A few weeks ago, I had the great pleasure of interviewing two Confab speakers, Jonathon Khan and Melanie Moran, in preparation for my attendance of Confab Minneapolis. While writing the introduction for that interview, I spent some time reflecting on why Confab is such a meaningful conference to me:

[Speakers at Confab] talk about writing from the perspective of thinkers – journalists, creatives, researchers, and readers – instead of merely dwelling on its marketing value. It’s a whole new world, connecting writing to design, turning copy into content.

Kristina’s call-to-action during this year’s event – “You are a salesperson” – especially rang true. As an independent content strategist, I work with three types of clients:

1. Clients who know what I do and value it
2. Clients with a rough idea and interest in what I do, and
3. Clients who simply don’t “get” content strategy.

By far, the third category is the most difficult: in addition to doing my job as a strategist, I have to teach these clients about governance, content creation, content curation, and content modeling. I also have to continually prove my own value. It’s the single most frustrating aspect of my work.

Communication techniques

Fortunately, this year’s speakers also taught me how to value both my clients who understand my work, and the clients who need me to be their guide. It’s advice I’m excited to put into practice.

Show them you care

Some clients love content strategy, but that doesn’t mean everyone’s on board. The easiest way to get people invested in content strategy is to listen, not speak. Listening shows clients that we want to understand the problem at hand. Stakeholders may not care about content strategy, but they do care about finding a solution to their problem. Once they hear their solution lies in a content audit, authoring guidelines, a governance plan, etc, they’ll jump on board. We might call it content strategy; they just call it “what works.”

Ask the right questions

During her keynote, Kristina focused on the top 10 issues that content strategists face. Many clients want future-friendly, multi-channel, single-source, magical-unicorn-meat content. It’s depressing to be the bearer of bad news, telling clients they need to trudge through the boring world of organizing content before they get to the fun “future” stuff. The solution is to remind clients that we’ll get to the future-friendly, multi-channel, single-source, magical-unicorn-meat content by starting with simple questions, such as: why do we need it; what already exists; and where is it?

Find your voice

The first step in building a content strategy isn’t necessarily a big, expensive, full-site, multi-channel redesign. Tiffani Jones Brown explained the value of starting small in her talk, Voice Lessons: Finding Your Company’s Personality. Voice is a combination of personality, energy, and the experiences clients have with your company – all the words that represent a brand. Before touching a page on the website, it helps to reassure clients that we’re not starting from scratch; we’re making a record of, and using, their own, personalized language.

Be Honest

One of the most valuable talks I heard at Confab this year was Ahava Leibtag’s talk, Winning the Work: Making the Case for Content Strategy. Ahava drilled down to the heart of a common content strategy concern: what if I’m not right for the job? Her advice? Be honest. In a worst case scenario, you are freeing up your time for projects to which you’re better suited. And in a best case scenario, the client decides to work with you, and has reasonable expectations! In addition, every prospective client appreciates working with someone who recognizes their own strengths and weaknesses.

Put the “Strategy” in content strategy

Many clients fear the unknown of “content strategy,” and they want to see either a process, or a list of deliverables, neither of which come naturally to a flexible content strategy. In Responsive Web Projects: How to Plan a Successful Discovery Process Steve Fisher and Alaine Mackenzie offered some suggestions for helping to create a process that clients can understand… even if the process doesn’t exactly match the sample one that ships with Microsoft Project.

Stay out of the silo

“Silos are for farming, not content strategy,” Steve Fisher told us. It’s easier said than done. Even as a proponent of knocking down silos between development, content strategy, and design, content strategists occasionally advocate for silos when working with management! A “heads down” approach and preference to work with clients who already “get” content strategy builds a wall between the strategist and the client; part of breaking silo walls down is teaching clients what they don’t understand.

Get started

Every conference leaves my head awhirl with new plans to change the way I work with my own clients. Starting now, I’m getting out of my private “content-knowledgeable” silo and advocating for content strategy. Feel free to follow my lead with these first steps:

1. Provide some therapy for new clients. Ask them what keeps them awake at night, and how they feel about their content.
2. Offer content strategy as the solution, not the issue. For clients who haven’t worked with a content strategist before, this will help frame the process.
3. Talk about the process. The process is flexible and ever changing, but it does exist.
4. Stay honest, stay optimistic. It’s easy to get jaded when “selling” your skills, particularly if you feel like you’re doing false advertising. Instead, engage in honest discussions with new clients; that’s enough to sell the value of content strategy!

The post A Confab Recap appeared first on UX Booth.

The story behind what we today know as the Business Model Canvas is an interesting one. Originally created as a conceptual framework for Alexander Osterwalder’s PhD project, it later became the subject of an entire book called Business Model Generation, co-authored with Yves Pigneur. Today, both the book and the canvas allow those of us without business training (including yours truly) to better understand sustainable business practices.

My application of the Business Model Canvas is likely atypical, though. Instead of using the canvas to aid clients, I wondered: what if I looked at my role as a business itself? After all, I need resources to operate (a budget, my supervisors’ time, my colleagues’ expertise); I have customers (people to whom I provide value); I have costs (my time, materials, stress). Could understanding all these things help me design more efficiently?

Introspection

To follow my logic, it’s useful to first understand how the business model canvas is laid out.

Personal Business Model Canvas Worksheet. Source: http://www.businessmodelyou.com

Divided into nine parts, it includes:

• Key partners – Who supports you?
• Key activities – What do you do to create value?
• Key resources – What do you require?
• Customers – For whom do you create value?
• Value – What problems do you solve? What needs do you address?
• Channels – How do you communicate your value?
• Customer relationships – How you interact with customers?
• Revenue – What do you get?
• Costs – What do you give?

Using the original book’s sequel (Business Model You) as a guide, I thought critically about my role within my organization. Rather than rigorously weigh all nine considerations here, though – something for which the book is much better suited – let’s look at three in particular: customers, value provided, and key channels.

Customers: not just the end-user

While it’s relatively easy to assume that our customers are the same as the customers of the company for which we work, this isn’t strictly the case. As the book defines them, customers are anyone for whom we’re creating value, including:

• Clients and stakeholders, who rely on us for our expertise;
• End-users, who rely on us to represent their needs;
• Software developers, who rely on us to clarify interactions and interfaces;
• Other members of the design team, who rely on us for user research; and, finally,
• Colleagues in quality assurance, who rely on us for specifications and clarifications.

Notice that end-users are only one item on the list. Notice, also, that colleagues are customers too. Couple this with the fact that we practice user-centered design and it becomes increasingly obvious why it’s part of our job to consider our team and their benefit.

User experience design isn’t limited to human-computer interaction; it includes human-human interaction as well. Before filling out the canvas, I instinctively knew this – that my responsibility did not end with “end users” – however, I didn’t know what I could do to serve them more effectively. That’s when I considered value propositions.

Value: not just deliverables

Just as clients tend to think of our work as deliverables, designers often think of our work as different activities: holding workshops, conducting interviews, writing scenarios, making wireframes. Yet one of the biggest mistakes we can make is to assume that the activities we conduct are the same thing as the value we provide.

