Yu Centrik

UX Masterclass Draws User Experience, Market Research, Design Professionals to Chicago

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, JULY 27, 2011 - User Centric, one of the largest user experience (UX) research firms in the US, will co-host the fourth UX Masterclass on Sept. 15 and 16 in Chicago, at The Field Museum. Both global and domestic leaders are expected to attend the event from the UX industry, healthcare and academic community and public sector, including GfK Group, Caesar’s Entertainment, Informatica and DePaul University.

The UX Masterclass will tackle the challenges confronting practitioners and the role of user experience in a product’s lifecycle, appealing to those creating experiences that lead to customer loyalty, minimize the return of products and aid customer retention. This event will draw executives considering a global initiative or currently conducting research outside the US, allowing them to discuss international market opportunities and challenges with UX Directors from around the world that are on the ground every day.

With a thriving UX market, Chicago is the ideal location for an exchange of industry best practices and new research methods.  While Chicago has been home to UX conferences in the past, unique to this conference, attendees will have the opportunity to gain insight from UX company leaders from around the world, including over 30 speakers from 25 countries.

“User experience research matters—it affects scores of people in dozens of industries. The agenda appeals to those responsible for delivering exceptional experiences to their customers, including UX professionals, designers, product managers and interactive marketing specialists,”  said Gavin Lew, User Centric Managing Director.  “Ultimately, you’ll walk away learning a lot.”

Presentations will highlight research and design techniques drawing from fields such as mobile technology, user-centered design and eye tracking. This year’s four distinguished key-note speakers include:

• Is the Customer Experience a Safe Bet? Brad Hirsch, Vice President and Assistant General Manager, Caesars Entertainment
• The Future of Market Research and UX Research, David Krajicek, Co-President, GfK Custom Research of North America
• Creative Alternatives for User Centered-Design, Mark Detweiler, Informatica, Inc.
• The Good, the Bad, and the Heatmaps, Aga Bojko, User Centric, Inc.

For program details, location information and registration visit http://www.uxmasterclass.com.

Early registration discounts end Aug. 15

So, Google+.  You saw this coming, right?
Have you noticed the clear trend in Google’s past few releases?  Google Wave, Google Buzz, and now Google+ - all are attempts to dive into social media.  Here at Yu Centrik, we’ve played with each of these three tools trying to get an idea of their purpose.  For the first time with Google+ we actually have a compelling answer to this question.

Sure, in Google+, users are able to add/follow friends, share content, manage their profile, and more.  While releasing a product so clearly in competition with social media Goliaths Facebook and Twitter, we mustn’t forget that Google is no David.  The ubiquity of Gmail and Google’s patented invite-only marketing has helped Google+ reach 10 million curious users in only two weeks.

Some have already declared the imminent failure of the service, but their arguments don’t seem to hold up.  Forbes magazine suggests a lack of support for groups will spell the end of the social network, yet they seem to ignore the success of Twitter: a free-for-all asymmetric social network which has achieved significant ubiquity with no real groups.  Many also seem to ignore the possibility that G+ is simply not aimed at beating Facebook at its own game.  Instead of casting our own judgments on its outcome, we chose to investigate the structure and interface of the service to answer one simple question: what is Google+ aiming for?

Google+ lies between Facebook and Twitter.
On a closer look, the lack of a system for direct communication immediately separates Google+ from Facebook.  Presumably due to its integration with Gmail, Google+ has no direct messaging and no personal “wall” of its own.  Instead, it fits within an ecosystem combining all of Google’s previously successful products (Gmail, GTalk, Calendar, Documents, Reader, etc.), which are now defined by a top navigation bar connected to the Google+ network.  This is a sure sign that the product is clearly of strategic importance to the company (likely an attempt to gain access to social data which can then be funneled into all other Google products, as suggested by ex-Googler Douglas Edwards).

