Fast Forward Six Months… We’d like to thank you for doing a fantastic job as our spring / summer Front-end Web Developer Intern. You’ve excelled at maintaining, editing, and documenting our stable of web properties. You spent much of your time creating all of our outbound HTML emails, and managed those campaigns through MailChimp. You supported those campaigns with social media managed through Sprout and added related posts to Medium.

Your site development skills are top-notch, as you worked closely with our web team to improve our online products. You worked your magical HTML5, and CSS3 skills to get our next version closer to what our users want. You explored WordPress and other builder tools.

To top it off, you’ve even helped us improve the documentation for our Git-based development process to make life easier for future interns and mined useful data from multiple databases for our Director of Marketing.

Thanks for your energy and enthusiasm during your internship. We know you’ll succeed at your future ventures.

Now back to today… If you’d like this to be your story, send us:

1. Your resume.
2. We need to see evidence that you can hand code HTML & CSS (some examples). A personal portfolio is best. Public GitHub repos are good.
3. Extra credit: A short list of the things you’d like to learn in your 6 months with us.

While we’re less concerned with your skills and qualifications, we won’t compromise on your ability to deliver team results. We’ll be back to you in 48 hours if you can follow these simple directions and have what it takes to achieve something special.

You might even want to check out our web sites— https://playbook.uie.com/ aycl.,uie.com, and http://www.uie.com—for some insight into our current efforts. Best of all, hear what past interns had to say about the experience— https://www.uie.com/meet-the-interns/ We th.ink you’ll be excited by where we are today and the challenge to get us where we’re going.

You will work in our North Andover offices. (Sorry, we do not hire remote interns, or those not already in the United States.) We’ll provide all the equipment you need, including Apple hardware and Mac software to bring out the best in your talents and skills.

We’d like this internship to begin in early April, with the ideal individual working up to 40 hours per week, but offer flexibility to the right candidate. This temporary position is not eligible for full-time benefits, such as health insurance.

Send your resume and write-up to: WebDevInternJob@uie.com

or: Adam Churchill / Director, Online Products / User Interface Engineering / 510 Turnpike Street, Suite 102  North Andover, MA 01845

#1 - Hunches, Instincts, and Trusting Your Gut

with Leah Buley
A 31-minute recorded seminar

Take your critique skills—something we value greatly in the UX community—to the next level with tips and tricks to evaluate designed elements.

Watch the seminar

#2 - Is Design Metrically Opposed?

with Jared Spool
68-minute recorded seminar

Talk to your teams about what you really need, help management interpret the data, and create analytical experiments that provide design insights.

Watch the seminar

#3 - Managing Outcomes in Three Easy Steps

with Josh Seiden
26-minute recorded seminar

Focus on outcomes over outputs by remembering that our work isn’t about creating stuff, but rather creating results.

Watch the seminar

The Curb Cut Effect

Discover the importance of true accessibility and how to get there by asking one question: How do we create a good experience for everyone every time?

• See why it’s important to put people first and design for differences
• Learn how to get a new perspective on your product—and accessibility—by viewing it through different lenses

Watch Part 1 - 20 minutes

Accessibility Thinking

You'll gain a new understanding of accessibility and the tools to create a better, more successful product.

• See how to set goals by asking the right questions
• Learn how to redefine QA as it relates to accessibility
• Find out how to get new perspectives by expanding your community

Watch Part 2 - 20 minutes

Connect to Recruit

Understand why having a diverse group of participants is important and get concrete steps to take to find them.

• Learn the importance of finding research and usability testing participants with disabilities
• Find out about organizations and places that can help connect you with potential participants
• Learn how to establish respectful, fruitful relationships

Watch Part 3 - 20 minutes

This series of webinars will leave you with a new understanding of accessibility, what’s needed to achieve it, and the tools and steps to do just that.

• Discover what makes a good workshop—and what makes a bad one
• Learn how to properly frame the question
• Get a guide to the four stages of facilitation
• Find out how to finish strong

Winning UX Workshops

• Before you even start to draw, have a plan. Know what it is you are trying to accomplish. This not only helps you create a better graphic, it saves you time.
• Provide a focus of attention to allow your users process your graphic faster and easier.
• Determine the message your users need to receive from the graphic. This helps you figure out what you want to include in the graphic and, equally important, what you want to exclude.
• Test your graphic by looking at it and verbalizing what you see. Is the graphic you created fulfilling its purpose, or is it confusing?

When your users see that your images are useful and meaningful, they’ll rely on them to learn, so keep these steps in mind when you create graphics.

For more tips about graphics, watch Essentials of Effective Visual Design with Patrick Hofmann.

• Learn the benefits of embracing the problem, not the solution
• Find out how to mine user feedback to understand critical needs
• Discover how to align user needs with business goals

Focus on Problems

Other successful uses of animation include the way interfaces mimic natural gestures, like a form that shakes when the user tries to submit it before it is completed. The action is similar to the way we shake our heads non-verbally when something is incorrect.

Quality animation can guide users and help them see a preview of an action they want to make. For example, the way drag and drop animations will show how a layout will rearrange when you move something. Val explains that these interactions are so common we forget how complicated they are to create.

Explore the elements of successful animated interfaces and learn how to better animate your designs in the virtual seminar, UX in Motion: Principles for Creating Meaningful Animation in Interfaces with Val Head.

Watch this seminar to discover how to design for empowerment, consider timing, and embrace opposing perspectives in your content all so you can help your audience embrace the courage of their convictions, on your behalf.

• Explore the problems caused when internal truths trump external data.
• Meet your audience where they are with your unique voice.
• Gain your audience’s trust by delivering the right volume and types of content.
• Reflect and rebuild trust by empowering your audience with vulnerability.