When I sat down to determine the value I provided, I was stumped. I could only think of – dare I say it – clichés. “Making things easy to use,” “generating empathy,” etc. I needed to break it down.

My actual first draft of value provided – this describes what value my role provides, irrespective of activities.

To determine the value I provided to others, I started with a list of what I was currently doing at work: conducting user interviews, diagramming mental models, building low-fidelity prototypes, tracing mind maps, putting together personas. Next, I considered my reasoning for each activity. Why did I interview project stakeholders?, for example.

Then I asked myself: So what? Repeatedly. Until I hit something.

This resulted in the following table:

Does interviewing customers before designing reduce the risk of product-market mismatch? Does one particular kind of prototype make it easier to adapt the design vision? You don’t know until you think it through.

Next, I considered the value provided by each of these activities for my customers:

Notice how the value differs depending upon the customer. Finding the right way to phrase the value we provide for a given audience is, simply put, a user-centered way of thinking. It requires asking the right questions and actually listening to the answers. In this case, we just have to add business constraints, and organizational fit to our list of topics to listen out for.

Communicating this way signals that we have a wide skillset. When I sit down at a meeting, I sometimes sense that a new client considers the role of designer to be analogous to that of an aesthetician: the person responsible for adding “color” to an interface. Communicating my role in terms of value signals that I think broadly. It raises expectations.

Key channels: stop waiting for recognition

The third realization I had when filling out the canvas was that I was often waiting for people to become curious about what I did instead of communicating my own value. Channels are the methods we use to communicate to customers. They afford three things:

• Awareness of the value we provide. They allow us to spread the word about what we can offer (and listen to others to see where its needed most).
• The value itself. Channels allow us to deliver the value we promise.
• Customer support after we’ve delivered our value.

Most importantly, this exercise helped me realize that I needed to start doing things resonated most with each of my customers. To that end, I might:

• Demo something I did in the company demo meeting and talk about the value to developers
• Share a usability test recording
• Make a cheat-sheet of my activities’ benefits for the sales team, or
• Write articles about our process for the company website so clients could learn more about what UX means for business

Making the sale

So there you have it: the business model of a UX Team of One. Selling UX – especially within an organisation – is a complex topic. Whole books have been written on the subject. The three insights above resulted from reconsidering my value and what I could improve on.

I eventually came to realize I needed a plan for communicating value to different groups of people I work with, and that I had to stop waiting and start doing. I also came to accept that there were areas in which I needed help – such as translating my reasoning for UX activities into business terms. I’m currently working on writing out all these benefits, with the help of an experienced consultant.

The business model canvas hasn’t made my job any easier to do, but it has helped me prioritize. Communicating value is a journey. I recommend filling out the canvas for yourself and seeing which boxes are most difficult to fill (yours might differ from my 3 key learnings) or with which you could use some help. I have no doubt you’ll find the result rewarding.

Related resources

On UX within organizations

• User Experience is Not Enough
• Selling UX
• Communicating the UX Value Proposition

On UX benefits

• Overview of UX activities and their benefits
• The ROI (Return on Investment) of User Experience

On the Business Model Canvas

• Business Model You – an adaption of the canvas for individuals
• Lean Canvas – A business model canvas alternative for startups
• Business Model Canvas for User Experience Design – an alternative focusing on the user

The post A User Experience Business of One appeared first on UX Booth.

The trends aren’t difficult to see. Co-authors Joseph Pine and James Gilmore pointed out eons ago in the web world – back in 1998 – that we live an experience economy. Simply put, people are drawn to products and services that are more considerate of their experience. Additionally, by now, designers are well acquainted with the idea of mobile, ubiquitous computing. It’s hard not to be. It’s the subject of books, blogs, even whole conferences.

One consequence of these trends is data. Lots of it. Data.gov, a site created and maintained by the Obama administration’s Open Government Initiative, houses over 73,000 sets of the stuff. The sheer quantity available begs the question: what can designers do? The (short-term) answer is visualizations. With them, designers turn otherwise confusing arrays of numbers into useful information.

Map-based visualizations seem a relatively humble start, yet the examples appearing on sites such as Data.gov and Data.Seattle.gov readily manifest the power of mere juxtaposition.

Visualizations are only a small part of the story, though. What’s more valuable than the insights created by way of visualizations and others information technologies like them are the storytelling opportunities that these neo-journalism tools afford. By piecing together the narratives behind collective action, locally-minded people – citizens – can tell more cohesive stories about their communities and plan for change. In essence, today’s technological landscape provides a compelling opportunity for designers to affect a positive change across entire municipalities.

The citizen experience

After years of working in the private sector, Jess McMullin had an epiphany. At two in the morning – the Saturday before Christmas, 2009 – he made the not-too-hasty decision to leave the consultancy he had founded six years prior. Jess left his own company to work in the public sector because, in his words:

I’ve found public-sector work to be infinitely more meaningful than private-sector work. I guess that’s because, as an individual, I actually have faith and confidence in the government as a solution to societal problems.

Individually, we tend not to act in a way that’s attuned to our collective needs. The free market led us to the housing crisis and situations like Enron. Unregulated, it’s a sociopath. Government provides a solution to the tragedy of the commons.

Jess Mcmullin

Many of the designers with whom I spoke while researching this piece had a similar epiphany: the “tragedy of the commons” becoming too acute, and projects focused on the citizen experience appearing refreshingly greenfield by comparison. It led user researcher Cyd Harrell to more prominently introduce the term to the community in her article on UX Magazine titled “The Citizen Experience Needs Us: Why UX practitioners should join the Government 2.0 movement.” She says:

Lately, I’ve started thinking that our view of the human as a “user” is incomplete. Yes, interacting with interfaces does come down to using technology, but just as “customer” is a more comprehensive term in the commercial realm, we need another term to describe other important relationships in people’s lives.

Anyone applying for a business license or a building permit, paying taxes, looking up public records, or requesting benefits is participating in an interaction where they are something more than a user. These relationships aren’t exactly voluntary the way commercial relationships are, but at the same time, the public nature of these services makes the user a co-owner in a way that customers typically are not.

Most citizen experiences don’t properly reflect this reality although they should, and it’s interesting to think about how they’d be different if they did.

Cyd Harrell

In other words, the citizen experience is a direct result of the platform provided by a municipality. While its opportunities aren’t as readily apparent, they’re no less important to would-be civic designers.

The civic design spectrum

The gap between today’s user-centered designers and tomorrow’s civic designers is closing, albeit slowly. That’s partially because citizen experience is a relatively nascent idea (to us), and partially because the resources available to designers are few and far between. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg scenario. Some resources do exist, though: Jess McMullin, mentioned above, wrote a guide called Getting into Government Consulting detailing his lessons from the trenches; researchers Nate Bolt and Tony Tulathimutte wrote an account of their work with Stanford University, helping get the word out about Swine Flu; and designers Elizabeth Buie & Dianne Murray co-edited a book called Usability in Government Systems, which acts as a good primer.

Dana Chisnell’s Field Guides to Ensuring Voter Intent were funded through Kickstarter and designed by Oxide Design Co.

