Michael S presented a high-level overview of what UX is for the Wisconsin Society for Technical Communicators. These are his slides. Get in touch if you have any questions!
Posted by Michael Seidel on August 30, 2011 0 comments
Our friend @boonerang was kind enough to provide us with a PDF extract of his excellent audience personas presentation, used during his visit to mkeUX on Aug 15, 2011
Posted by Michael Seidel on May 18, 2011 0 comments
Wow, it’s been a looong time since we’ve blogged. But let’s not get hung up on that. We’re back (for now) and that’s all that matters (again, for now).
Just want to give you info on our May 24, 2011 meeting. We’re insanely excited about it. We’re slicing and dicing our typical format this time around. Instead of the usual hourish-long presentations, we’ll do things lightning style.
What does that mean?
6 presenters, each presenting for ~10 minutes. Sounds sweet, eh? We think it will be.
We have a great roster of speakers who’ve volunteered their time:
Cory Allen, creative director at IDL Solutions and freelance designer for Cory Allen Design. He’ll speak on the UX considerations that have been made while designing Zap Four.
Lyman Casey, co-founder and partner of Centralis, a User Experience research and design company based in the Chicago area. He’ll discuss the values of remote and local user testing.
Kris Gosser, Swiss Army Knife at Harqen.com. He’ll talk about audio UX.
Daria Kempka, Web/Interactive producer at Marquette and producer of DrawCamp. She’ll walk us through some favorite sketching and knowledge games used by the Marquette’s Office of Marketing and Communication.
Jessica Krowiorz, User Experience Designer at Direct Supply. She’ll give a demo of LiveScribble Echo Pen and describe how she uses it within her UX practice.
Stephanie Sansoucie, Senior User Experience Architect & Consultant at Ascendant Technology. She’ll present a short case study involving the transition of a web portal experience to a mobile platform for a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical group.
The event takes place Tuesday, May 24th at 5th Ward Pub (814 South 2nd Street in Milwaukee, WI). It starts at 6:30pm.
While this movie isn’t specifically about UX, there is a hell of a lot of tie-in and an amazing amount of insight to be gained.
Here’s how the Objectified site describes the movie:
Objectified is a feature-length documentary about our complex relationship with manufactured objects and, by extension, the people who design them. It’s a look at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It’s about the designers who re-examine, re-evaluate and re-invent our manufactured environment on a daily basis. It’s about personal expression, identity, consumerism, and sustainability.
Through vérité footage and in-depth conversations, the film documents the creative processes of some of the world’s most influential product designers, and looks at how the things they make impact our lives. What can we learn about who we are, and who we want to be, from the objects with which we surround ourselves?
Posted by Michael Seidel on August 4, 2010 0 comments
Really belated, but we wanted to make sure that we posted a list of artifacts from our July 14 meeting on UX for mobile. For posterity. Know what I’m sayin’?
Posted by Michael Seidel on August 3, 2010 0 comments
Mike and I came up with the idea of mkeUX a few months ago. We were both working at a company we’ve since left, and we were bursting at the seams with energy. We wanted to learn more so we could do more.
What is came down to was that we were sick of each others’ voices, I think. We wanted to hear what others in the city had to say. To find out what they were thinking. What making their seams burst.
So we started the group. Contacted people. Got the ball rolling.
We had no idea what to expect. UX in Milwaukee has always seemed so segmented. It was like most UX practitioners and sympathizer were living in studio apartment-sized caves with all lines of communication to the outside world cut.
We wanted to reconnect people. Make things better, more vibrant, more fun.
The response so far has been overwhelming. Not to mention humbling.
Here’s the thing – we don’t want to own this baby. It belongs to all of us. If we’re doing things shittily or stupidly, we want to hear about it. If you have ideas for topics or presenters, lay it on us. Please!
We’re really grateful for everyone who has come to our first two meetings. And who has spread the word about what we’re doing. We’re still working out a lot of organizational kinks, so we’re happy you’re sticking by our side as we figure out what they hell we’re doing.
Our goal is to keep the meetings free and collaborative. That’s the only way we’re all going to learn more, which will help us do what we do even better.
Wouldn’t it be cool if people outside of Milwaukee started to notice the ripples our growing UX knowledge makes on the work we produce? If they started saying, Woah! Little ole Milwaukee really has its shit together. Who knew?
Our next meeting is next Tuesday, August 10, 2010 at Bay View Brew Haus (directions), 7pm.
Posted by Michael Seidel on June 21, 2010 0 comments
Bernard Yu was kind enough to pass along his notes from our June 9th content strategy meet-up. Here they are. Thanks so much, Bernard!
