Five Sketches™

There’s been a loss of usability for people who type text.
Like me, you may have experienced these unwelcome experiences:

After typing a long message in Facebook, when I click send, I get a page error and my entire message is lost.
After typing a post in WordPress, if the server has gone down or I press an unintended keyboard shortcut, […]

Series 3 of the user-experience trading cards debuted at the 2009 IA Summit this week. Five Sketches™ is included in this set:

The trading cards are a growing set—each card lists one method or technique useful to our industry—and are provided as a perk wherever one of nForm’s speakers presents. The whole set is useful to:

help provide consistent terms.
illustrate the range […]

Leah Buley talked about generative design at the South by Southwest Interactive conference, today. Buley feels design methods are lacking in the set of professional tools we use for software development: “We don’t have so many good, reliable, repeatable design techniques.” I agree with her.
Buley tells how, in her first design session at Adaptive Path, she was handed a pen and […]

I’m a big believer in following the standards for GUI and interaction design. But when do you copy or reuse an existing design, and when do you design something new? Here’s my guideline for when to design and when to reuse or copy the GUI and interaction:

Reuse
When…
Design

…there is an external standard.
For example: the Vista UX Guide recommends […]

When businesses buy software, rather than choose the software with the lowest purchase price, they ought to consider the total cost of ownership—including the added productivity and enjoyment that usability and user-experience provide.
Every software company will say “our product is usable,” so how can you prove to prospective customer that you’ve really got usability?
Your product has […]

On the IxDA’s discussion list for interaction designers, Liam Greig posted his “human friendly” version of a heuristics checklist based on Nielson’s originals and the ISO’s ergonomics of human-system interactions.
Here are  just the headings and the human-friendly questions, which are useful at a project’s design stage.

A design should be…

transparent. Ask: Where am I? What are my options?
responsive. Ask: What […]

Today, Joel Spolsky blogged about development process and design. He makes a couple of points I agree with. As an example, he says that developers don’t know how to do everything. He says it first by describing his lack of skills in an early job at Microsoft, and later by describing the lack of skills in very experienced developers:
Your […]

It’s been a year since that flash of insight hit me. Looking back, getting to what I now call the Five Sketches™ ideation-design method was an interesting journey.
The setting. I was working on a two-person usability team faced with six major software- and web products to support. We were empowered to do usability, but not design. At the time, the team was in the […]

Developing Five Sketches™ came with its share of challenges. Fortunately, all obstacles were overcome. Some of those obstacles were even on the official Ways To Fail list in Seth Godin’s book, The Big Moo.
I’m glad I didn’t have to face them all:

Keep secrets.
Set aggressive deadlines for others to get buy in—then change them when they aren’t met.
Be […]

Some software companies add ever more features to their software as a way to differentiate it from its competitors. Lucinio Santos’ lengthy analysis of sophistication versus complexity includes this graphic:

An excellent example of simplification is the Microsoft Office ribbon. Many users who upgrade dislike the ribbon for months because of the sheer amount of GUI change it imposes, but the ribbon […]