Five Sketches™

Designing is usually a rewarding activity, but the path from start to finish can be filled with frustration and even panic. I’ve seen design processes work—and come to the realisation that “My own designs benefited from rapid iteration!”
These humbling experiences helped me learn to trust the process, even in the face of frustration or panic. It’s these experiences that give […]

If you’re creating user personas, How-To articles often tell you that you only need two or three personas at most. That’s fine for most web-design projects. However, if you are working on an enterprise-wide system that has modules for different types of professionals who each perform distinct and substantial tasks, then you will have a […]

For a Five Sketches™ design session, I ask design participants to bring at least five substantially different ideas to the table, in the form of sketches. A common initial reaction is: “…But I can’t sketch!”
Many design participants believe they cannot draw. To be honest, I believe that about myself. People who feel they cannot draw tend to extend that belief […]

Three-quarters of the way through a Five Sketches™ session, to help iterate and reduce the number of possible design solutions, the team turns to analysis. This includes a usability analysis.
 
After Œ informing and defining the problem  without judgement  and  generating and sketching lots of ideas  without judgment , it’s often a relief for the team to […]

When you’re tempted to cut corners off your product, what do you cut?
Is it the usability?
Today, I watched a video of people helping a motorised cardboard construction or “robot” to navigate. The so-called tweenbot has a flag on it that says “Help me,” and that asks people to send it on its way to its outdoor […]

It takes a range of skills to develop a product. Each skill—embodied in the individuals who apply that skill—brings with it a different focus:

Product managers talk about features and market needs.
Business development  talk about revenue opportunities.
Developers talk about functionality.
Usability analysts talk about product- and user performance.
Interaction designers talk about the user experience.
QA talks about quality and defects.
Marketing talks about the messaging.
Technical communicators […]

Fresh advice, still:
“Usability goals are business goals. Web sites that are hard to use frustrate customers, forfeit revenue, and erode brands.
Executives can apply a disciplined approach to improve all aspects of ease-of-use. Start with usability reviews to assess specific flaws and understand their causes. Then fix the right problems through action-driven design practices. Finally, maintain […]

Involving users throughout the software-development cycle is touted as a way to ensure project success. Does usability testing count as user contact? You bet! But since most companies test their products later in the process, when it’s difficult to react meaningfully to the user feedback, here are two ways to get your testing done sooner.
Prioritise. […]

Having a good design idea is not an amazing event. People have good design ideas all the time. What is amazing is having lots of good design ideas, so that they can be combined and iterated into the best possible design.
Here’s why ideas are disposable:

Sketching lets you capture lots of ideas, quickly and inexpensively.
The more ideas […]

I’m sure Douglas Bowman’s blog last week was widely read. His post was a kind of public exit interview, titled Goodbye Google.
As Bowman left Google, he pointed out the pro-engineering bias in its approach to problem solving—including problems of design. Two of several examples he gives:
[…] a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 […]