Ideas, insights and inspirations.

Design for mobile first? No way. I was in denial. People couldn’t possibly enjoy trolling the Internet more on their smartphones than through their computers. Or could they? I thought about my own habits. Wake up. Check Facebook. Go about my morning routine. Get ready to leave the house. Facebook. Drive to work. Facebook. Go into work. Work for a little while. Eat a doughnut. Facebook… It’s a vicious cycle. But what does my millennial, forever-faithful relationship with Facebook have to do with the mobile-first web experience? The answer is everything. It’s a truth I wasn’t ready to accept, but then the usership numbers started rolling in on a landing page I designed recently. Ninety eight percent of users were visiting this particular landing page on their… you guessed it… mobile devices. And there it was: concrete, matter-of-fact, absolute data that proved my thinking was completely flawed. What now, huh? What does this mean? Thanks to Facebook, (Or, no thanks to Facebook, … Continue reading

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Take a look at this video. It was passed around our office recently.   We had a long discussion about it in one of our weekly staff meeting. If you were there, you could easily tell that it struck a nerve. I think that is because the core message in this video encapsulates what we try to do. In the video, Ole Scheeren, an architect, explains how he solved architecture problems differently. In each case, he could have built something standard to meet the need. He could have built just another big tower in the case of the Headquarter for China’s National Broadcaster. Or he could have built a group of towers to build 1,040. Both would have been sufficient and solved the problem at hand. But he looked deeper at the experiences and at the stories involved. He found that there were other problems to solve. Another tower wouldn’t become a pop icon figure and a piece of culture. … Continue reading

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I don’t like the term “UX Design” and this is why. Back in the day, when the Internet was still emerging and I was studying Design at Carnegie Mellon University, we didn’t call people “users”. We called them “people”. As designers we were taught to set our egos aside, and deeply consider the lives of those who would experience what we were designing. This is where I see an important distinction between what’s called “User Experience Design” and what I call “Human Experience Design”. In too many circumstances, UX focuses too narrowly on simply making the tool easier, instead of making lives easier. Here’s a real-world example of what I’m talking about: A person takes an online, professional certification course. At the end of the course they’re alerted that they’ve passed via email. The email takes them through a multi-step process to obtain their certification card. User Experience Designers work to make these steps easy to understand, and user friendly. … Continue reading

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It’s getting hard to remember life before social media – much more so since mobile devices enabled its wholesale invasion of every corner of our lives. One of the conundrums I’ve observed people encountering is that of how heavily committed one should be to keeping up with the goings-on of his or her social set. If I’m following 1000 people on Twitter, do I need to read all of their updates? If someone engages me constructively online, is there an obligation to reciprocate? Is it okay to go on hiatus for days or weeks and, if so, is there some etiquette I should follow? For my personal life, I chose a policy of obligation-free, occasional engagement. I am very unselfconscious about the regularity with which I read or post to social websites. A month away from Facebook is of equal value to me as flooding Twitter with nonsense, and I take and leave them interchangeably. But I’m an individual, I’m … Continue reading

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I have a friend named Devan. Like a lot of my friends (and a lot of your friends too), Devan has a cell phone. It’s an aging iPhone 3G. You can tell it apart from the iPhone 4 (and 4S) by its rounded edges and plastic case back. Devan’s had this phone for three years – a remarkably long time for a UX nerd to carry a phone, let alone when each successive year brings with it a flood of new features and capabilities, longer battery life, better screens, and updated styling. And the thing is, Devan’s phone looks like hell. He dropped it on the concrete sidewalk over a year ago, fracturing the LCD film beneath the glass in the process. The glass itself remains intact, but a good portion of the display is obscured by bleeding LCD crystals. Because of this, he can only see portions of any given app he’s using. When he gets a new mobile … Continue reading

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A few weeks ago, I wrote about the need for judicious consideration of whether to embark on an app-building journey or build a mobile-friendly website. A couple of days later, Buzz Andersen at Tumblr said something in an interview that rings true for most of us not profoundly drunk on the Kool Aid of the so-called app economy: Really since the introduction of the iPhone, but particularly after the advent iPad, this concept of “apps as content” has gained a lot of currency, and now every media company in the world feels compelled to be in the business of developing native software as a distribution channel. Despite the press’s tendency to portray this trend as futuristic, I actually think of it as a bit retrograde—particularly since we’ve actually been evolving an incredibly sophisticated medium for content presentation and distribution for over 15 years now: the web. – Buzz Andersen, Director of Mobile Development at Tumblr Good lord, is “retrograde” ever … Continue reading

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Once upon a time, a project (the making of, let’s call it, “The Product”) would go like this: Having finished discovery, the project lead, an information architect, and a content strategist would articulate the site’s purpose, structure, content strategy, and page requirements. This would take the form of a package of deliverables including spreadsheets, site maps, and wireframes – henceforth called “The Package”. Next, one or more visual designers – now invited into the project for the first time – would review the The Package, ask questions about The Package, reinvent parts of The Package, discard parts of The Package, and produce a proposed design based on the modified Package. Naturally, the designers’ renovations called for the re-entry of the information architect and content strategist, despite the fact that our process frequently made such re-entries inconvenient if not unfeasible. The project lead, information architect, content strategist, visual designer, and project manager would now enter into the cavernous stomach of a … Continue reading

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In my last post, I talked about how to use analytics to research your mobile website visitors so that you can make an informed decision about your future mobile projects. This time, we’ll look at how surveys and interviews can help you glean insights about your mobile presence (or lack of) from your site’s visitors. Why surveys and interviews? While site analytics gather quantitative behavioral data, online surveys and interviews can also collect more qualitative data, like opinions and self-reported preferences. Though self-reported anecdotes should always be taken with a grain of salt, survey and interview responses can be very helpful for prioritizing ideas, uncovering new insights, and giving a voice to your site’s visitors. Surveys Conducting an online survey is a great way to gain insights about your visitors because you can easily collect data and opinions from a large group of people. Surveys can be structured to gather both qualitative and quantitative data. For example, say that you … Continue reading

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By now, you’ve realized you need a mobile presence. Or maybe you already have one, or are trying to figure out whether it’s really working for you. Is it time for phase two? Your current state aside, chances are you’ve got mobile on the mind. But how do you know what your visitors want? It’s not rocket science. In fact, you have a lot of data and insights stockpiled already. Over the next few weeks, I’ll share some details with you about how to conduct your own DIY user research to better plan for your next mobile venture. This week, we’ll start by using website analytics. After that, we’ll explore interviews and surveys…you know, talking to real people. Why use analytics? Almost everyone has Google Analytics or some other web analytics package installed. Even if you haven’t been actively using it, the tool has. It’s been busy collecting valuable usage data. There are a few benefits to using web analytics … Continue reading

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It’s a scene as familiar as your drive to work. The conversation is marked mainly by questions. A 17-y.o. high school senior and his parents discuss college as they clear the family dinner table. What are his options? Why isn’t he interested in business? “Artists starve… how many times do I have to tell you?” Tonight’s conversation lasts longer than most: all of ten minutes before the son withdraws to his room. He knows his parents are right. He doesn’t want to let them down, but plenty of people manage to make a living in the arts. He just needs to figure out how. He reaches for his iPhone and launches Safari. In the Google search field, he types, “art and business dual degree,” and waits for answers to appear. And appear they do – an entire page of options. Schools he’s heard of, schools he hasn’t. Choices. Possibilities. Potential. He closes Safari, swipes twice, taps the App Store icon, … Continue reading

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