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Mobile is greatly influencing the user experience community. It’s challenging traditional approaches to design, but also bringing with it a host of new opportunities. Being a user experience practitioner in this changing environment is a bit scary. Yet coupling existing skill sets with the constraints of designing in the mobile space makes for an exciting world full of possibility.

The transition from designing for the desktop to designing for mobile can be a daunting one. Rachel Hinman of Nokia had her own experience with this challenge back in 2005 when the mobile world truly was a scary place to live in. Back then, the mobile web was little more than an afterthought. The experience of using the web on a mobile device was painful. With advancing technology and the advent of the iPhone and Android devices, mobile is becoming easier for users. Rachel considers that personal feeling and concreteness to be one of the exciting things about working in the mobile space.

The very nature of mobile offers opportunities that the desktop doesn’t, but also brings with it problems you don’t encounter on the desktop. Rachel thinks that it takes some “unlearning” to position yourself in the mobile context. Embracing the constraints of mobile and taking full advantage of capabilities such as voice and built in cameras are key. This allows you to leave the desktop mindset and design for the context.

Rachel will be presenting a full-day workshop at UX Immersion 2012 in Portland, OR April 23-25. Find out more details about the UX Immersion conference.

As always we want to know what you’re thinking. Share your thoughts in our comments section.

Recorded: January, 2012
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:13 — 0.0KB)

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Touchscreen devices give you the ability to directly manipulate content. This allows designers to create interfaces where the content itself is the control. This lessens the need for buttons and can reduce the level of complexity within your design. The problem is making the user aware of the availability of gestures in your design. Gestures, especially multi-touch gestures, are powerful control mechanisms but useless if the users aren’t aware of them.

Josh Clark, author of Tapworthy, says that touch interaction should revolutionize your approach to interface design. In his virtual seminar, Buttons Are a Hack: The New Rules of Designing for Touch, Josh offers techniques to make gestures more discoverable without overloading users, and experiences, with endless instruction. We ran out of time for all of the audience’s questions during the seminar, so Josh joins Adam Churchill to tackle those remaining questions.

Here’s an excerpt from the podcast.

“…buttons are an abstraction and I don’t mean that just in the virtual world, I also mean that in the real world. If you look at the history of the button, which is really only about 100 years old with the introduction of electricity, even then buttons were a hack, a workaround.

If you think about a light switch, putting a switch over here to turn on a light over there is not particularly intuitive, right? It’s a workaround because it’s really inconvenient to walk into a dark room with a ladder and climb up to the light bulb to turn the thing on. We’ve used buttons, at times, when we didn’t have the luxury of direct interaction. We had to insert this middle man…”

Tune in to the podcast to hear Josh answer these questions:

• How do you transport hover interactions to touch interfaces?
• Should swiping “back” be used for a back button type of command?
• Is there an advantage to Apple’s one hardware button versus Android’s multiple ones?
• Is there a replacement for radio buttons?
• Should multiple audiences be considered when giving instructions for gestures?
• How should users be able to access hints if they’re needed in the future?
• Is there any way to avoid collisions between operating system gestures and application gestures?
• What is the value of affordances?

As always we want to know what you’re thinking. Share your thoughts in our comments section.

Recorded: January, 2012
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Sure, you already know that data-driven decision-making can be a great thing. And a survey can be a great way of getting hold of a lot of data. But if you’ve ever had to complete a frustrating survey asking seemingly mindless questions, and we all have, then the idea of having to design one yourself might make you shudder.

In her seminar on February 28, 10 Tips for Designing Effective Surveys, Caroline Jarrett will talk about how to rescue already-in-progress surveys and strengthen their performance, as well as how to approach new surveys from scratch. The next time you need your surveys to obtain useful user data, you’ll have some practical ideas on how to get the best from them.

You’ll learn to:

• Entice site visitors to participate in surveys
• Get users to engage with your questions
• Help your users answer questions accurately
• Deliver survey feedback to stakeholders

If you’ve ever heard, “Let’s do a survey,” then register now so you can learn to obtain insights through a pragmatic method that facilitates clearer decision-making.

We’re creating the Next Step Series in cooperation with Rosenfeld Media.