Other designers have simply jumped in head first, making a name for themselves by taking part in what author Jon Kolko calls social entrepreneurship. Social entrepreneurship works just like its conventional counterpart except that social entrepreneurs seek to solve humanitarian problems rather than sell products. Dana Chisnell’s Field Guides to Ensuring Voter Intent and Laura Amico’s Homicide Watch serve as good examples, in addition to joint-ventures such as Random Hacks of Kindness (sponsored by Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, NASA, and the World Bank).

What’s clear is that civic design projects run the gamut – some are visualizations, some are physical objects, and some are quasi-public services. Is there any consensus as to what citizens actually want from the government of the future? This summary, accompanying an Accenture study from 2012, suggests an answer:

The majority of people say they would use digital services if offered by government, especially for routine transactions. And over half want to conduct all their government business digitally in the future. The biggest challenge for government is not catching up with the private sector—it’s giving digital citizens what they want while using digital channels to improve public value.

Laying aside the ambiguity of “public value” for a moment, it seems sensible to conclude that the primary way to increase that value would be to give each citizen a voice, helping them take part in their own democracy. San Francisco’s online service center, @SF311, does just this.

As Cyd explains (in the same article mentioned earlier):

One day last summer, driving through Golden Gate Park on one of our notoriously freezing and foggy June mornings, I noticed sprinklers in full spray all along a major road, wasting large quantities of water. Having recently heard about the service, I tweeted @SF311, and within 45 minutes I had a helpful response assuring me that it would be checked out. The next day when I drove the same route, the sprinklers were off.

Cyd Harrell

Tools such as SF311 are equal parts fascinating and vexing. While one the one hand they liberate – empowering citizens – on the other hand they also represent of an entire class of products and services that are often unheard of until after they’re built.

Better government for everyone

Anyone who’s interacted with an office of their local government knows that the public sector works as best as it can to serve the needs of its constituents. Organizations frequently adopt and adapt solutions along the way which inevitably introduces inefficiencies. Inefficiency, however, is something for which user-centered design is well suited. It’s just rarely the case that these two parties meet in the middle, despite the fact that they have so much to gain from one another.

This disconnect prompted Jennifer Pahlka – a former game-industry leader turned social entrepreneur – to found a civic-design organization called Code for America. Code for America is best described by way of analogy, drawing comparisons to both Teach for America and Peace Core (but for geeks). At its heart, the organization facilitates is a year-long fellowship program, recruiting designers and developers to scope and solve public-sector problems in collaboration with local governments.

In a nutshell:

1. Designers and developers apply from all over the country,
2. Next, a handful are chosen to participate in the San Francisco-based program,
3. Finally, states sponsor a group of fellows to come onsite and collaboratively solve government problems in a user-centered way.

Participation in the program is as much a learning opportunity as it is a gesture to shared future of our nation. The following video provides insight into one of the projects that came out of last year’s program:

Readers interested in transitioning into the the civic design space are highly encouraged to apply for the 2014 fellowship.

What tomorrow feels like

The most fascinating thing about citizen experience design is that it’s taken so long to come to the fore. The problem space begins with a question that’s pertinent to all of us: what’s it like to be a resident of a town or city? And how could that be better? Living somewhere is “an experience” most do not think of “choosing;” our parents made that decision for us. But as we grow up we do have a choice: do we keep things as they are or do we choose to make our future government better than we found it?

Related resources

• Civic Hackathon Challenge Design Principles: Making Data Relevant and Useful for Individuals and Communities

The post Design in Service: Crafting the Citizen Experience appeared first on UX Booth.

Unusable or inaccessible, what’s the difference?

As many within our community have pointed out, the things we might normally think of as well designed are often only “well designed” within a certain context. People with limited use of their arms, for example, might find a standard keyboard difficult to employ. Ditto those using browsers that might lack support for web standards. They often incur barriers when accessing the web.

Obviously, this is less than ideal. Design shouldn’t serve merely a subset of its audience – it should serve everyone, equally. Doing that, however, requires thoughtful conversations before, during, and after development begins.

That’s where this article comes in. Like others in this series, The Complete Beginner’s Guide to Universal Design won’t provide a comprehensive look at the subject. Instead, it’s written as a springboard, introducing universal design and its close cousin, accessibility. For context’s sake, we’ll take a look at some of the ways in which universal design manifests itself – both online and off – and then close with some thoughts on approaching design in a more universal way.

Ready? Let’s get started.

What is universal design?

Universal design describes a set of considerations made to ensure that a product, service, and/or environment is usable by everyone, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design. Accessibility is only slightly different, describing the degree to which a product, service, and/or environment is made available to everyone. So whereas the former is a design methodology (similar to user-centered design), the latter is its most commonly associated metric.

Colloquially, accessibility refers to the degree to which a design functions for people with disabilities – those who can’t see, can’t hear, can’t use a keyboard or mouse, or those who have a cognitive or speech disability. Although these people have historically experienced a marginalized web, the times appear to be changing. The recent rise in popularity of mobile devices has forced organizations to finally give due consideration to the idea of dynamic context: usage in a variety of environments under a variety of conditions. This, in turn, blurs the lines between “people” and people with disabilities. Product designer and mobile strategist Luke Wroblewski has taken to describing his target audience as having “one eyeball and one thumb.”

Both universal design (in general) and mobile-first design (as a case in point) make products and services more accessible, paving the way for what the web community calls “one web.” One web is an increasingly pragmatic vision of a browser- and device-agnostic future which, many believe, is the only future-friendly way forward.

What does universal design “look” like?

All this abstract talk about universal design has probably got you thinking: what does this stuff actually look like? Let’s start by looking at universal design in the real world.

During California State University at Northridge’s annual CSUN conference, accessibility champion Wendy Chisholm pointed out that “stairs make the building inaccessible, not a wheelchair.”

Sloped sidewalks are a design detail accompanying contemporary pedestrian walkways. Physically, they’re nothing more than ramps that are added to sidewalks to make things easier for people using a wheelchair; but their actual utility runs far deeper. By addressing the need for people who use wheelchairs, designers have also made life easier for moms with strollers, people with handtrucks, etc. This is a good example of how designing for the “extreme” case makes the experience better for everyone.

The digital equivalent of sloped sidewalks is progressive enhancement. Web designers and developers (smartly) assume nothing about their target audience and initially deliver a barebones, semantic website. After the page loads, we use feature detection to determine whether or not a richer experience can supersede it.

Like most universal design considerations, progressive enhancement (when done well) isn’t “visible” unless you know how to look for it. Nevertheless, understanding the thinking that goes into universal design for the web makes all the difference with regards to our approach.

What things shape a universal approach?

Many people have given thought as to what constitutes universal design: Alan Cooper mentions some considerations in his book, About Face 3, and NC State hosts a set of principles on their website. Here, I’ll briefly cover some of the aspects I’ve found useful.

Accessibility begins with content. Accessible content is defined as content that’s perceivable (visible or otherwise), operable (usable), understandable (learnable, logically sound), and robust (well described, available in multiple formats). It is, likewise, made available via an accessible service. Accessible services deliver content to people, browsers, and other applications via a user interface (UI) and/or an application interface (API).

