Mobile First Design: Don’t Make This Mistake
On September 12, our next event, The Mobile UX Summit, is coming to your virtual office! We’ve askedJosh Clark, Brad Frost, Theresa Neil, Greg Nudelman, Jason CranfordTeague, and Mike Fisher for 27 tips and 2 case studies on designing mobile experiences. You’ll walk away with new mobile UX insight and skills, get some questions answered—and the session recordings are included with your registration.
This week we asked Theresa Neil about the most important mistake to avoid in mobile design strategy:
Theresa Neil: There is actually a clinical term for a harmful practice I see occurring in the mobile space; it’s called the Hipster Designer Disorder. This affliction is characterized by an intense need to create novel designs just to be different.
It can be addressed by familiarizing oneself with existing design patterns and usability best practices.
All joking aside, this problem costs companies time and money in creating custom controls and interfaces that are frequently confusing to their users.
Sign up now to reserve your virtual seat at our Mobile UX Summit on September 12!
Mobile Typography: Don’t Make This Mistake
On September 12, we’re putting on our next event (a virtual one)—The Mobile UX Summit. We’ve hit up Josh Clark, Brad Frost, Theresa Neil, Greg Nudelman, Jason CranfordTeague, and Mike Fisher for 27 tips and 2 case studies on designing mobile experiences. You’ll walk away with new mobile UX insight and skills, get some questions answered—and the session recordings are included with your registration.
This week we asked Jason CranfordTeague about the most important mistake to avoid with mobile typography:
Don’t think that you can simply squeeze the desktop/laptop screen type into a smaller area. Working with responsive typography is more than just proportionally scaling text up or down for the screen; you’ve also got to consider its context.
For example, it’s common to use HTML links for navigation to articles (e.g., “Read More”). In most cases these need to be scaled up or converted into more finger friendly buttons for a mobile device. It’s so frustrating, though, when even some “responsive” web sites make me keep stabbing my finger at a tiny navigation link until I finally hit its contact area.
Instead of just resizing text, remember to consider how the text will actually be read or used. Links should be easily clickable, and headers may need to scale down more than body copy to prevent very short lines of text. I’ll give you some tips on how to do this at The Mobile UX Summit.
Sign up now to reserve your virtual seat at our Mobile UX Summit on September 12!
Why We Fail: now on sale
Why did Twitter succeed while Pownce plotzed? Why has “to Plaxo” become a verb? And Zune: great product, but are you using one right now?
More and more, products succeed because not because they provide better designs or functionality, but because their overall experiences are superior to their competitors’. Victor Lombardi’s book, Why We Fail: Learning from Experience Design Failures, which debuted just hours ago, is your field guide to failure. It’s packed with case studies and lessons that will help you, as Don Norman suggests in his foreword, “embrace failure to learn from failure” and “learn from failure to avoid failure”.
Pick up your copy of Why We Fail direct from Rosenfeld Media today—in paperback and three DRM-free digital formats (PDF, MOBI, and ePUB). It’s also available from Amazon and O’Reilly.
UX events for September and October
We’re continuing two great trends that we started back in the spring*.
First, we had such a fantastic time putting on a one-day virtual conference that we’re doing it again: on September 12, we’ve lined up Josh Clark, Brad Frost, Theresa Neil, Greg Nudelman, Jason CranfordTeague, and Mike Fisher to share their practical tips and case studies at our Mobile UX Summit. Co-produced with our friends at Environments for Humans, it’s a great way for individuals and teams to boost their mobile UX skills without traveling—and the recordings are included in the ticket price!
And if you’re in or near Mountain View on October 15 and 16, we’re reprising our Responsive Design Studio. This two-day deep dive is co-taught by a dream team of author/experts: content strategist Sara Wachter-Boettcher, designer Jason CranfordTeague, and developer Aaron Gustafson. Interdisciplinary by design, it’s ideal for teams; early registration deadline is September 21. Please register now; space is limited to 50 attendees.
* Northern Hemisphere spring, to be precise.
Now on sale: The User Experience Team of One
For years, Leah Buley has been guiding and inspiring people new to user experience at conferences around the world with her “UX Team of One” workshop. Her content and approach are so compelling that many have agitated to have it available as a book.
Well, today it is!
We’re grateful to have had the opportunity to work with Leah on publishing The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide. It offers a comprehensive and incredibly useful overview of the field that will obviously be a boon to solo practitioners. But even experienced practitioners and teams will find the book’s broad framing of the field a great help.
And like all our books, The User Experience Team of One is available in paperback and three DRM-free ebook formats (PDF, ePUB, and MOBI).
Enjoy!
Get 50% off Mental Models by Indi Young today only!
Get Indi Young‘s ebook, Mental Models, for 50% off! Use discount code WACKY to get your digital copy in our store today. The sale ends at midnight ET tonight so act fast!
We interviewed Indi recently to find out what she learned from writing Mental Models. Here’s what she had to say:
RM: What’s one thing you wish you knew about mental models before you started writing about it?
