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Category: user experience Posted by: cornelius Discuss: 5 Comments
The more I work on large projects, the more I realize that there is a point in each of them where a rift is created between the priorities of the senior management team and those of the UX team. Let's think about the typical timeline of how this plays out: Initially, we present our past work, our methodology (process) and the advantages of having a UX team on board. We show them user research, IA and design documentation, previous prototypes, finished designs and we hope that something will resonate with them that will persuade them to hire us. We'd like it to be something we've done in the past or the methodology we're employing, but as the project goes on, we realize that it was something else.
Typically (and I say typically because of my own experiences, I am sure things are slowly shifting), senior management is intrigued by the idea of having a UX team on their project mainly because one thing only: risk management considerations. I know, this sounds cold, but it's at least a large component of the truth. I've had this discussion as part of lessons learned / post-mortems of many projects that I've been involved with, and without exception, that was the main reason why a UX team was initially considered for the project. To expand a little further, the senior management team sees having a UX team on large projects as an insurance policy that states that by employing UCD methodologies the client will be part of the design proces. As a result, when UAT comes around, it will be very difficult for the client to reject a design that they were at least partially responsible for. All very valid points.
However, at some point in the process (in my experience this occurred anywhere between right after the end-user research stage, to the end of the high-fidelity prototyping stage), senior management starts to get impatient... Even though we are on track as far as the project plan is concerned, and even though the clients love the idea that we are constantly picking their brains in regards to how to redesign their product, senior management teams tend to get unhappy about the things that we uncover. So in this series of posts about why the senior management team hates UX, this is the first item i want to talk about...
Category: community Posted by: cornelius Discuss: 2 Comments
Last week I stayed up until 3:00AM EST to watch the live feed of the Davos World Economic Forum Social Media Panel, hoping that one of the speakers will describe the future impact of Social Media in all aspects of product design. The first guest speaker, George F. Colony, CEO of Forrester Research, provided me with a good starting point. He introduced the concept of 'Social Sigma', by making a parallel with Six Sigma and explaining that in the near future all companies will have to probe social networking and social media sites during the process of designing their products.
Don't get me wrong, this idea has been around for a while, but in a different form. Information Architecture, Design or UX practitioners following UCD (User Centered Design) Methodologies made of point of ASKING a sample of the product's end-user population about how to design a product. Virtually every site and consumer brand out there ASKS for feedback on their presence and products. This paradigm included ideation about business/technology requirements as well as user interface (ease-of-use, simplicity, recognition, etc.), and in most cases, it worked very well. End user research, IA, interaction design, prototyping, usability testing, all of these minimized the risk and in the end the product was relatively close to what the clients wanted. But...
Category: branding Posted by: cornelius Discuss: add comment
It's hard to believe that it's been 10 years since Ampli2de was born in 1999, back home in Transylvania, as a project that started out of boredom more than anything else. As I was looking to do something productive during my first summer after university, I came up with a name (the company used to be called Ampli2de Studios S.R.L.) and I ended up spending a few hours one night putting up some posters all over town about our new web design startup. All it contained was the name, the number, and the logo (the first of the three pictures after the break).
Category: tools Posted by: cornelius Discuss: add comment
The first mistake made out there is assuming that wireframes are primarily a design deliverable rather than an information architecture (IA) deliverable. The right interpretation should be self-explanatory. I personally use wireframes to demonstrate information, task flow and page flow rather than branding or graphics design. However, the notion of a wireframe has been expanded lately to include everything from physical hand-drawn paper screen mockups to high-fidelity, fully branded screen designs. This being said, my personal preference is somewhere in the middle as I prefer to use specialized applications to create them as a basis of discussion of content and overall structure rather than visual display.
If anyone's ever looked at a typical wireframe (and i say 'typical' very loosely as everyone personalizes the way they create them), you will notice that it consists of a collection of boxes, controls and annotations that make up the skeleton of an application screen. Each box may be an image, a section, a cell or a placeholder for application content.
When presenting screen design in the form of wireframes, application controls are also included. For example, in the case of a wireframe created for a web application, representations corresponding to HTML form controls will be added to the screen design in order to make the wireframe appear as an early drawing of the final product.
Category: research Posted by: cornelius Discuss: add comment
The guys at Elliptic Labs have finally managed to do what Zaphod Beeblebrox and Tom Cruise's character in Minority Report have attempted to do for a while: use a touchless, gesture-based, user interface that doesn't require sensors installed on the hand. According to the Elliptic Labs website, "the hardware is based on standard components only, similar to those in a mobile phone. The system can run on the CPU and power in most usual consumer electronic devices. It can be embedded into any electronic device, including hand held ones."
However, we've seen something similar to this before in the form of electrostatic UI's, which also happen to be touchless. However, Elliptic are the only ones that created sensor hardware that is based on standard components, and also used a form factor that is more portable and usable than our favourite Northwestern students.
