2017 | Experience Dynamics

How a wine glass instructs us about UX Design

By Frank Spillers

on December 28, 2017 - 6:16pm

Summary: The size of a wine glass has increased sevenfold in the past 300 years. The increase in wine consumption is speculated to follow this design shift toward larger wine glass size. This underscores an important and often overlooked factor in UX design: context of use.

Wine consumption has rocketed, and historically keeps increasing with the size of the glass. Researchers suspect wine glass design is increasing consumption.

According to a recent BBC report:

University of Cambridge researchers found glass size grew from an average 66ml in the 1700s to 449ml today - a near sevenfold increase - and wine drinking nearly doubled from 1980-2004.

Learn this important Visual Design lesson from Google

By Admin User

on December 27, 2017 - 11:40am

Summary: Google's Material Design language reinforces one of the most valuable principles of graphic design and user experience: provide design elements that make it clear that a control is present for use. This technique is called a "signifier": it signifies how to interact with the UI.

Visual designers, Creative Directors and UX designers have been on a mission for the past five years to "clean up" or minimalize UI design. The approach is called Flat Design. Design minimalism is not new and the intentions of de-cluttering your design are vital. However, industry studies and our own usability tests conducted on Web, Web App and Mobile apps tell us that there are a few things missing from most approaches to Flat design or new hybrids like "Flat 2.0".

Webinar: 7 Story-telling Musts for VR/AR

By Admin User

on December 20, 2017 - 3:35pm

News update: We've created a new UX training program for mastering VR/AR UX Design. Over 2018, you will see more webinars announced in our Experience Dynamics' Mastering VR/AR User Experience Design webinar series.

This webinar series is based on two years of intensive VR/AR design and research in addition to Frank Spillers 20 year VR background he has leveraged to create this important new training for the next wave of Immersive User Interfaces.

Is gamification viable for your UI/UX?

By Admin User

on December 12, 2017 - 12:00pm

Summary: Gamification, if approached delicately, can be leveraged to help your users stay motivated, engaged and move to the next “level” with your design. Puzzle question: What do elementary kids like best, levels or badges? (Answer in article below) ;-)

Many design teams talk about “gamifying” a UI or plan to use gamification, yet struggle to make it meaningful to users. Many teams don’t even know where to start or how gamification applies to their user experience. The first question anyone should ask is: “Is gamification even appropriate for our experience?”

The confusion around gamification is understandable. Gamification requires teams to apply pressure at the right points. One wrong “leaderboard” played in the users path and you can loose your relevancy.

How does Gamification really work?

First let’s define it:

3 Important Distinctions for Visual Design vs UX Design

By Frank Spillers

on November 22, 2017 - 11:56pm

UX vs Visual Design- walkway vs footpath

Image above cheat sheet: "Designers can create the right pathways, but users will do things their way. Knowing what those habits are-- will help you add shortcuts that make the journey more comfortable, and lead to better business outcomes for you" - Frank Spillers (UX Trainer / Chief Experience Officer, Experience Dynamics)

Summary: UX Design and Visual Design, while related, have very different approaches and intentions. Visual design is about helping users see controls, menus, buttons and areas of a screen where they perform an action, for example. UX Design helps define what should go on the screen, in the first place, and helps define interactions that reinforce Key Performance Indicators like engagement, adoption and task success.

5 Steps for aligning persona research to design

By Frank Spillers

on October 8, 2017 - 3:17pm

Summary: Personas have very practical value, not only as tools to unify organizational understanding of the end-user, but also as specific instruments to make your designs more precise. An important ultimate step in your persona research will be to translate user data into design requirements. Since design personas are representations of end-user or customer behavior, it is important to capture and continuously transfer user needs to the design team throughout the design phase.

In our experience, the design phase is usually where the most difficult decisions are made with regard to the intended user experience, and the one that actually results. Good persona research will help prioritize and manage constraints that are beyond the design, such as technology legacy issues that exist in large organizations.

The following 5 steps will help ensure your personas help by-pass organizational obstacles and transfer in-tact to your design outcomes:

18 Usability Musts for Ecommerce [VIDEO]

By Admin User

on August 6, 2017 - 1:01pm

Ecommerce usability best practices recording

Sumamry: Here's a 60 minute VIDEO RECORDING of a webinar from Frank Spillers, Chief Experience Officer at Experience Dynamics.

Keywords: Ecommerce usability: Ecommerce best practices; ecommerce UX; shopping cart abandonment; ecommerce social UX; mobile ecommerce; ecommerce content usability

What are known usability best practices for ecommerce? What has changed in ecommerce that you should be looking at? How does mobile play into ecommerce? What are common issues and mistakes that impact ecommerce user experience and bottom line conversions?

Topic:

Ecommerce is changing for many and stagnating for others. A decade and a half into ecommerce, and usability issues that have plagued conversions still exist. Yet new innovations are being introduced to deal with pesky issues like shopping cart abandonment or weak conversions on product pages.

What's wrong with Focus Groups and How to Fix Them

By Admin User

on July 31, 2017 - 3:34pm

Summary: Focus groups are innapropriate as a research technique to gather usability or user experience requirements. This is due to the fact they are opinion driven and not behavior driven. As a research tool they have a place in market research or early on "market idea" testing. As a way to influence usability or user experience projects, they are useless and misleading. To fix focus groups, they should be either: a) Abandoned in favor of ethnographic field studies or, b) Blended with behavioral research aka user interviews and observations to provide richer insights.

The Power of Ethnography

By Admin User

on June 27, 2017 - 10:59pm

Margaret Mead- Ethnography applied to UX

Ethnography is a technique developed largely by anthropologist Margaret Mead. It involves behavioral observation, contextual interviewing and analysis of users in their work, home or play spaces. The key strength to ethnography is context. Context provides insight into not only who users are (demographics) but what is important to them and what causes them to act and make decisions (psychographics).

Ethnography goes by a few different names. The most common include: Contextual Interviewing, Field Studies and Task Analysis. My personal contribution to the field, called "Cognitive Archeology"(PDF) involves an analysis of user behavior and environment with an emphasis on understanding decision-making, problem-solving and the interaction of tasks, values and beliefs.

[Part 2]: 12 Things Managers Need to Know about Running an Outside-In Design Org

By Frank Spillers

on May 26, 2017 - 2:56pm

Summary: Outside-In design organizations live and breathe user experience. The main differentiator between a technology driven organization and a Human Centered design approach is in decision-making. With Outside-In, design, business and technology decisions are gathered, validated, measured and infused into the Sales, Marketing, Business and Technology fabric. This post (in 2 parts, see part 1 here) explores those key organizational behaviors we've discovered and worked with for over 15 years. We've included to-do items for managers to action these insights.

How does Gamification really work?

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