Empower Your Audience

Designers have a lot of tools available to them to achieve that standard. They also have partners in their efforts: the devices readers use and the readers themselves. By understanding how readers view words, how devices transmit them, and how the brain processes them, designers are better able to adapt to and adjust for optimal readability and engagement. You’ll understand:

• The social and emotional impact of typography choices.
• When to trust yourself and when to rely on the default.
• How to harness technology to optimize your typography and design.

Get the Golden Rules of Typography

In Roadmaps Relaunched, Bruce McCarthy shares a brand new breed of product roadmap that focuses on results.

• Review the components of successful product roadmaps, from a clear product vision to business objectives, themes, disclaimers, and the use of broad timeframes.
• Establish a product vision using best practices, and learn methods for accurately prioritizing goals and features in your roadmap.
• Hear tips for how to obtain buy-in for your roadmap, presenting and sharing it with teams and stakeholders.
• Learn the dos and don’ts for developing your roadmap and see examples of the many forms that roadmaps can take, from Kanban boards to a slide deck.
• Get access to a free roadmap health assessment checklist, and tips for getting started on your new and improved roadmap.

Develop a Successful Product Roadmap

• People talking too much, or holding back
• People staying in their comfort zone by keeping comments at a surface level
• False consensus: people going along to get along
• Debate mode, when conversations have winners and losers

Marc Rettig explores patterns of participation, dialogue theory, and the elements of good gatherings in his virtual seminar.

Watch: Good Gathering.

In this seminar, Chris details the challenges he and his team faced when trying to overhaul the system to book prison visits in the United Kingdom. It was a project fraught with complexity and not as easy to solve as getting people to agree on the research, or the problem.

• Hear a real world application of service design principles that improved a public service
• Learn how process and user-centered practices focused a team to find the right solution across a web of connected dependencies
• Find out how a big legacy system challenge was solved by a low-tech solution
• Explore creative ways to apply service design practices to big problems within a system

Watch this Case Study on Service Design

Val Head tells us that there are two things that great user interface animation has in common: purpose and style. Animation can augment an experience by creating context for users and showing them different ways of completing a goal. How can you get started?

• Defining Principles: Find a meaningful space in your design for animation
• Creating Continuity: Reinforce mental models in the interface to show how content is related

Watch: UX in Motion: Principles for Creating Meaningful Animation in Interfaces with Val Head.

As the Internet has evolved, what was once difficult about executing typography well has fallen by the wayside. Now, the difference between having good typography and bad typography is based on choosing and setting up the proper systems and tooling to execute effectively.

Typography is design and a way of communication. It requires intention.

• The communication value of intentional typography and its online evolution
• The impact of variable fonts on good design
• How designers can play a role in the spread of variable fonts and good typography

Execute Your Typography Well

• Virtual Reality (VR): We co-exist in virtual environments with digital constructs
• Augmented Reality (AR): Information is overlaid on the world
• Mixed Reality (MR): A merging of real and digital worlds

Adapted from: Explore the future of immersive technologies with designer Preston McCauley in his virtual seminar, “Entering the Immersive Design Revolution.”

Affordance is a key to understanding how your users make sense of every interaction you design in a product or service. Whenever your users don’t understand an interaction the way you assumed they would, chances are affordance is part of the underlying problem.

Just understanding what affordance is can be a challenge. The word “affordance” has come to mean different things to different people, causing a bit of confusion. Thankfully, Andrew Hinton can return us to the true meaning of affordance and demonstrate how it differs from signifiers.

In Affordance 101, Andrew uses everyday examples to explain the concept of affordance, its background, and how it applies to your design work.

• Effectively define affordance and its importance
• Distinguish between affordance and signifiers
• Recognize how technology affects affordances and signifiers
• Use signifiers to clarify your design for your users

Provide Context to Your Users

• Nearly all of the major companies are building products and platforms to support VR and immersive technologies
• A talent pool needs to be cultivated and grown
• VR design requires multi-dimensional and spatial design thinking
• Crafting experiences takes planning and prototyping

In building the onboarding experience, the key is to assemble a diverse toolkit to follow the user as they progress.

Starting at the beginning, choose a thoughtful default experience. Usually the homepage and initial user settings, this introduction can make an invaluable first impression with inspired design and content architecture.

Then, as the user continues, they’ll be informed and aided by inline guidance, highlighted suggestions that exist in the flow of the experience; reactive guidance, tips that are prompted by the user’s actions; and proactive guidance, alerts for features the user hasn’t discovered but should.

Of course, once the user is in the flow of their user experience, they'll also want to self-serve their support. For this, great onboarding toolkits offer on-demand guidance, an easy to find and clear set of answers to the frequently asked questions.

When onboarding is flexible and adaptive to the user, their journey, and timeline, it evolves from a first-run tutorial to become a trainer.

Good employers, who value their employees' experience, will design an onboarding journey that evolves and evaluates outcomes over months, and sometimes even the full first year. They’re investing in their employees to ensure a long-lasting and mutually beneficial relationship.

They know that onboarding has more than one job – to familiarize people with a job (or service). The onboarding process is also a time to learn about the employee (user), so the employer can tailor the experience to their needs. Onboarding also attempts to get people engaged in some way (conversion), and guide their continued journey.

Further, good employee onboarding is evaluated over time. This helps to improve things for the current new hire (user) and new hires in the future.

Continuous guidance and evaluation, as practiced in a comprehensive HR model, and as applied to UX design, results in continuous improvement for the individual employee, future hires, and the company.

In UX, the mantra is “the less friction, the better,” but sometimes correcting or removing that friction just adds it to the team.

Start with backing up your hunch with research. Conduct user interviews, examine if desired outcomes are realized for tasks and features as intended with analytics and data. Then, test your theory. Assuage the worries of your team by showing them how it will work with prototypes.

Change can be a difficult undertaking, but it’s always those closest to the challenge that are best prepared to lead it.

