Expert Interview: Susan Weinschenk
You probably already know Susan—”the brain lady”—from her wonderful books, including 100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People, and Neuro Web Design: What makes them click? We’re fortunate to have Susan teaching one of our UX workshops—in Minneapolis on November 13—and that she’s available for consulting and teaching via our UX experts program.
RM: What’s one thing that’s surprising about how people do, or don’t, pay attention?
SW: It’s possible to look right at something but not “see” it. Eye tracking is really popular these days, but you have to be very careful how you interpret eye tracking studies. Just because someone looked at something on the screen doesn’t mean they paid attention to it! Vision and attention are not the same thing.
RM: When people are choosing from a list of products or services on a web site, does the order of the items matter?
SW: Yes, order is important. If people are unsure what to do, they tend to pick the first item on the list. But you can change this tendency in various ways. If you have three choices that are similar but priced differently—for example, a silver, gold, and platinum level—people will tend to choose the option that is in the middle of the price range.
RM: Thanks Susan; we’re looking forward to seeing you in Minneapolis next month!
Expert Interview: Caroline Jarrett
We’re thrilled to have Caroline, author of Forms that Work and our forthcoming book Surveys that Work participate in our network of UX experts. Like what she has to say below? Then consider having her work with your organization; check her profile page for information on her consulting and and full-day courses.
RM: What’s a common misconception people have about the design of forms?
CJ: That it’s all about visual design, things like where to put the labels compared to the boxes. Whereas the questions are far more important. It’s amazing how users can survive really terrible visual designs of forms—including horrible mistakes like putting the labels inside the boxes—provided they can understand the questions, find the answers easily, and consider that the questions are appropriate in the context of their goals.
In Luke Wroblewski’s book Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks, I contributed a piece, “People before pixels,” that dives into this in greater detail—and there’s even more in our book Forms that Work: Designing Web Forms For Usability.
RM: What’s one thing you wish everyone knew about survey design?
CJ: You’ve got to test—and preferably, test and test again. The professional survey methodologists are obsessed with testing; they test the topics of the survey on stakeholders, subject matter experts, and data users, as well as on respondents. They test the questions with everybody, and extensively with respondents. They test the heck out of the questionnaire itself (“the instrument”) in usability tests and pilot tests. And they iterate: make changes, test again. And again.
I realise I’m not going to persuade everyone to do that much testing for most surveys, but I’d dearly love to persuade everyone to do a bit of testing. “Write, send, and hope” is a recipe for poor quality data at best, and alienating your users at worst.
RM: Thanks Caroline!
Expert Interview: Aarron Walter
We’re excited to have Aarron, noted author and leader of MailChimp’s UX design team, on board as one of our UX experts. We love his writing, and we’re a more-than-happy MailChimp customer. Below Aarron discusses some of the challenges to managing a UX team, and interaction design in general.
RM: What’s a common misconception people have when it comes to building and managing a user experience team?
AW: The most successful companies and products have a very integrated UX team behind them. As companies grow they splinter into silos of expertise. Developers split into server-side specialties, front-end, mobile, system administration, and various technology specialties within each group. Design splits into specializing on specific areas of a product, marketing, mobile, etc. With each splintering of teams, communication breaks down and the continuity of the user experience can suffer. User experience is, by definition, dedicated to understanding and improving the continuity of a product, which requires peering into each silo, speaking the language of each team, and building bridges to connect them.
A good UX team combines expertise in design research, interaction design, business strategy, visual design, and development. It can be challenging to pull together such breadth and depth of skill, but when you combine that diversity of perspectives you end up fostering respect between the disciplines, which will make designing amazing products much easier.
RM: Speaking of IxD: what’s one thing you wish everyone knew about interaction design?
AW: Many interaction designers feel compelled to create new, novel interaction patterns. But with every new pattern you introduce, you place a burden on users to learn a new way to get something done. Great interaction design uses existing design patterns already familiar to users, and innovates only when necessary. Though it’s a little depressing to interaction designers, our ideas go unnoticed when we are doing our best work. If we remove all stumbling blocks in workflows and anticipate a user’s needs, the things we design become effortless to use.
