As a User Experience designer I’m responsible for providing design specifications to engineers. Sometimes the design problems are easy but more often they are complex and difficult to visualize. As designers we’ve latched onto some tools to help us communicate our ideas to our stakeholders. We use wireframes, mock-ups, omnigraffle/visio UML diagrams, comics, Powerpoint and a few other techniques to convey what we mean.

Here’s the problem: If you’re using a different tool, and designing without input from users then you are doomed to fail, or at least have a major communication breakdown eventually.

Have you ever read a book and watched a movie made from that book? Remember back to how different it was in your mind than how it was interpreted on screen. There are hundreds of pages with fantastic descriptions and still the interpretation can be so far off from person to person. That’s why it’s critical to get ideas into a working state as quickly as possible.

It allows the user to soak in the idea and start concentrating on the details. What if it did this? How does that work? Where do we collect this data? All important questions to be answered early. The user can’t start asking those questions unless they can interact with the interface, play with things and exploring. That’s where they prototype comes in.

Learn to design quickly, allow for full uninhibited feedback then iterate. That will give you the best chance at a successful, usable product.

Attending day two of the UIE. Spent the morning in Adaptive Path/ Luke Wroblewski. Both were excellent speakers. A little high level for my taste but overall pretty good stuff. They both provided good support for making a case for design in an organization.

Jared Spool was entertaining as always. I was a bit disappointed with the recycled content.

Jeff Patton’s talk on Agile and UCD was excellent. It’s what I’ve suspected for a while which is; design, iterate, design iterate is better than design and throw over the wall. The challenges for designers is greater than developers since they need to live in the past, the now and the future to do their work effectively. Jeff provided 12 best practices for UX designers to adopt to help transition themselves into an Agile development methodology.

I’m here at the UIE 13 Conference here in Cambridge MA. Day one is all day sessions. I’ve chosen the Bulletproof Ajax: Designing Interactive and usable Ajax solutions by Jeremy Keith.

Jeremy went over the building blocks of Ajax and some of the history. I’m really enjoying the high level building block discussion. I always find it easier to embrace a new concept if someone explains the “why”. Jeremy has done a great job keeping the technical stuff light while balancing the need to understand the fundamentals. I’ll update later after we put some of the fundamentals into practice. Stay tuned.

Practicing UCD in an Agile development environment can be daunting, frustrating and scary for the traditional user experience designer. After all, we like to design, research, survey, ask questions and create informed designs which get passed to development. UCD naturally fits better in a waterfall methodology.

Here’s the problem: It’s too damn slow. All that work takes time and unless you have great project management who can effectively stack concurrent activities you become the bottleneck. The designer is seen as the obstacle and not the problem solver. Agile development relies on everyone on the team working together in an iterative fashion to complete the work. But wait! what about my research? How can I influence the design if code is being written on day one? How can I survey users? How can I do my job?

You need to change mediums. You need to get closer to your product. You need to transition your skills and you need to get more involved. User’s don’t use your wireframes and photoshop mocks, they use your product. You need to learn the skills necessary to influence change within that product’s interface layer. For webapps you’ll need to bone up on your XHTML/CSS and JavaScript chops. You’ll need to get your hands dirty and work along side your engineers.

It may take some time to gain the skills and the trust to allow you into the codebase for a lot of organizations but that is where you need to be. It’s where the decisions are made it’s where you can have the greatest control it’s where you can influence change.

Since Agile is iterative you maintain the option to make changes during the development cycle. You don’t need to get everything “right” from the start. Let’s face it, we can survey, interview, test and design until we’re blue in the face but we’re not always going to hit a home run. Agile allows you to chip away at the large chunks and create the fine lines later in the cycle. You have the opportunity to test during development and make changes on the fly. It’s faster and more liberating since you are in control of the layer you and your users care most about, the UI.

I’m feeling a little left out of the iphone, ipod, idog phenomenon going on. So I decided to take a look at some common items and see if I can add “i” to it and see how they would look/interact. The first design is a simple thermostat. I’ll take a look at it’s UI and basic functions and see if I can make it into an ithermostat. The first time experience is below. I’ll create some of the additional screens later. Let me know what you think.

Default Interface

Unlocked

I have to admit I was completely surprised when I learned Google was launching a new browser. They kept the secret under lock and key kudos to them.

