Five Sketches™

When you’re researching users, every once in a while you come across one that’s an anomaly. You must decide whether to exclude their data points in the set or whether to adjust your model of the users.
Let me tell you about one such user. I’ll call him Bob (not his real name). I met Bob during […]

User-centred design (UCD) advocated involving users in the design process. Have you wondered what form that user involvement could take, and which forms lead to the most successful outcomes?
I recently came across data that Mark Keil published a while ago. He surveyed software companies and correlated project outcomes with the type of user access that designers and developers had.

Type […]

Previously, I wrote about GUI—when to copy it and when to design it. When your competition has something better, I recommended you design, to leapfrog your competitor. Here’s an example of two competing web browsers:

At first glance, the new Internet Explorer 8 address bar looks like a copy of Firefox’s existing awesome bar, but click the image for […]

Currently, I’m conducting research on usability analysis and on how Morae software might influence that. My research gaze is rather academic, in that I’m especially interested in the epistemology of usability analysis.
One of my self-imposed challenges is to make my research relevant to usability practitioners. I’m a practitioner and CUA myself, and I have little time for […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

I received an e-mail from someone at the 2008 IA Summit about Jared Spool’s declaration that UCD is dead:
 —  —  — Forwarded message —  —  — 
From: P
Date: Sun 13/04/2008, 2:54 PM
Hi Jerome,
I’m at the iA Summit in Miami right now, and hearing about all of the things that are going on makes me think of you. One of the interesting sessions was Jared Spool’s keynote […]