Five Sketches™

The Agile Manifesto includes twelve principles. These two are related:
Deliver working software frequently [in short sprints that last] from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
Working software is the primary measure of progress.
From discussions with other practitioners, I know that software teams can get dogmatic about the above […]

When designing the user experience of software, UX- and Development teams often focus on how the user interface supports user performance, because that’s within their locus of control. Once the product is in the wild, environmental factors may reduce user performance despite the team’s best product-design efforts. But I believe it’s possible for a UX team to […]

For professional reasons, I like to mess around with software. It’s a form of training, because some of the messing around leads to frustration, confusion, and inefficiency. And that’s good.
My hope is that my experiences will help me to better understand what I put various groups of software users through when they use the software […]

Three weeks ago, a client called me. They had just completed release 1.0 of a new Web application that will replace their current flagship product. The client was asking about summative usability testing to evaluate how well the product performs in the hands of users, because they want their customers to succeed.
Since the product is an […]

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 designing a bedpan washer, do you design one that nurses don’t have to wait for?
According to a newspaper report, BC’s Centre for Disease Control, or CDC, found that a British Columbia hospital had
bedpan-cleaning machines that take 13 minutes for each cycle.
If they wanted to ensure each bedpan got returned to the right patient, nurses had […]

How tiny does the keyboard on a handset or smartphone need to be?

If you ask me, I’d say: “Not anywhere near as tiny as they are.”
I’d also say: “If you make an app for iTouch or iPhone, ensure that the keyboard flips into a larger, wider version when users rotate the device on its side.”

If your user persona includes an image, which type of image helps the team produce designs that are more usable?

The illustration on the left?  Or the photo on the right?
According to Frank Long’s research paper, Real or Imaginary: The effectiveness of using personas in product design, photos are better than illustrations. Teams whose user personas include a photograph […]

My friend Donna, who is in her 50s, asked me to help her with her photos. (Donna is not her real name.)
Here are the things Donna wanted to do:

Move photos from the camera’s memory card to somewhere else.
Previously, when the camera’s memory card was full, Donna would delete unwanted photos by using the camera’s delete function. At […]

Recently, one of the new-media gurus characterised Twitter as a place where people whine about the annoying or unexpected things that happen to them, in microblogs of 140 characters or less. Here are some examples:

davidcrow tweeted ”You can’t blame a guy for trying.” Ugh, you wasted 90 minutes of my day dude, and for trying to […]