Day 93 - Storytelling Building Blocks

Yes, this is a blog about ux but story telling is a key part of human experience often using words and actions to tell a story. Stories are fundamental to meaning, memory, and experience.
These are the building blocks to complex narratives:

1. Rags to riches (a story that follows a rise to happiness).
2. Tragedy.
3. Riches to rags (one that follows a fall in happiness).
4. Man in a hole (fall-rise).
5. Icarus (rise-fall).
6. Cinderella (rise-fall-rise).
7. Oedipus (fall-rise-fall).

Day 92 - User Experience Problem Solving

If you want to understand a product's vision, you need to understand what problem the product is solving for, who is the product's user, what is their context, and how you plan to improve the user's experience.

1. Frame the problem by understanding your user's needs, user's anxieties, and business goals.
2. Dig deep and explore many solutions before narrowing the focus of the solution.
3. Prioritize and create a specific plan of action with timelines that address the most important needs.

Day 91 - What Speed Should Your UI Animations Be

Good  timing and duration for animated UIs are around 200ms to 500ms seconds.  This is more of an art than a science. Always test and adjust how fast your animation is.  Smaller animations will be in the 100ms or 200ms range, while larger animations that have more area to cover will be in the higher ranges.

Day 90 - Cognitive Load

What's cognitive load?  It's the amount of mental processing power needed to use your product, app, or service.

• Minimize cognitive load by keeping it simple.
• Minimize cognitive load by removing non-essential content and elements
• Minimize cognitive load by breaking the experience into smaller, easily-understandable segments controlled by the pace of the user.

Day 89 - Participant Observation

1. What do people do now?
2. What values and goals do people have?
3. How are these particular activities embedded in a larger ecology?
4. What are the similarities and differences across people?
5. Pay attention to all the artifacts.
6. Look for work arounds and hacks.
7. Errors are a goldmine.
8. If you ask people what they want (lead in questions) as opposed to observing what they do, you can be easily led astray.
9. Find out what people's goals are.
1. Try and do.
2. Ask and listen.
3. Watch and observe.

Day 88 - Advice for Conducting User Research Interviews

• Set schedule yourself
• Factor in breaks
• Recruit more participants than you need
• Record the sessions
• Be casual and conversational
• Ask open-ended questions
• Ask about behaviors not feelings
• Don’t judge their answers
• Paraphrase what you heard
• Be grateful

Day 87 - Designing with Empathy

Millions of people world wide have a disability so remember to design with empathy.

1. Pay attention to color for people with color blindness
2. Learn how screen readers work
3. Label everything usefully
4. Put yourself in the customer's shoes
5. Talk to people with disabilities

Day 86 - Ten Typography Tips

1. Don't be trendy.
2. Don't use too many fonts.
3. Choose different typefaces that work together.
4. Don't forget about serifs.
5. Be consistent.
6. Create a hierarchy.
7. Legibility is important across all devices, sizes, and experiences.
8. Don't crowd the typography.
9. Create equal 'Perceived' space between letters.
10. Less is more.

Day 85 - White Space

Five ways white space affects the user experience:

1. White space makes your content stand out.
2. White space helps the user focus on what's critical.
3. White space simplifies your designs.
4. White space makes your designs elegant.
5. White space allows for scannability.

Day 84 - Five Copywriting Tips

1. When you're editing copy read it out loud.
2. Make links clear and relevant.  Make sure your links make it absolutely clear what will happen on click.
3. Do more research. The best copywriters are determined researchers.
4. Make it scannable and visually appealing. People scan pages quickly so get to the point.
5. Refine your headline.  People read headlines more than they do body copy.  If the headline draws them in they might read further.

Day 83 - Iteration

Perform iterative design. It's rare to get things right the first time. Create multiple interaction designs, get feedback, and try different things.  Repeating, changing, and simplifying your designs can help you hone in on the problem you're trying to solve.

Day 82 - Clean Visual Design Tips

1. Clean design reduces conscious effort on part of the user to find information.
2. Deciding relevance. Does user even care about your information?
3. Ability to scan an overview. Convey the main ideas.
4. Basic comprehension.  Use visual design to make it easier on user to understand the information.
5. Ability to easily find actionable details.

Day 81 - User Interface Learnability

A UI should be easy to use from the first time a customer interacts with it.  If the interface isn't approachable or if it's confusing, people will abandon it quickly. The amount of functionality presented to the user should be limited to precisely what the user requires to accomplish the task.

Day 80 - Return on Usability Investment

Why should the business care about ux research, usability and design?
Research at IBM shows that as a rule of thumb for every $1 dollar spent solving a problem in design, you save $10 dollars in development, and you save $100 dollars in post-release maintenance.

$1 : $10 : $100

Day 79 - Five Mobile Conditions for Social Apps

It's a cliche at this point but astounding mobile growth continues.  What's different about building social apps on mobile than it was on the desktop.

1. Smartphone apps can access your address book, bypassing the need to build your social graph on a new service.
2. They can access your local photo library, uploading your photos to different websites is a nusance.
3. They can use push notifications rather than emails. The millennial generation generally don't use email.
4. Smartphones provide geo-location.
5. Crucially, they get an icon on the home screen.

Day 78 - Value FOR Your Customers

Five ways for creating value for your customers:

1. Focus on value.  What pain point are you solving for your customer.
2. Compete on value not price.
3. Be empathetic. Walk in your customer's shoes and see the world through their eyes.
4. Satisfy your customers by making them successful.  In other words, satisfy their needs.
5. Delight them by giving them something extra.

Day 77 - Ten Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design

Jakob Nielsen's 10 most general principles (or heuristic rules of thumb) for interaction design:

1. Visibility of system status.
2. Match between system and the real world.
3. User control and freedom.
4. Consistency and standards.
5. Error prevention.
6. Recognition rather than recall.
7. Flexibility and efficiency of use.
8. Aesthetic and minimalist design.
9. Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors.
10. Help and documentation.

Day 76 - System Usability System (SUS)

SUS is a series of ten questions. It's a quick and dirty usability scale to give your users once they've completed testing your service.  Users are asked to rate statements from 1-5 depending on how much they agree with them.

1. I think that I would like to use this system frequently.
2. I found the system unnecessarily complex.
3. I thought the system was easy to use.
4. I think I would need the support of a technical person to use this system.
5. I found the various functions in this system were well integrated.
6. I thought there was too much inconsistency in this system.
7. I would imagine that most people would learn to use this system very quickly.
8. I found the system very cumbersome to use.
9. I feel very confident using the system.
10. I needed to learn a lot of things before I could get going with this system.

Day 75 - Value from Your Customers

Value comes from customers in four different ways.

1. They can pay you money.
2. They can create content for you.
3. They can give you their eyeballs.
4. They can give you other users.

Day 74 - Problem Solving Using the Five Whys

Problem solving requires getting to the root causes of the problem. To figure out the root causes you need to dig deep into the underlying sources and symptoms of a problem. But how do you clearly discover and articulate the actual problem?  Use the "Five Whys" iterative question asking technique. Each subsequent question forms the basis for the follow up question.

When asking the five whys make sure you write down the specific problem/s and answers to your questions. The real problem is likely to change or come more into focus the deeper you dig.

Classic example of the 'Five Whys'.
The problem: the car won't start.

1. Why? The battery is dead (first why)
2. Why? The alternator is not functioning (second why)
3. Why? The alternator belt has broken (third why)
4. Why? The alternator belt was well beyond its useful service life and wasn't replaced (fourth why)
5. Why? The vehicle was not maintained according to the recommended service schedule (fifth why, a root cause)