I have a weakness for science methods... I’ve mentioned it before. Dan Saffer just wrote about the design process and the scientific method. In short Saffer gives a good explanation why the design process is not a scientific method: a scientific process should lead to repeatable outcomes, while a design will (and should!) not. I agree.

UX professionals, as in other social / humanity professions, usually choose between a scientific view of their profession and a more humanity / quality / creative view. Social sciences are relatively new fields of science and for many years striving to prove that they deserve the “science” title. Postmodernism winds have changed it a little but still for the wide public the scientific title gives an integrity certificate to whatever people do. I know math & physics seems complicated to most people (and both are in many ways) but dealing with people is always more complicated and a bigger challenge in my view.  With no definite rules, no one paradigm, no outcome twice (even when you pursue the same process, as Saffer pointed out) you need more than “just” a scientific method to achieve a solution. Yes, I agree research will help, problem solving methods help too but none of these tells the full story of a design process, there is more into it.

So while some UX’ers invest in research, processes and methods other claim it is all about creativity, sketching and doing good. Is there a road in between? I hope so cause that is where I’m heading. Which way are you?

See this movie (via Core77) for a great description of a design process. Although I never designed a product that is not software, the process described in this film is so familiar and so similar to a software UX design. It is both trivial and surprising.

The movie presents the following process:
Designer gets to know the users (e.g. bike riders), their needs and consider the experience they are looking for > sketch a few options > prepare a rough model > test it.
Then designer take the results to the computer, make a mockup and add details (e.g. detailed design) > prepare a detailed model > and test it.  >> Iterate and redo this until they achieve user satisfaction.

If you think this is simple – try to pull it off in a software company J

I loved the last comment about the “wow” reaction when you see people using your design (and enjoy it), this is why I’m in this business, and Muller expressed it exactly as I feel it.

I found Fletcher post about culture and design in India and China very interesting. It immediately made me think about UX in Israel, something that I already discussed before.

Fletcher pointed out two important design abilities: understanding the big picture and attention for details which, I agree, are both important for a good UX design.

If I may summarize Fletcher ideas, although I do urge you to read the full post, attention to details can be undermined as a result of:
- Daily life isn’t easy so details seem like a luxury, if something works – it’s good enough
- Education programs are lacking
- Not enough UX experience

Details are treated better when:
- People are used to do as told and tend to follow requirements in an exact manner
- A culture that values mastering old techniques rather than inventing new ones

So where is Israel on these continuums? Well I would easily say on the Indian side.

> Life in Israel is probably easier than in India, as for the perspective Fletcher is giving, but then it is easy to say we have more important things to consider then design details. I’m not sure this is true for UX practitioners but for Israeli users, details can be perceived as luxury. Also for policy makers of websites and software companies – it can be a reason for not investing in UX (unless they have international management or international users).

> Education programs for UX are definitely lacking, actually the big universities for all I know (Tel Aviv and Jerusalem) don’t have programs in UX at all!

> Add to that the absence of “chain of command” in the Israel culture, on the contrary – we always argue J and usually everyone has their own opinion when it comes to interface design.

> We are great with inventions even if we are a bit conservative. Anyway an Israeli will always adapt a short cut if available rather than “master an old technique”, so if we can cut down on the details, it is a win win situation.

> I would add to that our tendency to “round” corners, which is a known Israeli “pride” and does not work great with UX details.

> About experience, I’m not that sure, we had a good start as the army and related industries has UX (or Human Factors) for a long time, but somehow it did not pass on to the civil software industry. I don’t have a good explanation as technology tend to pass on a lot…

There is more in UX than details, I know, but this is a good point for considering the cultural significant in UX design. Despite the above list, I consider my fellow UX designer in Israel to be rather good in dealing with details, but hey I’m an Israeli too, so I’m not sure it counts.

I would love to know what you think – take a moment to share your thoughts.

 The IA institute published their 2009 salary survey. What I found interesting is the task statistics they present.  I meet many people who ask me about the task list of a UX designer. Some of them are junior designers some are managers that are considering a UX practitioner on board. I usually hesitate with the answer. UX is a wide variety of tasks; the exact combination depends on the person fulfilling the position, the specific product and, of course, the company including its culture and other professionals available.

That is a very general answer, a genuine one but not so helpful… The statistics from the IA survey may give a good example of the variety I’m talking about. Here is my summary of it.

