Tag Archives: User Experience

Intern Insights – Ideal vs. Real

- John Thompson is a User Experience intern

Friday Links: You’re stealing it wrong

• Why the revolution will not be tweeted, a thought-provoking piece by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker.
• Can experience be designed.
• George Lucas stole Chewbacca, but that’s okay.
• Doc Searls says let’s kill interruptive ads. Yes, let’s do that, shall we?
• 8-bit wood, I’m pretty sure The Nerdery needs these woodcraft Mario characters.
• How to detect a Photoshopped image.
• 10 best jobs of the future.
• How advertising reinforces Mommy and Daddy roles.
• You’re stealing it wrong, 30 years of inter-pirate battles.

Is the disk icon for save already archaic?

A few weeks ago one of the nerds tweeted about using the disk icon for save, and wondered when that iconography would be too dated (and if I could find the original tweet I would give proper attribution but trying to find a tweet in Twitter is a pointless waste of time).

Anyway, according to Daring Fireball’s John Gruber it already is. According to the Mad Mac Maven, Gruber has made a mistake. Again, this is one of those posts where the comments are rife with nerdery and user experience pedantry (you have no idea how happy I am that that’s an actual word). Who doesn’t love a nerdery pedant? Nobody, that’s who.

Where is the line between passionate and creepy?

I started out my career in the tech sector working in customer service for a small software company that made digital photography software. The job mostly consisted of answering e-mails and phone calls about how much the upgrade was and what new features were included.

At least once a day you’d get a call from THAT GUY (or gal, but usually it was a guy) who was irate about something the software did or did not do to his or her liking. THAT GUY would call and it would always involve a lot of swearing, exasperated sighs, and threats to either e-mail the CEO or call the better business bureau.

My fellow customer service reps and I would listen patiently and try to pass the ranter off to tech support as quickly as possible. “Sheesh,” I would think. “It’s only software.”

It wasn’t until I moved over to the marketing department that I started to understand the passion that software (or any product really) can generate in its users. Around that time I started working exclusively on the web, and turned into THAT GIRL.

Oh yes, I can’t deny it. I have been known to work myself up into a frothing rage when I have to deal with bad user experience . (and because I am THAT GIRL, blogs like Adobe UI Gripes totally float my boat).

However, there is a line between passionate and creepy. I’m not exactly sure how to define the line. As someone who has fired off an e-mail or two expressing my disappointment and frustration with some site or another, I’d like to think that’s totally on the right side of the line. People do that all the time, right?

I do know that the person who spit in Tech Crunch’s Michael Arrington’s face, crossed that line. In that post Arrington talks about some of the abuse he and his family have endured due to unhappy readers and just how crazy it is to get death threats over a blog:

I write about technology startups and news. In any sane world that shouldn’t make me someone who has to deal with death threats and being spat on. It shouldn’t require me to absorb more verbal abuse than a human being can realistically deal with.

We all can probably agree that physical harm and threatening death obliterates the line between passionate and creepy. But it’s still an interesting question to contemplate, what is the line between passionate and creepy? And how do you, as a consumer, express your displeasure when dealing with a shoddy experience, product, etc?

Some mighty fine examples of good UX

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll notice it’s been UX week here at Inside the Nerdery. If you haven’t been paying attention, that’s okay my feelings are only a little hurt. Anyway, you can read Part I and Part II to catch up. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Okay, ready? Now that’s we’ve talked about what UX is and how passionate The Nerdery is about good UX I thought we’d show you some examples of what we’ve been talking about. Look, pretty pictures!

Cultured Code’s Things: An obsessively refined efficient yet flexible task management software for Mac and the iPhone.

Cork’d: Social media site for the wine enthusiast

Mint: Personal finance software for the web

Threadless: T-shirt makers

Django Admin Interface: Automatically generated scaffold for all Django applications

WordPress 2.7: Open source content management system

Twitter: Simple, highly addictive micro-blogging service

37signals: Makers of small business, collaboration software

Okay, so those are just a few examples. What are some of your favorites?

How The Nerdery can help you create passionate users

Yesterday I skimmed the surface on what User Experience (UX) is all about and what that means to users. Today, I’m going to continue yammering on about it only this time we’ll talk about what having a UX team at the Nerdery means to the people who work with us.

First, Mike Johnson our UX Manager said it’s important to remember that, “good UX creates passionate users.” In turn passionate users are more likely to refer a product to other people, and what it all boils down to is a successful project for you.

It’s also important to remember that Mike’s role is to champion good user experience about every project he works on.

