UX: user experience

This outline contains many gems of information everyone should remind themselves of when they enter into a new creative project lifecycle. Many thanks to Fred Hammerquist of Hammerquist & Nebeker and his instruction at the School of Visual Concepts.

Build The Client Relationship

- The positive Client relationship that may take an eternity to develop… can be destroyed in an instant. -

1. Listen: Talk 10%, listen 90%.
Clients will love you and heck, you might just learn something.

2. Know the client’s business:
Do the research and understand their products, distribution, competition and position within the market.

3. Know the client’s customer:
Understand every step and emotion their consumers go through on the path to a purchase.

4. Be their brand steward:
Be protective of what’s responsible and relevant to their brand.

5. Exceed their expectations:
Surprise them with more than they expect and they’ll see more value.

6. Persuade, don’t sell:
Clients can smell a selling style and they think it stinks.

7. Don’t be self-serving:
Judge and support the work from a business perspective. If a client thinks you are looking at creative for creative sake the trust evaporates.

8. Demonstrate enthusiasm:
Show them that you love their business and helping them solve problems.

9. Know the client:
When a client knows the creative people on a personal level it goes a long way.

10. Apply some of these steps to the people you work with:
When the internal team trusts and respects each other, the work only gets better.

Get the Project Started

- Know what the client wants. Know what the client needs. Then, get them to want what they need. -

1. The Organizing Idea:
Apply your learning about the client and their business needs and communicate a concise strategic foundation.

2. The Creative Brief:
Always start by agreeing on what you are solving, and have the stakeholders sign off on the conceptual approach.

3. Know the decision makers:
Do everything possible to make sure they are all at the presentation and understand the project.

4. Bring them into the process:
Collaborating with the client throughout the creative development allows them to feel they’ve had input along the way.

Preparing for the Meeting

- The true secret of selling creative is to not SELL. Earning TRUST is the answer. For a client to accept a truly original idea, it often requires a leap of faith. The job of their creative business partner is to bridge that gap as much as possible. -

1. Make sure the internal team is on the same page:
The best teams are in sync with strategy, creative concept and execution.

2. Know the answers:
Anticipate what the objections to the work might be.

3. The fewer the better:
If there isn’t a role for someone, don’t bring them to the meeting.

4. If you lack the skills to present, don’t:
It’s not worth the risk. Have someone help you, or find someone else to present the work.

5. Develop the meeting support tools:
There are many ways to build the bridge from the business problem to the creative idea.

6. Consumer validation:
Get their customers on film sharing opinions that support your insight or direction.

7. Brand voice support:
Words and pictures make up the voice of a brand. Write a manifesto and construct a brand visual study.

8. Consider a “tone poem”:
Put the brand voice to sight, sound and motion, then add music and you might get them to cry.

9. Sizing your materials:
The presentation materials should be large enough for all in the room to clearly see.

10. Sweat the details:
More concepts die due to small, preventable mistakes than anything else.

11. Loose vs. tight layouts:
You may be able to replicate the feeling of an execution quite easily. If not, its better to show very loose sketches and support the idea with reference.

12. Theater of the mind:
If the idea can’t be conveyed well on boards then try describing it in such a way they can picture it in their heads.

Show Time

- Presenting is theater: The first few minutes are key — you will either have them engaged or glazed over. -

1. Define the aperture:
Paint a picture in their mind’s eye of how their customer will be introduced to your idea.

2. Share the insight:
Use the tools developed to set the emotional stage for sharing the work.

3. Resist the urge to hurry:
It’s at this point they really want to see the work. So much so, they may become impatient.

4. Share the work!:
Display the enthusiasm, confidence and conviction you have gained along the way.

5. Build the bridge:
Build the connection from their position back to yours.

6. Treat your ideas like gold:
You’re asking a client to invest precious dollars. The work should be handled with a great deal of respect and importance.

7. Know when to fold ’em:
Knowing the point in which to back off is critical.

8. There are always more ideas:
In my experience, going back to the well has often produced better work.

The Follow Up:

- Is creativity some obscure, esoteric art form? Not on your life. It’s the most practical thing a Businessman can employ. —Bill Bernbach

1. Keeping the work sold:
This is the hardest part. After you leave the “room”, internal processes can undermine the creative strategy.

