August 2007 Issue
An Audience of One: Creating Products for Very Small Workgroups
Published: August 20, 2007
As creators of digital user experiences, we must transform complex workflows and tasks into useful applications. Experts have written much about the UX design process as it applies to broad audiences, industry-specific vertical markets, and large corporate user groups. However, as our evolving information economy continues to encourage greater and greater specialization of job roles, there is an increased need for customized applications—digital systems that only a select few people will ever use.
It’s now not only possible, but also economically feasible to produce customized digital products for smaller audiences. There are many UX practitioners—especially those within IT departments at small companies and government entities—who build applications for very small teams—even for audiences of one. And though the UX design process for the micro team or single user has many similarities to designing for larger user groups, it also has its own unique challenges. There might be a specific person or team your user interface must satisfy rather than a persona or user profile. So, no longer is your audience an abstraction, but a real person or team you must get to know and understand so well you can create a usable, elegant digital experience just for that audience of one.
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Category: Columns
Conference Review: UPA 2007: Part I
Published: August 20, 2007
The Usability Professionals’ Association
(UPA) held its UPA 2007 conference at the Hilton Hotel in Austin, Texas, on June 11–15, 2007. This conference has a lot to offer, with a blend of
- the inspirational—keynotes and other invited speakers
- the didactic—tutorials, presentations, and peer-reviewed papers
- the participatory—workshops, idea markets, and special interest groups (SIGs)
- the social—cocktail receptions, networking breaks, lunches, and evening fun
This year’s theme focused on Patterns and how they serve as “blueprints for usability.” Conference co-chair, Carol Smith (shown in Figure 1), articulated the pertinence of this theme. “As usability professionals, our ability to observe users and to discover their patterns of interaction is integral to our work. By defining these patterns, we can then leverage that knowledge to create usable interfaces that are familiar and useful to our users.”
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Category: Reviews
Conference Review: UPA 2007: Part II
Published: August 20, 2007
Wednesday: Designing Designing Interfaces: How Not To Write A Pattern Catalog
Presenter: Jenifer Tidwell
Jenifer Tidwell, author of Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design, shared her motivations and the lessons she learned as she wrote her book.
One of the few conference sessions that actually related to patterns, this session promised to be interesting. Given everyone’s varying definitions and usage of patterns, I think it would have been helpful if Jenifer had started off this session with a clear definition of what a pattern is and how designers can use a pattern catalog. Afterward, when I spoke with attendees, I found not everyone was on quite the same page with the speaker when her talk began. Well into the session, Jenifer finally did define what she means by a pattern.
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Category: Reviews
Rediscovering Communication
Published: August 6, 2007
Blogs, wikis, emails, Web sites, virtual worlds, text messages—oh, my. Today we have more ways of communicating than ever. The challenge? If businesses aren’t careful, what they’re trying to say—and what their customers are trying to say—can get lost in the complexity. Think about your experiences as a customer. How many times have you received an email message that was meaningless to you, because its images didn’t download—or perhaps because it offered a message that wasn’t relevant to your life? How often have you come across a customer service page on a beautiful Web site, only to find its information unhelpful—or even contradictory to what the company’s brochure says? Have you ever called an interactive voice response system, or IVR system—aka those darn phone menus—that wasn’t at least a little irritating? All the technology in the world can’t replace the nitty-gritty job of communication.
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Category: Columns
Home Page Design
Published: August 6, 2007
It is time to review a company home page design. There are a number of stakeholders involved in home page design, and each of them wants a piece of the home page real estate. Are there questions you can ask before approaching home page design that can move it beyond the influence of specific stakeholders in the company toward a common vision? Are there tips to consider when designing a home page? This is article will help you better understand how to approach home page design.
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Category: Features