Jungus

Last month, Deb Brown at Aligned Structures wrote up a great review of Joshua Porter’s recent UIE Virtual Seminar, Designing for Signup:

Yesterday I attended an outstanding seminar by Joshua Porter produced by those great folks at UIE (yep shameless Ak’ing there.):) The topic was Designing for Sign-up. What struck me the most about the presentation, as a UX geek, was that the issue was not about the mechanical process of making the sign-up easier, but around the socio-psychological issues of helping users make a commitment.

Read Deb’s entire post.

SpoolCast: Web 2.0 Strategy and Design With Steve Mulder and Riccardo LaRosa
Recorded: December, 2008.
Brian Christiansen, UIE Podcast Producer
Duration: 26m | File size: 14.5 MB
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We love to talk to Steve Mulder (from Molecular) and Riccardo La Rosa (from Isobar) about building out a Web 2.0 strategy and incorporating elements, such as social features and highly-interactive elements to the design.

Steve and Riccardo work with mainstream organizations, which may not be as familiar as, say, a Silicon Valley startup with what the state-of-the-art is for these types of features. In this interview, they told me about the solutions they worked on with Reebok (a sports apparel company) and HumanaOne (a direct-to-consumer health insurance company). We talked about the challenges they faced on these projects and what they needed to do to overcome them.

During the podcast, we discussed how to determine what features to build, how to tell if the features are working as expected, and how results changed over time. We talked about how starting small and iterating is most successful, but not an easy sell in many situations. You’ll want to listen to hear how they overcame this challenge and other Web 2.0 adventures they had.

Enjoy the podcast? Well, you can join Steve and Riccardo for their UIE Web App Summit full-day workshop, Web 2.0 Strategy and Design, and learn how to apply the elements of social media, openness, rich interfaces, and emerging digital interactions to your designs.

Over at Semantic Foundry, designer extraordinaire, Will Evans, has a wonderful essay explaining how he uses wireframing as both a problem setting and a problem solving approach.

I pick my primary audience and the one activity which allows them to solve one goal quickly, effortlessly, elegantly. In this case, the primary audience wants to easily find the best cruise, at the right time, for the right price. I don’t even look at the requirements document or competitive analysis until after I have sketched a couple of ideas either on paper or using Omnigraffle, which explores the primary goal. I’m not looking for solutions at this point because the first round of wireframes provide a space to engage in a dialogue with other designers, stakeholders, and the wireframes themselves.

It’s a great description of how Will tackles a design and he’s provided his work products for you to download.

Read Will’s essay: Shades of Gray: Wireframes as Thinking Device

[Plug: At the upcoming UIE Web App Summit, we have two sessions dealing with wireframing. Dan Brown will talk about how wireframes are an essential part of your overall design deliverable strategy in his full-day workshop, Communicating Design: Essential Deliverables for Highly Effective Design Teams. James Box and Richard Rutter will spend half of their full-day seminar, Wireframing and Prototyping for Highly Interactive Web Apps, demonstrating how to use wireframes when building Ajax and social networking tools.]

Back in Holes in The Experience, I talked about what happened if you asked UPS about a package that your e-commerce vendor has readied for shipment, but hasn’t given UPS yet.

Originally, you got a dialog that looked like this:

This looks like an error because that’s how UPS treats it. While the e-commerce vendor has assigned a tracking number, it’s not in the tracking system yet, so it gives a not found error, asserting the user has typed it in wrong. (Interestingly, most of the time, the user hadn’t typed anything—the e-commerce vendor tapped into UPS’s API and automatically generated the error.)

But, UPS has learned. Today, you get this dialog instead:

It’s better, since it doesn’t treat the tracking number like a mistyped error. The UPS system acknowledges that they know a package exists and they even report important details, such as the destination and ship date.

Yet, from the perspective of the e-commerce customer, there’s still a hole in the experience. Stating that the status is “Billing Information Received” still requires the recipient understand UPS’s internal workflow structures. They have to understand that billing information is automatically transmitted through the UPS software that the e-commerce vendor uses to generate the package delivery request. They have to understand that they, the package recipient, isn’t being billed—the e-commerce vendor is.

Anyone want to take a stab at redesigning this to better communicate to the package tracking user what’s really going on?

Earlier this year, Carolyn Snyder and the good folks at the Cutter Consortium asked me to write an article for the Cutter IT Journal.

Several weeks later, I submitted Is IT Ready for Experience Design? I wrote this essay for IT managers and CIOs looking to understand what it means to create great experiences for customers.

Now, as a holiday gift, Cutter is letting me give our friends (that includes you) a complimentary PDF of the entire special journal issue, IT Usability: Bridging the Gap Between Machines and People. If you’d like to get it, just go to this page on the Cutter site and follow the instructions.

Warning: The Cutter folks ask for information before you download. I don’t know what they do with this, but I’m betting they use it for the forces of good and not to support the axis of evil. Proceed at your own risk. (It’s ok with me if Bill Gates downloads a bunch of copies. Not that I’m suggesting you falsify information. Wink. Wink.)