2. Keep the process moving:
The dullest knives come out if it lingers.

3. Incremental compromise:
Without defense a great idea can succumb to mediocrity.

4. It’s not safe to breathe until the ink dries:
Keep a sharp eye on it all the way to the finish line.

When you first have an inkling that “down time” is on it’s way–

• In the interest of being pro-active (with regard to productivity), you might consider looking into online tools to help you with your own awareness when these down-time’s (DT’s) start arriving.
  • This may not be a bad place to start. 102 Researched GTD Software Titles and Counting: http://www.priacta.com/Articles/Comparison_of_GTD_Software.php

• Ask or inform Director, PM or whomever, about the DT concern.
  • Don’t just assume that they see the DT’s coming. Depending on their management skills and/ or duties, they may be just as blind to upcoming DT as you.

• Keep list of DT projects discussed at other times. (Consider keeping list in a GTD app?)
  • For me it helps to keep a list of tasks that get mentioned in group meetings. Or a list of things that I thought of while involved in a project that would’ve helped my productivity but didn’t have time to deal with it during the project itself.
    • Fairly recently, on a project, I thought to my self: man, it would be nice to have a ready made set of generic assets for projects like this. So, when the project was done I decided to generate those assets and since then I have gone back to those assets more than a few times.

Keep inspired

• Being inspired is a constant need (for me at least) - this helps keep energy levels and overall excitement, at a good level.
  • What are some of the things I do to keep inspired.
  • Checkout SOTD/M sites for flash, CSS, mash-ups,
  • Blogs: Coudal Partners, FFFFound!, Ideas on Ideas,
  • Print: CA, Wired, Whatever else floats my fancy at the moment.
  • Traditional art and design.

• Find something, industry related to read… blog posts, book-
  • Share your inspiration with others
  • Here at Ramp, the UX team set-up a Tumblr account. This is where we can post whatever creative content we want to share with the others on the team. The tumblr allows this to happen with very little effort. Each team member can check it at there leisure.

Produce something

• Tear into something that challenges your skills. For me that’s tearing into tutorials or trying to create something I’ve never tried before. Reading and studying other’s design work.
• Generate useful content. Think of something that will benefit others in your team. For me, that was some illustrative assets that I could be used in other visual design projects. As well as some Wireframe assets that can be used across the board.
• Write about something related to what you do. Say like, I dunno… a blog entry about keeping busy?

Keep track of what you do. This is important for a lot of reasons. I am not going to go into all the reasons why. I want to talk about what might help you to keep track of your tasks and contributions to your; position, team, career, blah blah blah, so on and so forth.

• If you have to submit reports based on an hourly schedule, or if you have to report what you do regardless of working parameters.
• hearkening back to the apps that help you, list out what you do.
• Task or project journals.
  • You could potentially set up reminders to help with this notion. The places I work generally have a system (of sorts) to remind you. One of those is a PAYCHECK! if you don’t log the hours you don’t get paid. Typically your workplace, or client, will require you to submit your hours and/or a break down of tasks and time associated with a specific client or project.
  • You could keep an hourly, daily, or weekly journal or journal by task completion using various apps or simply writing it down with the ol’pen and paper method. If this is outside your comfort zone because you’re not diligent enough (or whatever), either; you practice until it is a common routine, or find work that doesn’t require the attention to this sort of detail.

Unfortunately not everyone is really good at journaling (including me). If fall short on an up-to-date journal, but (if) you want to be as accurate as possible on the records of your tasks;

• Check your calendar (if you keep one) mine is in iCal on my mac. I check the previous week to see what event’s I may have had to attend. Obviously, your time in meetings can be accounted for, therefor properly denoted.
• Go through your inbox and “sent” mail surrounding the week before. You may discover some dialog revolving around work you’ve been working on.

