February 2011
1 post
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WatchMy presentation for the Feb 21, 2011 mkeUX.
These slides are missing a lot of context. If you weren’t there and want to know what I said, please let me know! I may try to write a summary of what I covered sometime soon.
August 2010
4 posts
2 tags
Throwing users at UX
Lately, I’ve heard some seasoned UXers bemoan the dearth of user testing and data collection going on in a lot of modern UX practices. The internet has been around for quite a while now. People (erm, users) have had enough varied experiences that a lot of the tried and true “best practices” are no longer relevant. Or at the very least shouldn’t restrict what we do....
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Embracing constraints
Earlier today, @Abby_the_IA delivered her definition of UX as a one-two punch:
Day to day job of UX: mold experience our client is delivering to be as usable and useful as possible within current climate and constraints
Long-term job of UX is to help mold client mindset to bring the needs of the user into as much focus as best practices & business needs.
For a long time, I’ve been...
Using wireframes as visual design is like asking...
Most of my week has been spent playing around with different wireframing tools. Basically, our fresh-faced UX team is trying to figure out what will work best for us. We’ve all used different things in the past and need/want to come to a consensus, so it seems worthwhile to see what’s new and hot.
While researching, I came across Travis Isaacs’s presentation, Keynote Kung-Fu: How to...
3 tags
new job!
I haven’t posted in a good, long while. Maybe you’ve noticed. But probably not?
I don’t really have excuses for it, other than laziness, the impending birth of a daughter, and the general fog-headedness that comes with searching for, interviewing for, and getting a new job.
So thaaaaat’s what’s bringing back into the blog realm. I have a new job. And I want to tell you about it.
The past:...
June 2010
1 post
Wireframes: Like explaining metaphysics to a drunk
Over the past month, I’ve been working on a pile of wireframes that have a somewhat precarious purpose. They aren’t tied to the future design of a specific website. Instead, they’re meant to give our internal teams a sense of features they’ll be able to pick from and implement on their individual sites in the future. Kind of like a menu at a restaurant. Scaremongering There is an inherent danger...
May 2010
5 posts
2 tags
Reflections from a first time presenter
Today I did my first ever “speaking engagement” outside the confines of my corporation. My dad’s a member of the Racine, WI Founders Rotary club. Knowing that a lot of other members are small business owners, he asked me to give a high level presentation on creating good user experience on their websites. The main things I harped on were:
Knowing why you’re creating site
Knowing who...
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Social avoidance: Using Foursquare as your...
People love social media for its shrinking abilities. It helps them feel in the know. And to be part of that know. Foursquare is obviously a great example of this—it tells you where someone is at a given moment. Great! If you’re feeling social. But people rarely talk about using tools like Foursquare to avoid social situations. How to avoid people socially Truth be told, I’ve done this. (Have...
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This week at contente.org
Published two new article on contente.org this week:
The Impact of Content on mkeUX.com = describes how we used content as a starting point when creating mkeux.com.
Content as Visual Design = about how formatting of content can’t be overlooked as part of a creating a good content strategy.
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mkeUX.com
We finally launched mkeUX.com last night! Very excited for it.
What is it? mkeUX is a loose connection of people who meet irregularly to talk about creating awesome digital user experiences.
If you live in the Milwaukee area, you should come hang out at one of our meetings. Or if you have a topic you’d like to discuss/hear discussed, let us know. We’re totally open to ideas!
Mad...
April 2010
8 posts
2 tags
UX: An elevator pitch
On the Brain Traffic blog yesterday, Kristina Halvorson threw a bunch of blog topics at her readers. Her goal is to set off a volcano (oooh, sorry, that may still be a sore subject for some of you) of Content Strategy-related posts. She wanted to get people thinking and talking. And acting. Of course acting!
One of the topics was “What’s my elevator speech when someone asks me...
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Don't be an expert (in defense of flip-flopping)
Had this dream last night where someone (stupidly?) booked me to give the keynote speech at a conference. I was confused about why I’d been asked and terrified of how I’d blunder though it.
A phony. That’s what I felt like. Presentation day: The reality Anyway, the presentation day came. I have no idea what I was talking about or what I said, but I did it. There was applause,...
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For contente.org: The Buddy System
Another new contente.org post. This time about why you shouldn’t work alone or with false teams. Buddies are where it’s at.
You can really only get somewhere good when you:
Peck out of your own shell.
Sprint away, screaming, from guarded superficial team collaborations.
So this is why you need a buddy. Someone you wrestle with until you’re both bruised and weary.