Most of our projects involve teaming up with stellar ad agencies and marketing firms to help them build the interactive portions of their campaigns. It’s a case of two great tastes that taste great together. Agencies bring their creative wizardry and we bring the technical power.

Mike explains it like this: “Each agency we work with is unique in the skills they bring to a project. We’re like this thing that globs on to the agency and fills in the holes they might have. We make them complete.”

“Many agencies we work with come from a print background and find that jumping into the interactive can be a bit stressful,” Mike said. “They’re great at design but don’t have a lot of experience designing and developing complex applications. That’s where we come in. Not only can we execute their creative vision, be we can help them refine and develop their concepts with usability and good application design practices in mind.”

“We’ve always had this team of badass programmers and rock star developers that’s made us so successful with agencies,” he said. “Now, by adding to our diverse set of skills, we can create even more unique configurations of talent to compliment the agency side.”

For non-agency partners the UX team can provide a valuable service by helping the client organize and simplify their vision.  ”We build a framework for discussing abstract ideas.  We put the studs in the walls before we worry about the wallpaper.”

It doesn’t matter if our client is an ad agency or a business, what Mike’s role comes down to is bringing together the strengths of the design and the development to create natural synergy.

Mike talked about how programmers are really good at writing code, taking care of all the stuff that happens behind the scenes — like database configuration and how passwords are secured. But clients are oftentimes more concerned with how everything looks.

“To the client the UX is the most important part of the application,” he said. “While they want everything to work, their perception of the application is entirely on that surface layer.” If it doesn’t look good, they’ll perceive the entire project negatively, even if the code running it is spectacular.

This might make UX sound like it’s just design, but it’s more than that. In fact, the UX team actually gets involved before the designers start adding all their pretty touches.

“Oftentimes we’re designing complex applications,” Mike said. “And if you throw your average designer at a project before the necessary research and strategy has been determined, they likely won’t know where to start. What UX does is create models and wireframes to give a the designer a scaffold on which to build.”

Does your head hurt yet? Mine kind of does. It’s a lot to take in.

In fact, Mike said, “UX is all encompassing, it’s psychology, business, computer/human interaction, human perception. It’s everything, that’s why I like it.”

That’s probably a good note to end this portion of our UX discussion. Tomorrow, in part III we’ll show you some examples of great UX on the Web, in packaging, and in software.

A force that works in the interest of humans not computers

After talking with Mike Johnson, the Nerdery’s UX Manager, I realized I really need to start video-taping these interviews. The passion that Mike has for user experience (UX) is tough to put into words. If his enthusiasm for what he does were a rare case this wouldn’t be a problem, but all the nerds here are passionate about what they do.

Since there is no video, I am going to try to do Mike and our talk justice. It won’t be easy.

Before we talk about Mike’s role at the Nerdery, let’s spend some time talking about UX and what it all means. It can be some pretty heady stuff, which is what makes it so fun.

Here’s the thing about UX, it’s hard to define. It’s all around you in every store you go to, every product you buy, every website you visit, and all the software you use. When the UX is good, Mike said, you don’t notice it because it just works.

But when it’s bad, when things don’t work the way you think they should or something doesn’t make sense, that’s when you notice it.

“Here’s an example,” Mike said. “I was pissed at my alarm clock the other night because the backlight is too bright. I looked at it and thought, did the designer even think about this being next to a person that’s trying to sleep? I find inspiration in these kinds of things.”

That’s user experience, though you’d probably never call it that. To you, it’s just the way things work (or don’t work in this case).

“The world is getting much more complicated,” Mike said. “People didn’t really think much about this whole user experience thing 10 years ago. There needs to be this force that works in the interest of humans and not computers. People often forget that there’s a whole human element to everything we do with computers. The computer is here to serve humans. We can mold them, and why not make it a pleasure to use?”

Mike, who has been at the Nerdery for two years (eight months as a programmer and a little over year as a Software Development Manager), said that sometimes developers forget how advanced they are when it comes to computer use. “We’re really good at it. We just love this stuff, so we’re into it. But most people just want to get stuff done and they don’t want their computers to get in the way of that.”

This is one of the reasons Mike is so excited about his new role as UX Manager, he gets to act as an advocate on behalf of users.

“For me the most important thing is simplicity,” Mike said. “Programmers have a natural instinct to make things powerful to add a lot of cool features. Sometimes there’s this innate hostility for users who just don’t understand the power of the features. I like being able to counteract that, to put the user back into the process.”

Okay, now that you’re all up to speed on what exactly user experience is tomorrow I’ll tell you about how all this fits into what we do at the Nerdery (I told you getting this all down wasn’t going to be easy).