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!
So You Want to Write a UX Book
We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t think UX was a dynamic field, with enough subject matter to fill many books. Maybe you want to write one of those books yourself, but you’re daunted by the prospect. Understandable; a book is a formidable undertaking, especially on top of a full-time job, family, and other obligations. It also might just be the best thing you’ve ever done. Ready to take the leap? Some veteran RM authors offer tips that may help see you through the process and bring your book to its your ship date.
Write something every day (or nearly)
And keep track of your progress. While writing UX Team of One, Leah Buley jotted down each day’s work onto a big flip-chart calendar she kept in the kitchen. “I could look back and see when there were big chunks of time when I’d been writing diligently or when I’d simply been writing nothing. Each was motivating in its own way.” Sometimes she wrote on her CalTrain commute, happy to arrive at the office with the day’s writing already done.
Daily writing ignites momentum, and that, says Kevin Cheng, is “the only thing that matters.” Dabbling once a week, “it takes hours to get back into the swing,” says Cheng, author of See What I Mean. “When I started working daily, I could find myself with ten minutes before a bus came and still make noticeable progress, because the entire book’s status was in my head.” Once he got into a regular groove, the “runner’s high” kicked in and made it easier to keep going.
Cloister yourself
To throw down on Why We Fail, Victor Lombardi spent a week in a beach house off-season. “That allowed me to escape all other home and work distractions, and to research and write three chapters in that time,” he says.
Cloistering also was huge for Cheng. He finished his first draft in a cabin in the redwood forests of northern California, where he stowed away his phone and disabled all time-telling devices so he wouldn’t watch the clock. “I found that I was able to enter flow almost immediately,” he wrote in a blog post about the experience. “I got a lot more done in a shorter period of time than I normally would have.”
Don’t cloister yourself
What’s that? You don’t have the time or wherewithal to hunker down in a remote cabin? Not to worry; plenty of RM authors penned their books in crowded, noisy environs. Andy Polaine, who lives in Germany, worked on Service Design on long train journeys to and from Switzerland. “Personally, I work better in crowded spaces—trains, cafés—than I do in silence,” he says. “In solitary silence, every tiny thing is a distraction. In crowded places, my writing is the distraction.”
While cloistering may work for the heavy lifting of a first draft or cranking out copy for a deadline, Peter Jones finds it too confining for reviewing and revising. “A secluded office can lead to over-focus, making me hypercritical, and I end up wordsmithing meaning to death.” But he cautions, “Be careful following my advice; Design for Care took forever to write.”
Make It So co-author Nathan Shedroff finds cloistering helpful for certain tasks of book production, such as sorting research material, creating outlines, and indexing. But at other phases, solitude is counterproductive. “I find that writing is, at times, so confounding that being cloistered actually makes me less focused and more of a procrastinator,” he says.
If you’re collaborating with others, of course, some human contact will be necessary. The authors of Service Design—Polaine, Ben Reason, and Lavrans Løvlie—live in three different countries. Skype, Basecamp, Dropbox, and other tools helped immensely, but about halfway through, says Polaine, “we really needed a couple of days in a room together to nail the re-structuring. There’s nothing like having stuff pinned up on the wall.”
You won’t get everything in
You have a ton of material, yet UX changes all the time. How do you cover everything in such a way that it won’t be old news by the time the book’s published?
You probably can’t. Accepting that fact helped Sara Wachter-Boettcher move forward with Content Everywhere. “If I stick to a limited scope and do it well, my book will inspire further books and articles that tackle the topics I didn’t get to, or that dive deep into something I barely skimmed,” she says. “Getting stuck on the idea that you have to be exhaustive about your topic is a failing proposition: You will never finish that way.” If it just kills you to leave out certain stuff, well, blogs are lovely for that sort of thing, aren’t they?
Go analog
Ditching the laptop and writing on paper helped Buley drop “a work-y/email-y voice” and tap into “a different voice that was more intimate and conversational, which is the voice that I really want to share with readers.” She wrote her entire book on paper, then used dictation software to get it into digital form. “Probably not the most efficient method in the world, but it worked for me.”
Avail yourself of others.
Make It So co-author Chris Noessel says presenting material at conferences while he and Shedroff were writing the book “put pressure on us to find out what works, what doesn’t work, and get suggestions on improvements.” Other authors echoed this sentiment. Don’t be afraid to ask for input, they say; most people will be glad to offer some.
