Design for Kids… and everyone else

Today, Deb Gelman’s Design for Kids: Digital Products for Playing and Learning debuts. If you are in any way involved in researching and designing apps, sites, games or software for kids, Deb’s book belongs on your shelf.

But if you’re not, this book presents a golden opportunity to become a better designer or researcher by forcing you out of your comfort zone. Like such books as Luke Wroblewski‘s Mobile First and Sarah Horton and Whitney Quesenbery’s A Web for Everyone, Design for Kids will help you become a better designer by guiding you through a design context that may be quite foreign.

Deb’s book starts with just enough theory to serve as a strong foundation for seeing the differences and similarities between kids and other audiences. Then Deb serves up an array of practical techniques, principles, and patterns, and a framework that you’ll find useful when designing for any audience.

Check out the book’s table of contents, its FAQ, a lovely foreword by Brenda Laurel, testimonials, and an excerpt in today’s A List Apart. Then pick up a copy directly from Rosenfeld Media in paperback or four DRM-free ebook formats. (Of course, it’s also available from Amazon.)

Survey book of the month, October 2011

Which is better: an open question or a closed one? Should you include a “don’t know” option in your closed questions? Is there a “right” order for asking questions?

If topics like these concern you, then you’ll want to read my choice for this month:

Questions and Answers in Attitude Surveys: Experiments on Question Form, Wording, and Context by Howard Schuman and Stanley Presser. (1996,  reprinted in 1981)

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Our Canucks-only contest

UPDATED, August 16: Well, looks like we made entering our contest a tad bit too hard. Perhaps it was unreasonable to assume you Canucks tend to be toting your copies of our books whilst loitering about the Plains of Abraham? So, we’ll make it easier: just email us your photo in front of your favorite Canadian landmark, with or without your Rosenfeld Media book in hand. Please do so by Monday, August 23. Much easier this way…

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Luke Wroblewski on the Most Common Web Form Mistake

Web Form Design remains our best-selling title, and it’s not surprising—Luke Wroblewski took a topic that sounds painfully dry and made it a joy to read. And powerful too: poorly-designed web forms can negate much of your site’s value, but Luke’s book is packed with straightforward and often easy fixes.

RM: What’s the biggest mistake people make when it comes to Web form design?

Luke Wroblewski: Focusing on the layout or technical implementation of Web forms instead of their role in a conversation with people. In most cases, it’s the questions we ask and how we ask them that make or break form conversion, not a fancy layout or technical solution. Yet many teams will spend months designing and developing new Web form designs that ultimately don’t move conversion. A lot of this effort is probably better spent taking an outside-in look at the requirements in your forms. That is, seeing things from your customer’s point of view—not yours.

You can even go so far as scripting or acting out what an ideal conversation with your customer might be. For example, if you are offering home loans, a useful conversation might go something like this:

“How can I help you?”
“I’m trying to see if I can afford a home.”
“I can help you with that, is this your first home purchase…”

Whereas, a typical Web form conversation goes more like this:

“First Name”
“Umm ok I guess”
“Last Name”
“Phone number”
“Wait why do you need my phone number?”
“Agree to my terms of service!”

Clearly there’s a big difference between these two approaches.

RM: Are users really willing to have conversations with us? Don’t they take some comfort in the anonymity of interacting with faceless organizations through forms?

Luke Wroblewski: They are if they want what’s on the other side of the form and the conversation is clearly helping them get it. No one’s going to take the time to hand over a bunch of information unless they have some reason for doing so. The key to turning the process of collecting that information into a conversation is understanding that motivation: they want to buy something, they want to get a rebate, whatever it happens to be. When you know why people are there you can ensure your questions align with their goals or explain situations where people may think your requirements don’t. Even better, you can align your visual and interaction design with those goals too.

But if you are asking if people want to have actual back and forth conversations with personified paper clips, the answer is probably no. Thinking in terms of a conversation doesn’t mean you literally design it that way (though you can and I’ll be discussing that in the workshop!). It means you’ve thought about your requirements & process in human terms. Not just in terms of databases, marketing requirements, and legal mandates.

RM: So what’s the second biggest mistake people make with Web form design?