Keep your manager or director up to date constantly on whatever it is you’re doing. Sadly, I am not the best at this. I get caught up in what I am doing and don’t stop to think that anyone actually cares that I’ve been doing anything. Or I think: Well, my manager is so busy with important work, I don’t want to slow them down with my less than important work. Not to mention, that the manager types get so consumed with damned meetings. When the someone looks semi available, I feel bad for asking any questions that would add to their frustrations.

Another important note.

• In my opinion, just keeping “busy” isn’t always the best thing to do. Being tasked with “busy” work can be a waste of company time/ money. It’s a better use of your time, while at work, to be using the skills they hired you for or to be engaged somehow in a field directly related to you position or career path. So sure, I could sweep the floors and they could fire me a week later. The floors would need to be swept again, and I wouldn’t be there to sweep it anymore. But if, instead, using the same amount of time, I created content using the appropriate skill-set I was hired for or advancing my knowledge with regard to my position, that would pay-off for both parties involved now and in the future.

Here are a few “visualization” sites to bump around on- Your experience with these sites can often depend on your temperament (not to mention, your overall goal).

These site have different things to offer with regard to UX- Some good, some bad, you know… the usual. It’s good to approach these with an open mind and an attitude of exploration. Wow, that sounds kinda like the advice you might give to a bachelor at some dive bar. Aah well- I think I’ll get a drink, and do my own kind of visualization.

Space Nav
This is a “Tag” visualization tool. Go to the site and do some exploring.

Digg Labs
Visualize Diggs-

BidFlyer
Another way to visualize Ebay items

oSkope
Search visualizer

YouTube
Related vids, visualizer

You need to open a video in fullscreen to get to this- after you’re in FullScreen mode Click the “funny looking tripod” button.

FlickrGraph
Visually explore social relationships inside Flickr

Twitter Blocks
Visually Exploring Twitter relationships

I have more, but figure if you look through half of these you going to burn more time than you probably want to.

Introduction

UNIX is a collection of software known as a computer operating system (OS) that is used to communicate with a computer’s central processing unit (CPU) and memory. The OS software is also responsible for communications between the CPU/memory and the computer’s other peripherals (disks, printers, networks and etc.). Unix however does not refer to a single well-defined collection of software. Instead Unix is a generic term for a number of similar collections of software that differ depending on the supplier of the OS software.

The Unix OS is made up of the kernel and shell. The kernel is the main control program that is responsible for machine level operations of the system and the connection to hardware. The shell is a command interpreter that can communicate with any part of the system except the hardware. The shell parses, checks, translates and etc., inputs that are then passed to the kernel for execution. An analogy for the OS is a walnut - the important part is the kernel inside; the shell is what the nut presents the the outside world.

Technically, utilities are not part of the OS. They are a collection of basic software tools that are often distributed with the Unix OS. They make the operating system more immediately useful to the user by simplifying the tasks of communications, programming, editing text and more.

History

Unix was originally developed in 1969 by a group of employees at AT&T Bell Laboratories. In 1973, Unix was rewritten in C, a computer programming language also developed at Bell Labs. This allowed Unix to be installed and run on different computers which had a C compiler. Since then there has been a large adoptions of Unix and Unix-like operating system such as Berkley Standard Distribution (BSD), Sun Microsystems, Mac OS X and Linux. These “flavors” of Unix are all very similar but all use a slightly different dialect, like slang speech for the same common tongue.

The Shell

In Unix, to get things done you need to type commands that a shell can interpret. A shell can read command lines from a terminal or from a file (called a shell script or program). Because the shell is a program, scripting is possible without using a programming language. Any command that can be typed after a prompt can be used in a shell.

Basic Commands

Unix is a command-driven OS. Below is a list of basic commands that can get you started using Linux and other UNIX variation. All these commands will work on the Mac OS X, BSD, Linux and on windows using Cygwin. If you are using Mac OS X, you can open the Terminal located at /Applications/Utilities/Terminal and execute the commands after the Bash shell prompt ($).

Info about paths and root

Unix separates file and directory paths with the forward slash “/”. Also, a path that starts with the forward slash, means it is an absolute path from the “root” directory. If a path does not lead with the forward slash, then it is a relative path from the current directory.