• Should be a neutral party in the debate. They will be tasked with and trusted to lead a conversation, but not influence it in any one direction.
• Understands the entirety of a project and can break it down to size for each meeting. They will decide where to focus the team, what decisions need to be made and manage accordingly.
• Ensures that everyone gets a chance to contribute. The facilitator will have the autonomy to determine the sequence of speakers and, like a debate moderator, make sure no one monopolizes the conversation.
• Captures the ideas and conversations of the team in real time. They are not a note taker or commentator. They will close the laptop in favor of the Dry-Erase marker to keep the team present and focused on what’s right in front of them.

Facilitators play a key role in design meetings. If they do it well, they can seamlessly guide teams forward, encourage balanced participation within the group, and keep teams and projects on tasks.

The mistake that is often made is thinking that onboarding – the introduction to the experience – is finite and meant for the first run. Spoiler Alert: onboarding never ends.

UX designers and product managers should be encouraged to embrace “never ending” onboarding as a way to continue to nurture their relationship with the user and cultivate a lasting engagement.

Whether it’s developing a delightful first-run introduction and thoughtful default settings, to in-line tips and tricks, to reactive and proactive guidance, and of course on-demand self-service support like an FAQ, there are myriad ways to improve the user’s experience and assist them in taking full advantage of your product.

The life story for unseen friction can be told with two ‘characters’:

1.   Someone super passionate about the product (platform or process) says “Wouldn’t it be better if…?” and then figures out how to make that ellipsis a reality.

2.   Users who, before the fix, never noticed the negative attributes in their experience, but now that it is improved say, “Wow! This is so much better!”

The reservation confirmation without the “Add to Calendar” feature; Gmail without the suggested responses; or a smart phone credit card form without the option to snap a picture of the card. These are all examples of processes we encounter that take (too many) extra steps and were widely accepted without much complaint until, when changed discretely, changed the game broadly.

The before and after for unseen friction makes a macro impact. The path to identifying these friction points and their solutions often requires ignoring the local maxima and exploring new technology. The results raise the bar for the competition and raise the expectations of the users.

Project management encompasses an important set of skills, such as communication, planning, and forecasting. But does someone need the title of project manager to actually do the work?

In Brett Harned’s book Project Management for Humans, he makes the argument that project management is always needed on projects but the role itself is less important. You should focus on the skills in order to manage projects well.

In this podcast, Brett shares some of the highlights from his book. Our hosts, Adam Churchill and Jared Spool dig into those highlights, in particular, whether designers already possess the skills that project managers have.

Listen Now

Want more from Brett Harned? You can see all of his recordings here.

On personas: Give Your Users a Seat at the Table: The Characteristics of Effective Personas - Whitney Quesenbery

On IA: Collaborative Information Architecture - Abby Covert

On mapping experiences: Mapping Experiences: It’s the Destination and the Journey - Jim Kalbach

On defining the problem you’re solving: Discovery: The First Step of the Design Process - Dan Brown

On research: Making Sense of Research Findings - Abby Covert

On service design: Service Design Thinking - Marc Stickdorn

On research: Demystifying Usability Tests: Learning the Basics - Christine Perfetti

On design systems: And You Thought Designing Buttons Was Easy - Nathan Curtis

On product management: The Experience Is The Product - Peter Merholz

On analytics: From UI21: Is Design Metrically Opposed? - Jared Spool

On stakeholders: Preventing the Swoop-and-Poop with Successful Stakeholder Engagement - Kim Goodwin

On MVPs: Designing To Learn: Testing Your Minimum Viable Product - Melissa Peri

On taxonomy: How To Make Sense of Any Mess - Abby Covert

On simplicity: Simplifying Designs - Giles Colborne

On research: Infectious Research - Cindy Alvarez

On onboarding: Onboarding for Behavior Change - Samuel Hulick

On research data: Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Research - Laura Klein

On collaboration: So… what do I make? Exploring the World of Modern UX Design  - Dan Mall

On design systems: Design Tokens: Scaling Design with a Single Source of Truth - Jina Bolton

On strategy: Defining a UX Design Strategy - Jim Kalbach

Of course, there are 297 other great seminars to watch. Which ones make the list next time?

There’s a stigma surrounding meetings. They’re often seen as unproductive wastes of time. But in Kevin Hoffman’s view, meetings are actually a design problem. In his upcoming book, Meeting Design for Managers, Makers, and Everyone, Kevin lays out strategies to make meetings better for all those involved, making them gateways to success. In this podcast, Adam Churchill and Jared Spool discuss some of the highlights from Kevin’s book.

Listen Now

Want more from Kevin Hoffman? You can see all of his recordings here.

Stakeholders get a bad wrap for coming into projects late and upending them. They tend to be busy, time-strapped people who bring expertise to projects, but are not always around to share feedback or ideas. It’s up to teams to gain the trust of stakeholders, and a keen understanding of their desires, despite these challenges.

To mitigate the threat of the executive swoop and poop, start your projects with a RACI exercise to define team roles: who is responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed. Create project plans with milestone dates and specific points where stakeholders can provide critical feedback. Adapt to the ways of your stakeholders and proactively communicate with them to ease any anxiety they might have about the project. Make sure stakeholders know when they’ll have an opportunity to provide feedback. Listen to them, parrot back what you’ve heard, and communicate your next steps. The more stakeholders hear you reflecting their concerns and wishes, the more likely they’ll accept your solutions.

Dan Brown shares three mindsets that he believes designers need to cultivate to work successfully in collaborative environments.

Adaptable
An adaptable mindset allows you to roll with the punches. You are comfortable giving the client options and adapting your techniques to the unique needs of the client and environment.

Collective
A collective mindset allows you to accept perspectives and contributions from other people on a team. You understand that other perspectives can improve your work, and that more heads are better than one.

Assertive
An assertive mindset is confident without being arrogant. You can be comfortable in a situation where not all of the answers are available, but decisions need to be made based on where you are at and what you know in the moment.