Designing content and services so that they meet these criteria isn’t easy. Instead of the normal, user-centered approach with which readers here are likely familiar, universal designers take an opportunistic point of view, asking who are the people/systems that could possibly use this content or service, and what are the barriers that could possibly stand in their way? I’ve found that this breaks down into a few, key activities: building the business case, measuring accessibility, understanding content, understanding code, and, finally, sharing skills. To be sure, all of these revolve around learning about, developing, and adhering to “best” practices.

Building the business case

To build the business case for universal design, user-centered designers might first measure the content or service’s accessibility (see below) and, second, convince stakeholders that it’s a worthwhile investment. Some arguments include:

• Accessible content is more findable (SEO benefits) and more shareable (social media benefits).
• Because they’re standards-based, accessible services are comprised of more interchangeable parts (making for more efficient collaboration).
• Governments legislate against inaccessible products.
• For some customers / organizations, accessibility directly drives their purchasing decisions.

Measuring accessibility

Universal design is measured by way of accessibility. Designers can begin to understand this link by developing a working knowledge of the accessibility testing tools available and then using them to evaluate the content or service under question. Finally, they might define an accessibility testing heuristic to ensure consistent measurement.

Accessibility testing tools include – but are certainly not limited to – device labs, screenreaders (such as Chromevox), and disability simulators (such as Etre’s colorblindness simulator). These are just the tip of the iceberg, though. I recommend working with stakeholders to determine the range of disabilities that might apply to their target audience.

After determining which accessibility testing tools provide a useful assessment of their content or service, designers can develop a set of testing heuristics to ensure their consistent use. These could be as simple as checklists or step-by-step guides; they could be as complex as a set of video tutorials.

Understanding content

To improve the accessibility of content, designers must first understand what’s wrong from an accessibility standpoint – if anything – with an organization’s content strategy: how content is planned for, created, published, and maintained. Instead of testing for compliance after the fact, they can embed accessibility considerations into the editorial process from the beginning.

This flowchart shows how determining the content of an image’s alt text requires a bit of thought.

Understanding code

To improve our code we must first understand it. After measuring our service’s accessibility, designers should pair with developers (see below) to better understand – and eventually improve – their development lifecycle. Some organizations do this by creating more modular designs, maintaining pattern libraries. Others adhere to standard application architectures, providing RESTful APIs. Still others use developer frameworks such as Quail.js to ensure that their front-end code is accessible.

Sharing skills

Accessible patterns and company-wide conventions are usually developed ad hoc. While creating an instructive CMS or a set of design/development patterns goes a long way towards ensuring things are accessible, documentation alone is no panacea.

As Julie Dirksen points out in her book, Design for How People Learn, facts are learned differently than skills. Because accessibility problems are potentially introduced whenever content is created – whenever code is written – it’s imperative that team members engage in pair programming or pair writing sessions to share their knowledge.

Go forth

So there you have it. Although it feels like we’ve covered a lot, we’ve actually only scratched the surface. I’ve intentionally left many parts out of this article, parts that are much better covered by entire books written on this subject. If you’re interested in learning more, I recommend giving them a read or perusing the related resource list, below.

Note: Thanks to both Matt May and Derek Featherstone who provided feedback on earlier drafts of this article.

Related Resources

• The Web Accessibility Initiative and their accessible-content creation guidelines.
• Knowability: a nonprofit organization whose mission is to support the independence of children and adults with disabilities by promoting the use and improving the availability of accessible information technology.
• The Accessibility Project: A set of resources to help make web accessibility easier.
• A Web for Everyone – Designing Accessible User Experiences: a forthcoming book from authors Sarah Horton and Whitney Quesenbery to be published by Rosenfeld Media
• 4Syllables Articles: A fantastic collection of articles and resources for more accessible web content. I recommend starting with part 1 of their series.
• HTML Codesniffer: A tool to programmatically determine compliance with the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines as well as U.S. Section 508’s legislation.
• Accessibility Priority Tool: Useful for helping newcomers diagnose accessibility issues
• AudioAccessibility.com: A fantastic wealth of information for audio accessibility.
• Amara: The easiest way to caption and translate any video.
• QuailJS: a jQuery plugin for checking content against accessibility guidelines.
• Userium’s Web Checklist
• The Anatomy of a Perfect Web Page – Hitreach.co.uk
• Web Aim, Creating accessible forms
• “Translation is UX” by Antione Lefeuvre on A List Apart
• “The Accessibility of WAI-ARIA” by Detlev Fischer on A List Apart
• “ARIA and Progressive Enhancement” by Derek Featherstone on A List Apart
• “Things I learned by pretending to be blind for a week” by David Ball on Silktide
• “The Ten Principles of Inclusive Web Design” by Sandi Wassmer
• “Building a webpage with accessibility and interoperability in mind: part 1” by Alistair Duggin

The post The Complete Beginner’s Guide to Universal Design appeared first on UX Booth.

When I first walked into Confab in 2012, I felt as though I had finally found home. During their workshops and talks, speakers discussed the “hows” and “whys” of writing, rather than merely the benefits of having content. They talked about writing from the perspective of thinkers – journalists, creatives, researchers, and readers – instead of merely dwelling on its marketing value. It was a whole new world, connecting writing to design, turning copy into content.

It’s no wonder, then, that I’ve been looking forward to Confab 2013 since the day I left the event. And now that it’s only two weeks away, I can barely contain my excitement! In the weeks leading up to the event, I’ve begun conversations with this year’s speakers in order to learn more about areas of content strategy we don’t often hear about. Jonathan Kahn and Melanie Moran share their stories.

Digital Governance Fails Because We’re Afraid of Cultural Change

Let’s begin with Jonathan Kahn. He’s a busy man. Jonathan organizes events (Dare Conference, Confab London, London Content Strategy Meetup), presents worldwide (Webdagene Oslo, CS Forum Paris/Cape Town, IxDA Dublin), and writes extensively (A List Apart, Contents, lucid plot) about the revolutionary changes facing organizations, and why it’s so hard to overcome them.

With a background in web development, he’s also worked as an information architect, user experience consultant, and content strategy advocate. Jonathan is the Principal of Together London. He shared the story leading to his presentation, Digital Governance Fails Because We’re Afraid of Cultural Change.

For most of my career I told myself I was a firefighter, rushing in at the last minute to fix screwed up web projects. Recently, though, I discovered why I told myself that story: I was avoiding the scary part of my work, the difficult questions.

Today, things are different. My interactions with the content strategy community have helped me craft a new story, and it goes something like this:

1. The internet puts new demands on our content. Customers expect useful, usable content across channels and devices, all the time.
2. Organizations (usually) aren’t setup to deal with this reality. People avoid talking about content because it’s messy, political, and hard to do well.
3. So our content is a mess, and nobody takes responsibility for fixing it. This creates problems for both the business and the customer. It also drives us crazy.
4. Content is important, damnit! It’s a business asset. Content strategy provides a way for us to fix these problems, helping us spread the word about the value of content throughout the organization and around the world.

The content strategy story is all about asking hard questions: What content do we have? Is it any good? Why do we need it? What’s our messaging architecture, our voice, our tone? Which other departments do we need to work with? How can we create a sustainable plan for commissioning, editing, publishing, and maintaining content over time?