Examples:

/

# “root” directory/usr
# directory usr (sub-directory of / “root” directory)

Moving through the file system

pwd

# shows the path of the “present working directory” or the current directory

cd

# change the current directory to you HOME directorycd /applications
# change the current directory to the “applications” sub-directory of “root”

cd ..

# changes the current directory to it’s parent directory

List directory contents

ls

# lists the current directories contents

ls -l

# lists the current directories contents in long (detailed) format

ls -a

# lists the current directory contents including hidden files

Copying, renaning and moving files

cp file1 file2

# copies a filemv file1 /applications
# move “file1″ from the current directory to the applications directorymv file1 newname
# rename “file1″ in the current directory to “newname”

mkdir dir1

# make a new directory within the current directory

rm file1

# remove ‘file1′ within the current directory

rmdir dir1

# removes the empty directory “dir1″

rm -r dir1

# recursively removes a directory and it’s contents. BE CAREFUL!

Changing file permissions and attributes

chmod 775 file

# changes permissions of file to be read, write and execute (rwx) for the owner, and rx for everyone else.chgrp user file
# makes the file belong to the group userchown username file
# makes username the owner of file

chown -R username dir

# makes username the owner of dir and everything in its directory tree

User Experience experts come out of the woodwork to add their two cents to the great toilet paper debate. No, it’s not whether or not people should use it. The debate addresses the age-old question, “under or over???” The logical reason as to why this is such a heavily debated topic is because everyone can count on a toilet paper roll being their main focal point at least once a day (or at least once a week if you’re from the “unfortunate” camp). But an even more serious matter is when the toilet paper roll is NOT in view… But that’s a different topic altogether.

There are many arguments for hanging the roll in the over position (paper conveniently feeds from top front), and fewer for those who desire the paper in the under position (paper hidden from view behind the roll, and pressed firmly against the nasty bathroom wall). I’ll be supporting the only logical method for a user to experience the extraction of toilet paper from the roll, while debunking the opinions for hanging the roll in the under position.

A few reasons why everyone will hang the toilet paper in the over position after reading this blog entry:

• The most obvious reason is that it’s easier to find the beginning of the roll if it’s in the over position. If you can’t find it, turn the roll toward you from the top and the end will present itself.
• If the end of the paper extends beyond the roll in the over position, it will most likely be hanging down into mid-air, and will avoid coming in contact with the unsanitary bathroom wall that likely neighbors the “splash zone” of the toilet.
• Say you’ve been eating chocolate and need to clean your fingers. If the paper is hung in the under position and you reach under to advance the roll, there’s a chance that you won’t rip off enough paper to remove the chocolate that you transferred to the roll. The next person might not want to see chocolate on the paper.
• Many people argue that if you have cats or children you should hang the roll in the under position, so it’s harder for them to unravel the roll by pulling downward. Unfortunately, these people aren’t asserting themselves as responsible pet and child owners. If this is a problem, the bathroom door should remain closed when not in use.
• If you have young people in your house, the roll in the over position begs to be used more than a roll in the evasive under position.
• For those of us who find it important to purchase decorative TP with the quilted pattern, ONLY the over position will always present the user with the intended “read-right” exposure of the quilted side.
• Lastly, if you want to do a one-handed swiping tear of the paper, humans can whip their hand downward much faster than they can in the upward direction. Paper in the over position is much more conducive to this practice.

Hopefully I have enlightened the brainwashed few (who use the under method of hanging toilet paper) to adopting a much more useful method of hanging toilet paper in the over position.

Urban has had a standing offer, to meet up with him, his girlfriend Narisa (an art director at Big Fish Games) and other creative individuals on the first Monday of the every month.

I was fortunate enough to meet up with Urban, Narisa, and Patrick this last Monday (Dec. 3rd) at the Stumbling Monk in Seattle. It was an evening of highly interesting conversations, awesome beer and coasters doodles.

It was very laid back and off-the-cuff. Conversations ranged from; acupuncture (there was a person studying to be an acupuncturist) to some very interesting copyright laws (from the perspective of the lawyer at the table) to abstract video manipulation. I would be hard pressed to find these conversations outside this sort of venue.

