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New on UXmatters: May 22, 2017
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A column by Janet M. Six
In this edition of Ask UXmatters, our expert panel considers some different approaches to establishing the budget for a UX team within a large organization. In particular, we consider the pros and cons of using a ratio model for funding User Experience and how to define a UX budget as a percentage of the research and development (R&D) budget.
In my monthly column, Ask UXmatters, experts answer our readers’ questions about user experience matters. To read their answers to your question in an upcoming edition of Ask UXmatters, just send your question to: ask.uxmatters@uxmatters.com. Read More
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By Corinne Wayshak
Setting up a UX practice inside any organization—whether small or large—can be a challenge. As a UX leader, to ensure you keep the highest-performing individual contributors on your team, you should make sure they have a clear understanding of what they must do to expand their careers within your organization. While leaders often have a clear growth path inside a company, it is often less clear how individual contributors can nurture their professional career.
For example, in some companies, the only way to advance from an interaction designer, visual designer, UX researcher, or other individual-contributor discipline is to become a manager. But, for individual contributors whose talents are less as people managers and more as superstars in their discipline, who love what they’re doing, and who want to continue to be the best at what they do, their way forward is unclear. Read More
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Guiding Practices for Making Meaningful Work
By Daniel Szuc and Josephine Wong
Recently, a group of about 30 technologists invited us to run a two-day client training workshop to teach them some best practices for making meaningful work and help them to kick start and sustain a UX practice on their projects. These technologists had limited exposure to User Experience or practice with design tools. In other words, we needed to help them get excited about the topic, understand what it means for them, and give them some capabilities that would let them take at least some of this program forward—even after only two days of training together.
Facilitating workshops is always a nice challenge—especially with a new group of participants—because you must generally be well versed in the topic, study new practices, and prepare exercises to help participants understand and embody their learnings, using the prescribed tools. For us, it’s also really important that the participants have a good time during the workshop—as they step outside their own day-to-day work routines and job functions—and that we can provide at least a touch of inspiration. Our intent is to get participants to express themselves and open up conversations on how they can mix tools and processes in various ways to help them understand what users need and, most importantly, gain clarity on requirements as a path to better design. Read More
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By Alesha Arp
The intent of a guideline, by definition, is to help determine a course of action or provide advice on how to do something. A guideline can be a recommendation, suggestion, general rule, or principle. Guidelines can inform design, inspire, help bring about consensus, or aid in decision making.
You can translate your UX research findings and understanding of users’ needs into design guidelines that apply to your design efforts. However, the challenge is often writing guidelines that are both inspirational and actionable.
Recently, my boss asked me to take over design strategy for an architectural design project from a colleague who was leaving the firm for an opportunity closer to her home. My colleague had conducted UX research and had done a great job of documenting her findings. I was to step in and pick up where she had left off. She had already developed a set of design guidelines for the project. I came onto the project at the point when we were to share those guidelines with the architects who would be designing the building. These design guidelines were inspirational in their language, and I wanted to understand what they meant to the project team members. Read More
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By Jessica Enders
This is an excerpt from Chapter 5 of Jessica Enders’s new book Designing UX: Forms. 2016 SitePoint.
Chapter 5: Flow
Paper forms are static. Immobile, unresponsive, fixed. Forms come alive when they’re on the Web: questions can appear or hide, errors can be flagged and corrected, and the experience can be tailored to users and their needs.
In this chapter, we’ll see how to best design all these user interactions and more. Because we want the total user experience to feel smooth and painless—like gliding down a river—we’ll call this aspect of form design flow. 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.
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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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