A short roundup of good things we’ve read/watched/listened to in the last 7 days. Sometimes about UX, sometimes not. All things you can learn from.

1. Amazon’s new headquarter design is pretty amazing.
2. Microsoft announced the Xbox One on Tuesday. Here’s what you need to know about it.
3. Upping Your Type Game
4. Two words – pantone underwear.
5. Doodling – amazing.
6. How about some Fresh Cut Grass Vodka?
7. Biblioburro: The amazing story of a mobile library on the back of a donkey
8. Like technology, politics, and culture? You MUST subscribe to the recently re-launched Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything
9. The Midwest UX 2013 conference is accepting proposals for presentations. Takes place in October in Grand Rapids, MI. GO SUBMIT.
10. If you have a toddler, buy them the Petting Zoo iPad app. It’s the best. Hell, as an adult, you’ll probably spend waaaaaaaay too much time having fun with it yourself.

I’ve gotten a lot of mileage telling this accessibility-related story from a past job: I was in a meeting about incorporating CAPTCHA (those ridiculous riddles you’re forced to solve when filling out a web form so that the system knows you’re a real person) into all the web sites the company developed.

I was fresh into my accessibility days back then, but knew enough to caution that whatever flavor of CAPTCHA we used, it should have accessibility considerations like audio equivalents to the garbled codes.

One of the lead technical people scoffed and said, “Yeah, because blind people use the Web.” Yes, he was dead serious. To make things worse, a project manager in the room started pantomiming a blind person, giggling at himself in the process. Yes, he was an idiot.

Fast-forward a few years to when I started researching video game accessibility. I was reading an article about how many of the color palettes in the game Bioshock 2 posed significant problems for color blind gamers.

In one comment, someone bemoaned disabled people thinking “the rest of the world should cater to them.” Another gamer pointed out that there’s just some things that people with disabilities should accept they can’t do.

What’s lost in those narrow-minded rants is that people with disabilities don’t limit themselves to just “the things that only disabled people do.” Think about the hobbies you are passionate about. If you were suddenly to lose your sight, or hearing, or motor skills, you wouldn’t immediately lose your love for those activities.

Of course a person who can’t use their arms isn’t going to experience a video game the exact same way someone with full motor skills will. Listening to a movie isn’t the exact same experience as watching and listening to it.

But time and time again, creators of great user experiences find ways to open doors for the widest spectrum of people possible.

Web sites that are coded cleanly and organized, use color responsibly, have consistent navigation and concise, clear content can be fully enjoyable and useful to those with or without disabilities. The clean code and nav help screen reading devices correctly parlay the pages to blind users. The attention to color reduces obstacles for the color blind. People with cognitive disabilities have a much better shot understanding content that isn’t a convoluted mess.

Similarly, video games that have things like sub-titles, support for assistive controllers and devices, settings to brighten/darken the visuals, and mindful color contrasts at least open up avenues for disabled gamers to play, all without “watering down” the experience for everyone else. Don’t believe me? Check out this guy:

Apple and Microsoft consistently bolster the accessibility capabilities of their operating systems with each release. Amazon just announced enhancements to its Kindle iPhone app (and eventually for Kindles themselves) to make it easier for blind readers to enjoy their favorite literature through that medium.

The bottom line is that it’s much easier to make sweeping statements like, “Disabled people don’t use my product” than to take the extra time to figure out ways to enable them to get a rich user experience visiting your web site, using your application, or playing your game.

Note: If you are an experienced UXer but don’t necessarily meet the listed criteria, please submit a resume anyway. We’re looking to talk to anyone UX-related, including IAs, User Researchers, UX Developers, etc! There may be an opportunity for you.

POSITION: UX Designer, Visual/Interaction Design (contract, with the potential for future hire as a permanent employee)

LOCATION: Johnson Controls, 507 E. Michigan St, Milwaukee

CONTACT:  jciuxjobs@gmail.com

DUTIES: Work within a User Experience (UX) team to design interactive experiences for Web and/or mobile, meeting demanding quality standards and conforming to expected processes. Responsibilities may include:

1. Under minimal guidance, develop innovative designs to meet requirements, including creating visual assets, screen mockups, behavioral/interaction design, and annotated wire frames.
2. Document style guidelines and visual specifications.
3. Provide input to design discussions; propose visual solutions and concepts.
4. Provide work estimates for the creation of visual assets and related documentation.
5. Present work to stakeholders for feedback and approval.
6. Evaluate developed software for compliance to corresponding UX designs and visual specifications.
7. Proactively report on progress and raise any issues affecting ability to complete work.
8. Actively seek opportunities to engage with others and to take on additional tasks and responsibilities.