Before you get started on a product solution, and to minimize the risk of creating something that won't find a foothold with your target audience, Perri recommends asking the following questions:

• Do our customers really have this problem?
• What do our customers expect to gain in the end?
• What are our customers doing to solve their problems now?
• What do they care about in a solution?
• Where will they use the solution?

When preparing for your stakeholder interviews, put together a set of basic questions. These questions may even seem dumb, but it’s important to encourage stakeholders to explain in their own words the challenges that may (or may not) seem self-evident.

Some of those basic questions may look like the following:

• What do you think this project is about?
• Who is it for?
• When do you need it completed, and why?
• What’s the worst thing that could happen?
• What should it accomplish for the business?
• How will YOU define success?
• How do you want to be involved, and what’s the best way to involve you?
• Who else will influence the outcome?

Create a spreadsheet and run your website through a free webpage test tool. Note your page times for start render, visually complete, and fully loaded. Now list your competitors and compare their times against yours. Tools such as webpagetest.org will generate a report that can help you make the decisions you need to improve your site’s performance.

There are three qualities , or mindsets, that Dan Brown believes are essential to the discovery process.

Curiosity

A curious mindset understands that there are gaps in one’s knowledge. When we are curious, we ask questions, follow hunches, and give ourselves permission to explore ideas. We find excitement in the process of learning new information.

Skepticism

A skeptical mindset does not accept all of the assumptions it sees at face value. When we bring a skeptical mindset to a project, we are able to assess ideas, play devil’s advocate to challenge assumptions, and approach a problem from different angles.

Humility

Humility reminds us that we don’t have all of the answers; regardless of the experience and knowledge we bring to a situation. Cultivating humility allows us to listen to the opinions of others, and be okay when we don’t know what we don’t know.

Adhocracy: This organization is comfortable with change and finds wisdom in information gathered outside of it. It values external data like user interviews and research. It tends to have a lean, startup atmosphere that is iterative and creative, loose on process but high on invention. Employee roles and responsibilities might be unclear.

Clan: This organization values change, but believes wisdom can be found within the company. It invests in employees and makes everyone feel like a stakeholder. Collaboration is a necessity.

Hierarchy: This organization values internal expertise over external research. It is risk-averse, structured, and values stability. It is heavy on process and structure and responds well to templates and process.

Market: A market-oriented business likes stability and risk reduction, and tends to value external data and research. It loves data analytics, A/B testing, and anything that can tie design to metrics. Google is a classic example of this structure.

Dan Mall believes that every prototype you make should solve one problem with one solution. Don’t build something that is complete. Use your prototypes as an opportunity to explore creative problem solving, and typography. What will an infinite scroll look like on this site? Explore the pieces of your project in creative and inventive ways.

Developing prototypes and element collages are all part of the skill set of a great designer. Sketch more. Write more. Make something.

Problem-Solution Fit: Does this problem exist and can I solve it?

Product-Market Fit: Is my product desirable in the market?

Product teams learn through experimentation, and though these experiments may result in more failures than successes, the process of questioning, experimenting, and testing will hone the final product vision and strategy.

If you take an inventory of button styles, for example, on your project or site, you may find a variety of styles, typography, and subtle design variations that were not intentional. Design teams can review an inventory, and all of the decisions that were made, and use that information to create an overall style guide that streamlines design decisions and can be applied in the future. This approach will result in cleaner code, and reduce the cognitive load on users.

The qualitative datasets that researchers collect as part of user research are often full of metaphors – and not just the things that people say. Cyd Harrell notes that researchers take while observing participants often contain rich insights into user behavior. Metaphors humanize the data we retrieve and can become a powerful part of the larger design and product conversations we have.

There are a variety of ways that teams can recruit testing participants, from simply finding people on the street, to targeting specific audiences.  Each approach has pros and cons. The method you use for gathering participants should be informed by the type of user research you do, and the product or concept you are testing.

Eight Categories For Recruiting Research Participants

1. First person you see
2. Someone in your office
3. Friends and family
4. Craigslist, or another community
5. Recruiting Agency
6. Panel
7. Facebook Ads/Twitter
8. Live User Intercept

Dan Saffer has a practical prescription for getting unstuck, unblocked, and energized. Here are his tips for how to build a creative habit that sustains you through those dark days when ideas run dry.

• Prepare: Build a creative habit. Schedule a small block of time and show up every day.
• Find a ritual: Artists often create a ritual around the work they do to get them in the right headspace. It could be listening to music, arranging pencils, what-have-you. Find what works for you.
• Keep a list of your top three big questions: Hang them in a visible place in your workspace so you can think about them.
• Walk: If you are feeling stuck, get outside. Why? Because even Nietzsche thought it was a good idea.
• Be boring: If you are out and about, resist the urge to look at your phone and other digital distractions.
• Time: Spend as much time as you can with the problem you are trying to solve.

Solutions tend to come to us when we aren’t thinking very hard about them. Give yourself the space to ruminate over ideas, ideate, and percolate.

• Attraction: Love, sex, and friendship. Participants might express emotion in these areas toward a product or concept. Attraction represents deep human needs, but it can also represent repulsion — for example, participants who feel discomfort with a product or experience.
• Food and Shelter: Language that describes the feeling of home and safety, or lack thereof.
• Status & Competition: This is another deep human connection that can result in the use of interesting metaphors. What kind of competition are people trying to win? What is important to them?
• Places: Language that describes a place or context.
• Animals: What creatures show similar behavior?

A good place to begin is with a team meeting that explores the roles and responsibilities of everyone involved: who will be responsible for doing the work, who will be accountable (the people who will approve the work), who should be consulted, and who should be kept informed. The acronym for this approach is called RACI and seasoned project managers are familiar with the process.

This presentation is one of 6 we captured from Lou Rosenfeld's User Research for Everyone. 

This presentation is one of 6 we captured from Lou Rosenfeld's User Research for Everyone. 