RM: Thanks Aarron!
NYC, Minneapolis, Toronto: fall UX workshop roadshow stops
Another season, another fantastic lineup of day-long UX workshops—in three of our favorite cities—New York, Minneapolis, and Toronto!
Standbys Steve Krug, Anders Ramsay, Rachel Hinman, and Lou Rosenfeld will be joined by superstars Kim Goodwin (author of Designing for the Digital Age), Nathan Shedroff (Design Is the Problem, the forthcoming Make It So, and many others), and Susan Weinschenk (100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People and Neuro Web Design).
As always, you’ll enjoy a learning experience that’s engaging, intimate (capped at 50 per day), and highly practical—our workshops delve far more deeply into their topics than what you’ll find at most conferences. And we think you’ll find the lineup pretty impressive—ranging from mobile prototyping to using science fiction as a way to improve and inspire interaction design.
Finally, we’ve got incredible list of sponsors and local partners. In New York, we’ll be supported by Moment and General Assembly (our host). In Minneapolis, our friends at Brain Traffic are helping us out. In Toronto, the gang at Hypenotic is making it happen. And all of our stops are generously sponsored by: UserTesting.com, Loop11, Axure, Rackspace, TechSmith, and User Interface Engineering.
Hope to see you this fall!
Make It So is now on sale!
What could be more fun than learning interaction design from studying science fiction movies and TV shows? From Metropolis to Star Trek to Minority Report, sci-fi offers an unconstrained design milieu that can inspire and teach us, and in Make It So, Nathan Shedroff and Chris Noessel have captured those lessons in this ground-breaking book. From gestural interfaces to augmented reality, and from medical interfaces to future sex, you’ll be blown away by all this book has to offer.
Like all of our titles, Make It So is available in a lovely color 348-page paperback and three DRM-free digital formats (PDF, ePUB, and MOBI). Pick a copy here at our store or via Amazon.
Wired already has a nice write-up. Alan Cooper, The Bourne Identity’s Mark Coleran, and io9’s Annalee Newitz have weighed in with glowing testimonials. But we’ll let Bruce Sterling bring it home with his foreword’s conclusion: “I never imagined that I would be reading a book like this, or that it would be this good”.
Expert Interview: Christian Crumlish
You may know Christian, one of our crew of UX experts, from Designing Social Interfaces (O’Reilly, 2009), which he co-authored with Erin Malone. Or if you’ve spent time in the Bay Area, you’ve surely crossed paths with him at a BayCHI meeting. We asked Christian to help us better understand designing for social.
RM: What’s a common mistake people make when it comes to designing social websites and applications?
CC: Oh, there are so many. Let’s see, a few of the most common are to build far too much before launch based on hypotheticals. Much better to build something focused and amazing, invite some people in, and then start working with behavior.
Another common one these days is a sort of mindless “gamification” in the form of highly mechanical point systems, badges, or the like. They usually fail as games and can have many unintended distorting effects if not designed carefully as part of an overall engagement strategy.
RM: As you’ve investigated how clients approach the design of social experience, what’s one thing that’s really surprised you?
CC: Very little has surprised me on that front. Folks take all sorts of approaches, most commonly based on imitating or mashing together some effective, newly familiar models. I try to get people to take a step back and look at things on the ecosystem level, model things out a bit more, do a bunch of UX exploration and ideation, and then get back into the weeds of a roadmap and defining specific features and flows.
Honestly, the surprises always come from the users. A well-designed social experience establishes a framework and some ground rules, and operates as a good host and an honest broker. The real vitality of any such application or service comes from the critical mass of participants. Kindling the participation is one phase of things and has its own challenges, but beyond that the “folkways” of a social experience tend to ultimately invent uses and customs that might never otherwise have occurred to the founders and inventors. At that level, when a social environment is really humming along, it’s nothing but surprises, and the real challenge is figuring out which behaviors to amplify and reinforce.