It started somewhere between 6 and 7 that night and I think we (me, Urban, Narisa, and Patrick) left between 9:30 and 10 that night. By the end of the evening we had amassed a good collection of coaster art. Here is Narisa’s Stumbling Monk Flickr account where she has uploaded a bunch of coaster art.

Patrick brought along his new (vintage) Polaroid camera and he took some pictures that we discussed at the table. All In all, I would highly recommend (if you aren’t already) attending this event on the first Monday of the month.

Details for the next get together:
Designer’s Korner
Monday, December 3rd 6:30pm
Stumbling Monk
1635 E. Olive Way

I’ve just started to explore the “new and improved” Fireworks CS3. The last time I used Fireworks was back in the 90s when it was packaged with Director and Flash. I didn’t give it much of a chance since I was such a Photoshop and Illustrator fan. I’ve seen other IAs mention it as a wireframing tool, but to me it sounded like using Word for press-ready design. Possible, but painful. Illustrator has been my tool of choice in the past. I’ve also used Visio because of an established process at a previous job, but since Visio wireframes don’t represent actual pixels it was a challenge when translating to visual design.

What I found awesome…

• Pages is a new feature; using Frames (meant for animation) was the past work-around. In addition to having different pages within a single file, a Master Page can be specified to share common layers among all pages. You can delete layers on a per-page basis, and only the layers for the current page are displayed.

(image from http://www.adobe.com/devnet/fireworks/articles/introducing_fireworks_cs3.html)

• My last experience with Flash was version 5, but I still remember the concept of symbols and instances. This saves a lot of time and reduces the number of document layers. Rich symbols are symbols with scripts that have the ability to show elements in various states: active/inactive, on/off, hover/press, etc. I can specify which parts of my symbol are editable, and with 9-slice scaling, these symbols can be resized as I want, i.e., retaining the height of a header bar. I followed this tutorial to create a symbol and its custom script.
• New 9-slice scaling feature.

(image from http://www.adobe.com/devnet/fireworks/articles/introducing_fireworks_cs3.html)

• Creating a symbol script is easy.

• You can specify which symbol properties should be editable.

What I found lacking…

• Tabs would have been very helpful in mocking up tables.
• Text boxes are only for holding text. I’m unable to define a fill and stroke for the text box; I have to draw a separate box behind the text if that’s what I want.
• There aren’t any contextual menus within the tool menus (like layers and symbols) which helped me work faster in Photoshop and Illustrator.
• I still find the vector tools in Illustrator more robust and easier to use – I about lost my mind trying to draw a 3-sided box! In Illustrator, I can simply click and delete one side of the box with the “hollow” arrow. The same arrow in Fireworks doesn’t work that way.

I’ve got lots more to discover, so please send me your tips and tricks for working faster and easier in Fireworks. Thanks!

Use Comic Life 1.0.1 to make comic strips from your own photos! Now Fido can be a crime-fighting hero just as you’ve always imagined!

From Macworld via swissmiss

If you’re familiar with the writings of usability guru Steve Krug, you know he often uses doors as an analogy for website usability issues. He talks about how the human mind parses all sorts of subtle cues presented by a door in order to know what action to take. A long metal bar indicates push, a handle indicates pull, and doorknob indicates twist, etc. The user’s mind subconsciously processes these cues and acts accordingly. However, if the door doesn’t behave the way it’s expected, the simple task of opening a door moves to the forefront of the user’s conscious. Who hasn’t approached a door and pulled on the handle, only to discover it needs to be pushed? At that point the simple task of opening a door becomes a roadblock, albeit a minor one.

I thought about this as I approached this door the other day. Everything about it said don’t bother trying to open – deadbolt, doorknob with keyhole, electronic card reader with red light. The wall is concrete and the door itself is metal. Yet a gentle nudge opened it right up. Kind of the reverse of the problem that Krug talks about, but a good usability study. Most people probably wouldn’t even bother with this door and would look for another way in. It’s a good example of how important visual cues are to users as they navigate through your site or application.