When I was an engineering student at WPI, one of the non-technical classes I took required us to read Mary Shelley’s classic book Frankenstein. As a young geek, I had already read it, but not with the intent of analyzing the very important theme running through it that all technologists should consider: just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do something.
Victor Frankenstein was so obsessed with conquering death that he didn’t stop to think through the repercussions, and the results…. Well, if you don’t know, read the book.
There are many stories that follow a…
As time goes on, and mobile becomes more popular, we are seeing global growth in its use. Everywhere you look, likely you will see a mobile device in just about any setting. With the increase in mobile device popularity, comes higher expectations. Users have grown to expect websites to be tailored to their needs. If a user is unable to access a website in this multi-faceted world of technology they will simply click away and find one that is more flexible to their needs. In the United States and more developed countries, when one is designing for the User Experience (UX) on any website…
Monday, May 16, 2016 - 08:49
">
•
By Jeff LeBlanc
•
UX, User Experience, user-centric design, transfer of learning
One of the perks of being a technology company, is we get lots of fun toys around the office. For example, we've had a few Keurig coffee machines in our office kitchen for several years now. They are quick, simple to use and produce adequate caffeinated beverages to feed our morning addictions. So when I heard that ICS had acquired a Keurig®-KOLD™ machine, I immediately headed for the kitchen to see how it compared to its warm-blooded sibling.
(Note: We're based in Boston; we have 'soda', not 'pop'. Just go with it.)
Sadly, I was not impressed. Having used the other Keurig machines for a…
A regrettable consequence of getting older is that both our senses and our memory tend to be less acute. While I scoffed at this notion when I heard about it in HCI class back in my 20s, it is now a fact of my daily life. The National Institute of Health (NIH) describes how changes in our brains as we get older may cause us to take longer to learn new concepts or remember information.
Even at our best, our working memory can only handle so much information at once. In 1956, psychologist George Miller introduced the world to the theory of Chunking. This notion says…
Monday, April 18, 2016 - 15:58
">
•
By Jeff LeBlanc
•
UX, User Experience, user experience design, navigation, locus of control
I have read many software specifications over the years that simplistically list being “user friendly” as a design requirement. User Experience (UX) designers can get a chuckle from this, knowing that there is a fair bit of effort involved during the design phase to make that happen. The seventh rule of Shneiderman’s Eight Golden Rules talks about supporting an internal locus of control, and may be the closest thing to a simple description of user friendly of any of the rules.
A description of the notions of internal vs external locus of control can be found here. Simply…
In this next blog post, we will explore the sixth rule of Ben Shneiderman's Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design. This rule is for designers to permit easy reversal of actions. Shneiderman explains this rule as the following,
“As much as possible, actions should be reversible. This feature relieves anxiety, since the user knows that errors can be undone, and encourages exploration of unfamiliar options. The units of reversibility may be a single action, a data-entry task, or a complete group of actions, such as entry of a name-address block.”1
This rule means that the user should always…
Ben Shneiderman explains design dialogs with the following: "Sequences of actions should be organized into groups with a beginning, middle and end. Informative feedback at the completion of a group of actions gives operators the satisfaction of accomplishment, a sense of relief, a signal to drop contingency plans from their minds, and an indicator to prepare for the next group of actions."
Schneiderman is explaining the process of moving the user smoothly through the various steps of an interface, making it easy for them to understand what they are doing and preventing confusion. These…
Monday, March 7, 2016 - 11:18
">
•
By Jeff LeBlanc
•
UX, user experience design, UXD, software developers, engineers
Shneiderman’s Rule 5 is the one that I suspect is most often violated by software developers, and I say that looking back at 20 years of writing code. When writing software, developers think in terms of edge cases and data validation. The rule of thumb is that, for example, when a user enters a value that is outside of the expected range, you will want to display an error message and ask them to try again.
I think this mindset goes back to the early computer classes that engineers take. I remember some early computer classes when we wrote simple command-line programs that…
Thursday, February 18, 2016 - 17:23
">
•
By ICS UX Design Team
•
Eight Golden Rules, UX, Interface Design, Visual, Informative Feedback
The third rule of Shneiderman's Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design is as follows: "For every user action, there should be system feedback. For frequent and minor actions, the response can be modest, whereas for infrequent and major actions, the response should be more substantial. Visual presentation of the objects of interest provides a convenient environment for showing changes explicitly."
This means that for every user action, the system should show meaningful, clear reaction. This is as simple as a button changing to a highlighted state when pressed, the change notifying the user of…
Continuing this series, the second of Shneiderman’s Golden Rules is that User Experience Designers should design systems and software for the widest range of reasonably possible users. This is a challenging, but not insurmountable, activity.
People come in a wide variety. For example, let’s consider physical vision for a moment, someone could have very strong eyes capable of seeing details at a distance or reading very small text on a monitor. Others, such as myself, struggle with details at a distance, and font sizes that were legible to me 20 years ago are no longer so.…
In Ben Shneiderman's Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design, he wrote: "Consistent sequences of actions should be required in similar situations; identical terminology should be used in prompts, menus, and help screens; and consistent color, layout, capitalization, fonts, and so on should be employed throughout. Exceptions, such as required confirmation of the delete command or no echoing of passwords, should be comprehensible and limited in number."
