Seven UX strategy ingredient

The seven UX strategy ingredients I discuss in this article are as follows:

• business strategy
• competitive benchmarking
• Web analytics
• behavioral segmentation, or personas, and usage scenarios
• interaction modeling
• prioritization of new features and functionality
• social / mobile / local

Paul Bryan: 7 Ingredients of a Successful UX Strategy

Design principles: Visual Design vs. User experience

Visual Design is the establishment of a philosophy about how to make an impact.

User Experience is the establishment of a philosophy about how to treat people.

Principles of Visual Design:

• Contrast
• Emphasis
• Variety
• Balance
• Proportion
• Repetition
• Movement
• Texture
• Harmony
• Unity

Principles of User Experience:

1. Stay out of people’s way.
2. Create a hierarchy that matches people’sneeds.
3. Limit distractions.
4. Provide strong information scent.
5. Provide signposts and cues.
6. Provide context.
7. Use constraints appropriately.
8. Make actions reversible.
9. Provide feedback.
10. Make a good first impression.

Whitney Hess

Mandel: The Golden rules of interface design

Place Users in Control

1. Use modes judiciously (modeless)
2. Allow users to use either the keyboard or mouse (flexible)
3. Allow users to change focus (interruptible)
4. Display descriptive messages and text (Helpful)
5. Provide immediate and reversible actions, and feedback (forgiving)
6. Provide meaningful paths and exits (navigable)
7. Accommodate users with different skill levels (accessible)
8. Make the user interface transparent (facilitative)
9. Allow users to customize the interface (preferences)
10. Allow users to directly manipulate interface objects (interactive)

Reduce Users’ Memory Load

1. Relieve short-term memory (remember)
2. Rely on recognition, not recall (recognition)
3. Provide visual cues (inform)
4. Provide defaults, undo, and redo (forgiving)
5. Provide interface shortcuts (frequency)
6. Promote an object-action syntax (intuitive)
7. Use real-world metaphors (transfer)
8. User progressive disclosure (context)
9. Promote visual clarity (organize)

Make the Interface Consistent

1. Sustain the context of users’ tasks (continuity)
2. Maintain consistency within and across products (experience)
3. Keep interaction results the same (expectations)
4. Provide aesthetic appeal and integrity (attitude)
5. Encourage exploration (predictable)

From the chapter ‘The golden rules of interface design’ in: Theo Mandel, ‘The Elements of User Interface Design’, 1997

3 core activities of an information architect

Stimulated by Dan Brown’s 8 principles of information architecture, I’d describe information architecture in 3 core activities:

1. Understand: Obtain a thorough understanding of the vision (aka requirements) and the users.

   ### Dan Brown says: … nothing

2. Outline: Develop models of how content can be organised and how to facilitate direct and mediated interaction.

   ### Dan Brown says: Manage the paradox of choice; Allow for growth; Disclose progressively; Think in facets.

3. Curate: In the digital world, everything is hidden by default. Create interfaces (visual, auditive, tactile) that allow users to uncover relevant content and easily touch base with the system.

   ### Dan Brown says: Provide examples; Provide multiple front doors; Navigate by function.

8 principles of Information Architecture

1. Treat content as objects
2. Manage the paradox of choice (Less is more)
3. Disclose progressively
4. Provide examples
5. Provide multiple front doors
6. Allow for growth
7. Think in facets (Provide multiple classification schemes)
8. Navigate by function; move away from thinking ‘Top navigation’, ‘Left hand nav’, ‘utilities’ etc and think of different navigation types that support interaction with the site, eg Topical navigation, Service navigation, Magazine navighation, Dynamic navigation … (examples mentioned in talk, don’t necessarily agree with these types but like the general idea of describing navigation by its purpose (see quote below).

“Navigation is a tool and we must think about it in terms of the purpose that it serves … (such as) exploring related topics, digging deeper into a current topic, escaping from the current topic, filtering a collection. (…) Don’t describe navigation in terms of where it lives on the page but what it does.”