But before anything, you gotta produce some words. Other people can help with this too. Joining a “Shut Up and Write” meetup in San Francisco helped Aga Bojko plow ahead on Eye Tracking the User Experience. Her favorite sessions are weekend marathons held in a coffee shop, during which members write for ninety-minute sprints—no talking, no phones—broken up by thirty-minute breaks for eating, drinking, and socializing. People in her group work on everything from screenplays to poetry to dissertations. “The main idea is to get together and, thanks to peer pressure and encouragement, get a lot done,” says Bojko. “And we do get a lot done!”
A support system of trusted friends or colleagues, says Wachter-Boettcher, can help battle “the soul-sucking beast” of impostor syndrome: I’m not smart enough to do this. Everyone will laugh at this. “These are normal feelings but remember that they don’t reflect reality,” she says. And don’t be shy about drawing the line on outside input. Says Noessel: “Instruct your friends to not ask how the book is going. It’s the polite thing to do.”
And some other stuff.
Shedroff: “Take long flights and don’t watch the movie.”
Cheng: “Sometimes, momentum can be lost on the other end (after the book is finished) because the editors or other support people are busy with their schedules or other books. It’s as much up to you to keep the momentum going and not let that be an excuse for you to go, ‘Well, I haven’t heard from them. …”
Noessel: “It will take longer than you think.” “You have to build authority in the text, not presume it.” “The book will (should?) change the way you think. This is awesome.”
Buley: “Some people have what they want to say in their head at the beginning, and some people figure out what they want to say through the process of writing. I’m in the second camp. Once I realized that … I didn’t feel so bogged down by imposter syndrome or the slow guilties.” Also: “Get pregnant! A due date makes for a very formidable deadline.”
Wachter-Boettcher: “Write your heart out, do your damnedest, and be rigorous. But don’t drag your feet. After all, anyone can write. Authors ship.”
A Short Interview With Dirk Knemeyer
Dirk Knemeyer is the founder and CEO of Facio, Inc., a software start-up dedicated to dramatically improving understanding of the self and one another. He offers courses on Applied Empathy Frameworks, Starting Up Software and the Catalyst Method.
We got to sit down and talk with Dirk about Applied Empathy and product development. Here’s what he had to say:
Rosenfeld Media: How does the Applied Empathy Framework help in product development?
Dirk Knemeyer: The reason why Apple, in digital products, and precious few companies overall, bring such wonderfully designed products to market is that they have a largely instinctive understanding of the sweet spot between what the market needs from a features perspective, what people want from an aesthetic perspective, and what the proper style is to stand up and above the rest of the market.
For those few companies, that’s fantastic. But for the rest of us, we can either trail in their wake or try and do something about it.
The reason that Apple’s products are so popular and their customers so loyal is because they connect with users on a deeper level. Rather than being devices to complete a task, or objects of style, the truly exceptional products intertwine with key aspects of an individual’s identity. They make a meaningful difference in one or more of our physical, emotional and intellectual selves.
The Applied Empathy Framework provides a road map so the rest of us mere mortals can intentionally plan and execute to create breakthrough products that succeed on the most powerful levels of connecting with passionate customers.
RM: As you’ve investigated the Catalyst method, which increases employee engagement, what’s one thing that’s really surprised you?
DK: Gosh, it’s so many little things. I’ll tell you the one thing that I think is most important: being considerate of each person and treating them uniquely based on who they authentically are. That might sound simple or common sense on the surface, but it most certainly isn’t. As just one example—some people like to meet formally in a private space; other people like to meet casually in a more open space. Most managers engage their employees in the way that is most comfortable for them, the manager. This creates real cultural issues where people who are more “alike” to the manager in this way are most successful, while those who are the most different are statistically far more likely to struggle. And again, this is only one example.
We’ve identified more than a dozen key markers between co-workers and/or managers and employees that have a huge impact on job satisfaction and productivity, just based on the intersection of different personality traits.
With Catalyst we help people understand their own and others’ personality specifics and begin to more intentionally engage with one another. It’s a fantastic thing to see in action. Only 31 percent of employees in the U.S. today are engaged with their jobs, and—based on a $60,000 annual salary—engaged workers create about $28,000 bottom line impact for their employers each year. It is not rocket science to realize the remarkable importance of addressing this in a long-term and organization-wide way. That’s what we’re doing.
5 books for the price of 4
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If you have four books in your Rosenfeld Media shopping cart, you can add one more… free! No discount code necessary—just add the fifth book (in the same format—paperback or digital) and our cart will automatically figure out not to charge you extra. (If you’d rather use a discount code, please do, but you can’t do both.) It’s that simple.
No, there are no strings attached. We just like you. And we want to you to enjoy more Rosenfeld Media books.
