Practitioners-Guide-User-Experience-Design

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STAKEHOLDERS AND THE SIXTH FINGER As I discussed earlier, storytelling not only makes for a richer user experience, but it can be instrumental in getting your work approved, and also in creating a work culture that is more attuned to user experience concerns. The single biggest complaint I’ve heard from my students about actually practicing UX on the job is, “My boss just keeps descoping all the most important parts of the experience.” I’ve felt this same thing many times in my own work, and I’ve told some stories already in this book about my experiences with it. Sometimes our ideas are shot down for good reasons—maybe they’re just too innovative. I don’t mind features being removed then, because I’ve probably gotten away from thinking about what the user really wants and needs. But sometimes the feature being nixed is a component that affects the core usability. No matter; the people in charge of approvals are still totally free to overrule you. This can make it tempting to resort to subterfuge. I’ll never forget the time a senior designer told me a story of the sixth finger. It was at the Wall Street Journal, where we had a stakeholder known for always getting his way. His opinions were unmovable, and they often clashed with what we wanted to do. One tactic we used was to give him options to try to steer his decision-making. People had competing theories about the best way to do this: Do you put the best option last, so that you end the presentation with a eureka moment for him, or do you put it first to try to set a positive tone for the review? None seemed to work very well. Then one day I was preparing a review with a more senior designer. I had designed three options for a navigation model, one of which we felt was the clear winner, and made simple wireframes to show them. To my surprise, when I showed my wireframes to my colleague, he took a pen and started to draw in the rest of the interface that the navigation was a part of. “We’re painting the king a sixth finger,” he said. I had no idea what he was talking about. He explained, “In dealing with a tyrant king, you want to distract his attention from any real issues by supplying him with fake ones.” If he sees a sixth finger— the obvious mistake—he won’t pay attention to something else going on with the first five. When the day of the review came, we got plenty of feedback from “the tyrant,” but it was all about our layout. The navigation made it through unscathed. The sixth finger had worked! You don’t really want to have to resort to this (though you might want to try it sometimes). Much better is to tell a really good story to stakeholders. Video prototypes are a great way of doing this. They provide a richer visual experience of your design than either flat wireframes or even more high-fidelity prototypes often can. Many people who don’t make wireframes find them very hard to follow, and there’s nothing at all engaging about them. By contrast, a product video can be filled with emotion and fictional content, allowing stakeholders to actually have some of the experience you’re promising. Both types of prototype represent the nexus of all your research and drawing, and once you progress to creating the higher-fidelity versions that you’ll most often want to use for testing with users, they should include thoughts around content strategy,
information architecture, interface and interaction design, and animations. These higherfidelity versions take longer to make, but I think they’re worth the effort, because when using a prototype for user testing, the closer you can get the look and feel to the actual product, the more reliable your results will be. I use two tools for hi-fi interactive prototypes, Tumult Hype and InVision, but not simultaneously. I use Hype for motion prototypes or interactive ones that need to display custom animations. InVision is good for linking together screens, but not for customization, so it doesn’t work for showing the custom animations I often create.
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Also from General Assembly The Prac
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CONTENTS ALSO FROM GENERAL ASSEMBLY
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INTRODUCTION This is a great time t
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goals. And one of the most pressing
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YOU’RE NOT DESIGNING FOR YOU The
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A I think I spoke to it occasionall
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a user is through GPS. This app, wh
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I responded. “I care!” I tried
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WHAT IS UX, EXACTLY? That experienc
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GETTING TO KNOW YOUR USERS The prac
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content in the iPhone app according
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A Little Listening Goes a Long Way
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Sending Out Surveys Surveys aren’
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WSJ Live iPad app article continuat
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DESIGN FOR CORE USER’S NEEDS With
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PRIVILEGE THE USER’S TIME It’s
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users at the top of their feeds of
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you’ve completed is struck throug
Page 38 and 39: Seeing Through Users’ Eyes: POINT
Page 40 and 41: pager, a fax machine, and a persona
Page 42 and 43: advantage of CSS3 to increase respo
Page 44 and 45: UX designers are often not programm
Page 46 and 47: THE NEW SYSTEMS SMORGASBORD These d
Page 48 and 49: A tracing of the Spotify app. Objec
Page 50 and 51: make interactions familiar and acce
Page 52 and 53: AUGMENTED REALITY FOR FINGERNAILS N
Page 54 and 55: Trade-offs Both web and native tech
Page 56 and 57: Top: Desktop navigation module with
Page 58 and 59: Creativity Loves Constraints POINTS
Page 60 and 61: tools for bringing digital products
Page 62 and 63: make decisions with the tools or ut
Page 64 and 65: ehind the weather information. For
Page 66 and 67: GUIDING YOUR EVERY STEP It seems th
Page 68 and 69: DON’T BREAK A STORY’S SPELL Con
Page 70 and 71: personality and storytelling qualit
Page 72 and 73: A rough sketch visualizing an app
Page 74 and 75: User flows of the first time a user
Page 76 and 77: do note if one flow is part of a la
Page 78 and 79: Start with Quick and Dirty Minifram
Page 80 and 81: high-level decisions for the produc
Page 82 and 83: Full wireframe for a video website
Page 84 and 85: MAKING A DESIGN MOVE Prototyping is
Page 86 and 87: ig improvements over these others t
Page 90 and 91: A PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS
Page 92 and 93: HOW DO YOU TELL SOMEONE THEY’VE M
Page 94 and 95: Chapter 4 INNOVATION IS NOT FOR INN
Page 96 and 97: TAKING WORK AWAY One of the few rel
Page 98 and 99: BUSINESS GOALS WILL OFTEN OVERSHADO
Page 100 and 101: A SMALLER USER BASE TENDS TO MAKE I
Page 102 and 103: SOMETIMES IT’S BETTER TO ASK FORG
Page 104 and 105: and open to changing or abandoning
Page 106 and 107: of twenty TV stations, shows, and g
Page 108 and 109: GRAB PEOPLE IN THE HALLWAY During m
Page 110 and 111: CLARIFYING YOUR PRIORITIES The resu
Page 112 and 113: TESTING THE COMPETITION Another gre
Page 114 and 115: RELEASE, FIX, RELEASE There is one
Page 116 and 117: Chapter 5 GOOD UX COMES FROM BEING
Page 118 and 119: YOU’RE NOT THE OWNER OF THE UX In
Page 120 and 121: course, this is just not the way th
Page 122 and 123: (Courtesy Shutterstock) Well, sure,
Page 124 and 125: pieces of images peeking out from t
Page 126 and 127: knowledge that data can have about
Page 128 and 129: Frequency vs. Importance: Give a se
Page 130 and 131: COLLABORATION GOES BOTH WAYS Always
Page 132 and 133: MAKING IT LEAN Fitting the parts of
Page 134 and 135: SEEK INSPIRATION EVERYWHERE Just as
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SHOW, DON’T TELL In the beginning
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POINTS TO REMEMBER Good UX Comes fr
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November 16, 2012, http://managemen
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Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 78 business
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size of user base and, 121-22 user
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Qu, Hong, 158 Rams, Dieter, 117-18
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UX design, 1-4, 62, 19, 33, 148, 16
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Practitioners-Guide-User-Experience-Design

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