RM: Thanks, Christian!
Now supporting Readmill
Readmill is pretty cool—it’s a web service and iPad app for storing, reading and sharing highlights of DRM-free digital books.
If you like Readmill, you’ll like this: you can now download your Rosenfeld Media digital books to your Readmill account. Just go to your Rosenfeld account’s Download page and click the “Send to Readmill” link next to each of your digital books. That’s it! Enjoy!!
Chris Noessel on learning from science fiction interface failures
Chris, managing director and practice lead at Cooper and co-author (with Nathan Shedroff) of Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction, is the subject of today’s mini-interview. Make It So should go on sale in early September; sign up and we’ll email you a notice and a swell discount code as soon as it goes on sale.
RM: What came as the biggest surprise during the writing of your book, Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction?
Chris Noessel: It’s the seeming “failures” in SciFi interfaces that can be the most rewarding to analyze. Yes, some are just nonsensical even after careful consideration. But most every interface that characters deal with serve a purpose, and their design has some core sense to it. If you can just hold on to that core sense and find a way to redesign or reconceive the parts that seem broken, you can have “Eureka!” moments that result in new, cool concepts. In the book we call this “apologetics,” and it’s one of the most surprising and rewarding concepts to emerge from the work.
How to get $100 off your next book order?
Simple: be one of the first ten people to register for our New York City workshops (October 10-12) with Kim Goodwin, Rachel Hinman, and Nathan Shedroff).
…or one of the first ten people to register for our Minneapolis workshops (November 12-14, with Louis Rosenfeld, Susan Weinschenk, and Steve Krug).
…or one of the first ten people to register for our Toronto workshops (November 28-30, with Steve Krug, Lou Rosenfeld, and Anders Ramsay).
We’ll send you a US$100 gift certificate that you can redeem at our store. It really is that simple! So is learning all about our fall UX workshop series; everything you need to know is here.
Indi Young on generative versus evaluative research
As part of our ongoing series of short interviews with Rosenfeld Media people, we turn to Indi Young, the author of our first book, Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with User Behavior. Since its publication in 2008, the book has become a perennial favorite; we just keep printing more!
RM: What’s the biggest mistake people make when it comes to mental models?
Indi Young: Someone said to me last year, “So I still don’t understand how to set up a scope to find out why someone would buy an iPhone over a Windows phone or an Android phone.” That would be evaluative research; mental models are a structure to contain generative research. The scope this person would explore generatively would be, “Tell me your thoughts around staying connected while on the go.” With a scope like this, you will hear the goals people have in mind—”Keep track of where the kids are,” “look up my client’s business address to find nearby parking,” “let my husband know I’ll be 30 minutes late getting home,” “change my flight reservation because this meeting is running long,” “listen to that new song my friend gave me after I get home, on my quality speakers,” “give that report to my co-worker after I finally remember during dinner at the pizza place,” etc., etc.
These are the things people are trying to get done, and they might use a mobile device to do it. Or they might use a phone book or the TV or a map or a piece of paper. It doesn’t matter. What matters is how each goal is supported. Does the Android phone support “give that report” as well as an iPhone or a Windows phone? You’d look at how each of these devices helps a person accomplish each of the goals. If there are stronger matches between certain devices and certain goals, then that indicates why a person might select the device with the stronger match. But just asking for the matches is a weak use of a mental model. Instead, use it to think up more specific, stronger ways to support a particular goal, for a specific subset of the audience.
Another mistake is the assumption that a lot of time and effort is required to create a mental model. Folks get scared off and never try one. True, if you go interview a bunch of people then yes, it will take six weeks or longer to get through all the steps. But you can also get a lot of insight using short essays people write about their thought processes regarding a particular scope. Or you can re-use existing research and your own knowledge of the customer perspective. These are a few ways to create, or at least sketch, a mental model within a week.