The system allows users to form asymmetric, one-directional relationships, much like Twitter’s concept of “following”.  However, the comprehensive approach to profiles and posting also separates Google+ from Twitter.  A little less public than Facebook, and a little more personal than Twitter, Google seems to be working toward a niche for itself between the two services.  The system appears to bring the simplicity, privacy and content focus of Twitter into a more personal social network like Facebook with better support for multiple personal networks.  Before even discussing whether it could grow beyond these competitors, the next few months must first tell us whether that niche even exists.

G+ is actually designed for content sharing.
It seems to me that Google+ is a social media system which has been designed specifically for content sharing.  Seems like old hat, but this concept is surprisingly unprecedented.  While millions of users have appropriated Facebook and Twitter for content sharing, neither seem to have been originally designed for this purpose.  Facebook included comprehensive sharing features much later in its lifecycle, and Twitter’s interface has only recently integrated shortened links and lists.  These actions represent both service providers simply catching up with the behaviour of their users after the fact.  With Google+, the focus seems to have been on content sharing from the beginning.

The interface design seems to be a cocktail of the best ideas from competitors along with a slew of additional features and functionalities which seem to be geared toward content sharing in a private and controlled manner.  One can sense clear attempts to attack the weak points of other social networks, and Google+’s refined interface achieves an unparalleled maturity in this regard.  Further, focusing on content sharing, one of the major reasons users engage with social media in general, may turn out to be a silver bullet for the social media-scape.  We can see these points more clearly through an analysis of two of G+’s main features: circles and hangouts.

Circles let you covertly organize your contacts into groups using a simple callout with checkboxes, or a visually interesting drag-and-drop interface for handling many contacts at once.  Circles enable you not only to share content to specific groups of people, but also view content from those same groups.  If I share a technology-related link or status update with my fellow Yu Centrik people, they are the only contacts which will have access to that information.  On their Google+ interface, that post will show up only in the circles within which they have placed me.  This is an effective way to drastically improve the signal to noise ratio of your social media, and give you much more control of your sharing and receiving.  One part Twitter, one part Facebook.

Interestingly, your organization of circles is private, making this feature significantly more useful than Twitter’s lists.  The focus on privacy also directly tackles some of Facebook’s biggest failings, an element even more visible through Google’s attempts to respond to privacy concerns quickly.  Again, all signs point to a goal of reinforcing Google+’s attacks on Facebook’s Achilles heel: privacy.

Hangouts are a group video/voice chat system, a concept first introduced almost two decades ago.  Again, the novelty here is that the Hangout interface is designed for content sharing.  Users of Google Talk may recognize attempts to incorporate content sharing effectively into live chat.  They’ve done it even better in the Google+ Hangout.  My brother and I have been showing each other YouTube videos for years, and Google+’s inclusion of a shared YouTube player is a stroke of true user-centered design (see his elation after our first hangout if you don’t believe me).  This concept may be the most innovative part of Google+; there’s no similar service on Facebook, Twitter or even Linkedin.

A few days using the Google+ interface and you’re sure to feel what our User Experience Director Marcio Leibovitch tweeted (ironic, i know):

The Goals of Google+
With Facebook’s privacy concerns, incessant interface redesigns and a huge amount of noise (third party applications and disorganized friend lists), Google+ seems to be trying to build a niche for itself with a more mature user experience focused on detailed content sharing.  In other words, by bringing elements of the Twitter model to more secure and controlled version of Facebook, my feeling is that Google+ is not expecting to destroy Facebook and Twitter in the short-term.

If I had to guess, I would say the short-term goal of the Google+ project is to carve out a place for a social network which optimizes content sharing among friends, peers, coworkers and acquaintances, while limiting Facebook use to conversations and dialogues and limiting Twitter use to wide-scale content sharing, marketing and self-promotion.  I should restate that this is a short-term goal, because if achieved, I’d also guess that the long-term goal is much more ambitious.

Prototyping is an essential part of design. At some point during the process of creating and releasing a great product, building a prototype is inevitable. Prototyping allows you to validate your design choices with developers, project stakeholders and, most importantly, target users. A good prototype is simply the best way to share, communicate and get quick feedback on your design ideas.

