The AYCL Blog

When our words look good, our readers feel good.

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

Product roadmaps offer something unique that investors, stakeholders, and even customers like to see: a clear articulation of the product’s purpose, strategy, and goals.

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

The way we meet for group workshops, project check-ins, brainstorms, and all other forms of information sharing and gathering, can be comically ineffective. By designing better ways for groups to meet, we can address some of the classic challenges that undermine group gatherings, such as:

• 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.

Service Design is about the design of services, from end-to-end communication materials, paper forms, call center scripts, to back and front-office software, and more. It’s a lot more complicated and bigger than a deliverable.

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

Most of us feel relatively confident in our ability to spot examples of bad animation. But what are the qualities of good animation? We might say animation is good when it doesn’t distract or take away from the user experience. What kind of animation should you be creating?

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.

In this seminar, Jason Pamental guides us through the history and importance of typography and how the evolution of technology can bring us to a new design Renaissance that will satisfy style guides and content management systems, and delight users.

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

British designer Alex McDowell coined the phrase “immersive design” in 2007 to describe experiential storytelling, which is at the heart of user experience design. Today’s emerging technologies are allowing designers to create experiences that build a narrative into their work and design a world that feels tangible and immediate. Let’s define terms.

• 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.”

We're adding Andrew Hinton's Affordance 101: From Things to Screens to Things to UIE's All You Can Learn Library. This seminar recording is 40 minutes long.

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

Virtual reality (VR), while long a favorite topic in science fiction, used to be a choppy experience. But as Preston McCauley explains in his virtual seminar, we are on the cusp of something new with emerging technologies, such as VR, that allow designers to create truly surreal experiences. Immersive design will push us to the next level of user experience in applications, as well as gaming.

• 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

Users should experience a product or platform in a layered way. The further they go, the more new features and benefits they discover. This means the user is always learning, and as designers, there is the opportunity to engage them multiple times and ways through their journey.

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.

Think back over your career and the first weeks or months of a new job. There are probably examples of good, bad, and ugly onboarding experiences. With those in mind, we can better empathize with users, and look to the HR onboarding process as a model for UX.

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.

Because you have a finger on the pulse of your user’s experience, you’re in the know about what’s working or not. When you find something to change because it could work better, smarter, or more efficiently, it’s worth considering your approach with your team and management.

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.