This presentation is one of 6 we captured from Lou Rosenfeld's User Research for Everyone.  

If you take an inventory of button styles, for example, on your project or site, you may find a variety of styles, typography, and subtle design variations that were not intentional. Design teams can review an inventory, and all of the decisions that were made, and use that information to create an overall style guide that streamlines design decisions and can be applied in the future. This approach will result in cleaner code, and reduce the cognitive load on users.

Begin by asking yourself what the story of your product is.

• Who is the hero?
• What is the hero’s goal?
• What is getting in the way of that goal?
• How will your product meet the hero’s goal? What is its value?
• How will you get your hero to use the product?
• How will you sustain interest in the product?

Our goal, says Donna Lichaw, is to create the best product stories that we can for customers. Successful product stories shape the way customers interact with the product. We create a world in which customers can see how our products enrich their lives.

This presentation is one of 6 we captured from Lou Rosenfeld's User Research for Everyone.

This presentation is one of 6 we captured from Lou Rosenfeld's User Research for Everyone. 

Eliminate the clutter and noise of multiple fields and focus your user’s attention on the information you need to gather. Make every field fight for its existence. This can be hard, as forms often represent an amalgamation of “asks” from across an organization. You’ll need to fight the good fight and argue for clarity, precision, and laser-like focus. Pare-down fields to the bare minimum and remove anything that isn’t required.

Make sure it’s clear to your users what they need to be doing, and why it benefits them to share their information with you.

In the full seminar, you'll write a manifesto that gets your project on track from the start, as well as use performance budgets to guide your design work.

As Jenn Lukas tells us, we have 10 seconds to engage users on our sites before they lose interest. Forty percent of people will abandon a website if it takes longer than three seconds to load. Every second of your page load-time counts, and the culprit behind growing page sizes and slow rendering is the lofty and powerful image, particularly on e-commerce sites.

As we look at page load times and our brand experience across devices, we need to ask whether the image we use in one experience fits the needs of all devices. We should not only consider strategies like optimizing images, loading images lazily, but also choosing the right image and size for the right device, particularly in responsive designs. We want our sites to perform well and we should be shooting for page load-times of one second.

This presentation is one of 6 we captured from Lou Rosenfeld's User Research for Everyone.

As Margot Bloomstein tells us, when appropriate, users appreciate slow experiences when it is right for the brand, and it allows them to be engaged with the content, discover information, and create memories. Slow content can focus user attention and allow them to deliberate. For example, e-commerce sites that allow users to compare different types of products, pricing, quality, and attributes within comparison charts encourage deliberation. Financial and health information content can also benefit by these slower experiences.

Watch this seminar to hear case studies and techniques on how to translate behavioral science research into design that improves user engagement.

But we do have tools to investigate these questions. Customer Journey Maps help us see an experience and a product through the eyes of the user. Qualitative findings derived from user research can and should drive quantitative analysis. Quantitative and qualitative research should be essential tools that we blend together in our work to make informed design decisions that improve the user experience.

Watch to learn how you can contribute to more strategic conversations and build cross-functional, collaborative environments in the workplace.

This seminar explores an innovative approach that establishes a creative feedback loop with early adopters to get to the heart of a product’s appeal to a broader audience.

If you are looking for techniques to collaborate more successfully and find common ground around language and structure, this is the seminar for you.

If you are looking for ways to improve retention rates and signups in your user onboarding, this seminar is for you.

The diagrams that we make are compelling artifacts. But the answers that we seek cannot be found in the diagrams themselves but rather in the process of mapping information and engaging with others in discourse around it.

People support what they help to create and when we map user experiences as teams, including stakeholders, we draw individuals out of their heads, out of organizational silos, and into the room to work collaboratively and develop this shared understanding.

Watch this seminar if you would like to improve the way you deliver and receive critical feedback.

Collaborative Information Architecture is a practice that draws stakeholders out of their respective silos within an organization, helps teams reach clarity on content and goals, and ultimately creates a common ground of understanding between all parties through the use of meeting facilitation, and visual diagrams that communicate complexity and resolve conflicts.

Collaborative IA can alleviate the following problems:

• Internal disputes over what to call things
• Lack of clarity over what things “are” within an organization (people often have a different understanding across departments)
• Overlapping functionality
• Lack of prioritization of audiences or goals
• Arguing about priority through a lens of organizational politics
• “This is how we’ve always done it” thinking
• “Lacksonomy” instead of taxonomy, when language and structure is developed organically and not thought-out

Discover a framework for measuring the success of the onboarding process as well as specific tactics for teams to use to problem-solve weaknesses in their own onboarding and optimize products for success.

“I think some of my love for content strategy in this day and age is, in a sense, acknowledging that in many situations a redesign is not the answer,” says Karen. She says that often times, her clients aren’t seeing the traffic that they expect on their site, and believe that the resources required by a major redesign will lead to gains.

But for many organizations, says Karen, “The effort that they should be putting in should be in their content.” Changing the design in major or minor ways is always an option, but “none of that is going to be worth it if you don’t have the content to back it up.”

If you are curious about how service design works, or you are familiar with it and would like to learn more about service design tools, get started here.

What is the core loop? It’s the heart of your product, a series of actions that engages and delights your users and makes them want to return. A successful core loop drives long-term user engagement with a product.

So, how do you find it? Design your experience to evolve over time. This isn’t about designing how the product looks, but rather systems. Ask yourself what the customer’s experience with your product will be like, and how it will grow and evolve. Define what fun looks like for your audience. (It can mean different things to different people.) Then find and court early, passionate adopters of your product and seek their opinion.

That early feedback will be crucial to your product’s development. If you can nail these early customers, who are not always representative of your ultimate end-market, they become partners and collaborators in your product as it develops.