Indi Young: I wish I knew not to refer to the bits I get from the interviews as “tasks”. “Tasks” is a word with way too much history. People trying the method, having read only that word and not all my explanation, go off down the path of capturing the process, rather than the inner thoughts and reactions. I am so sorry I used “tasks”. I often have to back teams out of this path. They have captured how, not why. Yes, it’s true that the models contain things that people do, but those are not laid out as discrete steps in a process so much as lumped together with the reasons why they are doing them, the inner frustration they might be feeling, the underlying motivations for saying something a certain way, the pride they have over an accomplishment or team, the fears that guide how they decide what to do, the workarounds they have concocted to make the best of the situation, etc.
RM: Thanks, Indi!
There’s still time to get your 50% off digital copy of Indi’s book, Mental Models. Enter discount code “WACKY” at checkout before midnight ET tonight!
Get 50% off Web Form Design by Luke Wroblewski today only!
Get Luke Wroblewski’s ebook, Web Form Design, for 50% off! Use discount code WACKY to get your digital copy in our store today. The sale ends at midnight ET tonight so act fast!
We interviewed Luke recently to find out his secrets to staying ahead of UX trends. Here’s what he had to say:
Rosenfeld Media: You seem to be ahead of the rest of us when it comes to figuring out what’s going to be important in the field. Your books, like Web Form Design, are great examples of that. What’s your secret? How do you figure it out?
Luke Wroblewski: Being late to things. In all seriousness, I don’t think the trick is being early. Its being there at the right time. For example, it was no secret that mobile was going to be huge. In fact, for many years it was projected to be the “next big thing in 3 to 5 years,” like many other technologies or trends we talk about today. But if you got there too early you were alone.
I’m usually not the first one to uncover new things, but I think I’ve been lucky with getting there at a time when lots of other people were also trying to figure stuff out—when there’s lots of questions that need answering. I love to learn and explore new things so I feel good in that kind of environment. I also tend to get a handle on things by writing them out in order to understand them. So I do that a lot and share what I learn.
As a result, I uncover things that are of interest to people wrestling with the same questions. As the number of people encountering these questions increases, so does interest in the topic. And maybe that’s why it feels like I’m “ahead.” I certainly don’t feel that way on most days!
RM: What do you think the next “big thing” will be in the UX field?
LW: I hear lots of people wrestling with delivering great experiences to a wide range of devices: laptops, desktops, tablets, phones, and everything in between. All these things are connected to the network so if you are making digital applications or publishing digital information—they’re your problem. And there are lots of interesting, unanswered questions when it comes to designing and developing for this multi-device Web.
But it seems like this is just the start. TVs, watches, glasses, cars, wearables, and much more just extend this problem. Once you have more than one of these devices, questions about how they can work together become really important as well. These are the areas I’m most interested in these days. No guarantees that they’ll be the next “big thing” but there is a lot of uncertainty out there about how to tackle these problems. Which, to me, is really exciting.
RM: Thanks, Luke!
There’s still time to get your 50% off digital copy of Luke’s book, Web Form Design. Enter discount code “WACKY” at checkout before midnight ET tonight!
Interview with Peter Jones, Part I
Peter Jones‘s new book, Design for Care: Innovating Healthcare Experience, is on sale now! Use discount code RMBLOG for 20% off the original price in our store.
We sat down with Peter to ask him a few questions about healthcare and the design process. Here’s what he had to say:
Rosenfeld Media: What’s the book about in a nutshell?
Peter Jones: Design for Care is the book I would have wanted when starting in this area almost 10 years ago. It deals with the complex intersection between healthcare and the services of design. The book leans heavily toward what designers need to know about healthcare, which is the harder to learn stuff than design method. So I focus on three major design approaches. I deal with information use but not so much informatics, which has its own deep literature. My approach to service design is a “care systems” approach, which is needed in clinical practice design. And I focus on system design of care organizations and processes (healthcare institutions are called that for a reason, they are very structured).
I designed it as a guidebook for design professionals to navigate across the conflicting and confusing perspectives, methods, and current issues in healthcare services. While it’s not truly comprehensive—health is a huge field—it covers more ground than any prior book. The other audience is healthcare professionals. They have to learn about the practices, tools, and validity of design and design research before they will fully sponsor and work with us as members of the care team. So I’ve sacrificed emerging technology and more risky design practices to focus more on fundamental cases to which I had direct access. There’s a lot of creativity in the design research methods, where I’ve selected some unique but highly validated tools for sharing with these audiences.
Are you advocating a design process for healthcare, or is there a different meaning to care?
PJ: The book is not a single design process, it’s a series of frames that fit each of the sectors I chose. Each frame has an application, a bit of theory and a central case study I selected three broad sectors—consumer, clinical practice, and institutional – and these have their own slices that follow a patient’s journey through the system.
Technology, as many believe, does not “drive” healthcare practice. At the very heart of things, “care” drives healthcare, and that’s the ultimate focus of design work. Making sure care happens, to serve patients, families, communities and the caregivers. Healthcare is a human system all the way through, full of the heroics and messiness of taking care of people. In my view, the humanity of practice explains why the field seems so far behind. Doctors, nurses, staff, everyone on the front lines are working directly with and on patients and their stakeholders. Technology can always be worked around, mediated, fixed over time. Nobody ever held up care because an EMR wasn’t working right. So the “user demand” for design excellence is not a big driver, yet. Better usability, information workflow, and service flow will save lives—but it’s not an immediate save. Care delivery comes first.