This story is a framework for making content strategists vulnerable. Brave. Able to put more of ourselves into our work. At the same time, there are ways in which this story can be limiting. To understand why, it’s important to discuss a challenge that almost all content strategists face: governance.

Governance

Governance includes the standards, policies, and procedures made to allow an organization to care for its digital operations over time. In theory, a governance plan ensures our content strategies stick, but it rarely works. Writers don’t follow our voice guidelines, marketers ignore our message architectures, and developers create apps without considering the complexities of content.

We’re doing good work, but it isn’t sticking, which feels like a terrible waste of time. Why won’t people follow our guidelines? Recall the first point I made in the content strategy story above: “the internet puts new demands on our content.” While that’s true, we’re scared to ask the obvious follow-on questions:

• Why does the internet put new demands on our content?
• Why is the business environment changing so quickly?
• What does that mean for our business models? our siloed organizational structures? our “waterfall” development process? the software we buy? the agencies we hire?

These questions terrify us because we’re afraid to face the truth: content strategy is just one piece of the challenge of digital transformation. Our governance attempts fail because we’re working backwards: governance can only sustain culture, it can’t create it.

So what does governance look like when backed by the notion of digital transformation? To make our organizations sustainable, we need to change culture in a way that’s broader than content strategy, incorporating practices we know little about: service design, agile development, and cross-functional teams. Once we understand this, we can start changing our organizations’ culture, today.

Readers can learn more about how to affect a cultural change within their organization by attending Jonathan’s talk. It’s happening at 2:50pm on day two of Confab Minneapolis.

Content Strategy in Higher Education: Uniting Print and Web

Next we hear from Melanie Moran. Melanie is the Director of Integrated Communications at Vanderbilt University. Her presentation this year, “Content Strategy in Higher Education: Uniting Print and Web,” highlights her team’s year-long, ongoing journey towards cohesive, cross-platform storytelling.

She’s looking forward to learning from content experts from many different sectors and bringing home a passel of great ideas. In the meantime, she shared the thought-process leading to her presentation.

I’ll always remember when the light bulb went on for me – when I learned the importance of content strategy. I was sitting in a meeting of campus communicators at Vanderbilt University. I had just returned from conducting an hour-long interview with a faculty member, a professor whose research explored neuroscience and education. I needed his thoughts to inform a story I was writing for the web.

Just then, across the room, a colleague from another office reported that she, too, was writing a profile of a faculty member – for one of our print magazines. And wouldn’t you know it, it was the same guy. She had conducted the same research and was writing the same article.

This is crazy, I thought. Why was web not involved in planning for digital content to support print stories? From that moment forward, my colleagues and I began seeking ways to shake content out of its container – be that container print, web, video or even a press release. It eventually paid off in more innovative storytelling, expanded social media impact and a more strategic use of print.

How did we do this? Here are some of the key elements that informed our content strategy:

• Story first

  Forget the deadlines; forget the Facebook and Twitter beasts that need to be fed. Forget about that for just a minute and ask, why is this a great story? You can have the most interactive website or jaw-dropping magazine around and no one will read it if the stories are lame. Story first, always.

• Exploit the platforms

  Now that you’ve got your story, think about the many ways to tell it across different platforms. What is told with a photo or graphic on Facebook can then push to a feature on your website; can be explored in detail in your print publication; can be told via a video on YouTube. You get the idea. This will likely mean writing different headlines, using different images and even showcasing different parts of the story for different media – but that’s okay. Let go of the need to show everyone everything on every platform and disaggregate the story for maximum portability.

• Strategy, not reflex

  We all know the perils of the “we’ve always done it this way” mindset. And I know it’s 2013 and many of us have already mourned and moved on from print, but for many people it remains a relevant, effective way to reach their audience.

  Vanderbilt’s alumni magazine, for example, lives in the homes and offices of alumni around the country and world. Its physical presence connects them directly with Vanderbilt through dynamic storytelling and gorgeous photography and illustrations. We support this connection heavily with digital, of course, but print remains an important and compelling component of our strategy.

• Analytics, analytics, analytics.

  It was beautiful, it was epic. You laughed, you cried. …but did anyone read it? How was the social media engagement? Did it drive traffic back to your website? Picked up by media? Put yourself on a pretty strict plan of analytics tracking and use it to refine your content strategy. Then share what you find with decision makers, as data drives most organizations. Being able to provide it in relation to communications will elevate others’ understanding your work and the impact it has on your brand’s strength and reputation.

Readers interested in learning about cross-channel storytelling should join Melanie Moran at Confab Minneapolis. Her session begins at 9:40am on day two of the event.

See you there?

So, there you have it. Confab Minneapolis begins on Monday, June 3 and – in addition to Jonathan and Melanie’s – the workshops and talks range from content measurement and modeling to creating content in a zombie apocalypse.

As always, Confab features a mix of well known and up-and-coming content strategists. I’m particularly looking forward to Catherine Toole’s “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and Sara Wachter-Boettcher’s “Write Like a Human, Think Like a Robot.”

Who are you looking forward to seeing?

The post A Taste of Confab 2013 appeared first on UX Booth.

Design research, content strategy, gamification, oh my! Here’s the goods to make us good (err, well, better):

Design research

Design research is a necessary part of every user-centered design project, so more resources to that end never hurt:

• Patterns. Pattern recognition is something for which every systems thinker accounts. Tech writer Kai Weber’s asks how we might we more-thoroughly incorporate it into our process?
• Usability heuristic. Some, otherwise-obvious issues are difficult to see until a user points them out. But why wait? Userium’s usability checklist helps teams uncover problems before they conduct user testing. This leaves those same users free to uncover harder-to-catch issues. Oh, and if this kind of thing fits your fancy: Cameron Chapman compiled a list of 45 web-design checklists some four years ago.
• Remote research. It shouldn’t be too surprising that the state of the art of remote research has changed a great deal since Nate Bolt and and Tony Tulathimutte released their seminal book three years back. In this presentation, Nate shares the latest and greatest methods informing his work!

Content Strategy

Far too many content strategy articles focus on the outcome rather than a productive “how to” – especially when it comes to writing. The following resources focus more on how to write effectively.

• Tone of voice. Creating a solid “voice” is difficult, even for experienced content strategists. Enter Gather Content: A Guide to Tone of Voice. Created by Gather Content’s Kevan Gilbert back in November, this article provides a rough heuristic for lending personality to your website or application.
• Valuable content. Those looking for more content strategy advice should check out Ahava Leibtag, President of Aha Media. She’s been practicing content strategy since 2005 (!), and her Creating Valuable Content checklist is a gift to anyone tasked with its creation. It’s simple to use and easy to adapt.
• Using comics. Kevin Chang’s book, “See What I Mean,” was written in a show-and-tell fashion, beginning life as a presentation. The book demonstrates how comics can engage teams and facilitate understanding. Read it, and you’ll… see what I mean.
• Health literacy. Although it was published all the way back in 2010, the US Department of Health and Human Services’s Health literacy online guide is as contemporary as ever. Chock full of research, design advice and content considerations, it’s an easy recommendation.