Map your users’ first experience with your product. Imagine what happens in their first sitting. If you use tool tips, don’t throw them at the user all at once. Deliver them one at a time, and make sure they are action-oriented. If you do use tool tips, expect them to be skipped, especially if they are not action-oriented.

People don’t buy products, Samuel explains. They buy better versions of themselves. What is the improvement that your product is providing? And how can you move your users toward that step?

From, “Growing Your User Base with Better Onboarding,” a virtual seminar with Samuel Hulick.

You might have some hesitation about creating your own visual models, but Stephen Anderson strongly suggests you give it a try. Models help us see patterns in information, and combinations, that reveal new insights.

Many of use charts and diagrams, models and templates to track data or map a user experience—even visual models as simple as a Venn diagram or XY matrix. These are all highly useful methods to help us solve problems and create a new understanding of the work that we do.

Let analytics be your guide, says Whitney Quesenbery, accessibility expert and co-author of The Web For Everyone. Which PDFs are downloaded most often? What are the most popular videos? Find out where users go and what they do.

Once you’ve identified key tasks and content, you can explore any existing barriers and address these systematically. While you’re in the process of updating PDFs, for example, you can give users the option to contact you and request a specific PDF in accessible format. This is another source of “street research” that will help you prioritize your work.

Whitney’s advice? Acknowledge the problem. Communicate that you’re working on a solution. And focus your energy and resources on the things that your users are most likely to need.

This post was originally published on Abby's blog, Abby The IA, on August 5, 2016.

Last week I had the pleasure of teaching a new webinar for UIE’s All You Can Learn Library. The video is now available, and with permission from UIE I have decided to share and primary lessons of the talk. 

(You can get Abby's slide deck or read the transcript)

Why Collaborative Information Architecture?

I talk to a lot of people about IA. It is one of my favorite things to do. One common theme I run into in these conversations is how to deal with people. It seems that everyone agrees that the main challenge of practicing IA is not deciding where to put things or what to call things, it is doing so in an environment where people have diverse opinions about where to put things and what to call things. After bumping into this reality enough times, I decided to really give it some thought. The result is this:

Too many people are practicing information architecture alone at their desks and presenting the results to their colleagues and clients. As a result, they are struggling to make actionable change, being discouraged by lack of understanding and getting frustrated with not being respected for their expertise.

How to Make Sense of Any Mess, I wrote: “…making maps and diagrams alone at your desk is not practicing information architecture.”

I made this point in passing to get across the idea that dealing with other people’s opinions is part of IA work, not something we get to choose our way out of. Ever since writing this line I have looked to pressure test it and create lessons around how to get other people involved in IA work.

Because in my experience, practicing IA with other people is not only more efficient, it is also more effective.

In preparation for the webinar I sent out a survey asking people a few questions about challenges they face in practicing IA. The result was 79 in-depth responses where people poured their hearts and souls into two simple free text fields.

Here is a recap of the common things I heard:

• Conversations about language are difficult because people within a single organization are often speaking different languages based on role or area of focus
• It is common to run into arguments about priority (of audiences, of goals, of resources et al) and for prioritization to be considered through a lens of organizational politics not user centricity
• People complained about the prevalence of “This is how we have always done it” thinking and how hard it is to get organizations to change
• Other competencies were reported to ignore or override decisions made by IA or seeing IA as cosmetic and arbitrary
• Lack of time or budget for collaboration, testing and iteration around IA was often attributed as the largest thing standing in the way of good IA thinking

With all this in mind I set out to create a webinar to help people think about their IA process and look for opportunities to make it more collaborative.

In this 90 minute presentation I cover:

• How to communicate the value of IA to your organization
• How to make time/get time for IA
• How to think about IA in agile vs waterfall environments
• How to use stakeholder interviews to get people invested in making things clear
• How to facilitate low fidelity conversations about language
• How to mine for language across channels and contexts
• How to use diagrams and drawing exercises to collaborate on IA with others
• How to get people to actually pay attention to controlled vocabulary work

One of the most valuable parts of the research survey was the “burning IA questions” that people asked — but with all the content I had to share in the webinar, a lot of those great questions ended up on the cutting room floor. Below I would like to answer the top five questions that people submitted that didn’t make it into the talk.

How do you establish trust when you don’t have years of experience?

The best advice I can give you when it comes to building trust is this: listen more than you speak. I find that often times people go through their days aiming to be seen as the smartest person in the room, constantly looking for opportunities to show off their skills or ideas. If you instead spend most of time asking questions and genuinely listening to the answers your clients and colleagues give you, you will be seen as a more trustworthy partner.

The second piece of advice I have for you is to stop having opinions. Well, more like stop weighing in with your opinion. When we talk about IA we are already dealing with many people’s opinions. You want to position yourself as someone who will help to weigh and compare all the opinions that exist so progress can be made, not as someone who will take sides or fight for a certain point of view. Both of these pieces of advice require you to set aside your ego in service of acting as a filter for others. This is a serious challenge to overcome if you want to be trusted in doing IA work, especially without a proven track record.

“When making a cup of coffee, the filter’s job is to get the grit out before a user drinks the coffee. Sensemaking is like removing the grit from the ideas we’re trying to give to users.” excerpt from How to Make Sense of Any Mess

Who within an organization should own the IA?

The simple answer is everyone. I have experienced the IA being owned in technology, marketing, design, product and even most recently by finance… all have resulted in the same issue. Whatever group owns the IA gets its priorities all over it. So instead of deciding who should own the IA, I have started to recommend that my clients create governing bodies for the IA that include cross functional members who come together on a set schedule to discuss IA issues and make IA decisions. By making it so that there is no one group or function that owns the IA it is more likely that decisions will be upheld and questions will be routed appropriately.

Can we practice IA with others without them knowing what IA is?

Yes. Often the best way to talk about IA is to talk about the two concepts within it: language and structure. Both of these concepts tend to make sense to folks across functions and areas of experience. So while educating people on IA can be useful when trying to influence an organization to care about it, it is more 201 level content best taught once the 101 concepts are clear and actionable.