QUALIFICATIONS: Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in Graphic Design or related field of study. 5+ years of industry experience with visual problem solving as a web, interactive, software or product designer. Exceptional understanding of fundamental design principles (typography, layout, grid systems, hierarchy, color, composition) and an advanced level of expertise with Photoshop and other standard design tools. Experience in developing and communicating visual specifications. User-focused thinker who can proactively communicate and lead in creative, business, and technical discussions. Highly detail-oriented, self-motivated, highly organized, and able to work in a team environment that is fast-paced with multiple projects. Must exhibit a solid understanding of user-centered design methodologies and a high tolerance for ambiguity. Expertise in the following areas is highly desired: responsive web design, mobile design, creating interactive prototypes, information architecture, user testing, and Scrum (or other agile development methodology). Candidates must provide a portfolio demonstrating their capabilities (online preferred) and must be available for an in-person interview.

A short roundup of good things we’ve read/watched/listened to in the last 7 days. Sometimes about UX, sometimes not. All things you can learn from.

1. The User is Drunk!
2. A round up of Google I/O stuff.
3. Season 4 of Arrested Development is going to be awesome!
4. Ahhh… Before the days airlines thinking of people as cattle. – Vintage air travel posters.
5. Feeling the creative burnout? Fear not.
6. You should read this book – Ken and Burn: Conversations with Design Entrepreneurs.
7. The McDonald’s Theory.

A short roundup of good things we’ve read/watched/listened to in the last 7 days. Sometimes about UX, sometimes not. All things you can learn from.

1. Can you imagine a year without using the internet?
2. The art of laser-cutting paper. Eric Standley is amazing!
3. Powwowapp: Scheduling user research. – interesting app.
4. Want to buy cigarettes? Not from these machines.
5. Ahhhhhh – Craft Beerds. Wait, what?
6. Here is a great series that goes along with our last meetup on “Becoming UX” – Beginner’s guide to UX. This is a 5 part series.

Responsive design is amazing. It allows you to design an experience that adjusts with the form factor you are viewing it on. It also adjusts the usability of the site/application you are viewing so it can be touch friendly when viewed on a phone and mouse friendly on a PC and everything in between.

The other thing it does really well is it shows your users/customers that you care about the experience ecosystem you have and that you are sensitive to their access needs. It helps establish your creditability as a modern company; one that understands that technology is not standing still.

This way of designing and implementing web sites, applications, etc. is a great leap forward. It isn’t, however, a substitute for mobile strategy.

“What do you mean, mobile strategy?”

What I mean is a business strategy that accounts for the “whys” behind the need for your web site/application to be usable on a mobile platform and how much content/application features your users need to complete tasks in a mobile way.

Mobile applications are meant to have bite-sized pieces of content, and focused task completion. Users tend to be motivated on specific things. They “go to the hip” when they have a specific question that needs answering, or if they need to check on status of certain information. Mobile web applications should narrow in on the important functions users are looking for to “get in and get out”.

Let’s look at it this way shall we – there are many pitfalls in mobile web design – and strategy is hard; so it is easy to say just make everything work on a phone and tablet. Unfortunately, there can be a great cost in having this mentality. Potentially, there is a lot of time and effort put into getting pieces of your application working on a mobile platform that your user base will never use. Then there is the maintenance and up keep of those features and functions as new things are added to your application.

Understanding your users needs in the mobile space will help you come up with a solid mobile strategy that will help you deliver a rock solid experience that your users are expecting. It will help you determine if you need a mobile web application or a “native app” or both. It will help you determine what features and functions will give your users the best experience possible.

Ultimately this approach to design will give you users confidence that you care about their needs and you are providing an experience ecosystem that responds to them.

For our Monday, May 20th meet-up, Mike Massie will give an intro to Ambient Intelligence and discuss how sensors can give the user super powers.

As shrinking technology allows us to cheaply put hardware eyes, ears and touch sensors on everyday things, the data now readily available can offer a magnitude of information without the user even lifting a finger.

Some are calling 2013 the “Year of the sensor”, and it is giving passage to the Internet of Things and Big Data; aside from buzz terms we’ll talk about how these tools will offer the ability for more interactions to get out of the way.

A social hour will take place at Burnhearts (2599 S Logan Ave, in Bay View) immediately after the event. Burnhearts is right down the street from Makerspace!

A short roundup of good things we’ve read/watched/listened to in the last 7 days. Sometimes about UX, sometimes not. All things you can learn from.

1. MUD: Minimal Viable Design
2. “We don’t like make-believe. Make-believe doesn’t get us a great product.” Secrets From Facebook’s Mobile UX Testing Team
3. Kicking-starting intrapreneurship: creating a design innovation program within a large company – a poster from the UX team at Citrix, presented at IA Summit 2013
4. Microsoft – a pioneer of design?! The Flattening of Design
5. No ideas are stupid.
6. A really interesting take on coding color for colorblindness.