Dan Brown Eight principles of Information Architecture

IA heuristics

IA heuristics (comes handy for review)

1. Does the site structure match the tasks to be performed by the user?
2. Does the apparent site complexity and functionality match the intended user need?
3. Is the structure designed so as reduce the total number of navigational steps needed to reach the desired page?
4. Are frequently needed and critical pages located near the top of the site structure, requiring a small number of clicks from the homepage?
5. Does the structure convey an appropriate metaphor that facilitates user’s understanding of the site?
6. Do the navigational labels provide meaningful, unambiguous summary of the pages?
7. Do the labels use familiar and consistent terminology?
8. Are the labels distinct from one another?
9. Do important keywords stand out in the labels?
10. Does the site promote learning of the location of pages in the site structure?
11. Does site design build on our prior learning and experience of the intended users?
12. Does the layout of the navigation facilitate visual scanning by the user?
13. Do the number of pages per navigation level and the number of levels in the site structure optimise navigation time?
14. Has random or arbitrary ordering of pages on a particular level in the site structure been avoided?
15. Are pages on a particular level presented in a logical order to facilitate scanning?
16. Are pages on a particular level ordered to reveal structure and relationships among them?
17. Does the order of pages agree with the user’s expected ordering?

From Volkside: 17 guidelines for better information architecture…from 1991

IA/UX: Making stuff meaningful

My job is making applications and Web sites meaningful (wow, big word). How does that work?
• Thinking relevance. I ensure that functionality and content is relevant to what users actually want or is in the scope of what they might want.
• Thinking logic. I develop a structure that is consistent but does not exclude users with a different view on the content’s organisation.
• Thinking culture. I explore shared values, ideas, and activities of users in order to create a meaningful digital environment.
• Thinking narrative. Every product wants to tell a story. I apply that story to the structure, the navigation journeys, and the placement of contextual information.

Folksonomy

A folksonomy is a classification system on the basis of user-generated tags.

“In a folksonomy, the relationships between tags are inferred based on their usage patterns. There are no formal relationships in a folksonomy, other than perhaps ‘degree of relatedness’. Because a folksonomy uses agorithms to look at tagging patterns, two tags that have no known semantic relationship may have a statistical relationship.”

Gene Smith, Tagging: People-Powered Metadata For The Social Web, p. 82

Lexical Relationships

Linguistic Terms that describe lexical relationships:
• Synonyms are different words with the same meaning;
• A homonym is one of a group of words that share the same spelling and the same pronounciation but have different meanings;
• Homographs are words with the same spelling but distinct meanings;
• Heterophones have the same spelling but different meanings (and often different pronounciation);
• Capitonyms are identically spelled words that take on different menaing when capitalized;
• Hypernym is the more generic term in given taxonomy (duck is a hypernym of bird);
• Hyponym is the subordinate and more specific term in a given taxonomy;
• A Meronym describes a constituent part of a whole;
• A holonym is a word that names the whole of which a given word is a part;
• Polysemes are words with more than one similar meaning.

WordNet maintained by Princeton Unioversity

Based on Gene Smith, Tagging: People-Powered Metadata For The Social Web, p.70

IA Checklist

Language
1. Are we still talking to our primary target audience?
2. Are our labels accurate and informative?
3. Can any of our labels be misinterpreted?
4. Are we speaking a language our audience understands?

Content
1. Does all our information fit together logically?
2. Can visitors easily (logically) find the answers to the questions we asked during the role playing phase?
3. Are any chunks of information left dangling somewhere without a logical place in the overall hierarchy?
4. Is there a mechanism by which visitors can see what’s new on our site? (If not, do we need one?)
5. Have we effectively established shared references?
6. Have we established ourselves as a company to be trusted?

Navigation and links
1. Is our structure too wide? (Can some menus be consolidated effectively?)
2. Is our structure too narrow and deep? (Do we need to split some menus up into more specific subjects?)
3. Is there too much repetition of the same basic editorial content from one menu item to another?
4. Can we reduce the number of clicks needed to reach the lowest levels without sacrificing understanding or logic?
5. Are frequently accessed areas too far from the top level?
6. Is related (contextual) information contained in different parts of the site properly linked? Is there a way to bundle it in an even more convenient way?
7. Are links used consistently? What type of links can be determined? Are meaningful trigger words used?

Individual Pages
1. Do we really have something to say on each of the main category pages or are they merely glorified menus?
2. Have some pages been created merely for the sake of completeness?
3. If someone has submitted information or placed an order, are all the appropriate “Thank you” pages indicated?

Goals and Growth
1. Does the structure live up to our primary goals?
2. Is the site meeting the goals of our target audience?
3. Have we given people a reason to come back and visit again?
4. Is the site prepared for growth and/or change in the future?
5. Have we found our site’s USP? Is our product the hero?