Is it possible to architect something that you don’t understand because it is just too big, too specialized or too complex?

I spent a lot of time thinking about this one. I landed here: No it is not possible to architect something you don’t yet understand. It is the process of understanding it that allows us to shape places in support of it. I have been in many circumstances where the brain-hurt of getting up to speed was hard to stomach. I have lost sleep thinking “this is going to be the mess I can’t make sense of” and yet with time, persistence and bravery I have always been able to break it down and understand it. Here are some tips:

• Take your time, some things take a while to unravel. Spread the work out and take breaks to think on it. Sometimes our brains need to sit with something passively to have a real breakthrough
• Visualize it, it is always more complicated when it is kept in our heads alone. These visualizations can be messy and stay messy for a long time while you are working through the mess. Don’t be afraid of unresolved diagrams, they are sometimes needed to resolve larger issues surrounding the diagram
• Use your naivety as a tool to get people to break down complex things into its parts. I have often asked my clients to describe something as if they were speaking to a grade school classroom.
• Compare it to something you do know. Find a metaphor or like minded thing in the world that can serve as a bridge between not knowing and knowing

How do you balance the need to continuously educate your co-workers with not getting stale/turning people off with constant preaching?

There is a thin line between educating and preaching. The first tip I have on keeping from turning people off is similar to the advice I gave on question 1. Try listening more and talking less. What would it be like to go into your next meeting and pose everything as a question? Often the person you are trying to educate can tell you what they don’t understand easier than you can educate them on everything you know while hoping something will stick. So after an initial period of proactively introducing some concepts around IA, keep your teaching reactive to what people are struggling with. Also work on your critiquing skills, and make sure your opinions aren’t clouding your judgement. It is common for people to get all hopped up on their own expertise and use their expert voice when voicing their opinions.

Lastly, make sure people know that you know that IA is subjective. There are many ways to do this work. If people understand their role in making good IA choices, they are more likely to feel educated, and not preached at.

—

I hope you found the presentation and my answers to these questions useful. I am always open to questions from readers, so throw them my way if you have them.

Thanks for reading.

Abby "the IA" Covert is an independent information architect living, teaching and working in New York City.

Nathan Curtis, EightShapes founder and author of Modular Web Design, uses “design clinics” to build collaborative relationships and keep his team faithful to standards and design systems. Once a week, he holds drop-in office hours. Designers and developers stop by to present their work and get advice about how to bring it in line with the corporate brand.

Design clinics are a lightweight, informal way to “triage” glaring discrepancies while fostering a sense of unity and collaboration. They don’t eat up a bunch of hours, but they can have a huge impact on the quality and cohesiveness of your organization’s designs.

If your strategy discussions feel more like political battles than progressive team-building, this seminar is for you.

Pattern libraries are a great way to start “sorting the pile,” but they don’t always go far enough.

You don’t really see how these things get used. You don’t see these things in context. You don’t see how these basic LEGO blocks combine together to form the final interface.

With atomic design, you can see how the components fit together—how they interact with each other. You can create consistent, cohesive experiences. And ultimately, you end up with a robust system that the client can use in the future, versus a handful of page templates that only work with the current use case.

Watch to see what kind of content is useful and usable, and how content already influences your user and business goals.

Lean UX is the perfect disaster-avoidance technique.

1. You start with one customer—your end user.
2. You do your research and figure out the number one problem they have with your product or service.
3. You take a guess at what you could do to solve that problem.
4. You run your “hypothesis” through the “think, make, check” cycle to see if your guess was right.

If it was, congratulate yourself. If it wasn’t, go back and start over.

Derek Featherstone is going to show you how beautiful, inexpensive, and user-experience-driven accessibility truly is when it's addressed early.

What is the core loop? It’s the heart of your product, a series of actions that engages and delights your users and makes them want to return. A successful core loop drives long-term user engagement with a product.

So, how do you find it? Design your experience to evolve over time. This isn’t about designing how the product looks, but rather systems. Ask yourself what the customer’s experience with your product will be like, and how it will grow and evolve. Define what fun looks like for your audience. (It can mean different things to different people.) Then find and court early, passionate adopters of your product and seek their opinion. That early feedback will be crucial to your product’s development. If you can nail these early customers, who are not always representative of your ultimate end-market, they become partners and collaborators in your product as it develops.

If your team is more focused on “ship date” than creating real customer value, watch this seminar.

Watch Steph Hay's seminar to see how to apply content-first UX design and contextual learning.

As designers, we often look to the user for answers. Leah Buley argues that relying on customer data alone, “squanders [an] opportunity to foster an environment where we talk about the design together and we put forth strong points of view about what good looks like.”

This is the point when we need to get back to our gut instincts. Leah has an approach that she uses called “The Blink Test” to harness that initial impression we have and to observe what it tells us.

Close your eyes, step back, and take a moment. Then open your eyes and listen to what you are feeling. Observe that first moment and ask yourself the following questions:

• What do I notice?
• How does this feel?
• Is this prototypical?
• What can I do?

So, what are they? Begin by defining a qualitative objective. The objective is your big idea, the brass ring. Your key results are the quantitative measures you need to reach to support your objective. Key results are not tasks. They are signs and metrics that place you on the right track. Focus on only one objective and attach no more than three key results to reach each quarter. Unite the company around them, and let the results define your success.

Do fewer things and do them better:

• Meet each week with your team to review if the group is taking care of what matters.
• Schedule how you'll meet your goals, and help teams prepare for what you are doing.
• Build dedication to goals and the team.
• Celebrate on Fridays with demos and check-ins. Let teams share their progress, from business development and sales to design and engineering.
• Communicate your goal and the OKRs each week with team status emails.

If your product discussions feel more like territorial battles than progressive UX design, you'll want your team watching this seminar.