Gamification

The gamification debate is complex. While it’s generally agreed that adding a “game layer” to an application is not a solution, there’s definitely value in incorporating engaging elements into our websites. These two resources dig a little deeper into the true aim of gamification:

• Fun and (learning) games. Keeping the Play in Learning is a video highlighting the game mechanics inherent in education, banking, eCommerce, and other daily tasks. Play is also the subject of a TED talk or two.
• Engagement via gamification. Chris McClelland’s presentation, engagement through gamification, examines the differences as well as the similarities between game mechanics – rewards, achievements, and competition – and UX best practices.

Live and learn

Ours is a rapidly evolving field, and every so often we learn another way to make the process more efficient. Leave a comment with your own favorite infographics, process-changing checklists, or a slideshare or video that speaks to the innovative designer in you.

The post April Resource Roundup: Food for Thought appeared first on UX Booth.

Consider the design of a voice-based interface. Because users can say what they mean in any number of ways, there are many situations for which designers cannot account – especially in the first iteration. Designers proactively create a set of interactions that users might accomplish, but the diversity of “common” speech patterns prevents a more prescriptive, task-oriented solution.

Clearly those designing voice-based interfaces intend for users to accomplish something. So how might designers shape their interpretation? To better answer the question, let’s examine some problems encountered defining “design” and then borrow some thinking from literary studies. Finally, we’ll explore how these considerations affect the everyday work of information architects and interaction designers.

Intention

The word “design” is problematic. Colloquially, we tend to think of design as the purposeful creation of some thing – a physical object, an experience, or even a conceptual argument – whereas etymologically, we can trace “design” back to Latin. There, it connotes purpose, choice, and designation.

If we push the etymological boundaries a little, we might think of it as the deification of an object (de-), or the association with god-like qualities. The designer is an intelligent creator that crafts things according to his/her intention. A final perspective points to the designer as someone who sets meaning elsewhere. Intention is so powerful here that the designer does not even consider variation in interpretation; the designer’s intention is the final meaning.

The problem with all four of these interpretations is that they are incongruous with the principles of user-centered design. User-centered design holds that user experience – to say nothing of designer intent – is the most important element of a design system.

Interpretation

In order to reconcile the disparity between intent and interpretation, it’s useful to borrow from literary critics, those with a long history of interpreting things (albeit from a textual perspective).

In 1946, critics W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published a paper called The Intentional Fallacy arguing that “[the] intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art.” Instead, they believed that the only reasonable factors that could serve as the basis of critique were direct-textual material (e.g., the work itself), indirect-textual material (e.g., inferences), and contextual material (e.g., history). In other words: a literary text should be judged on its content, its merit, and history’s perception – not intent!

Contemporary HCI researcher Clarisse Sieckenius de Souza stands on the other side of the fence. Working within the realm of semiotic engineering, she sees a direct relationship between a designer and user, one facilitated by a “designer deputy.” To de Souza, a designer communicates intent through an interface. The user then interprets that interface to accomplish certain goals. It’s a one-way conversation.

Although their opinions diverge, both Wimsatt/Beardsley and de Souza’s are both “correct.” How can that be? The former – a critic’s perspective – concerns works of art, whereas the latter – a researcher’s perspective – deals with objects of utility.

Elucidation

For better or for worse, web design provides avenues for both art and utility. There are certainly elements of a bank’s website that are more artistic than utilitarian, for example. And, as such, we need to recognize that the interplay between designer intent and user interpretation is a spectrum rather than a dichotomy.

Don Ihde, a philosopher of science and technology, ruminates on this in his essay The Designer Fallacy and Technological Imagination (2008):

[T]he designer fallacy is ‘deistic’ in its 18th century sense, that the designer-god, working with plastic material, creates a machine or artifact which seems ‘intelligent’ by design – and performs in its designed way. Instead, I hold, the design process operates in very different ways, ways which imply a much more complex set of inter-relations between any designer, the materials which make the technology possible, and the uses to which technologies may be put. Ultimately I am after a deconstruction of the individualistic notion of design which permeates both the literary and technological versions of the fallacy.

Ihde goes on to suggest that the most interesting use cases are the unanticipated ones. Designing a utilitarian system demands a level of intentionality, a very narrow definition of success. Art objects, however, have a more ambiguous aim. They’re designed such that emergent properties create results, which in turn creates more emergent properties, more results, and so on.

As designers, we must accept that intention, at the very least, cannot be the central focus of a successful design output. Any object is always more than merely an object. Context gives it meaning. While our intention may affect the “in the moment” relationship to an object, later examination leaves much more room for emergent meaning creation.

Care

Because meaning created through emergent systems has the potential to regenerate itself ad infinitum, those of us designing experiences must exhibit care for how intentionality effects that meaning thusly created. I emphasize care, here, in a manner close to the way Heidegger might – as for him, concern is not the same as keeping in mind, but rather entails a specific way of being. Interface designers must concern themselves with both intention and interpretation.

Designers create systems of meaning. Artifacts are only physical manifestations of our intent. Once users put those manifestations to use, though, our original intent is no longer relevant. Associated meaning is now part of peripheral thinking about these objects.

Insofar as the designer can influence the creation of meaning after the initial interaction, we must think of the design object not as the end of our process but rather, in a strange sense, only the beginning. No interface – no object whatsoever – is valuable in-and-of itself. Value is derived from user interpretation before, during, and after the interaction.

Application

As the complexity of technological systems continues to grow, designers need to consider novel, long-form approaches to their design problems. Considering both intention and interpretation throughout the design process provides clients a more well-rounded approach, one that blends theory-based hypotheses with practical validation (or invalidation).

To that end, we might consider the following questions:

Intention

Giving more consideration to our intentions as designers puts us in a better position to create their manifestations.

1. What are we assuming?

   Intention is shaped by the assumptions we make. Being aware of these – and working to validate (or invalidate) them – helps ensure that our intentions as a designer do not conflict with those of our users.

2. What’re our design principles?

   Design principles frame a team’s approach. Enumerating goals, listing requirements, and brainstorming user stories are all statements of intent. Clarifying these helps us focus on defining aspects of the solution rather than better framing the problem.

3. What does our work affect?

   Even when creating something relatively simple, like a landing page or the information architecture for a small website, the things we design have an impacts far beyond their initial experience. Think in terms of systems. How is the element we’re designing affecting all the other elements in the system?

4. What else effects our user’s perceptions?

   No design solution is an island. As user-centered design (and the emergence of an experience-driven economy) has successfully proven, solutions conceived without consideration of context rarely succeed. Context, especially the boundaries between them, heavily influences interpretation. Knowledge of context helps mediate the ambiguity that different environments create.

Interpretation

The next step – often overlooked – is to examine how users interpret those manifestations; to consider the direct, indirect, and contextual interpretations of our work.

1. What is the direct textual material we’re designing?

   These are the “content” comprising our interfaces: physical objects, screens, images, buttons, text, audio clues, etc. Look at the actions they afford. Do they match our design intentions?

2. What is the indirect textual material?

   How do users interpret our objects? What inferences are they making? Are they interpreting the artifacts in the same way as we are? Alternate, unintended interpretations are not necessarily a bad thing; they can often lead to new opportunities and angles.