In the world of mobile devices, the evaluation of native applications, mobile websites and web apps is crucial. While desktop PCs have been around for about 40 years and the World Wide Web is celebrating its 20 year anniversary, mobile devices are relatively new. The history of web has seen a number of design standards emerge. Despite the constant evolution of the platform, best practices can help anticipate user behaviour on any desktop web application. Since the same can’t be said about touch phones and tablets, validating design choices as soon as possible becomes crucial. For mobile, fewer best practices exist and user behaviour is hard to predict.

PROTOTYPE SOONER THAN LATER
So what’s the right moment to prototype when designing for mobile devices? It’s not that different than other areas of design: you need start as soon as possible and you can’t stop until you are confident about the solution you are proposing. Throughout the creative process, the purpose of your prototype will evolve, and so should its actual manifestation.  At the brainstorming stage, you may simply be trying to communicate and get feedback about specific ideas from your peers with a couple of hand-drawn sketches.  However, later in the process, you may be hoping to perform a more serious evaluation of high-fidelity prototypes with real users.

One persistent issue with mobile prototyping is its small screen.  While you may be able to get away with larger brainstorm sketches, we advise running all prototypes on a real mobile device to simulate the size of your user interface (UI), the feel of your website/application, and the way people interact with it.

Another crucial aspect surrounds the fact that prototypes are meant to be shared. The whole point is to share them with the people from whom you need feedback, so the ability to serve as a communication tool for your interaction design is a basic attribute of every prototype. You have to easily be able to get it out there to see what people think, how they use it and what they understand (or don’t understand), in a way which reflects the actual proposed application.

But before you start building a prototype, you need to clearly define what you want to communicate, what kind of interaction you want to validate and what type of feedback you need. List the features you want to show, the questions you want to ask and based on that, write the usage scenarios that will help take people through your product.

Depending on your scenarios the prototype you will develop will fall in one of the three different categories:

LOW-FIDELITY PROTOTYPES
Prototypes can be as simple as a slide show of drawings made of pictures taken with your phone camera. Showing these pictures in your phone allow people to provide initial feedback regarding labels, positioning of objects, visibility and other elements that don’t require interactivity.

If you want to go one step further, you need to provide a way for people to interact with the pictures in order to simulate realistic scenarios. A number of different applications available in the market today make adding interactivity to your screens and running your prototype on a mobile phone quite easy. These tools help you link your screens together so people can navigate through them as if they were using a real mobile website or app. On the iPhone, tools like Realizer and Mockability help you build a prototype in a couple of minutes and easily share them. Invision is a recently launched web-based prototyping tool that works with all platforms.

If learning how to use another piece of software in not on your plans, some of the best tools for basic prototyping are likely already on your system: Apple’s Keynote and Microsoft Powerpoint. They both have the necessary functionality to link slides very easily and then export the “presentation” to a PDF file that can be “read” on all mobile platforms. A major advantage of these software packages is the number of available UI libraries for iPhone, Android, Blackberry and others.

One the best libraries in the market today is Keynotopia. Available for Keynote, Powerpoint and even OpenOffice, it provides UI libraries for the iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone 7. It also offers an iPhone/iPaq app optimized to display your PDF prototypes. Or you can use your PDF reader of choice, like Goodreader on the iPhone or ezPDF on Android.

These tools are extremely useful when you need to create rapid prototypes to validate basic aspects of your design like labels, size and location of objects and the basic understanding of the navigation and flow.

MEDIUM-FIDELITY PROTOTYPES
Basic prototypes can only take you so far. You will frequently face the challenge of trying to communicate or test your design when users can’t see or do certain things you need them to do. Simple things like page scrolling can’t be achieved with linked screenshots like those in the basic prototyping category. You will often find yourself hitting a wall with the limitations imposed by basic prototypes. You will want to overcome some of these limitations to be able to explore your ideas in more detail.

