Want to come up with a great solution? Understand the problem. Want to understand the problem? Come up with a solution. If you figure one out, you immediately understand the other.

The design iteration, then, becomes a nice, sweaty wrestle between problem and solution. A designer will do a bit of research on the problem, and then propose a solution. That proposal invites feedback (aka more information about the problem), which the designer then takes into account for the next solution proposal. Rinse and repeat. Slowly, the designer’s understanding of the problem and the solution grow together, until finally, voila! We’ve got ourselves a finished product.

Clients Have Brains Too

As designers, we’re comfortable with this relationship between problem and solution. In fact, we use it to make a living. We’ve come to accept the iterative synthesis of solutions as the best way to come to understand problems. And we love it.

Well, it turns out our clients are often doing just that when they blurt out an unsolicited design suggestion. They may see a problem with our design, but instead of describing the problem by saying something like “You know, the home page just doesn’t feel ours enough. It still feels a little generic to me. I don’t think it reflects the personality of our company quite yet” they propose a solution and say “I think the logo should be bigger. Way bigger.”

This is because clients have brains too, and they understand that problems and solutions are like bellies and belts, like crooked teeth and braces, like moobs and manziers. So, perhaps involuntarily, they blurted out a proposed solution instead of a description of the problem.

So why are the solutions they propose rarely great? Because they’re not trained designers. But that doesn’t mean they’re bad clients. They may be diagnosing a legitimate problem, but because they did so by prescribing a lousy solution, you think they’re dumb.

Take a step back. Breathe.

Find the Twin Sumo

Now it’s back to you in your client’s office, iPad clenched in agony. You need to say something. What to say, what to say, what to say?

Well, if you understand that your client’s lousy design suggestion is really the mirror image of a problem he’s trying to diagnose, all you have to do is find the twin sumo. Take the proposed solution and turn it into the problem you think it was designed to solve. Then shoot it back at your client. Hmmmm…bigger logo…what could he be talking about?

“So, what you’re saying is that you think the current design doesn’t really feel like it belongs to your company, like it’s really you?”

Whew! You made it. Now, relax. Wipe your brow and get rid of the poker face. The conversation is ready to go somewhere.

Did you nail the problem on the head? Maybe so, or maybe not. But when you translated your client’s proposed solution into a diagnosed problem, you did something priceless. You let your client know that his input does matter, but you did it without compromising the integrity of your work, or your role as the design expert in the room.

Now you can work to refine your understanding of the problem the client is trying to diagnose. And your client? Not an idiot. Not a deadbeat. Just a guy with a brain trying to tell you something’s wrong. So listen up. You just might learn something.

Mobile Content: If in Doubt, Le...

"Mobile Content: If in Doubt, Leave It Out" ~ Title of Jakob Nielsen’s latest Alertbox.
I like.

Get the company to see what the...

"Get the company to see what the customer sees. If the executives inside the company could just “see through the eyes of a customer,” it quickly would become clear how to improve the experience." ~ Great post by Mark Hurst in Good Experience. I am experiencing this right now on a project, and it’s exciting when key stakeholders are committed to “seeing through the eyes of the Church member.”

There are many recipes for grea...

"There are many recipes for great personas, yet the teams decide to take shortcut, skip steps, or just plain do something that doesn’t make sense. They don’t follow the recipe. Then they complain when the project doesn’t turn out well." ~ From a great article by Jared Spool titled
5 Ways To Suck Value Away From Your Persona Projects.
Very timely as I gear up to train a team on creating personas.

If you find that your company b...

"If you find that your company buys expensive enterprise software instead of putting your A-team engineers on making awesome internal tools, then they don’t understand what the word ‘leverage’ actually means, and you my friend, likely have a serious and systemic problem." ~ From John Hitchings, engineer at wealthfront on the importance of internal tools

The art challenges the technolo...

"The art challenges the technology, and the technology inspires the art." ~ John Lasseter in The Pixar Story. In his honor, I have decided to start calling all Hawaiian shirts, “Lasseters”.

Fewer than one-third surveyed b...

"Fewer than one-third surveyed by Tealeaf cited low priority as the reason for struggling to understand the customer, so it would appear that there is a disconnect between knowing what needs to be done and overcoming funding constraints." ~ Discussion of how ecommerce companies know what they need—better customer focus and understanding—but don’t know how to get it, or aren’t willing to pay for it. Seems to me they haven’t adequately measured the cost of having a bad user experience…
Via eMarketer

We need fewer technologists and...

"We need fewer technologists and more customerists." ~ I like it! But maybe “Customerologists”?
From Mark Hurst, on Twitter

Nobody in life gets exactly wha...

"Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen." ~ —Conan O’Brien. Words to live by.

Wim Crouwel, the legendary Dutc...

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Wim Crouwel, the legendary Dutch typographer and graphic designer, when asked about design in today’s world, had this to say: “[for young designers], the stimulus is coming from the new techniques, from the new wonders, from the freedom of life – and that makes it difficult I think. ...What I say to young designers is to keep your radar turning, and pick up everything that you love, but in the same time, be very sure that you find your own way in it, but not be brought off your path by all the things that happen in the world. You need to find out what you love yourself and try to stick with it and try to find your own way” – great advice.