3. What are the contexts in which this product is used?

   How are contexts different? What are the effects of these differences? Think about your design object not as a static thing but rather a piece of a larger system of meaning, one that is constantly in flux. Objects are interpreted in vastly different ways according to the contextual spaces in which they exist. Contextually-aware design works to understand the differences between situations—cognitive, geographical, emotional, informational, etc.—and create products that fit within these differences. A thorough understanding of intention and interpretation is necessary to achieve this end.

But what does it all mean?

The systems we design are becoming increasingly complex. As technology continues to afford new behaviors and incorporate new sets of data, designers have a multitude of potential solutions at hand. Advances – such as context-aware systems, natural user interfaces, and pervasive computing – will change user- as well as designer-behavior. With new intentions and many-more interpretations to consider, designers have a responsibility to re-examine this critical divide.

The post Intention vs. Interpretation: What Matters? appeared first on UX Booth.

It’s no secret that responsive design helps us develop a single site to serve smartphones, tablets, and desktop displays equally well. But the thinking that goes into a good responsive design? That takes time. How might designers go about making a site tablet-friendly right away?

This is exactly the problem we currently face at Cars.com. While my team is busy considering all of the elements that make up our site (content first, kids!) and how they might be handled in a responsive manner, we’ve wanted to make some quick changes that might immediately impact visitors.

People visit Cars.com to find vehicles for sale, read editorial content, and browse consumer reviews. With these things in mind, we’ve prioritized our short-term changes by focusing on three, key areas: content, layout, and forms.

Content

As Elaine McVicar recently reminded us: when it comes to touchscreen interfaces, content is navigation. This has serious implications for Cars.com – specifically, our photo galleries and content-promoting carousels. Fortunately, mobile luminary Brad Frost has a fantastic article weighing in on this particular element.

Our takeaways? We need to make sure our carousels are swipeable, as swipe gestures allow touch-based users to more-intuitively move through the panels. Next, when it comes to galleries with thumbnail strips, we need to ensure people can swipe through thumbnails. We can’t – or, rather, shouldn’t – exclusively rely on previous and next arrows.

The examples below show what a difference these considerations can make:

The main content carousel on the BBC homepage does not recognize swipe gestures. You have to tap the right or left arrows to navigate through the content or let it play like a slideshow.

The carousel on the Cars.com homepage has a much larger area for tablet users to interact with than the one on the BBC homepage.

While accounting for large swaths of our content (and navigation), we found that we also needed to pay attention to the way in which that content presents itself. This meant considering layout.

Layout

Fingers are horribly inaccurate as pointing devices. As a consequence, Apple, Google, and Microsoft all provide guidelines for the proper sizing of tap targets. But because pixel and point sizes are variable (a topic beyond the scope of this article), Steven Hoober suggests that physical sizes be used when thinking about mobile layout.

The team at Cars.com has taken this to heart – I personally decided to keep a ruler at my desk. This allows me to measure distances right on the glass and, aside from testing with real people, provides a great way to get a feel for whether tap targets are too small or too close to one another.

Compare the left-hand navigation in the examples below from Macy’s and smart. Which would you rather use?

Macy’s faceted browsing has tap targets that are too small and too close together for tablet users to navigate easily without first zooming in. This is common in eCommerce websites in which the design predates the proliferation of tablets.

smart’s navigation design includes larger tap targets and better spacing between the targets.

Having considered both content and layout, in general, we figured: what’s next?

Forms. That’s what.

Forms

Forms do the “heavy lifting” on Cars.com. They’re one of the main ways users tell us what they want. And let’s face it: while forms can be difficult to use on desktop computers, they pose an even bigger problem on mobile devices with their small, virtual keyboards.

When it comes to forms on mobile, otherwise simple changes can go a long way towards improving usability. Luke Wroblewski’s best practices ring true:

• Use the fewest number of form fields necessary to achieve your business goal.
• Reduce the number of fields that require typing. If there is another way to get the information other than the keyboard, use it. I call this mindset “more tap, less type”.
• Use native device capabilities. The GPS, compass, accelerometer, camera, address book, and native social networking apps can all provide data so people don’t have to enter it manually.
• Let people type whatever they want. Allow people to enter values like phone numbers with various special characters even if you’re just going strip them out afterward.
• Whenever possible, retain form contents in error states. Don’t make people retype their whole email address on a virtual keyboard because they forgot the period.

Simply by redesigning our forms against these guidelines, we increased their overall utility. What’s more, redesigning our forms also gave us a chance to reconsider our form aesthetics.

Layout

As with our content, the larger our forms’ inputs, the easier they are to navigate. Increasing the padding around form elements as well as making some of them taller and wider makes them more navigable.

Compare the previous version:

Form elements are too close for comfort on an older version of the Cars.com dealer locator form.

To the new version:

The redesigned form increases the size of the form fields and adds more spacing between elements. This reduces people’s likelihood of tapping the wrong element.

Notice the difference? Next, we use a different background or border color to indicate focus. This isn’t groundbreaking, of course, but it does provides a visual confirmation that the characters a person types will appear in the correct place – and differences like this add up.

What’s more, the CSS required to do this is super simple:

input:focus {
  background-color: #ffffe0;
  border: 1px solid #f00;
}

Finally, we looked at context-specific keyboards.

Get specific

Context-specific keyboards offer users a subset of the traditional keyboard layout to encourage completion of a specific task. For example, a “number” keyboard provides number keys (as well as commas, periods, and dollar signs) to users rather than the traditional QWERTY keyboard.

HTML5 provides an easy way to trigger the display of context-specific keyboards using the “type” attribute. Specifically:

• <input type=”email” /> triggers a keyboard with the @ symbol and a period.
• <input type=”number” /> triggers the keyboard with numeric digits plus characters like the dollar sign, comma, and period.
• <input type=”url” /> triggers the keyboard with characters needed to type a URL, including a “.com” button on iOS and some Android devices.

Notice how Crate and Barrel utilizes <input type=”email” /> on their sign-in screen. When entering an email address, people are presented with an “@” key and a period key:

Crate and Barrel’s create an account screen gives people all the characters they need to type an email address on one keyboard.

We decided to make heavy use of <input type=”number” /> on Cars.com since many of our tools use ZIP code to determine the person’s general geographic location. Without utilizing this input type, people would be forced to manually switch back and forth between different keyboard layouts – alphabetical and numeric. That’s a lot of unnecessary interaction.

Oh, and one more thing: there is no negative impact to using these input types. Because older desktop browsers that don’t understand them, they default to “type=text”. Newer mobile browsers will display a more user-friendly keyboard and older desktop browsers will be unaffected.

Getting started

Improving the three, key areas of Cars.com highlighted in this article has provided our mobile-based users with a dramatically better user experience, all while affording our design and development teams more time to think through our responsive redesign.

The team at Cars.com now thinks about tablet users for every design change we make on the “traditional” site, helping to achieve a vision that’s more usable across devices. Hopefully, following a similar approach increases your team’s sensitivity to (and awareness of) the design considerations specific to touch and gesture-based interactions.

