on July 29, 2021 - 6:31am
User Advocacy
on March 23, 2021 - 7:32am
Summary: Most IT professionals including UX Designers logically run away from confusion. All too often confusion is perceived as bad or the thing to avoid. Instead, confusion offers an opportunity to explore, learn, and deconstruct poor user experience, allowing designers and decision-makers to create better experiences for users.
Confusion is how we learn
Without confusion, we would not be able to understand user behavior, problem-solving, or issues that arise with service and product experiences. TED Talks Founder, Richard Saul Wurman, and the first to get us to think about designing for understanding through information design and visualization provided the term 'Information Architecture' to explain this art form, back in 1976. He famously nailed the gift of confusion in the following phrase:
on February 14, 2014 - 9:47am
User advocacy is at the heart of usability, user experience and Design Thinking. User advocacy is a core design decision making tool because it utilizes empathy. Advocating for user needs is empathy demonstrated.
In this week's UX Power Up, Frank shares some tricks for remaining a strong user advocate in your language and thinking. Please post your comments below, we would love to hear your thoughts.
Transcript of video above...
User Advocacy
Frank Spillers, founder of Experience Dynamics, and it’s time for this week’s UX Power Up.
on August 15, 2013 - 9:00pm
A UX train wreck is a user experience that makes you work- really work. UX that's so broken, it breaks you down psychologically or emotionally. In this post we'll explore some big train wreck user experiences from Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft. These companies do a lot of great UX work, but they also do some 'train wreck' ones that make for good learning. Do the opposite of these and you'll end up closer to an elegant user experience.
on March 18, 2013 - 9:00pm
In this post, we'll explore the basic user experience skill of not taking for granted what your users can do.
Why is this important? If your assumptions about your users are incorrect, you'll make unwise design decisions...and you'd never want to do that now, would you?!
Those of who follow my work via my ux trainings or web seminars, know we don't believe in the myth of the stupid user. We say there are no user errors, only designer errors. That attitude let's us understand user error, and design around it.
on March 15, 2012 - 8:07pm
It was Albert Einstein's birthday yesterday, and to celebrate I wanted to share this excellent example of outstanding task-oriented design from Einstein Healthcare Network.
What makes me dedicate an entire blog post to Einstein.edu's home page usability? The courage that I believe is reflected in the home page layout choices.
on June 29, 2011 - 8:57pm
Experience Dynamics celebrates its tenth birthday this year. It was Spring of 2001 that Frank Spillers founded Experience Dynamics together with Alison Gavine.
on May 27, 2011 - 1:55pm
There's a common belief that the problem with errors users make with Web sites or Web apps has to do with differing intelligence levels.Some users even blame themselves for being dumb.
"Sorry about this", I was told by an IT manager at a major financial institution, "It's just that our users are lazy and stupid".
on July 31, 2010 - 11:05am
Comscore just released a new study last month (June 30 2010) entitled Women on the Web: How Women are Shaping the Internet (download here).
The worldwide study adds some key insights into the growing research on gender differences on the Web and in particular around social networking usage. Why is this a big deal?
on March 2, 2010 - 9:06pm
Today is Dr. Seuss's birthday!
Originally written in 2001, this is still timely and captures the consequences of poor user experience:
"One link two link, red link blue link,
Oh my gosh here comes a new link.
This click that click, here click there click
Huh? click HELP! click Who knows where click?
New rules new day, how you must play.
Who say? You say! I squeal "Oy-vey!"