The survey asked about the time dedicated for a task, interestingly enough, none of the tasks received a score of “this is all what I do”, meaning no UX practitioner is devoting her time to one primary task, it is always a list of tasks. Frequent answer for most tasks was “occasionally (not every day)”.

So what do we do most of our time?

*Score is a weighted combination of number of responders and time they spend on a task (this is my score you can see original numbers in the Survey report)

Although the survey provided quite a long list of tasks, many people felt it is not exhaustive and added more tasks under the “other” category:

• Building and documenting the internal design research practice
• Business requirements, functional specification creation
• Business semantic and metadata management
• Collaboration and knowledge sharing
• Contextual inquiry, survey analysis, search data analysis
• Evangelizing user experience research findings and recommendations
• Meeting with clients to review current work and understand business requirements.
• Presenting (ideas, lectures, etc)
• Prototypes development, product roadmaps
• Prototyping
• Qualitative data analysis
• Report generation
• Requirements gathering, requirements management, use cases
• Research
• Review the work of development teams for compliance with corporate design standards
• Specification writing, design reviews
• UI implementation
• Writing use cases and stories for agile product development
• Business analysis, requirements development, QA, testing
• Content and/or competitive assessments
• Domain modeling, evangelism, workshops, meetings
• Evangelism - communication - selling IA
• Evangelizing strategy
• Front-end development, production, document creation - style guide, spec creation, gathering and defining requirements
• Internal education
• Managing internal (customer) relationships
• Presentation creation
• Problem solving
• Product management
• Product strategy and management
• Project-specific problem-solving; internal consults
• Social media: strategy and monitoring
• Writing reports

55 of the 431 responders added more tasks - it is a large number suggesting the need for more task options was significant.

It is important to note that this is probably a good picture of the current situation (mainly in the US – about 70% of responders), but not necessarily the desired one…

Ouriel Ohayon just wrote an important post about UX in Israel.
Generally I agree. UX in Israel is skimpy… although slowly growing (slower than was expected), it is still far behind the US. Sorry Lea, you are right about CraigList and such, but still UX in the states, is wider in skills (research, UX, visual, etc) and deeper in perception. A glimpse at education programs will easily reveal some of the differences.

But Ouriel post contain the exact pitfalls it describes – from top to bottom…
At the top is the header. UI ? that is an Israeli title. US professionals are using  UX (user experience) and IxD (interaction design).  You may say it is just a terminology thing, but I would argue that it does say something about how we view our profession. We design experience and interaction and not the interface. If we call ourselves UI designers then this is how we are perceived – and then the requirement is a great UI guy or a graphic design with UI knowledge (a recent job posting I just saw), instead of a UX team.

At the bottom (last but not least) the beginner tips.  These are great tips exactly for a UI guy (not even a great one).
Reading - The reading is  cool but limited. If you want to read about UX try this short list of UX blogs you should read (including Smashing magazine and others), or go over one or two reading lists for the top UX books (there are more of course).
Doing - To start the design process with a Balsamiq mockup will not pass for a good UX process by any standard…
What about user research, workflows, personas, story board… See the classic The elements of UX (even if a little outdated) by J.J. Garrett or the UPA well known poster for Designing the User Experience, these two will give a beginner some insight on the UX process. I’m not saying you must start doing it all, I’m a realistic J, but I think that even as a beginner, you need to have an idea about best practices before you start. And still whatever you do and how limited resources are, you need a phase of research before you start prototyping!

from: UPA – Designing the user experience

from: JJG dot Net – Elements of user experience

I just found this beautiful flowchart. I love it.
I saw a comment saying it is great usability. Is it? I’m not sure. Great esthetics – yes, but is it a better way to read the song or understand it? Is it a better experience than reading the complete lyrics?
It did raise a smile on my face, so maybe it is  better UX.
Enjoy -

 Matt Constantine built a Firefox extension that simplifies Gmail by removing all the distracting clutter.

So, what do you prefer a simple gmail or the high end wave?

Constantine is advising us to use keyboard shortcuts, does that really simplifies gmail? mmm… definitely better for productivity, but simple? Visually – yes but functionally – not sure.

   

Quality vs. quantity is a long lasting dilemma in social sciences and obviously (for me) also in UX.