Additional resources

• HTML5 Forms – Dive Into HTML5
• Touch Gesture Reference Guide – Luke Wroblewski

The post Finger Tips: 3 Quick Ways to Retrofit a Site for Touchscreen Use appeared first on UX Booth.

I explored the 10 best UX books of 2010 and, three years later, the time has come to follow up. There are a bunch of great books due out this year, covering myriad topics from the psychology of persuasion, to experience strategy, to lean UX, to microinteractions. Although we may not all get around to reading all of them, perusing the top 10 at least gives provides perspective. Without further adieu, here’s the list!

Designing the Search Experience: The Information Architecture of Discovery

Tony Russell-Rose and Tyler Tate kicked off the year with this impressive guide to information architecture as it pertains to the ever-present search bar. No doubt this will be added to many an a library sometime soon. Covering both the art and design of search, “Designing the Search Experience”, weaves together the behavior of information seeking with the practice of user interface design.

Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann; Available now!

A Practical Guide to Strategic User Experience

In “A Practical Guide to Strategic User Experience,” Leisa Reichelt covers the foundations of both user-centered design and business strategy. She explores methodology, documentation and tracking metrics, helping designers make a more seamless transition into a strategic role.

Publisher: Five Simple Steps; available: Summer 2013

Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights

Understanding users is an absolutely essential part of what we do and the skills required to do it should never be taken for granted. Although Steve Portigal’s webinars have provided suggestions for embracing our user’s perspectives in the past, his book will likely provide a more comprehensive approach.

Publisher: Rosenfeld Media; available: May 2013

UX Team of One

Similar in scope to “Undercover UX” – Cennydd Bowles and James Box’s eye-opening book from 2010 – Leah Buley’s UX Team of One is specifically written for people working without the support of a team. It aims to highlight the real-life challenges faced by designers who need to produce deliverables with low effort and high impact.

Publisher: Rosenfeld Media; available: June 2013

Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience

Continuing along the Lean UX theme, this “hands-on” book aims to cover the principles of Lean UX – how this collaborative process enables you to forgo excessive deliverables in favour of building a shared understanding within a product team. Jeff has been working in lean UX and agile development for years now; he’s certain to provide valuable tactics and inspiring techniques!

Publisher: O’Reilly; available now!

Designing with Agile: Lean User Experience for Successful Products

While agile may function well for other teams, I’ve personally struggled trying to reconcile it with my own approach it. In this book Anders Ramsay aims to “provide a path” for design teams, and User Experience practitioners in particular, to help them transform their practices by applying Agile methods and thinking.

Publisher: Rosenfeld Media; available: late 2013

Designing the Conversation: Techniques for Successful Facilitation

An increasing number of books address specific areas within the context of user-centered design and I for one am glad for it. Designing the Conversation is aimed at practitioners who are looking to take their facilitation skills to the next level. Written by three UX professionals, this book helps designers facilitate stakeholder interviews, peer brainstorms, and client interactions.

Publisher: New Riders; Available now!

How to Get People to Do Stuff: Master the art and science of persuasion and motivation

Susan Weinschenk – otherwise known as “The Brain Lady,” – has spent the past 30 years applying psychology to the design of technology. With several publications to her name, including “100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People” and “Neuro Web Design (What Makes Them Click?),” Susan’s next book is all about how we “get people to do stuff;” how to use insights from recent research in psychology to be more effective in motivating people and to get them to do the stuff we want them to do.

Publisher: New Riders; Available now!

Microinteractions

In “Microinteractions’, Dan Saffer provides a new way of thinking about designing digital products. He proposes that every feature, large or small, is nothing more than a series of interactions that are essential to creating a compelling personality.

How do you turn mute on? How do you know you have a new email message? How can you change a setting? All these little moments are opportunities to engage the user. These are the moments that change a product from one that is tolerated to one that’s beloved.

Publisher: O’Reilly; available: May 2013

Human Computer Interaction: An Empirical Research Perspective

“Human-Computer Interaction: An Empirical Research Perspective” covers foundational topics, including: historical context, the human factor, interaction elements, and the fundamentals of science and research. Throughout the book, Scott provides hands-on exercises, checklists, and real-world examples. Given Scott’s background of more than 30 years in interaction design, this book is likely to be a very comprehensive guide to research in HCI – a hefty addition to any bookshelf.

Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann; Available now!

Collect them all!

It’s impossible to read everything that’s coming available this year, but the books above are the ones that I’m most looking forward to. And at this early stage of the year I have the best intentions to read as many of them as I can!

So, what’s on your 2013 reading list? Have you read any from this list yet? Join the conversation in the comments below – I look forward to hearing more suggestions.

The post 10 UX Books Due out in 2013 appeared first on UX Booth.

For context’s sake, here are the sessions I attended that informed my reading list:

• “The World Is The Screen: Elements of Information Environments” by Andrew Hinton
• “Sitting in the Director’s Chair: How the Role We Play Drives the Vision of the User Experience.” by Traci Lepore
• “Links, Nodes, and Order: A Unified Theory of IA” by Jorge Arango
• “Taxonomy for App Makers” by Andy Fitzgerald
• “Web Governance: Where Strategy Meets Structure’ by Peter Morville and Lisa Welchman
• “Closing Plenary” by Karen McGrane

These are just a subset of the total sessions comprising the conference, of course. For a full list, check the schedule page for the conference.

Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension

The Embodied Cognition theory suggests that sensemaking is as much an external process as it is an internal one. In other words, technologies with which we interact change how we think about the world. Andrew Hinton suggests that this has significant implications on the work we do as information architects.

Cognition in the Wild by Edwin Hutchins

As a compliment to Supersizing the Mind, Edwin Hutchins’s Cognition in the Wild reminds us that our understanding of the world is also cultural. This idea touches on some of the educational concepts that Bill Gribbons mentioned to me last month, so it was a natural addition to the list.

The Empty Space: A Book About the Theatre: Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate by Peter Brook

Traci Lepore’s presentation explained how perspectives that function in the world of theatre can also lend themselves to the management of user-centered design projects. Although this book framed the majority of her talk, Tracy also mentioned method acting, which has me thinking about its applications to our practice, as well.

The Connected Company by Dave Gray and Thomas Vander Wal

Ah, governance. It’s a topic that’s as puzzling to me as it is important to the continued success of any design endeavor. Peter Morville and Lisa Welchman referenced this book as they explained how “loosely connected pods” are the key to a good governance plan. From what I understand, this approach informs Amazon’s corporate structure.

Content Strategy For Mobile by Karen Mcgrane

This one’s high on my list. In her closing plenary, Karen McGrane explained how radically different tomorrow’s content problems will be. When working with The New York Times, Karen recounted how digital publishing used to be relegated to a separate office. Today, it’s given equal footing with the print side of things. And tomorrow? Let’s just say we’ve got our work cut out for us.

Yours?

I find it quite likely that some of you who read UX Booth attended the Summit. What books caught your eye? Are you currently reading anything that informed your understanding of this year’s talks?

Share your thoughts in the comments below!

The post A Reading List Courtesy of This Year’s IA Summit appeared first on UX Booth.