Tonight I had the opportunity to attend a panel discussion put on by mkeUX about pursuing careers in UX (for those who aren’t familiar, UX stands for user experience–in essence, determining how to make an application intuitive for its target users). It was a lot of fun and I learned quite a bit–it was also a great chance for me to start connecting some dots to the Human-Computer Interaction course I’m taking. There was a lot of passion among the panel members about building educational programs in UX, and as I am passionate about higher education and have really been enjoying what I’ve learned about UX so far, I was very energized by the discussion! I had a lot of thoughts swirling around in my brain after the panel and I wanted to try to write them down before they fell out of there, so I apologize if this gets a little bit “stream of consciousness”. But, here are my initial reactions:

UX could be just what the liberal arts has been looking for. Anyone who follows higher ed knows that liberal arts are often the scapegoat in an increasingly scrutinized industry. One of the things I noticed tonight was how frequently liberal arts majors and backgrounds came up in tonight’s discussion: this UX designer was a history major, this one studied anthropology, this one English lit…you get the idea. And it wasn’t a case of these people “settling” for a job unrelated to their major; rather, it was them falling into the field because the skills and concepts they learned in their major (such as studying people) provided a helpful perspective from which they could approach UX. UX is a growing field with job demand. Liberal arts are looking for ways to demonstrate their relevance in today’s job market. If the initial connections are already there, it seems like a no-brainer to leverage them for both groups’ mutual benefit.

UX Education has to go beyond faculty. I mean this in a couple of ways. The most obvious is that collaborative partnerships between faculty and working UX professionals are key to staying current in the industry and providing relevant ways students can apply the concepts they learn in the classroom (getting students to understand the application part is a daunting challenge based on my experience thus far–but one I hope to continue tackling with each class I teach!) But we also need to educate those who educate students about the career options out there. Career counselors and academic advisors are other points of contact for students exploring possible careers. I know quite a few of these people, but I don’t get the sense any of them know much about UX. And if they’ve never heard of it, how can the suggest it as a possible avenue for students to pursue? These are just a couple of examples, but in essence, one key to a successful UX education program is raising awareness among students and the professionals who work with those students.

UX is accessible. When I first heard about UX, I was intrigued but intimidated. I assumed it probably required a degree of technical knowhow that I don’t have. While I’ve built up some of my Photoshop, InDesign and social media skills over the past couple of years, I haven’t dipped a toe into coding yet and in many ways still feel like a jack of all trades, master of none (my pre-higher ed background was agency account service, an area that lends itself to that.) It was reassuring to learn that UX pros come from different areas of specialization: while some originated as designers, programmers or information architects, others came from areas like technical writing. The real core competencies for successful UX work are problem solving and the ability to listen to and understand people. There were several examples during the panel discussion that reminded me of things I used to do at the agency (such as taking a ton of information from the client and organizing it in a way that would make sense to the creative team), as well as things I do in my current job (such as taking a complex set of course requirements and finding a way to simplify it and communicate it to students. I’m certainly not going to start calling myself an experienced UX pro now, but I do feel like I have a useful skill set for it. And if I can do it, maybe I’ll also be able to teach it at some point!

There is an opportunity in here somewhere. I’ve been thinking about things my university could probably do very quickly to further UX education, from identifying and “packaging” existing courses to incorporating UX into the discussion and marketing of current certificate programs to partnering with UX pros for projects in existing relevant courses. Of course I also know almost nothing happens very quickly in higher education, and in that respect alone I’d probably face some uphill battles (not to mention I am nowhere near a decision-maker at this point). But if we could figure out a way to make something happen, and it were successful, it would be a big win for UX and higher education. If nothing else, maybe these ideas will lead me to a spectacular dissertation topic.

So what do you think? Are my thoughts on UX education on target or off base? Are there issues or ideas I’m not considering? And what should the next step be?

Plug “validate” into dictionary.com and you get this:

1. to make valid; substantiate; confirm: Time validated our suspicions.
2. to give legal force to; legalize.
3. to give official sanction, confirmation, or approval to, as elected officials, election procedures, documents, etc.: to validate a passport.

Scary stuff.

And stuff that user researchers should be wary of. Our job is to talk to users and observe them interacting with our products.

We need to take what users say, ask follow up questions, and place it in the right context. Feedback aids understanding. It should never be used to say, We nailed it. It’s perfect. Let’s ship it!

We can call what we do a few things:

• User research
• User feedback
• Usability testing
• Usability study

But we should never call it validation.

We shouldn’t ever drive toward asking (even in a non-verbal, implied way), “Do you give official sanction, confirmation, or approval to what you just saw?”

If we do, it means we don’t understand the power of our own methodology.

Validate is a loaded word. Let’s stop using it.