This is a fundamental principle that transcends throughout the world of design, consistency is a key factor. In Interface design, all of the…
Tuesday, January 12, 2016 - 10:23
">
•
By Jeff LeBlanc
•
UX Design, UX, User Experience, Success in UX Design, building a UI, Qt
While I missed the recent 2015 Qt World Summit, I have been to and presented at Qt Dev Days for the previous three years running. Each year, I presented two topics. The first was related to a recent project or piece of software that we had been working on, including such fun items as an In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) system for Intel or the latest in voice recognition and gesture-based interfaces. My second talk was actually the same each year: “Introduction to User Experience for Engineers”. I made tweaks to the talk every year based on new experiences or research, but…
Monday, December 28, 2015 - 13:39
">
•
By Jeff LeBlanc
•
UX, user experience design, UI, ui design, anti-patterns, Design Patterns
Some time ago, I wrote a post about the use of patterns in user interface (UI) design. The idea is that, when one solves problems for a living, over the years the same problems will crop up, and similar solutions will be re-used. The context may change, but a solution that worked well at one point may also end up working well for a new problem. Having the experience to recognize these patterns and not have to re-invent the wheel each time is what makes one an “expert”.
The idea of patterns grew out of Christopher Alexander’s seminal work on patterns “A Pattern…
Tuesday, December 22, 2015 - 16:30
">
•
By Jeff LeBlanc
•
User Experience, UX Design, steve harvey, Miss Universe
If you’ve been anywhere near a media source in the last few days, you’ve probably heard about the epic gaff (http://money.cnn.com/2015/12/21/media/miss-universe-2015-donald-trump/ ) made by poor Steve Harvey at the 2015 Miss Universe pageant. It's hard to imagine a worse mistake at a beauty pageant than to announce the wrong winner! However, in the world of User Experience (UX) design, we never blame the user for mistakes; rather, we look to see how changes in design would have prevented the error from happening in the first place. Preventing errors is on the Ben Shneiderman…
Monday, December 14, 2015 - 17:26
">
•
By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D.
•
UX, User Experience, Design, rapid prototyping, iteration
Getting a user experience (UX) design completed quickly is good for developers, good for customers and good for business. Surprisingly it’s part of a good design practice as well. Here are the steps I use:
Begin with a rapid prototyping technique
Iterate frequently on the evolving design
Use customer feedback to drive those iterations
You will soon have a spot-on design. Imagine the reverse: you spend a fair amount of time gathering requirements, then build a detailed professional-looking prototype and after doing some user testing you realize you have to substantially rebuild…
Monday, November 30, 2015 - 15:53
">
•
By ICS UX Design Team
•
UX, color science, low-light environments, user interface design, HCI
When most of us hear night vision goggles, it is usually a safe bet we imagine a night scene with that glowing green-scale overlay or something similar to that shown above. For those who have ever used night vision goggles or have used a digital camera with a night setting, you might already be familiar with this concept, but it really does look like this! Have you ever wondered why the exclusive use of green? Quite often, movies and video games embellish the reality of technological devices, but these intriguing green-scale displays are very real and there is actually some science behind it…
Monday, November 16, 2015 - 14:40
">
•
By Jeff LeBlanc
•
UX Design, Human Factors, HCI, visual designers
Here in the U.S., the month of November makes us look at ahead to the Thanksgiving holiday, which for many is a time for being with friends and family, giving thanks for the good things in our lives, and eating copious amounts of turkey. Professionally speaking, I’m thankful for the opportunity to have built an amazing team of User Experience (UX) and Visual Designers here at ICS. Reflecting further on that, I find I’m thankful that these professions exist these days, and you should be too.
When digital products were first being produced, there were no UX designers…
Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - 14:15
">
•
By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D.
•
user experience design, UX, user experience designers, designers
Designing is a process, and as a designer you can utilize numerous strategies to progress to a successful outcome, but a sure way not to succeed is to deny the process. I like to describe it as not “honoring the design process.” You need to pay homage to the natural forces of doing and deciding. In other words, performing a bunch of random activities utilizing gathered requirements, constraints and user profiles does not necessarily lead to a solid design. A couple of examples that I have witnessed:
The pudding recipe approach: Just add 30 functional requirements to this particular hardware…
Monday, October 19, 2015 - 15:12
">
•
By Jeff LeBlanc
•
Internet of Things, IoT, UX, User Experience
At the expense of some minor spoilers for a seven-year-old movie, the post-credit cut scene in Iron Man (2008) showed Tony Stark walking into his dark home and calling for his virtual butler J.A.R.V.I.S. to turn on the lights. Fast-forwarding to 2015, we can now do that, more or less, courtesy of the Internet of Things (IoT).
Here at ICS, we’ve been working with IoT technology for some time now, and it’s been very exciting work. Some of my colleagues have written various blog posts on the topic over the last several months such as the Internet of Things: Easy to Use is Complicated…
Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - 14:56
">
•
By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D.