It’s easy for web applications to get overly complicated. Ideally, complex applications help their users solve complex problems, making their lives simpler. Unfortunately this isn’t always the case. Vague commands, useless dashboards, and confusing navigation create headaches for users by otherwise well-meaning applications. Often this can be a product of the structure of the application itself.

Hagan Rivers is a walking encyclopedia of web app design knowledge. A frequent speaker at our events, she has an amazing knack for making the highly complex digestible and easy to understand. Examining the structure of your application can reveal the places where your users struggle and provide you with opportunities.

In today’s UIEtips, we’re reprinting an interview that I had with Hagan about web application design. It was a fun discussion, talking about how she’s come up with the concepts, such as hubs, interviews, and her technique for diagramming the structure of web apps.

Read the article, Discovering Web App Structure: A Discussion with Hagan Rivers.

Hagan will also be bringing her expertise to an upcoming UIE Virtual Seminar, Designing Dashboards: The Do’s, Don’ts, and D’ohs!. She’ll show you a bunch of dashboards. And she’ll give you tips for helping stakeholders understand the implementation benefits and drawbacks of seemingly simple components, from graphs to customizable panels. You won’t want to miss it!

Dashboards are a great idea. The problem is, many are useless. In this seminar, Hagan Rivers will show you which elements to include, how to structure them, and what to slash out of your existing dashboard that needs some UX TLC. She’ll show you a bunch of dashboards. And she’ll give you tips for helping stakeholders understand the implementation benefits and drawbacks of seemingly simple components, from graphs to customizable panels.

Join us on February 23 for Designing Dashboards: The Do’s, Don’ts, and D’ohs! Designing a new UI? Evolving an existing one? You’ll walk away from this session knowing how to make your dashboard what it needs to be.

You’ll learn to:

• Determine what’s succeeding or failing in your dashboard
• Create a strategy for overhauling your dashboard
  or making a new one
• Prevent interaction pitfalls by focusing on tasks
• Design customizable dashboards that don’t suck

Whether you’ve got an onerous dashboard on your hands or you’re charged with designing a new one from scratch, then you simply can’t afford to miss Hagan’s practical and information-packed seminar on dashboard design.

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The goal of any site is for the right audience to find the right information. But beyond your actual content there are many things that can cause findability issues. These tend to be unanswered questions about your primary audience and whether or not you’re satisfying the need of that audience. Good information architecture can help guide your design decisions so that your users can effectively engage with your content.

Lou Rosenfeld offers up suggestions in his virtual seminar, 8 Better Practices for Great Information Architecture: Closing the Findability Gap. Lou believes information architecture offers long-term strategic value, and is more inclusive than some people may think. There wasn’t enough time to address all of the question during the seminar so Lou joins Adam Churchill to answer the remaining ones for this podcast.

Here’s an excerpt from the podcast.

“…I spent a lot of time talking about the Zipf Distribution, which is basically a rule of many sites that a little goes a long way. Things like, a few of the search queries that people do on your site account for a huge proportion of all search activity. So a handful of queries needs to work well in order for search overall to work pretty well. Or, a handful of your documents are the ones that most people are going to be accessing, or are going to be accessing far more than any of the other documents.

So really not worrying so much about the long tail of the Zipf curve, but the short head. And once you have a sense of what that short head is, you can start working on smaller problems that, when you solve them, go a long way…”

Tune in to the podcast to hear Lou address these questions:

• Are there any special considerations regarding intranets?
• How many audiences can a website reasonably handle?
• Is there a distinction between engagement and involvement?
• Web analytics and UX tell us different things. How should you balance knowing when something is wrong versus why something is wrong?

How do you use information architecture to solve findability issues? Share your thoughts in our comments section.

Recorded: December, 2011
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Seats for the premiere Agile development and mobile design conference are going fast

We started out with 100 spots, but already we’re down to 80 for the UX Immersion 2012 Conference in Portland, OR April 23-25.

You can register at the lowest rate of $1,349 to secure one of the remaining 80 spots. After these spots are gone, the price increases by $300.

We’re not surprised at how fast these spots are going. Once you see the full-day workshop topics and amazing speakers, you’ll want to grab your own spot.

Spend 3 intensive days devouring the latest UX techniques in 2 important areas: Agile development and mobile design.