Luke Wroblewski: I may have been too kind in my first answer because I assumed that an organization actually takes the time to think about and carefully design their forms. More often, though, forms are just a label/input field version of the name/value pairs in a database. Many people don’t realize how much you can do to improve critical interactions like checkout, registration, and so on. They simply assume “a form is a form” and that’s it. There’s a world of optimization, science, and art that can be applied to forms to great effect, which is what this workshop is all about—not only what’s possible but the details behind how to do it.

Hope to see some of you at my workshop!

Survey book of the month, January 2011

You’re looking for a book on surveys, and my one isn’t yet out. What do to?

I thought I’d help by sharing some of my favorites over the next few months. These will be the titles that I find myself turning to again and again, whether to check a point I’m writing about or when I’m designing a survey myself.

Top of my list has got to be “Internet, Mail, and Mixed-Mode Surveys: The Tailored Design Method” by Don A. Dillman, Jolene D. Smyth and Leah Melani Christian (Wiley, 2008)

A book with practical insights backed by research

Why do I like it so much? Well, it certainly isn’t a visual feast. The cover isn’t all that inspiring, and here’s a sample page of content – deliberately made small so you can get an inkling of what the design is like. Yes, that’s a solid block of text there, and it’s fairly representative.

The value in this book is all in what it says. Don Dillman has been researching surveys for 50 years. He’s the author or co-author of over 240 papers, and he’s co-written 9 other books in addition to this book and its three previous incarnations under slightly different titles. All this might lead you to suspect that the book is a dry, academic tome that will be hard work. You’d be wrong.

Yes, it’s impeccably referenced throughout. But it’s also practical. This is a team that believes strongly in testing everything, varying everything, and testing again – in one-on-one usability tests, A/B tests and experiments. I opened my copy at random just now and here’s a typical passage:

“Often web survey designers and programmers are on the cutting edge of computer technology, have the most recent versions of web browsers, and are adept at customising their own settings. However, it is important to design and test the web survey from the respondent perspective; the respondent may not be as computer savvy or familiar with being online. In one of our recent student surveys, we decided to send a tester out to a number of different computer labs at our university because many respondents would be completing the survey on campus. In the process of testing, it was discovered that two labs on campus had not updated their browsers in 5 years. Although many students were aware of that and avoided using those labs, others did not know and may have completed the survey on those computers with the outdated browsers”.

I’m sure it’s not news to you that there is often a gap between what your developers are using as their technology and what the users might know. But how many academic researchers do you know who would be willing to go from lab to lab checking something like that? How many people, when they start to design a survey, ask themselves “How many of our respondents are likely to be on old browsers?” before you raise that point with them?

You may be thinking “OK, but what will I learn in that book that I don’t already know?”

My answer: lots. To show you what I mean, here’s another picture. When I got my copy of this latest edition (pre-ordered, based on avidly reading and re-reading the two previous editions), I went through it marking only the most crucial points that I knew I would definitely need to think about for my book on surveys. Then I went back and challenged myself: is this point absolutely essential for the busy user experience practitioner? And here’s the photo of the results of that two-step process, showing a host of markers.

What you won’t find in the book

If you’re still with me, you probably have another question: “If this book is that good, why are you writing another one?”

Even though the book is over 500 pages long, it doesn’t cover the entire survey process. Dillman and his co-authors assume that:

• you have a clear set of goals for the research
• you have the resources to do a proper random sample, and a multi-stage administration process
• you know how to analyze the data.

So there are some aspects missing that we probably ought to think about it – and also, we don’t all have time to read that much. So I’m still working on my (much shorter) book.
 

Survey book of the month, February 2011

This month, I’ve been working on my chapter on survey questions and revisiting my libary of books about questions. My favorite, easily, is:

“The Psychology of Survey Response” by Roger Tourangeau, Lance J. Rips and Kenneth Rasinski (2000) Cambridge University Press.

Let me take you through their main framework and some of my recent experiences with the book, and I hope that will explain why I like it so much.