RM: Where is the “Care” in Design for Care?
PJ: I found that every one of my stories and chapters had a different take on the meaning of care in its context. In a technical sense, it means the delivery of clinical services by professionals treating a patient’s health concerns. In a social sense, care is the meaning of human concern for another’s well being. In the design sense, I see our purpose essentially in helping caregivers innovate. Helping care happen, designing for the experience of the one being cared for. To me that not only includes what we call patient experience, it means whole families and communities and circles of care. And to a great extent that means making the work of caregiving and care practice more humane, safe and engaging. Clinicians to a great job of care while coping with constant workarounds. Rather than just fixing the sources of problems (such as wait times), the big design contribution will be to lead innovation for new integrations of technology and workflow practices.
With the strong practices of empathic design now, I think design practice has a stake in this practice. But to earn our rights, design must practice in the field, practitioners should be dedicated to healthcare as other care professionals are. Otherwise we’ll just be hired guns creating efficiencies.
Our society and institutors are very ambivalent about actual caring. We give lip service to “being caring” but its not a strong North American value. Consider that most caregivers—family members—are not socially valued, are never paid. Yes, doctors are among the highest paid professionals, but it’s due to risk and technical proficiency, not care. The real clinical carers are nurses, and they have always fought for equality. There’s been a turn in social philosophy recently that should help make a case for designing as care professionals. Riane Eisler writes about the caring economy in the Real Wealth of Nations, and advocates a paradigm shift toward a “caring economics” that treasures the real value of human relationships, communities and national well-being. In the book I cite Milton Mayeroff whose view is both simple and profound, where care is a strongly local, felt understanding that actively seeks to help another person grow. I believe designers can fulfill that role with others in “care delivery” and health services. We can help others to grow and if not always help the healing process, we can design better artifacts, systems and places that provide care safely, attentively, and universally. We need to be working with clinical teams and “caring providers,” but yes, designers can help bring the inherent care values in healthcare to the center, making them understood, within our services and clinics.
RM: Thanks, Peter!
Stay tuned for Part II of Peter’s interview next week! Pick up a copy of his new book, Design for Care: Innovating Healthcare Experience, and use discount code RMBLOG for 20% off!
A short interview with Whitney Quesenbery and 50% off her book today only!
Wacky Wednesdays are here for the Summer! This week we’re featuring Storytelling for User Experience by Whitney Quesenbery and Kevin Brooks.
We had a quick chat with Whitney about personas and easy mistakes to avoid in storytelling. Read on for more and use the discount code WACKY to get 50% off ebook versions of Storytelling! This sale only lasts until 11:59pm ET tonight!
Rosenfeld Media: How do personas improve the user experience of a product?
Whitney Quesenbery: For all the time in a project when you are not working directly with real users, personas stand in for them. They express what you know about the audience and keep those real users in mind as you make the thousands of decisions (large and small) that go into a new product.
Personas include a lot of data about demographics, behavior, and opinion. But what personas do better than a lot of charts and graphs is communicate imagery, emotions, context, and motivation. They help you remember the stories you heard, and let you tell new stories that explore how the personas will react to your new ideas.
RM: What’s a common mistake people make when it comes to personas and storytelling?
WQ: Not using them effectively. Too often, UX teams go to a lot of work to create personas, and then do little or nothing to put them to work. They make a few posters, run a presentation, and then put them aside.
Personas should be part of your product team. They are the way you continue to think about the audience and bring the UX research into the design process. Everyone on the team should know them by name, and be able to think about what each persona needs, wants, dislikes. This means that they need to get to know the personas properly—have a chance to ask them questions, learn what makes them crazy about the way things are now, and hear what new ideas will make them excited. Can you look at a sketch or prototype and have a good idea what they will do first and how they will react?
Two dangers to watch out for:
- Do all the personas start to sound the same? If they don’t represent different perspectives, attitudes, or contexts, then they don’t let you explore all the ways real people will experience your product.
- Do stories about the persona end too easily? Do they jump right from a problem to fully embracing your new app? Maybe you are telling stories for the users you hope to have, instead of the ones that are really out there.
RM: Thanks, Whitney!
Wacky Wednesdays Are Back!
It’s summertime again in the Northern Hemisphere and our Wacky Wednesdays are back in action!
From 12am ET tonight to 11:59pm ET tomorrow, you can use the discount code WACKY for 50% off a digital copy of one of our Rosenfeld Media books.
THIS WEEK’S SALE:
Storytelling for User Experience by Whitney Quesenbery and Kevin Brooks.
If you…
Need to share research and design insights in a compelling and effective way
Struggle to communicate the meaning of a large body of data in a way that everyone just “gets”
Want to explore a new, innovative idea, and imagine its future
… this book can help you, by showing you how and when to choose, create and use stories.
Enter the code WACKY when you checkout on our books page for 50% off a digital copy of Storytelling for User Experience!