If your progress journey has been slow and rough, spend an hour with Bruce and get the insight you need to clear the way.

According to Kevin Hoffman, the difference between those two types of meetings is the ability to practice what he calls co-design. Co-design can happen whether you’re working remotely or in the same physical space. What matters is that your team is thinking and functioning collaboratively.

Kevin uses The Marshmallow Challenge to demonstrate the power of co-design. The challenge involves building a freestanding tower out of uncooked pasta that can bear the weight of a marshmallow.

In his challenges, the winning teams are the ones that exhibit the key facets of co-design: jump in, take risks, learn from failures, consider the input and perspectives of everyone on the team, and work as fast as they can to build the “minimum viable product.”

Josh Seiden will show you how to apply Lean UX in organizations of any size.

If you want to learn how to build better product experiences, this seminar is for you.

How? Start by humanizing the language in your forms. Approach the content as a conversation you would like to have with your audience, and use language they would use.

Eliminate the clutter and noise of multiple fields and focus your user’s attention on the information you need to gather. Make every field fight for its existence.

This can be hard, as forms often represent an amalgamation of “asks” across an organization. You’ll need to fight the good fight and argue for clarity, precision, and laser-like focus. Pare-down fields to the bare minimum and remove anything that isn’t required.

Make sure it’s clear to users what they need to be doing, and why it benefits them to share their information with you.

If you want to design less for features and screens and more for holistic experiences, this seminar is for you.

Fred believes UX professionals possess four traits that make them good at what they do. These aren’t the kind of traits you find in actual designs. These traits are reflected in the designer’s approach to work, what motivates them, and the way that they think.

Fred suggests we look for the following in UX design candidates:

• Is this person intrinsically motivated?
• Are they people-centered? A good designer always has the user in mind.
• Are they curious, specifically about technology and people?
• Do they have thick skin to handle critical feedback?

Even the most talented UX designers make mistakes, but the best of them know that mistakes can come with the territory and it’s our desire to remain curious, accept criticism, and move forward, using the methods we have at hand to improve our work.

Step away from desktop and mobile screens and explore the ever-expanding world of off-screen digital interactions. A world that sets users free from the "tyranny of the screen" and pushes the limits of what we think is possible.

Ask everyone on the team to answer each of the following six questions—quietly— on individual sticky notes. If they don’t know the answers, challenge them to get creative.

1. Awareness​: How will people hear about your product?
2. Education​: How will people learn what your product does?
3. Engagement​: How will you predict a visitor will become active?
4. Conversion​: How will you get contact data from visitors?
5. Revenue​: How will you make money?
6. Recurrence​: What makes someone a repeated user?

When they are finished, have the team place their notes on the whiteboard under each category. Arrange the order of the categories as they relate to the user journeys of your target audience groups. While all of your users won’t make it through the life cycle as you’ve defined it, quantitative metrics will help you identify where they are getting stuck.

adapted from “Planning Your User’s Path Together,” a virtual seminar by Laura Klein.

If you’ve got the basics down, but want to uplevel your mobile research, spend an hour with Cyd Harrell and you’ll be well on your way.

Fred Beecher , who nurtures fledgling UX designers at The Nerdery, recommends looking for folks who are:

Intrinsically motivated: These folks are dying to break into UX. They seek you out. By email. At conferences. During the work day. They’re always hanging around, asking questions, and showing an interest in the UX team’s work. They read books about it and participate in community on their own. They’re going to pursue their UX dreams, with or without you.

People-centered: They understand that great design solves users’ problems, so they seek input and feedback from people at every stage of the process. They’re sensitive to the needs of all of their users and stakeholders, and they balance them judiciously.

Curious: Great UX’ers are full of questions. “What if we tried it this way instead?” “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could use X to solve for Y?” “Why isn’t this working?” They’re curious about people, about technology, and about how to bring them together to make life less frustrating.

Criticism-tolerant: Learning a new skills usually involves a decent number of fails and misfires. You want someone who can take criticism without being defensive. Someone who see negative feedback as a tool to make the work better.

adapted from “Teaching UX,” a Virtual Seminar by Fred Beecher.

Objectives and Key Results is a system that causes little disruption and has a huge positive impact. OKRs were developed by Intel and adopted by Google, and are currently utilized by a growing number of successful Silicon Valley companies. It’s your turn!

If you feel like you’re being asked for an endless list of features--or designing those features without the context of “why,” then watch Bruce’s seminar.

Intranet teams should focus on delivering business value. Organizations are made of people who work with other people. So maybe content isn't king -- maybe people are king. Don’t just give your people a static repository of news, forms, policies, and procedures. Make your intranet an essential part of their day-to-day work life. Make it integral to getting the job done.

Your intranet has to serve your business. Defining that core business is your first step. Then, sit down with stakeholders and ask, “What does our intranet need to be? What key activities does it have to support? How can we help the people who do the actual work to work together?”

adapted from “Bringing Order to Your Intranet,” a Virtual Seminar by James Robertson

If you feel like you’re in an endless cycle of making design deliverables and sitting in exhausting meetings, then it’s time to get responsive with Ben.

Most user research is Qualitative, Evaluative, and Solution-framed.

• We look at why users do certain things, taking note of patterns, regularity, and differences.
• We look at how well things are working, whether or not they’re supporting the needs of our users.
• We ask questions about offerings and solutions that already exist.

Coming at your user research from a different perspective may yield richer insights.

Ever wish someone could teach you best practices for data visualizations so you could talk about them with your organization? Watch Noah's recording.

Lean UX is the perfect disaster-avoidance technique.

• You start with one customer—your end user.
• You do your research and figure out the number one problem they have with your product or service.
• You take a guess at what you could do to solve that problem.
• You run your “hypothesis” through the “think, make, check” cycle to see if your guess was right.

If it was, congratulate yourself. If it wasn’t, go back and start over.