•
UX Design, user experience design
Although design is a subject of much interest in this age of highly usable technology products, misconceptions about the user experience (UX) design process abound. A fundamental fallacy is that the design process is one-dimensional, involving essentially one kind of thought process.
The ‘Misconception-ers’ often fall into two camps:
--those that believe designing is primarily a burst-of-inspiration, gestalt experience
--those that believe designing is primarily an extensive to-do list
The tendency is to hold the activity of designing as being all one style, or the other. Gestalters…
Monday, September 14, 2015 - 14:59
">
•
By Jeff LeBlanc
•
UX, UX design team, user research, User testing
Team building is always one of the biggest challenges facing any manager. Sometimes you get to build a team from scratch and get to forge your own dynamic, other times you inherit a partial or full team and have to figure out the dynamic. For a user experience (UX) design team, besides the interpersonal mix, there is also the added factor of determining what skill sets to bring into the team.
For a UX designer, there is a wide (and not fully agreed upon) list of possible skills one could have: user research, user testing, ethnography, interaction design,…
Monday, August 24, 2015 - 12:15
">
•
By Jeff LeBlanc
•
User Experience, technology, software projects, UX
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke
As technologists, we are privileged to be working in a time of magic, or at least working with technology that would have seemed magical to our grandparents. Many of us have more computing power in our pockets than was used to put men on the moon. Even Hollywood is finding it hard to come up with technology to show in movies that is much beyond what we use and envision daily. With the Amazon Echo coming out, my hope of having my own personal J.A.R.V.I.S. running my house is…
Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - 19:08
">
•
By Jeff LeBlanc
•
User Experience, UX, interactive devices, Design, engineers
One of the challenges to creating effecting and engaging User Experiences (UX) for interactive devices is balancing the creative aspect with the functional. Talented visual designers can create amazing works in Photoshop, some of which make even experienced software engineers cringe when it comes to having to implement them. Knowing the capabilities of your development team can be critical when trying to make the right decisions in the early phases of a design effort.
As part of a consulting organization, ICS designers have become skilled at recognizing that the heads of the…
Monday, July 27, 2015 - 14:13
">
•
By Jeff LeBlanc
•
developers, designers, user experience design, UX
Before getting the opportunity to run a design team, I worked as a Qt developer and trainer for many years. This has given me some insights into the development pipeline that I think a lot of people have missed. I’ve heard both developers and designers complaining about one or the other many times, but the reality is that both disciplines are more alike than many people would believe. I’ve blogged about this previously (Lean UX and Agile Development: Not So Different After All ) and I have to say that the similarities grow stronger the more I think about this.…
Monday, July 13, 2015 - 17:27
">
•
By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D.
•
Internet of Things, IoT, Internet of Everything, IoE, User Experience, UX
Does the Distinction Matter to User Experience Designers?
Qualcomm and Cisco have been pushing the term, Internet of Everything (IoE) while most others are using the term Internet of Things (IoT). As could be expected, confusion about the difference between the two has ensued. Is there a difference or is it just rhetoric? Some people use them interchangeably but there is a clear conceptual difference. IoE encompasses a wider scope and takes into consideration the infrastructure needed and the potential impacts that will occur on data, privacy, security and usability as a result of connecting…
Monday, June 29, 2015 - 15:43
">
•
By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D.
•
UX patterns, user experiences, Internet-enabled, Internet of Things, IoT, designer, UX
The user experiences (UXs) of Internet-enabled devices that are part of the Internet of Things (IoT) are expected to require little or no learning for users to be effectively proficient with them. As these devices proliferate, it’s inconceivable that users will have any patience to figure out complex or confusing user experiences. This is particularly so with public devices where the time that any one user might engage with a device is measured in minutes.
How does a designer deal with this dilemma?
To add to the challenge, many of these connected devices are not built upon platforms that…
Tuesday, June 16, 2015 - 16:57
">
•
By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D.
•
Internet of Things, IoT, user experiences, UX, Design
The Internet of Things (IoT) will be an opportunity for new kinds of user experiences (UXs) to proliferate - smart, ambient, minimal and wearable. These new interactive experiences will need to be very appealing and easy to use. In other words, these new devices and systems must possess a very high level of usability; users/consumers have come to expect that. This is good news for designers because it ensures that their skills will be highly valued as the IoT grows in scope and size.
However, employing high UX standards are not the only factor at play here. The number of IoT devices and…
Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - 16:04
">
•
By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D.
•
Internet of Things, IoT, graphical user interface, GUIs, NUIs, touch
The emergence of the Internet of things (IoT) is reshaping our relationship with computing technology, including the interface paradigms that we use to interact with digital technology. Touch has replaced mechanical pointers such as the mouse on some classes of devices, notably mobile. Speech recognition is slowly finding appropriate use cases where hands-free interaction is desirable, such as in-vehicle devices. Physical movement is the interaction with wearables that track your activity. With all of this change, the question becomes will the once ubiquitous Graphical User Interface (GUI)…