The Berkun Blog
Management, design, and the making of good things.
This week in ux-clinic: Managing usability time
October 9th, 2006
This week in the ux-clinic discussion group:
I’m a single usability engineer serving over 100 programmers across a dozen ongoing projects. I focus on a couple projects at once, but have large amount of miscellaneous work that comes to me from the other projects.
My major challenge is that the project teams I work with generally have haphazard schedules themselves. So, its hard to plan my own time given that uncertainty. And to make this even more fun I have a new team member joining and will need to manage both our time.
Planning and organization are not my strengths, so I need techniques that are easy to use!
Yours,
- Coming Up For Air
This week in ux-clinic: the usability police
October 2nd, 2006
This week in the ux-clinic discussion group:
I’ve been asked by the boss to do a usability review of all of websites, and to report the results directly to him. Happy as I was that he’s interested, as I’m working I get that “you’re going to bust us” look from all of the programmers and designers I’ve been working with, as I’m now a kind of UI enforcer. How do I do the job of reviewing the work for head honcho, without being someone people are afraid or resentful of?
- Signed, the rookie on the force
This week in ux-clinic: Designing for novices and experts
September 25th, 2006
This week in the ux-clinic discussion group:
We’re a start-up of veteran designers and software developers, building a cutting edge - home music system (think wireless). One big debate we’re having is how to approach the problem of satisfying both user populations: novice consumers and expert audiophiles. Both user groups are important to us, but their needs, and the assumptions we can make in designing for them, are so divergent, we’re struggling with how best to approach the problem.
Should we:
- A) Figure out now who is more important, and design for them
- B) Focus on the happy middle of design problems / features that both groups want done as simply as possible
- C) Deal with this one feature / decision at a time
- D) Something we haven’t thought of
I’d love to hear how other folks have dealt with this problem, even if just “we made it up as we went”
- Signed, SPD, split-personality design
This week in ux-clinic: in-house vs. outsource UX
September 18th, 2006
This week in the ux-clinic discussion group:
My UX group consists of 7 designers and a manager. In the last year our company has found new work with more front-end design. So we need new talent but they’re hard to find.
Currently we use freelance designers significantly - they are willing to do extra work (they’re usually not booked 100% and work on weekends), seldom complain about planning, don’t ask for any educational budget, time for internal meetings or complain about company design process.
Now, among our project managers the question has risen why we don’t continue hiring external designers instead of finding additional internal staff.
Who has faced this situation before and can tell me how they dealt with this?
- Signed, An “innie” in an “outie” org
This week in ux-clinic: harvesting the idea farm
August 28th, 2006
This week in the ux-clinic discussion group:
We’re early on a project and doing lots of prototypes and crazy UI exploration. But as the design manager, I know its almost time to turn the corner and focus. My problem is my team is in love with how they’re working, and I don’t know how to harvest the idea farm, without killing the morale of all the farmers.
How do I turn down the velocity on idea generation without turning it off? We need to get at least one level deeper in focus and stop thinking broadly, but I don’t know how to safely make that happen.
- Harvesting the idea farm
This week in ux-clinic: Can UI be funny?
August 21st, 2006
This week in the ux-clinic discussion group:
We’re supposed to be designing a short tutorial for an on-line banking web-app. One of our designers made a kick-ass prototype that centers on humor (excellent cartoons of dropped ATM cards, customers crying after early withdrawls, etc.) - but the rest of the team is afraid to use it. Everyone from marketing to management has no experience using humor in design, and I need some help.
I think it’s totally appropriate, but I can’t for the life of me think of other examples where humor has been used in mainstream designs.
Can humor be appropriate in design? How do you decide when? Do you know of any examples of mainstream designs that use humor, even in documentation or support? Or are there good reasons why 99% of all design work everywhere is humorless?
This week in ux-clinic: How to cut a bad, shipped feature
August 14th, 2006
This week in the ux-clinic discussion group:
I’m on young team that has finally admitted to itself that a much-hyped feature of the last release (2.0) is actually quite bad. As in, on one can even figure it out to fully realize how bad it is bad. The problem is, everyone is all thumbs when it comes to what to do about it. The business folks want us to leave it in (the evil feature is still part of the marketing literature), but us UI folks are all for tearing it out - the problem is, how?How do you make the argument to throw away weeks/months of work? How do you message this to customers when something that was there disappears? I need the playbook for how to cut a bad, previously shipped, feature.
- Signed, Cut-less in Chicago
This week in ux-clinic: Beyond don’t make me think
August 7th, 2006
This week in the ux-clinic discussion group:
Recently, I switched from working on consumer websites, to the more staid, practical, button-down world of accounting software. As in, accounting software for accountants. In reviewing all the usability classics, I’ve noticed how focused on the pick-up-and-play side of things most of it is.Aside from the odd mention of Fitts Law and the number of clicks required to perform a task, there’s little coverage given to designing for efficiency, especially expert efficiency, in interface design.Anyone have experience with designing for performance, not ease of learning, as job #1? What tips and/or references can the list offer that might help me adjust my mindset to this new set of demands? Is it even possible to make such data entry software a pleasure to use?- Working beyond don’t make me think
This week in ux-clinic: Superhero UX vs. conservatives
July 31st, 2006
This week in the ux-clinic discussion group:
We’re a pair of UX folks (a designer and a usability engineer). We’ve teamed up to turn our team around, but despite our awesome talent combo, we’re spinning our wheels. The team had the good sense to hire both of us, but is fixated on tiny, short term, miniature UI developments. Big architecture work is added to the schedule easily, but all the UI bits are “tweak this”, “improve that”, or “provide a basic UI for new feature blah”.
Our team is smart and leaders are good - but they’ve never taken, or witnessed, a big bet on UI, despite the customer centric project goals. How do we use our powers, design or usability, to change our leadership psychology so that sizable UI/UX investments are part of the game?
– Superhero UX vs. the conservatives
This week in ux-clinic: The requirements to design gap
July 24th, 2006
This week in the ux-clinic discussion group:
I work for a large medical software company that attempts to follow a strict engineering process (partly for ISO certification). All logged bugs are supposed to be tied to a requirement (we use ReqPro), but managers aren’t sure what to do with “visual” bugs because visuals aren’t included in the official requirements docs.
So the big question is: What is the best way to fit the visual/UI deliverables into the engineering process?
Specifically:
- How best to deliver visuals? PDF? HTML?
- If designers don’t write the req documents, even if we wanted to, how do we get the designs into the requirements?
- How should visuals relate to the written requirements?
This week in ux-clinic: Getting the new up to speed
July 17th, 2006
This week in the ux-clinic discussion group:
Right now, our company is growing by leaps and bounds and an initiative has been put forth to reduce the time it takes a new hire to become productive. My question really is what approach have others seen work when it comes to getting new hires (fresh out of college/grad school) up to speed as usability engineers or designers?
How long does it typically take a new hire in your company to be completing projects on their own? What topics are included in your training program and what format do those training sessions take (e.g., lecture style, one-on-one w/ a mentor, hands-on “lab” type training, etc.)?
This week in ux-clinic: vision and collaboration
July 10th, 2006
This week in the ux-clinic discussion group:
While managing a small design team how does one manage both a strong design vision, and maintain a sense of collaboration and team ownership over that vision at the same time? How do you keep your team of real designers from becoming production crafts people when the design vision is quite strong from the beginning? Let’s assume for this thread that the strong vision is internal to the design teams and held and managed by the design manager.
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