The goodies that come with your registration

• Two full-day workshops: You’ll choose among 3 Agile and 3 mobile design focused workshops
• One day of Featured Talks: Hear from each of the workshop presenters, 2 case study presentations, and a keynote from our very own Jared M. Spool
• Complete conference materials: We’ll send you the PDFs of every talk and workshop just before you leave for the conference
• Recordings of the Featured Talks: After the conference you can relive every Featured Talk at your office with your entire team

Learn more about UX Immersion 2012

Save your seat before they’re gone

Now is the time to act. Register now and we’ll guarantee you get into the workshops of your choice. You’ll get to choose your workshops at the end of February.

$1,349 is the lowest possible price. Don’t miss it.

New can be very scary. It’s easy to get comfortable with what we know, only to have everything turned topsy-turvy when we encounter major changes.

The world of mobile design is new, and therefore, scary for many. The comforts of designing for the desktop disappear when we have to deal with these portable, tiny devices. Even the way we design – the processes and techniques we’ve honed over many years of practice – suddenly doesn’t work the same. We need to think about our work in new ways. Very scary.

Yet this scary new world also brings tremendous opportunity. Thanks to the pioneers in this space, there’s a new appreciation for the value of design. That new appreciation gives us room to rejigger the broken parts of how we’ve designed in the past. And that’s really exciting.

In this week’s UIEtips, I explore both the scary and the exciting that comes with mobile design. Join me as I look at four areas where designers will face challenges and opportunities in the coming year.

Read the article: UX & Mobile Design – 2012′s Challenges and Opportunities.

If you’re facing these mobile design challenges and opportunities, then you’re in for a real treat. We’ve just announced our new spring conference: UX Immersion 2012, which has a focus on creating great mobile designs. You’ll want to consider one or two of the in-depth, full-day workshops by Rachel Hinman, Luke Wroblewski, or James Robertson. These folks will help you overcome the challenges and take advantage of the opportunities. See the entire UX Immersion program.

How are you dealing with the challenges of mobile design? How have you taken advantage of the opportunities? Leave your thoughts below.

Peer into Your Future

You’re about to see a project we’ve been working on for several months. A brand new conference bringing the newest, most critical thinking around two separate and important topics: mobile design and Agile development.

These experts will dive deep and get to the nitty-gritty details that will make you a stronger and more valuable UX Pro.

Agile Process

• Hugh Beyer – UX Design Inside Agile Development
• Jeff Gothelf – Lean UX: A Radical Approach to Integrating Design into Agile
• Dave McFarland – Demystifying jQuery for Agile Prototyping

Mobile Design

• Rachel Hinman – Creating Great Mobile User Experiences
• Luke Wroblewski – A Detailed Look at Designing Mobile Inputs
• James Robertson – Innovative Mobile Intranet Designs for Your Enterprise

Get First Dibs on a Seat When You Become a VIP

There are only 100 specially priced $1,349 spots available for the 3-day UX Immersion Conference. One of them can be yours.

VIPs will receive a special link to access registration on Monday, January 30. Everyone else will have to wait until Tuesday night to save their spot.

So be sure to get on the VIP list and start exploring the UX Immersion Conference.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:50 — 0.0KB)

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A common trap in designing data visualizations is focusing on all the different ways to represent the data, rather than the questions that the data should answer. The presentation of a data set is pointless if it’s not useful, usable, or if people can’t understand it. With so much data to choose from how do you keep the goal of the visualization in mind? How are you sure you’re telling the right story?

We turn to Noah Iliinsky when it comes to data visualization. He is the co-author of Designing Data Visualizations and co-editor of Beautiful Visualization. Drawing from cognitive psychology, Noah explains that there is both an art and science to designing data visualizations. Aspects of shape, color, and placement all play into our brain’s ability to process the data being presented.

With the idea of placement in mind, it helps to think of the constraints and boundaries of your visualization. Careful consideration of its landscape prevents you from ending up with a “hairball” of data. Putting meaning behind placement helps the layout of the data but also conveys greater knowledge about it.

Noah and Jared Spool discuss creating data visualizations in this podcast. And you won’t want to miss Noah’s virtual seminar, Telling the Right Story with Data Visualizations, on Thursday, February 2.

As always we love to hear your thoughts. Please share with us in our comments section.

Recorded: January, 2012
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