That’s progress.
...
1 tag
Willful illiteracy & why Content Strategy matters
Yesterday, someone on Twitter said that the buzz around Content Strategy flies in the face of the long-held idea that people don’t read on the web.
I replied as eloquently as 140 characters allows: “U think the surge in content strategy negates the Fact that ppl don’t read online? It really nurtures the fact by flushing junk.”
Ok, here’s the thing People do read on the web, but people...
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These models become out of date
Absolutely love and agree with what Andy Budd from Clearleft said in his recent 52 Weeks of UX interview:
There are no absolutes on the web. The reality is that like a lot of science—like chemistry or physics—in the beginning we use very simple models and as our knowledge and understanding of the field grows, these models become out of date. As our understanding of the many various edge cases...
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Will they blend? UX & social media
Yesterday, Comet Branding hosted the PR & Social Media Summit here in Milwaukee. My job is not focused on social—I went was to get a deeper sense of how social media and user experience (UX) overlap and what one can learn from the other.
Community is not all-encompassing Have you heard this before? “We need to make this UI so easy to use, my 80 year old grandma can use it.”
Nonesense. How...
4 tags
For contente.org: Warriors!! Come Out and Play!
New blog on contente.org. It’s called Warriors!! Come Out and Play! and it’s about the user experience ghetto.
We need content to be the kernel of everything we do. It dictates how information is structured on sites, and influences how users interact. [read the whole thing]
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Exploding heuristics! [a case study]
Want to see something awesome?
This morning, this:
Became this:
Pretty sweet, eh?
It looks infinitely slicker. And it is. But really, the changes we made to improve the UX of the Funway Holidays site were super small and came about really quickly.
Our process Here’s were the steps we took:
Funway asked for suggestions to improve their homepage.
I conducted a full heuristic...
March 2010
9 posts
twitter much?
Are you reading this and on Twitter?
Well, I’m writing this and am on Twitter. You should follow me: @michaelseidel
Friendship is rad, friend. So let’s make it happen.
New post coming tomorrow, likely.
For contente.org: Rock Star, My Ass
I’ve written another post for contente.org, about how internetmakers need to stop calling themselves rock start, gurus, and ninjas. Like, right now.
Let’s do our work amazingly, always. But let’s not make ourselves and our peers look like idiots by claiming—even jokingly—that we’re anything other than what we are. It’s ok. We’re just fine like we are. [read it all]
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Yay for inverted design funnels!
This week I’ve been thinking about funnels. Not funnel cakes or anything tasty like that, but UX design funnels. Especially as they relate to homepages.
Too often, the homepage is looked at by stakeholders as a key area to ensnare audiences. It’s where you sell every morsel of yourself, make everything sing and be heard.
If you’ve sat through user testing, you’ve seen how overwhelming this...
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For contente.org: Online help is evil
@nicoleslaw over at content.org published another piece of my writing. This time, it was about how crappy online help is. For the most part.
Here’s an excerpt:
The biggest problem with online help is that it’s usually created by people who’ve never had direct contact with the people who use it. So they create sucky content in a vacuum. No good. This approach leads to filthy, irrelevant...
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Testing internal users is never good. Enough.
The company I work for has 1,500+ish employees. We’re geographically dispersed and run the gamut from call center agents to finance to developers to bus drivers to you get the picture.
We produce websites for varying audiences. But most of what we, as a User Experience team, have been focusing on lately has been the overhaul of several of our biggest consumer-facing sites.
Occasionally,...
4 tags
Users are dogs
I wrote an article called (Not) Seducing Users for my friend Nicole’s content strategy blog, contente.org. It’s about setting restrictions on your writing for the sake of your users.
Here’s a snippet:
Oddly, after a while, you’ll internalize the restriction. You’ll start creating paired back prose at first stab. It’ll become habit. You’ll write better when you know you can...
3 tags
Google Buzz: a coo of redundancy
Am I the only person in the world who actually likes Google Buzz? Sometimes it seems that way.
That said, I don’t find it all that useful. Why? Because the information I see on it is insanely redundant.
The whole connected sites concept is a great, but most peoples’ lack of Buzz adoption (and adoration) make it so you’re forced to see the same stuff by the same people in multiple places.
Here’s...
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User testing: Gorilla vs guerrilla vs go-for-reala
Half inspired by the $5 Guerrilla User Test concept, half by the need to quickly and cheaply get user feedback to quell internal debate, @yellowledbedder and I hit up AJ Bombers in downtown Milwaukee last Wednesday afternoon. We were armed only with a pair of laptops and a question: Which approach is more effective, user?
