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New on UXmatters: June 5, 2017
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Humanizing the Enterprise
By Pabini Gabriel-Petit
Is your company failing to innovate and, consequently, finding itself the target of disruptive innovation? Is the ability to deliver stellar experience outcomes eluding your enterprise? Are you having a hard time attracting and retaining the best employees?
In today’s rapidly shifting business environment, many large enterprises are struggling with all three of these challenges. The reason: meeting each of these challenges requires a highly engaged workforce and, unfortunately, such workforces are rare.
If, as a leader within a large enterprise, you need to solve one or more of these problems, you should think about how you can humanize your enterprise and make it a place in which people can do their best work. Read More
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By Steve Diller, Nathan Shedroff and Sean Sauber
This is a sample chapter from the new Two Waves book Blind Spot: Illuminating the Hidden Value of Business, by Steve Diller, Nathan Shedroff, and Sean Sauber. 2016 Rosenfeld Media.
At this point in your journey, it’s time to start making touchpoints. Let’s face it—this can be a little scary. All of the work you’ve done so far has been preparation for that big blank sheet of paper—or nowadays, more likely, a screen—that you’ll use to create ideas and concepts, and develop them into something new. Needless to say, many find this a disorienting and difficult moment. Many businesspeople treat this phase as just another check box on the to-do list.
It’s not.
Designing the offering is the most complex phase, the most critical, and although incredibly ambiguous and anxiety-producing for those who feel safe with a set recipe, the most fun. Read More
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Ever since I was little, I’ve avoided uncomfortable moments in movies. I would always fast forward through the parts where the characters I liked put themselves in uncomfortable or embarrassing positions. I still do that today. In general, most people avoid uncomfortable situations in real life, but we all have our strategies for dealing with them.
Just this morning, I had an uncomfortable encounter with a shoeshine guy at the airport. After exchanging the usual pleasantries, he proceeded to talk to me about his religious beliefs in excruciating detail. At this juncture, I had several options. I could have asked him to stop. However, that would have immediately changed the interaction between the two of us from a friendly service encounter to one of frosty silence. I could have faked interest and engaged with him on this topic—something I’d have a hard time doing in my personal life. I could have chosen to let this annoy me. However, getting my shoes shined is one of my personal pleasures, and the context was all wrong for going down this path. Read More
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By Awais Imran
I recently read Alan Cooper’s book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, which came out in the late 1990s. Cooper is known as the “Father of Visual Basic” and founder of Cooper, a San Francisco design consultancy. In his book, he takes a comprehensive look at software companies’ engineering-centric development processes and how they lead to unusable software. The book is a must-read for interaction designers.
For me, the most memorable part of the book is the chapter “Designing for Power,” in which Cooper discusses—among other interesting topics—why we should design human-like politeness into software. In this two part series of articles, I’ll discuss Cooper’s fourteen characteristics of polite software, providing relatable examples—both good and bad. I hope this approach to software design will be as helpful to you as it has been for me. Read More
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By Janet M. Six
In Practical UX Design, Scott Faranello talks to UX designers and others about the harsh reality that User Experience is still an often-misunderstood field. User Experience is about much more than just user interface design and product usability testing that occurs late in a product-development cycle. User Experience requires a holistic mindset that considers value creation for users, customers, and stakeholders. Scott believes it is very important to speak about User Experience outside the field of User Experience. Our professional peers need to understand what User Experience can do so we can practice the profession in the most effective way.
Scott talks about numerous cases in which companies and UX designers have considered—or failed to consider—how people will use a product in real-life situations, as well as the business impacts of their decisions. He discusses the myth that Henry Ford said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said ‘faster horses,’” noting the fact that this quotation cannot reliably be attributed to Ford. More importantly, what Ford actually did shows that he did keep his customers at the forefront in his mind. Ford perfected the assembly-line method of manufacturing so customers would have access to affordable cars. Throughout his book, Scott provides many examples, pictures, and links to additional resources on the Web. Read More
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Thank You to Our Sponsors!
We would like to thank our sponsors for their support of UXmatters!
One of the biggest challenges of designing user experiences in an agile world is fitting into agile processes. Compounding this challenge is that it can sometimes feel like engineers are from Mars and designers are from Venus. This is why it is essential to find ways of making User Experience techniques more Lean and agile.
Join Dean Barker, VP of UX and Agile coaching at Optum/UnitedHealth Group, as he discusses how to remove the waste from your UX processes for a truly Lean foundation.
This Webinar will teach you how to
- understand User Experience in the context of agile
- integrate Lean research techniques into an agile development process
- take an agile approach to UX design
This Webinar will take place on Thursday, June 8, 2017, at 10am, Pacific, and 1pm, Eastern.
Register for this free Webinar now!
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Conferences UXmatters Will Be Attending
Hope to see you there! Please say hello and let us know if you're interested in writing for UXmatters.
::: Enterprise UX 2017, June 7–9, in San Francisco, California
We hope to see you at EUX17! Use the code UXMATTERS15 when registering for the conference to get 15% off!
Conferences UXmatters Has Attended
Look for our conference reviews in upcoming editions of UXmatters.
::: O'Reilly Design Conference 2017, March 20–22, in San Francisco, California
::: TiEcon 2017, May 5–6, in Santa Clara, California
Sponsoring UXmatters
If your company offers products or services for UX professionals, sponsoring UXmatters provides an ideal way for you to reach your audience—the senior practitioners, managers, and executives who recommend and approve their purchase. If you want to inquire about sponsoring UXmatters, please contact us at sponsor@uxmatters.com.
::: Read more about sponsoring UXmatters.
Thank You!
Thanks to The Interaction Design Foundation for providing a feed to their current list of upcoming international UX events to UXmatters! Check out the event calendar!
Opportunities for Authors & Volunteers
If you are an expert in user experience (UX) strategy, any aspect of UX design, or user research who has strong writing skills, we welcome you to contribute to UXmatters. Please send an article proposal to us at info@uxmatters.com.
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There are many opportunities for you to contribute to UXmatters. If you're interested in volunteering with UXmatters, please contact us at info@uxmatters.com.
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About UXmatters
UXmatters is one of the foremost Web magazines for UX professionals. We deliver compelling content about developing effective UX strategies and designing digital-product user experiences that optimally serve people's needs and satisfy their desires. Created by and for UX professionals, UXmatters covers a broad spectrum of topics about UX management, strategy, design, and research for a diverse range of digital products—from Web, mobile, and desktop applications to mobile devices and consumer electronics products. Our audience encompasses people in all UX professions.
About User Experience
User experience (UX) encompasses all aspects of a digital product that users experience directly—and perceive, learn, and use—including its form, behavior, and content. Learnability, usability, usefulness, and aesthetic appeal are key factors in users' experience of a product. UX design takes a holistic, multidisciplinary approach to the design of user interfaces for digital products. It integrates interaction design, industrial design, information architecture, visual user interface design, instructional design, and user-centered design, ensuring coherence and consistency across all of these design dimensions.
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