Gretchen Thomas talks about how we must satiate people’s appetite for information, and how content strategy can do it. (Her slides. Follow on Twitter.)
“People can read. And they want to all the time, especially online.” People are consuming information all the time and they’re doing it everywhere while on their laptops and phones (even while driving). Everyone does it, even our president.
We must meet the demand for information. If we don’t, nobody will use our site.
Content strategy is organizing and planning our communication to meet brand+business, user needs, sales+marketing, and technology objectives.
Content strategy is essential for interface and design planning, social media, blogging, and ongoing website management.
Without a proper content strategy, projects tend to fall into content delay syndrome, where copywriting, media creation gets pushed to the very end of a project rather than being planned as part of the interface. (Lorem ipsum doesn’t work!)
Often projects end up with “Website Bolt-On Syndrome” where websites are hastily developed before thoughtful planning can occur. Future content and functionality becomes homeless and the overall interface becomes disjointed. This also often happens when websites are developed before they are planned.
Content strategy should come before picking the CMS, and there may be times the content strategist should be in the meeting to pick a CMS.
CDS and WBOS is where you get home pages with titles like “Home Page.”
Content strategy should at least include specific content to address, meta data/SEO keywords, a plant for content distribution, and an ongoing editorial plan for keeping content fresh.
Content strategy is good for the your sanity! It makes sure the client, project team, and marketers are all on the same page, and know what the goal is. It promotes brand consistency, and ultimately helps end users.
A content strategy can start out like a sitemap and go into wireframes with detailed information. With larger and more complicated sites, a content strategy plan may need to be a large detailed document laying out objectives page-by-page. The sitemap is a living document.
Example: change.org redesigned around a comprehensive content strategy. There was increased user engagement, a better user experience, and increased traffic.
Great user experience needs great content. Half-assed content will tear down the rest of the project.
“Make great content a priority, and you’ll create something that actually matters.”
Content strategy is: “Planning for the creation, aggregation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable, and appropriate content in an experience.”
“Content strategy can help you communicate as a designer — and through design.”
“Content is the real reason people use the web.” They want to find your store hours, comment on a post, publish their pictures, research, etc.
Good content strategy makes for a more coherent projects. It gives everyone on the project a shared goal, and ultimately helps build a cohesive user experience.
Content strategy starts from putting together a “message architecture”:
What do you need to communicate your brand?
List of adjectives that describe the business and brand.
Prioritize key messages
Use real copy. (Don’t use Lorem ipsum!)
Words are cheaper than comps! Content strategy saves time and money for the design budget.
You can get things done in fewer revisions.
Content strategy offers clients predictability.
Content strategy offers clients predictability: they can plan for what will be needed: photo shoots, gather testimonials, you can anticipate all the different content types that will be needed, clients can write to exact specifications and character counts.
Content strategy offers predictability for you: design for specific content types and character counts. Anticipate structure for user-generated content. The designer can create more interesting templates because you can anticipate and design for content types and even exact character counts.
Example: If the designers know that descriptions and summaries will be within a specific length, then they can design exact spaces for the content so all the different content types fit together on the page.
Content and visual design that shares a message architecture creates a more consistent, richer user experience.
Content strategy should offer editorial style guides: Sentence structures that fit with a brand, word to use and not use.
You can anticipate content types in your design, and even design for exact character counts!
Content strategists can empathize with the information architects and project managers. Figure out what content you already have, and what is needed. (After all, how can you budget by page count if you don’t know how many pages you need?)
Content strategy needs a quantitative and qualitative content audit:
What content is there already?
Is it structurally consistent? Does it fit the brand? Is it current, appropriate, and relevant? Is it good? Does it even work?
“Content strategy informs more thorough, comprehensive sitemap, and wireframes.”
How to sell content strategy to the client:
Not wasting money (they want to say something, right?)
Content strategy isn’t just writing,
Copywriting doesn’t hit the strategic questions
In-house writers lack an outside perspective.
Helps write brand consistent meta and ad copy.
Content management should be considered a workflow solution to carrying out the content strategy.
Effective use of social media is not just about advertising the brand, it’s about engaging with the audience: 1/3 self-promotion, 1/3 about others, 1/3 general helpful information. “Good conversation demands good content strategy.”
Content strategy plans for the future. By developing editorial style guides and an editorial calendar, it keeps content fresh, and keeps all new content (via blogs, social media, etc.) consistent with the brand and overall message.
Good content strategy creates more air-tight solutions, saves time/budget, cohesive user experience, higher conversions, and makes everyone happier.