A bit of background We’ve been working on developing a new section for our...
3 tags
The usability of money
My credit union, UWCU, kind of rules.
In addition to having shockingly low credit card/loan interest rates and stellar customer service (I’ve never once been frustrated), their web branch rolled out a great new set of money management tools last month. These tools give users the ability to keep track of how they spend their money by adding personalized categories to transactions.
Basically, when...
February 2010
5 posts
5 tags
Interview with Cindi Thomas of Translator
Last week, the Milwaukee Twitter community learned that three Fullhouse team members splintered off to form their own company, Translator.
I was quick on the draw in getting in touch with one of Translator’s partners, Cindi Thomas, to discuss what the new firm is all about. Specifically, I wanted to know how a former Director of Experience Design planned to weave user experience into the...
6 tags
Use bullet points in web copy. Please.
True story: In 2008, we were conducting a usability lab for a client on the outskirts of Chicago. While the computers and cameras were getting wired and fired up, we expressed concerns about the framing of content on the client’s site. “There’s too much text, all of it badly structured. Users want to scan,” we said, “They want to make it though quickly. They want bullet points.”
For most...
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Why I love Hot Gloo for wireframing
Twitter told me about the Hot Gloo wireframing tool sometime last summer. I created an account immediately, did a very rudimentary wireframes with it, then shelved it for a while.
Over the last few months though, there’s been a groundswell of need for wireframes both in my 9-5 and for freelance work. As a result of this, I decided to dig deeper into Hot Gloo. And guess what? I kind of love it.
...
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Sometimes a full site redesign makes sense
Anti-redesign There’s been a lot written lately about shirking comprehensive site redesigns in favor of slower, incremental roll outs of enhancements.
The reasons for this are simple: You can be nimbly reactionary. You can test out a concept outside the usability lab (which has has its inherent awkwardness) to see how it performs. If it does well, you can sit on it. Or better, refine it...
January 2010
7 posts
3 tags
Say it loud & proud: About Us as homepage content
If you want someone to connect with your brand/company post-haste, don’t fool around with them. Use your homepage to shout at them: Hey! This is who we are and this is what we do! Does this sound like a coarse approach? It doesn’t have to be. And if done right, it won’t be. There are tons of sites out there who’ve keyed into this idea. They use prime real estate on their homepages to introduce...
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Define "free": Expecting too much from user...
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about whether good user experiences are a privilege or a right when it comes to free sites, apps, and software. Remember the riptide of criticism that Facebook, a totally free services, got for the “Live Feed” and “News Feed” roll out a few months? Was the vitriol really warranted? There are people who use the site for fluffy, superficial...
2 tags
Accessibility IS usability
Still reeling from the incredible accessibility presentation I attended last night.
While demonstrating how a screen reader works, Scott Mayer, a blind man from American Family’s usability department, almost off-handedly said, “A usable site IS an accessible site.”
To me, that was the night’s most cogent statement.
As UX people, I wondered, do we truly give accessibility...
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Usability Lifecycle
In an effort to get usability even more deeply engrained all of our company’s projects, I recently put together a flow chart of usability touch points. This is what I came up with—we’re not 100% there yet, but this is what my vision for the future looks like.
How does this match up to what you do? Am I not doing something I should be doing? Or doing something I shouldn’t be? If so,...
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Do usability books still matter?
Here’s an admission: I don’t read usability books.
This isn’t a proclamation of anti-intellectualism; it’s the result of a deficit of time. In the past I’ve worried a lot about not having read all the books I “should” read, but the transition into this new decade has me wondering: Does it really matter?
Think about the blistering speed of change these days (duh). Think about the technologies at...
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Usabilty in Milwaukee | MilwauCHI's Jan 18...
Nearly a year ago, I started working with a group of Milwaukee, WI usability professionals to (re-)establish MilwauCHI, the local chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (AMC) Special Interest Group (SIG) on Computer-Human Interaction (CHI).
That’s really just a long way of saying that we’re a group that puts on meetings for people interested in usability-related issues....
Travel sites: US vs UK user experience showdown!
I do my UXing in the travel realm. This past week, I’ve been forced to climb outside of my US comfort zone to focus on doing a heuristic evaluation of a UK-based leisure travel website.
As part of my research, I did extensive competitive research (this should go without saying, right?) of UK sites.
The bad Here’s what I found: Many of the UK sites I looked at are rife with...