The tools previously presented are good for the early stages of a project but as you move forward, more advanced tools are needed to allow you to reproduce the behaviour of your product. Fortunately we are not short of them. The market is full of powerful and simple to use tools that will take your prototypes to another level. Tools like Axure, Justinmind, Flairbuilder, Protoshare and Fireworks let you create more complex interactions and allow you to quickly share and get feedback on your prototypes. You can simulate data entry, add conditional behaviour, and even animations; all this without writing a single line of code. These tools have a slightly higher learning curve, but nothing that is out of the reach of designers accustomed to typical drawing tools.

These tools give more control over the whole experience and help you simulate behaviours that are closer to the way your application or website will actually work.

HIGH-FIDELITY PROTOTYPES
If you need a prototype that behaves as close as possible to how the final product is supposed to behave, you’ll need to dedicate more time it, maybe even getting your hands dirty and writing some code. It doesn’t mean you need to start from scratch, but you’ll need be ready to play with HTML/CSS/JavaScript or some other programming languages. Combining rudimentary coding skills with tools like PhoneGap, jQuery Mobile and Sencha Touch will allow you to create extremely rich prototypes that can be tweaked to run well in different platforms. Limitations lie only in your coding skills and time.

The advantages of this approach are extended control of the final result and the ability to reuse generated code if done well.

CONCLUSION
There’s no excuse today to skip the prototyping phase of designing mobile applications/websites. The number of tools available, whether you need a rapid prototype or a more advanced one, is growing everyday.  These tools can do a pretty good job of simulating interactivity for validation purposes at very reasonable prices (often for free). The market for mobile applications and websites is growing more and more competitive. Transparent review systems where people openly criticize and spread the word about bad applications make prototyping an essential part of your design process: you simply can’t afford to correct mistakes after building your application.

Year after year, students graduating from the Université de Montréal’s Industrial Design program showcase their work to an interested public. Though neglected for a long time, industrial design is now taking its place in the ergonomics and user experience industries.

This year, Chrystel and I were invited as jurors for the RAEDIUM prize. Each year, this prize is awarded to the student whose final year project excels in terms of understanding user-centered design and context of use. Our congratulations go to the winner, Hugo Messier, for his project R-Mano.

In this article, we present this project, as well as 2 other projects which deserve honourable mention.

R-Mano: Prehension Aid
by Hugo Messier

This sport glove allows the disabled to hold an object in their hand without using any force. It is designed for people with limited grip strength and dexterity while still having strength in their arms.

While still only a prototype, R-Mano has been tested and approved by people with handicapped hands.

Sysmo: Modular Support Bar System
by Chloé Tétreault

Sysmo enhances the experience of elderly people in the bathroom. Their attractive design, a definite improvement compared to existing systems, allows them to be fixed to the shower wall or bathtub. They allow for maximum grip and the rotating base gives the bars enhanced flexibility in terms of usage.

The support systems integrates seamlessly in the aging people’s environment, evolving with their needs and allowing them to keep their autonomy for as long as possible.

ICI : Public Transportation Targeted Information System
by Émilie Bonnier

The ability to select a route and find our bearings in transit may influence our choice of transportation mode. ICI provides users with targeted information at bus stops and inside the bus.
The goal is to improve users’ orientation by using their own personal reference points throughout the city.

For more details about these projects and to view the work of all the students, visit design.umontreal.ca.

I was involved with the TED Travel project, last month, here is a short spot of what happened there!

One of the primary goals of form design is making sure users can accomplish their tasks quickly while having an effective and positive experience. Usually, we design forms with the intent of improving efficiency and time of completion, reducing complexity, ensuring consistency to minimize the user’s cognitive load and enabling speed scanning. Still, it feels like the design of forms hasn’t changed drastically in the past ten years and we repeat a routine which works well.

However, we recently saw a new form emerging. Praised by the form guru Luke Wroblewski and the usability expert Jared Spool, Mad libs have become increasingly popular. Let’s try to explore what is going on…

This blog is available on the Global User Research website.