Just What is a UX Manager?
Earlier this week, I wrote quick blog post, calling out seven lessons for UX managers from this year’s MX conference. Then on Twitter, Livia Labate, who leads the experience design practice for Marriott International asked, “Dear @AdaptivePath, what is a UX Manager?” Here’s my not-so-twitter-length response: UX managers come with all sorts of fancy-pants titles. This isn't about titles. This is about responsibilities. Someone who manages user experience has stuck their neck out and said they'll deliver business outcomes through improving the experience that customers have with a product or service. That means you believe UX is a force that can not only improve people's experiences but that it can also drive business. Why I <3 UX Managers Okay, let it be said that I'm biased. I've spent the past six years trying to get to know as many of you as I can, either speaking at or chairing Adaptive Path's Managing Experience conference. What I've learned is that this is an emerging discipline.
Principles of User Interface Design
Clarity is job #1 Clarity is the first and most important job of any interface. To be effective using an interface you've designed, people must be able to recognize what it is, care about why they would use it, understand what the interface is helping them interact with, predict what will happen when they use it, and then successfully interact with it. While there is room for mystery and delayed gratification in interfaces, there is no room for confusion. Clarity inspires confidence and leads to further use. One hundred clear screens is preferable to a single cluttered one. Interfaces exist to enable interaction Interfaces exist to enable interaction between humans and our world.
Digital Scarcity | Tuhin Kumar
"2 Billion Likes per day on Facebook. 400 Million Tweets per day on Twitter. 50 Million likes per day on Instagram." We live, for most part, a life that is eerily being encroached by the digital. Every day we find a part of the analog being replaced by the digital. An app to replace a board game, a website to answer a question instead of asking a friend, an app to know what's happening instead of looking around and talking. As time goes by, digital, which is even today seen as a secondary dimension, will replace physical as the primary dimension in which we spend our time. I am not suggesting it as necessarily negative, merely pointing it out. You might answer back, one can like something or fav it or share it and that is an intent of telling others, this is GOOD. But it is not just WE, as the users of these systems and tools, who are to be blamed for this state of affairs. Think about that for a second. What if you could only have 50 friends on a service? See. Recommended Reading:
Why Responsive Design is Not Built for the User
Jeff Hasen is CMO of Hipcricket, a mobile marketing and advertising company. Marketers and designers have been told repeatedly of the benefits of responsive design. I, however, believe these benefits are mostly myths, since the theory hasn’t lived up to all that it’s promised. Some claim that responsive design automatically fits all devices: It is a simple design build that extends across many browsers and devices. Even if responsive design promises one build to start, a designer still must test it on each device and on every generation. If you create a desktop site via responsive design, smartphones still must download the entire site design, not just the contents for the mobile version. Perhaps my biggest problem with responsive design is that it doesn’t consider the user experience by remaining focused on the most importance user concern: content. Responsive design is only a piece of the puzzle, and certainly not the comprehensive solution that some marketers believe it is.
Reframing “UX Design” : peterme.com
I was asked to speak at UX Week 2012, and figured I’d turn my blog post “User experience is strategy, not design” into a talk, but a funny thing happened along the way. I realized that, yes, UX is design, but not design as we’ve been thinking of it. And by reframing “UX design” as a profession, we can set it up to uniquely address increasingly prevalent business needs. Before tackling the profession, we need to agree on just what “UX design” is. I have not come across a better definition than Jesse’s, which he originally shared in 2009: Experience design is the design of anything, independent of medium, or across media, with human experience as an explicit outcome, and human engagement as an explicit goal. Jesse went on to define human engagement across four factors — perception, action, cognition, and emotion, and then showed how design contributes to this engagement: Similarly, Dan Saffer attempted to diagram the scope of user experience design: These both present very broad mandates.
The Rise of Cross-Channel UX Design
By Tyler Tate Published: October 17, 2011 “The message is now abstracted from the medium, and the book is a channel-independent experience—whether held in its physical form, heard as the spoken word, or read on an eReader, mobile phone, or desktop computer.” A few Saturdays ago, I was walking around Greenwich in southeast London when I decided to peruse the local bookshop. Drawn to a display titled “Utopias and Dystopias,” I noticed the book A Brave New World sitting beside George Orwell’s 1984, which I had read and remembered enjoying. Figure 1—Amazon Kindle eReader and Kindle applications Books, newspapers, and magazines have not only gone digital, they’ve gone ubiquitous, contextual, and formless. The invention of the printing press transformed the physical object that is a book from the output of human transcription to that of mass production, ushering in the era of information as a physical object. A Sign of What’s to Come Retail Travel Banking Cross-Discipline Collaboration References
