Fit and Finish: Insight from the Ironworks User Experience Group

The Dubious Waves of Error

From the customer’s point of view, an error message is a crisis.  When you’re hit by an error on a website, you’re in trouble – by definition.  To make things worse, the message can be so cryptic it stops you dead.  A  poorly-designed error message drives you to a competitor’s site, on the phone with the call center, back to paper-based processes, or just giving up.

Don’t let this happen to your users!  It’ll take work, but make the effort to establish consistent and effective messages and standards for your websites.  The end result should be simple; the error message tells your visitors what went wrong, helps them over any barriers, and lets them get on with their business.

 

A Summer in UX Events: Putting Pointers Into Practice

Back in the shop, the interactive team revisits some of this season's “stickiest” User Experience topics from An Event Apart

 

It’s been a busy few months for User Experience events, with UXWeek out in San Francisco in August and several recent iterations of An Event Apart. While big conferences are great for building excitement around new ideas, the real challenge is always translating this energy back to project work. We find it’s useful to rehash event learning a while after the fact to see what’s been most memorable in practice. Here are a few practical highlights looking back on An Event Apart DC.

 

Photo Credit: Ashley Bush

In case you forgot: Content First!

For those who couldn’t attend, An Event Apart is a three-day conference for “people who make websites.” Daily sessions focused on content, design, usability, and code. One of the most coherent themes at this year’s events was content strategy, with many sessions either relating to how to craft effective content, design for it, and make it work on multiple devices. 

LESSON WORTH REVISITING: Mobile is the New Normal

Mobile statistics show that a growing number of Americans (31% of those with cellphones) are becoming mobile-only internet users. And organizations, particularly government agencies, are preparing to focus on the responsibility to get ALL of their content available on mobile devices. But content poses a design problem for both mobile and the web.

Sticky Ideas:

• Stop “dumbing down” content for mobile – particularly government agencies. For many Americans, mobile is their only access to the web.
• Treat content as a service. Use the process for going mobile as a filter for what your content should look like: concise and focused. 
• Rethink the back button. Now that mobile is the new normal, designers need to expanding thinking beyond standard interaction conventions. For example, the latest iOS allows web browsers to “slide” the screen back in place of having to click on a back button. Passwords could be gestures on a touch screen vs typing in characters. And Windows 8 for desktop is actually inspired by mobile, not the other way around.

 

Photo Credit: Ashley Bush

LESSON WORTH REVISITING: Dive Deep to Understand Your Content

Content should be at the core of the entire web design process. Developing content requires an effective strategy that includes processes or systems that enable content creators to produce “good” content for designers to use when designing. This requires getting to know your content at a much deeper level than previously.

Sticky Ideas:

• Know Your Artifacts. Understand the artifacts the systems intend to produce, and gain
  an intimate knowledge of them.
• Spend time understanding the stakeholders, the content management systems, and
  the processes they use. Use content audits as a way to understand the
  individual elements of content.
• Employ people with knowledge. Young people are not a guaranteed avenue of
  innovation. Tap into wells of knowledge to produce rich content.

LESSON WORTH REVISITING: How to Design for Content First

Good design starts with good content, and content precedes design. Everyone agrees that content should drive experiences, but pulling this off is easier said than done. Many of the speakers this year covered how the rules have changed when it comes to crafting and designing for content.

Sticky Ideas:

• Design without content is just decoration.
• Beware patterns. Design that does not serve people does not serve business. When you do things that are anti-user, you are designing anti-user patterns.
• Designers must say ‘no’ tactfully with data and examples to design requests that are bad for users. This means not bombarding pages with links, irrelevant content, navigation, and more.

 

And More Great Stuff to Recollect...

There was lots of additional, practical advice for designers coming out of the talks that is worth recalling, on topics like iterative design, effective use of meetings, and working with clients. For more details, you can check out Ashley's complete notes on the ICF Ironworks Facebook Album.

We hope you enjoyed this review. Now back to work making stuff.

 

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Idea Forge is a series from the ICF Ironworks’ Interactive Group that highlights practical uses for big ideas in User Experience design. For the latest thoughts hot off the forge, follow our blog at fitandfinish.ironworks.com

Ensuring Equal Web Accessibility for All Is Our Specialty

Americans are more reliant than ever on the Internet as their primary source of critical information and communication. When disaster strikes, news happens or inclement weather is on the horizon, the quickest access to the most information is just a mouse click (or finger tap) away. Continue reading after the break ...

Video: Mobile Web Apps vs. Native Apps

When Ironworks set up their own YouTube channel, the Interactive group started thinking about how we could contribute content. I mean, we're all really, really, ridiculously good-looking, so how could the camera deny us?

We've got a lot of great ideas lined up for the near future, but the first thing we decided to shoot was a simple conversation. Interactive is a pretty collaborative and opinionated group, so rarely a day goes by that we don't end up talking about current web events, theory or the like. It just made sense to document and share one of these conversations.

Larry King and I have been having this discussion on the future of mobile applications for a while now, and it's a fun thing to talk and ponder about because we're rapidly approaching a crossroads. What will the mobile application landscape look like in 5 years? Will the iTunes store be but a painful memory?

If you're interested in the mobile space and want to hear what we think, head on over to the Ironworks YouTube channel and watch our newest video, Mobile Web Apps vs. Native Apps

Hello Newman, Hello Opportunity

There’s a famous scene on the show Seinfeld where the mailman Newman is explaining why postal workers “go postal.” He says:

“Because the mail never stops. It just keeps coming and coming and coming. There's never a letup, It's relentless. Every day it piles up more and more, but the more you get out, the more it keeps coming in. And then the bar code reader breaks. And then it's Publisher's Clearinghouse day…”

If you are in charge of a website, you may be able to relate to the never-ending nature of the job. Unlike a book, a website is never finalized. You can never sit back, prop up your feet, and say “It’s finally done.” There’s always something that should be updated, something that needs better organization or something that should be redesigned. In this sense, your site is more like a newspaper (a new issue every day) than a book. New articles need to be written and updates need to be made often or the site will become stale and out of date. How much fun is it to read a newspaper that’s a month old?

The bad news with this is there’s always something to do. The good news is there’s always something to do.

While some, like Newman, would get frustrated in an environment where the work never stops, most of us find that aspect of our jobs enjoyable. The web provides the endless opportunity for incremental improvement. You can make your site a little better each day. Fix a form. Improve the readability. Optimize for search engines. Make a function more accessible. The to-do list is endless.

And we like it that way.

The Annoyance Parallel

Customer-centric guru Gerry McGovern wrote last week:

“Traditional marketing is about getting attention. Web marketing is about paying attention.”

I really like the distinction he has made, although I think the lines are blurring.

A former colleague of mine and I used to argue over the effectiveness and wisdom of pop-up banner ads. I argued that a vast majority of users hate them and the increased revenue you may see is offset by an annoyance factor. His response was that a vast majority of magazine readers are annoyed by blow-in subscription cards too (they ones that fall out when you flip through the magazine), but they work. So do annoying telemarketers and infomercials.

But the web is a new kind of place. A medium unlike any before it where the customer has more choice and more control. Applying old school marketing techniques to the web is the equivalent to building a brochureware website.