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Interview with Responsive Design Expert Jason CranfordTeague

Our new Responsive Design Studio is just around the corner! Join us in NYC, April 29-May 1, for three days with three multi-disciplinary experts: Sara Wachter-Boettcher, Jason CranfordTeague and Aaron Gustafson. Each will be on hand for all three days; capped at 50 participants, that’s a 17:1 student:teacher ratio!

This week we had a chance to ask Jason to share some wisdom on Responsive Design from his perspective as a visual designer. Here’s what he had to say:

Rosenfeld Media: As a designer, how do you convince your clients to get on board with Responsive Design?

Jason CranfordTeague: I get this question from a lot of designers: they would love to be using Responsive Web Design (RWD) techniques in their projects, but their clients and managers don’t understand what the benefits are. This is especially true when weighted against the extra effort it requires. Before you can even start planning to include RWD in a project, you need to get buy in from clients and from co-workers. The good news is once you show the upward trend of mobile devices and and lay out how RWD allows you to target not only the devices, but the context those devices are likely to be used in, most clients and team members quickly come around. In fact, the most common response I get is “why wouldn’t we do it that way?”

RM: What are some of the pitfalls designers encounter with creating responsive web designs?

JCT: The biggest downside to working with RWD is during the planning stage, where you have to consider your content and design, not just from the perspective of someone sitting at a computer screen or a laptop, but of someone sitting in a coffee shop using a tablet or walking busy streets using a smart-phone. Web designers are used to creating static wireframes and visual comps, and struggle when it comes to having to produce these for multiple-screens. One of the techniques I help my students understand is how using recently developed prototyping tools makes it so much easier to plan their designs for all three major contexts dynamically.

RM: How can RWD be used to help tailor an interface for context

JCT: If content is king, then context is queen. But for a long time, web interface designers have been able to get away with assuming their audiences are all in the same context: sitting at a desk. This is no longer the case as mobile devices allow users to untether themselves. RWD cannot tell you exactly where and how a user may be interacting with your designs, but by detecting the device capabilities, we can make some educated guesses that will inform our use cases for presentation and functionality.

RM: What is the most common mistake you see being made with RWD?

JCT: I see designs all the time where the tablet or smart-phone versions are just “mini-me” iterations of the computer screen version. One size does not fit all, and the layout that works for one screen and orientation does not always work on others screens or orientations. Navigation patterns, layouts, interactions, and even functionality will need to shift or change entirely as the design shifts between different contexts.

RM: What’s the coolest thing you can do with RWD that most people haven’t heard about?

JCT: That would have to be Webfont iconography. Web fonts have come on strong the last several years, exploding the typographic possibilities for web designs. But what a lot of designers and developers do not realize is that web fonts can be used to create easily styleable and infinitely resizable icons. Since fonts are vector in nature, you can create dingbat font files with your needed icons, and then size them for the context without resorting to multiple images and without loss of image quality.

RM: Thanks Jason!

There’s still time to get the Early Bird Discount for our Responsive Design Studio on April 29-May1 in NYC! Join Jason along with Sara Wachter-Boettcher and Aaron Gustafson for a three-day intensive course that’s interdisciplinary by design (so bring your whole team). Hope to see you there!

Interview with Responsive Design Expert Aaron Gustafson

The Responsive Design Studio is quickly approaching! Join us in NYC, April 29-May 1, for three days with three multi-disciplinary experts: Sara Wachter-Boettcher, Jason CranfordTeague and Aaron Gustafson. Remember, you can get a hefty team discount if you register with three or more!

This week we sat down with Aaron to get his take on the world of Responsive Design. Here’s what he had to say:

Rosenfeld Media: You’ve had a lot of varied experience in the field of responsive design. If you could go back in time to give the younger you some advice on the topic, what would it be?

Aaron Gustafson: Be adaptable, but keep your eye on the big picture.

Things change so frequently in this industry that you can spend all of
your time trying to keep up with the latest techniques. It can be so
overwhelming at times that it becomes tempting to tune out and take an
“if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” approach. Balance is important. We
need to be flexible enough to allow ourselves room to change our
approach as we learn more about our medium while at the same time
viewing the latest techniques through a critical lens that takes into
account the true effect the adoption of a given approach, methodology, or
technique will have on the end product and how our customers
experience it.

RM: What are a few things that all UXers need to know about this topic?

