User Interface Design – The Key to Consistently Providing Superior Customer Experience

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pdma-bresslerOn April 3, 2013, I sat on a panel for a special program, sponsored by the PDMA and the Bresslergroup. The program included students from Philadelphia University Masters in Industrial Design program as well as software engineers and product design leaders from around the Philadelphia region.

The program focussed on emerging trends shaping user interface design process with the industrial design process. The panel was moderated by Rob Tannen, Ph.D, Director of Research and Interface Design at the Bresslergroup.

I included a brief summary of the topics we covered below…

Rob: How do you determine which features and content to deliver on various devices?  Should the goal be to provide full functionality across all platforms? Continue reading →

Design the box

Posted on by rick

33942900_1Have you ever been so close to your product that you couldn’t see the forest for the trees? Have you ever wanted input from others to discover the true value proposition for your product? I have a suggestion – design the box!

Design the Box is an exercise where participants’ imagine and design product packaging that represents the value proposition for a given product. Participants are askedto Continue reading →

The Thing About Personas

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headIf you look up the definition of persona you will learn there are various types of persona, each different depending on their context of use. There are persona for literature, music, video games, communication studies, psychology, marketing and user experience design. Although their use varies, personas typically include people, actions,  behaviors, a back story, and specific context or scenario.

If you plan to develop and  use persona in your experience design work, make sureyour persona include Continue reading →

Name That Thing Exercise

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thing1_2-150x150Finding the right terminology for a product’s features and content can be challenging. This can be especially challenging if the original taxonomy evolved within a highly specialized group or culture. Terminology born under these circumstances can easily be considered jargon and completely foreign to others outside the group.So how do we avoid terms that can be considered jargon?
Continue reading →

Jargon guidelines in product design

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blahWhen designing a product, terminology can be as important as a product feature or content. Using unrecognizable terms for navigation can make features and content impossible to find. After all, if you can’t find it, it doesn’t exist. To that end, it is generally good UX practice to avoid jargon. But what happens when your users are steeped in jargon?. What should UX practitioners do?
Continue reading →

Spitwad Brainstorm – Facilitator Guide

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Paper-Toss-Wallpaper-1920x1200-150x150Spitwads is a general-purpose brainstorming workshop designed to elicit ideas, achieve group consensus and identify follow-up action items.

- from sourcemaking.com – The guys from the 56 Geeks Project

Start with a question

Pose a question to the group, like “How can we improve performance of X?” or “What is the most important thing we are missing in our process?” The question should be thought provoking and open ended.

Continue reading →

Presenter Guidelines for Webinars

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The following guidelines are recommended for folks who demo product features for company wide webinars.

Consider the objectives

There are three general objectives for presenting product updates to PointRoll employees companywide through webinars…

  • Generate enthusiasm for the product updates
  • Promote the value of features being released
  • Gather high-level feedback that may be added to an enhancement list and prioritized at a later time.

To that end, webinar demos should be… Continue reading →

Meeting Guidelines for Organizers and Participants

Posted on by rick

Use this guide to help make your meetings more effective.  Whether you are the facilitator or a participant, follow these best practices to make the most of your time.

Ask yourself the following questions after your next meeting…

  • Did I understand the goals of the meeting
  • Were all the attendees engaged and focused on the goals of the meeting
  • Were there any actions items as a result of the meeting
  • Was this the best use of my time – everyone’s time?

Continue reading →

Presenter Guidelines for Development Demos

Posted on by rick

The following guidelines are recommended for folks who demo sprint deliverables.

Consider the objectives

There are two general objectives for hosting demos with product stakeholders:

  1. Provide validation for the team’s work
  2. Gather high-level feedback and insight from stakeholders that may be added to an enhancement list and prioritized at a later time.

To that end, demos should be positive, well organized and predictable. Continue reading →

Cyclones vs Quakertown November 2012

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Here are some highlights from our ICSL Youth Soccer Championship game in Quakertown, PA. The video was shot by one of our parents and captures some of the most dramatic moments in the game. Set to Asturias, the video captures the spirit of the team.

Let’s talk about iCons

Posted on by rick

What makes an icon? Most often, we experience icons that are a graphic representation of some utility, content, concept, or culture. I have been designing icons for years and it is pretty straight forward.

You want to convey some utility, you identify a theme and blow-it-out. Add some dramatic rendering and the icons will Continue reading →

Agile UX – Define, Identify, Develop

Posted on by rick

I recently read an article from Jared Spool, of User Interface Engineering, that was written as if he were writing about my personal experience. The article, Essential UX Layers for Agile and Lean Design teams, identifies key concepts I have found helpful with agile UX…

  • Define a big picture scenario that describes a holistic product experience the team is designing for. This is useful for extracting user stories necessary for sprint planning.
  • Identify a set of UX design principals that guide design decisions. If the principals are simple and easy to understand, the agile team members can easily adopt and promote these principals throughout the design and development process.
  • Develop a UX vision that Continue reading →

Affordable 360 degree video for iPhone

Posted on by rick

There are some innovations that really resonate with me. This is one such innovation. Dot, a 360 degree camera attachment for the iPhone, crosses the divide from passive to immersive image capture that places the viewer literally in the middle of an experience. What’s more, it’s interactive. You can pan the scene in motion. For $79 this will surely generate an entirely new genre of mobile video. YouTUbe be warned.
Read more about the Dot project on Mashable

To design something really well…

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“Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn’t what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that. Continue reading →

Stay hungry. Stay foolish. Steve Jobs’ Stanford commencement ’05

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“Death is very likely the very best invention of Life. It is life’s change event. It clears out the old to make way for the new….Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life….Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.”

-Steve Jobs, 2005
Stanford University Commencement Speech