I’ve been test driving it for the last two days and it seems like a great new browser, it’s a little faster than FF3, Safari and IE8, it’s got a decent user experience and I’ve found it to be extremely stable.

But more than all the new fancy new features, I’m glad it came out of the gate with excellent support for Web Standards. With FF3, Safari and IE8 the browser landscape has change dramatically over the last few months. I’m starting to see the light at the end of the IE hack tunnel. I’m starting to see what it might be like to design once and not worry about browser testing.

Which one is best? I’m not sure, I’ll keep banging away at all four to see if there is one clear winner but it’s obvious the biggest winner are the HTML junkie, CSS jockey and JavaScript hero.

So Microsoft has a new “viral” site out that hopes to dispel the myths around Windows Vista. They conducted several focus groups and asked participants their opinion about Windows Vista of which most were negative. Then they showed the participants the new Microsoft OS called “Mojave”. They see, and love the new version.

For full disclosure, I upgraded to Vista and have several likes and dislikes but overall am happy with the upgrade. But I’m more interested in the psychology at play.

There are several factors influencing the perceptions of the participants:

Negative press and full assault from Apple from day one.
The launch of Vista seemed to be mismanaged from the start. I remember the lines at the store when Windows 95 came out. This was nothing like that.

Past experience using Windows products (good or bad)
Windows has been such a strong part of our day-to-day lives. We expect really big things from upgrades.

The luxury of having someone explain all the new features to them
This is a big one. Users rarely every dig through documentation to figure out how all the features work. They slowly learn only the ones that are relevant to them.

The opportunity to see a “new product” before anyone else
Users who are asked to participate in “new” designs are more optimistic than those who are asked to provide feedback on a product they already know.

Overall I think it’s a great case study on perception versus reality.

One last point of criticism for Microsoft: If you are building a product called SilverLight to go head to head with Flash why in the world would you put this together in Flash?

Update: Looks like the whole project has been upgraded to use SilverLight.

According to several sources the mirror has been around since the 13th century (give or take). Just about everyone is familiar with it. You know, that shinny thing that looks back at you in the bathroom.

But leave it to the product designers at LG to turn it into a “feature”. I think we’ve officially run out of new features for the phone.

See commercial below:

Now if you’re really into cutting edge check out the Jitterbug:

Imagine that. All it does is make calls and keep track of your contacts! No games, no facebook, oh yea and no mirror.

So I’ve been playing this game with my blog. Trying to climb my way to the top of Google for the search “Sean Landry“. I was getting there, a little more SEO and I would be there right…Wrong!

I dropped off the Google listings completely. I flipped page after page and still no seanlandry.com listed. Huh weird. So I did a search which would definitely bring my site up. I typed “seanlandry.com” And it came up #1. Great right? Not.

Here’s what I saw:

YIKES! What is all that text underneath my site? I went to my blog and everything looked fine. I couldn’t figure it out. So I looked at what Google webbot sees using the Google Webmaster tools and the first 50 keywords for my site looked like this:

1. alcohol
2. credit
3. marijuana
4. loan
5. card
6. effects
7. ringtone
8. drug
9. cocaine
10. phentermine
11. ringtones
12. prescription
13. viagra
14. debt
15. instant
16. cards
17. score
18. generic
19. steroids
20. approval
21. student
22. tylenol
23. tramadol
24. nicotine
25. reporting
26. cialis
27. ortho
28. testosterone
29. vicodin
30. adderall
31. hydrocodone
32. xanax
33. zoloft
34. blood
35. prednisone
36. soma
37. ambien
38. canada
39. pharmacy
40. effexor
41. equity
42. application
43. heroin
44. lipitor
45. mortgage
46. wellbutrin
47. abuse
48. mp3
49. acid
50. interaction

So I looked at the source of my pages. And there it was. Several HUNDRED lines of code all right before the end of the page. All using the display: none CSS to hide it from me but not from the crawler.

Now I’m in the process of changing passwords, updating my site’s index and locking everything down. Nothing worse than a SPAMer/Hacker to ruin my day.

If you use browser tabs as much as I do you’ll love this tip. Clicking the scroll wheel on your mouse will open a link in a new tab. I’ve been right-clicking > Open in new tab for years. This is a single action that does the same thing. Works in FireFox and IE7. Enjoy!

Give it a try!