AG: It’s important to realize that everything we do is connected. Whether
we are devising a business strategy, writing copy, designing
wireframes and interfaces, or authoring code, each decision, line, and
keystroke we make has a profound effect on the experience of using our
products.

RM: Thanks, Aaron!

There’s still time to sign up for our Responsive Design Studio on April 29-May 1 in NYC! Join Aaron along with Jason CranfordTeague and Sara Wachter-Boettcher for a three-day intensive course that’s interdisciplinary by design (so bring your whole team). Hope to see you there!

Future Practice Interview: John Ferrara

As part of our Future Practice webinar series, we’re interviewing presenters to give you a preview of what they’ll cover. Next up is John Ferrara on
Extending Game Design to Business Applications. An information architect at The Vanguard Group, John has been published in Boxes & Arrows, Interactions, and presented at venues including the IA Summit and EuroIA. His work is featured in the upcoming Rosenfeld Media book, Search Analytics.

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5 Hands-on virtual workshops to level up your UX Research skills

Are you ready to revolutionize your UX research skills in 2025?

The Advancing Research conference is back with an exciting lineup of 5 hands-on virtual workshops that will transform your approach to user experience research. Starting in mid-March, world-leading UX research (UXR) experts will guide you through cutting-edge methodologies, innovative techniques, and practical strategies to elevate your research game.

These workshops dive into crucial topics that are shaping the future of UX research. Whether you’re looking to master trauma-informed research, explore quantitative methods for qualitative researchers, or harness the power of AI in your UX research workflow, there’s a workshop tailored to your professional growth.

Don’t miss this chance to enhance your skills, network with fellow researchers, and stay ahead in the rapidly evolving field of UX research. Secure your spot at one (or more!) of our workshops and equip yourself with the knowledge and tools to drive impactful research in the years to come.

Experience our hands-on virtual workshops

Trauma-Informed Research: Caring for You and Preventing Secondary Trauma

with Carol Scott and Melissa Eggleston
8 hours over 2 segments: March 17 & 19, 2025

In this workshop, learn about secondary trauma and how you can protect yourself and your team. Carol and Melissa will explore practical tips, discuss ways to continue your journey toward becoming trauma-informed, and help you thrive in a long career that is mutually supportive, equitable, and healing for all.

Learn more »

Quantitative Methods for Qualitative UX Researchers: Triangulate Your Way to Holistic Insights and Stronger Storytelling

with Subhasree Chatterjee and Archana Shah
8 hours over 2 segments: March 18-19, 2025

Many UX researchers often rely on familiar qualitative methods such as interviews and usability testing, overlooking the potential benefits of combining these with quantitative methods through triangulation. Depending solely on one set of tools can result in blind spots, limiting researchers’ ability to provide comprehensive insights. This workshop aims to address these challenges.

Learn more »

Radical Participatory Research

with Victor Udoewa
8 hours over 2 segments: March 20-21, 2025

This workshop will start with a short, general introduction to Participatory Research methodologies, and then specifically introduce a type of relational research called Radical Participatory Research (RPR), a meta-methodology. We will explore ways to transition to RPR, team recruitment, bias awareness, transitional facilitation, intersectional research, asset-based methodologies, compensation, evaluation, and RPR advocacy.

Learn more »

AI for UX Researchers

with Llewyn Paine

8 hours over 2 segments: March 25 & 27, 2025

As researchers begin to adopt LLMs, it can be hard to determine where AI makes research better, where it falls short, and where the human researcher provides unique value. In this workshop, learn a framework for understanding AI’s capabilities within the context of user research and workshop opportunities for AI to evolve the role of research, making the researcher even more valuable in this new world.

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Listening Deeply

with Indi Young

8 hours over 4 segments: March 18, 21, 25, 28, 2025

Listening is the foundation for inclusivity, for new opportunities to support more people, and also for powerful team efficiency. Having clear techniques for understanding a person’s interior cognition–for developing cognitive empathy–allows professionals the foundation for later finding patterns that will reveal gaps and inclusive, intentional direction for your solutions. This workshop will teach you how to pay rapt attention. And when and why to do it.

Learn more »