The unpleasant set of experiences that commonly comprise air travel these days include: being charged an additional fee to check a bag; sitting on the floor near wherever you can find a power outlet; and having to separate out liquids into a separate bag. These are commonplace annoyances that for various reasons weren’t part of air travel just a few years ago.
Yet, even though the experience of flying has changed in fundamental ways, luggage, an essential part of this experience, hasn’t evolved much.
That’s why I’m psyched about ZÜCA luggage, which I just found out about. “With a built-in seat (seriously) and removable packing pouches that stack like drawers, this patented new concept in travel is like nothing else.”
I like the luggage but what I like even more is the spirit of it—the thoughtful understanding of the realities of travel and the creative rebuilding of a commoditized product.
The people who designed the bike talk about what the bike can do, but the rider wants to find out what she can do. In the former vocabulary: “We give you 20 gears.” In the latter vocabulary: “I’ve decided to bike to work twice a week, but I fear the pain of getting up that steep hill on the way there.” If the bike company were smart, they’d be talking about making it easier to get up hills while commuting to work, or suggesting alternate routes or techniques so that you’ll arrive at the office without needing a shower and a nap.
No one ever called the tech support line and asked, “How can we maximize productivity?”. Rather, people asked highly specific questions, like, “How can we change the calendaring system to send reminders two days in advance instead of one?” and so on. But it’s a lot easier to make up imaginary Frequently Asked Questions than it is to discover the real ones. Compiling a true FAQ sheet requires a sustained, organized effort: over the lifetime of the software, incoming questions must be tracked, responses monitored, and all gathered into a coherent, searchable whole that reflects the collective experience of users in the wild. It calls for the patient, observant attitude of a field naturalist. No grand hypothesizing, no visionary pronouncements here—open eyes and accurate note-taking are what’s needed most.
A few weeks ago we were out with a small group at The Alembic. Our crew included visitors from Australia and the UK, and the discussion turned to how to spend a day in San Francisco. Here, in no particular order, are our suggestions from that night that I scribbled in my notebook.
There’s a lot of talk of jobs getting chopped and savings being slashed. In the interest of spreading positivity, let’s focus on chopping and slashing vegetables, instead!
I do seem to spend a sizable chunk of my time dismembering vegetables, and the Cut & Prep System looks like it will make that process faster, safer, and more pleasurable. And isn’t that the ultimate goal of any thoughtful design?
In February I’ll be traveling to Denver for the next Web Directions conference. Web Directions is officiallly described as “a highly focused conference and workshops for web designers, developers, UX and ID designers, and other web professionals whose day to day job is building web sites and web applications. It features two dozen world class experts, with a razor sharp focus on practical techniques and technologies you can use right away to build even better sites.”
I’ll be giving a talk on building empathetic corporate cultures and co-leading a workshop with Mark Trammell on setting up a user research program.
When everyone at your organization cares deeply about the customer experience you will build better, more inventive, and more delightful products. So how do get everyone to really care about and understand not just the usability but the overall experience of your products? Though it takes time, an empathetic corporate culture is not impossible to create and nurture.
In this session Juliette Melton will share several case studies in how to build a culture of empathy at your organization, including best practices for running usability tests, sharing web usage statistics, and developing user personas.
Right now, someone, somewhere, is using something you’ve built. Who are they? Are they having a good time? It’s not that hard to find out.
User testing doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive, and shouldn’t only happen at the end of the product development cycle. The best and most useful research is distributed throughout the product lifecycle and can be done within a stone’s throw of your office using inexpensive tools. At this workshop, Juliette Melton and Mark Trammell will show you how to build an effective user testing program from scratch and how to keep it going over time.
Who is this workshop for?
This workshop is for those who want to understand how to learn about user experiences, including project/product managers, designers, and usability professionals.
What will you learn?
A structured approach to building a user testing program
Web analytics basics
Surveying tips
How to include coworkers in your research
How to perform task analysis
Recruiting testing participants tips
Best practices when sharing research findings
(Wondering about the spaceship I would land in Colorado? Full lyrics here. Anyone who lived in Colorado as a kid will probably know it by heart.)
The ever-observent Killface of Frisky Dingo is displeased that a map is missing some essential information. “Oh, here’s a good idea — indicate north! Otherwise, it’s not technically a map. It’s just a drawing.”
StopBadware.org, the university-based consumer protection initiative developed to combat badware, announced today that Mozilla, creator of popular free and open source software such as Firefox, will become its newest sponsor. Mozilla joins Google, PayPal, Lenovo, VeriSign, AOL and Trend Micro in supporting the initiative led by Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
“Firefox was developed through the collective knowledge of a community,” said Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of StopBadware.org and author of The Future of the Internet – And How to Stop It. “We look forward to applying lessons of Mozilla’s open development process to our own efforts in fighting badware.”
Those efforts include research into how badware spreads online, an active community of users helping each other to keep their websites and computers protected, public alerts about new badware applications, and a clearinghouse of dangerous websites reported by StopBadware.org’s partners.
ZAba:
Hello Came across your blog totally by accident and really enjoyed it and your photoblog has some really intersting pictures. Nice eye ;)
Regards