Now on sale: “Design for Care: Innovating Healthcare Experience”
Design for Care: Innovating Healthcare Experience—which we proudly launched this morning—is a very different kind of Rosenfeld Media book. It’s our first book focused on a specific industry—healthcare, of course. It’s also something of a service design book and a design strategy book to boot.
It takes a visionary like Peter Jones, on the faculty at OCAD, to thread such a needle. The result is a book with depth that we hope will serve as a model for other “vertical” books. After all, as the design field becomes increasingly recognized as strategically important, we’ll need to contextualize its value for a variety of wicked problems—ones that are often associated with particular industries.
We hope you enjoy Design for Care!
Interview with UX Expert Steve Krug
We’re thrilled to have Steve Krug speaking at our upcoming conference, 31 Awesomely Practical UX Tips!
Register yourself—or your team—for the May 29th day-long (10am-5pm ET) virtual conference. You’ll learn from and interact with UX experts you know and respect: Steve Krug, Luke Wroblewski, Susan Weinschenk, Aarron Walter, Jeffrey Eisenberg, and Whitney Quesenbery.
This week we pick Steve’s brain about UX tactics and DIY Usability. Here’s what he had to say:
Rosenfeld Media: You’ve always been a big proponent of DIY Usability, i.e. the fact that it’s not rocket science so anyone should be able to do it. We understand anyone can do it, but does that mean they can do it well?
Steve Krug: Actually, my trademarked slogan is “It’s not rocket surgery,”™ but why quibble? You’re right: it does mean I believe that most people—with a little instruction—can do much of what I do as a usability consultant. They can’t do it as well as I can—hopefully—because I’ve been doing it for 25 years, but a lot of it is just applying common sense.
And that’s particularly true for running some basic usability tests. Someone with experience–especially a professional–can probably do a better job than an amateur. But can an amateur do it well? In my experience, almost anyone can do at least a halfway decent job right away. After all, it mostly consists of just giving someone a task (or tasks) to do using whatever you’re building, and then watching them while keeping them thinking aloud.
In fact, the hardest part for beginners is biting their tongue and resisting the impulse to help, to comment, and to ask leading questions.
RM: But does this mean they can do it well enough to make it worthwhile?
SK: I think so, for a few reasons.
First, someone beginning to do DIY testing probably hasn’t been doing any testing before, and some testing is infinitely better than none.
Second, if they haven’t been doing any testing, then there are probably huge usability problems just waiting to be found. So even if the facilitation is less than perfect, the participant is still going to run into the worst problems and the observers are going to see them.
And finally, I’ve been asking people for years to send me examples of cases where testing by amateurs made a product worse. And after all this time, I haven’t had anyone send me a convincing example. In fact, most of the examples I’ve received have been where supposed professionals did a shoddy job. It makes sense that these are the ones I get, because professionals are—correctly—held to a higher standard.
So I guess my answer is that amateurs may not do a perfect job, but they almost always do it more than well enough.
RM: If anyone can do it themselves, when would you need an expert or consultant to come in and help?
SK: I’ve always said that if you can afford to hire a professional, by all means do it. It’s just that the vast majority of the people out there developing “stuff”—sites, apps, etc.—can’t afford to hire someone. That’s why I’m always trying to teach people how to do it themselves.
But if you have any money for it, I’d highly recommend at least hiring a professional to do two things:
1. An expert review. Having a pro look at your stuff and apply their years of experience is enormously valuable. In particular, they’re likely to have a lot of knowledge about what’s worth fixing, and what kinds of fixes will actually work. It’s a great investment.
2. Coaching. Even if you’re doing DIY testing, it’s great to have someone with experience looking over your shoulder and mentoring while you get started. They can help you formulate task scenarios, show you ways to recruit participants, observe your sessions and critique your facilitation skills, and decide what to fix and how to fix it.
Like I said, professionals are going to be better at it than you are. But if you can’t afford to have one around all the time, get them to teach you.
RM: Thanks, Steve!
There’s still time to sign up for 31 Awesomely Practical UX Tips! Join Steve along with five other experts for this awesome virtual event on May 29th.
Now on sale: Steve Portigal’s “Interviewing Users”
We’re very happy to welcome a new member to the family: Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights, by Steve Portigal. Our fifteenth (!) title, it’s something of a throwback to our early days, when we were focused on UX method books. And interviewing is a method that we’re all so familiar with, that we often take our skills for granted. That’s where Steve’s book comes in—by showing us how easy it is do it wrong and how to get it right.
Through his many years as a consultant, speaker, and columnist, Steve has helped so many in our community improve their interviewing skills. We’re proud to help Steve take Interviewing Users to a new level.
