Jessica Harllee’s Sharing Our Work: Testing and Feedback in Design is a great article on different ways to get user feedback on designs:

To help choose our path, we create low-fidelity mockups and do concept testing with Etsy users who fit the target audience for the project. Rather than invest a lot of engineering time up front on building something we might not use, we often test clickable prototypes, which, while clunky, are cheap to create and involve zero engineering time. They’re mockups of an unbuilt interface, which also means we’re able to throw in blue sky features. Focusing on the best-case scenario of the feature lets us test whether sellers grasp the concept—realism and constraints can come later.

I wrote an article on analytics and usability testing for the UserVoice blog, so I wanted to share it here as well. From How = What + Why (Or, Where to Start Improving Your User Experience):

The first thing to clear up is this: in order to know where to start to improve the user experience of your product, you’re going to need more than a single data source. No single method can tell you the whole story you need to make good decisions. Usability testing will show you where there are interaction problems, but it won’t show you the magnitude of those problems. Web analytics will show you lots of numbers, but it can’t tell you how to fix issues you encounter. Even worse, it’s not always clear how to interpret analytics in isolation, so you might not even be able to tell if some things really are issues in the first place.

There is hope, though. It’s in the combination of these two methods that we find the elusive answer to our question. Combining usability testing with web analytics gives us the insight we need to make the right UX decisions about our products.

I love Hal Phillips’s story of how ethnographic research changed the culture at Benjamin Moore¹. From Escaping a Strategic Cul de Sac: Using Ethnographic Insights to Challenge Organizational Bias:

They no longer saw homeowners simply as property owners who were protecting their investments – they were also people whose homes were reflections of their changing selves.

They no longer saw painting contractors simply as skilled applicators who would always choose the best paint for the job – they were also businesspeople facing market pressures from all sides, and who needed a helping hand.

And they no longer saw designers simply as indoctrinated advocates for Benjamin Moore – they were also project managers who still wanted mentorship.

Equipped with their newfound intuition, Benjamin Moore set out to reconnect authentically with their customers at all levels. We provided a road out of their strategic cul de sac – a human heartbeat in all of the hard data, and a way to truly internalize the emotions motivating stakeholder behavior.

There is, in my experience, no better way to humanize a company’s design process than doing ethnographic research.

Clive Thompson’s essay on the experience of reading War and Peace on his iPhone is just so, so good:

The phone’s extreme portability allowed me to fit Tolstoy’s book into my life, and thus to get swept up in it. And it was being swept up that, ironically, made the phone’s distractions melt away. Once you’re genuinely hankering to get back to a book, to delve into the folds of its plot and the clockwork machinations of its characters, you stop needing so much mindfulness to screen out digital diversions. The book becomes the diversion itself, the thing your brain is needling you to engage with. Stop checking your email and Twitter! You’ve got a book to read!

He seamlessly blends thoughts on the reading experience with impressions on the book and revelations on the differences between reading physical books vs. ebooks. (Spoiler: it turns out reading books on screens isn’t as bad as some might want us to believe…)

I especially liked this idea he mentions towards the end:

By the time I was done with War and Peace, I had amassed 12,322 words of highlights and marginalia. It was a terrific way to remind myself of the most resonant parts of Tolstoy. Indeed, I so enjoyed revisiting those notes that I wanted a paper copy of them. Using the Espresso print-on-demand machine at the McNally Jackson bookstore in New York, I had the notes printed up as a small 84-page paperback. It sits on my shelf, a little compilation of my reading and thinking — or, as I titled it, War in Pieces.

This is something I want to do for the books I read as well, so I took to Twitter to ask Clive how he did it.

In addition to his response (he exported text from Kindle Highlights into InDesign), the folks at Clippings.io chimed in to tell us about their service¹. Clippings lets you import your Kindle highlights and notes, organize them, search them, and best of all: you can export to PDF if you want a nicely-printed version. I signed up immediately and I’m really liking it so far.

In The New York Times Product Discovery Activity Guide Al Ming lays out how the product team brought Lean principles into their organization:

As part of our efforts to adopt such a data-driven, experimental approach to product development, we recently kicked off a product discovery “pilot program.” Small, cross-functional teams were paired with coaches and facilitators over a six week period to demonstrate product discovery and Lean methodologies as they apply to real-world customer opportunities at The New York Times.

This is such a great way to introduce Lean activities into a large enterprise. Start with a small project, prove value, then expand.

The team also made an “activity guide” for teams to follow, and it reads like a cheat sheet for developing great products. This is really impressive work. Here’s the guide:

A couple of weeks ago I did a talk on Enterprise UX at UX Burlington. You can now read a written version of the talk on A List Apart. From Unsuck the Enterprise:

So if you’re someone who works in enterprise software, come a bit closer—I need to tell you something…

I know the work can be difficult. I know there are an infinite number of factors involved in getting product live, and sometimes what gets launched isn’t what you had in mind. I know there are sleepless nights about this sometimes. But don’t give up. Don’t think that enterprise design has to be boring or tasteless. With a little bit of effort and a lot of tenacity, it’s possible to create great enterprise product. We need you to make it happen, though. Who else is going to do it?

Or if you have 20 minutes to spare, the video for the talk is also now available on Vimeo:

Chris Palmieri’s A Practice of Ethics gets a bit rambly at times, but I really like the questions he wants designers to ask themselves. This bit on friction is particularly good:

Some friction is borne of our simple incompetence. This friction leads to the potholes of user experience — hidden data entry requirements, inscrutable error messages, long page loading times. Some friction is borne of greed, such as the tedious impedance of user abandonment. “Are you sure?” Yes, I’m sure.

But some friction is borne of respect, when we present information about the choices available to users and help them make better decisions. An emailed invoice could remind a customer they were paying for a service they no longer use. A checkbox could assure a user of their current content privacy settings before posting a sensitive photo. Recognition of a past purchase can save a customer the hassle of having to return a book they already have, or confirm that they are re-buying exactly the same shampoo.

It reminds me of Andrew Grimes’s excellent Meta-Moments: Thoughtfulness by Design:

Meta-moments can provide us with space to interpret, understand, and add meaning to our experiences. A little friction in our flow is all we need. A roadblock must be overcome. A speed bump must be negotiated. A diversion must be navigated. Each of these cases involves our attention in a thoughtful way. Our level of engagement deepens. We have an experience we can remember.

Not all friction is bad…