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I saw the One Less Drop product showcased in my RSS feed from DesignSpotter, and loved it immediately (yup, I’ve joined the pre-order list!

What I liked even more was the video that the designer made about the design evolution of the product:

Business Objectives vs. User Experience
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/02/04/business-objectives-vs-user-experience/

Experiences are Emotional
http://johnnyholland.org/2011/02/03/experiences-are-emotional-2/

Are meetings broken, or are other problems being overlooked?
http://www.uxbooth.com/blog/are-meetings-a-broken-model-or-are-other-problems-being-overlooked/

UX Benefits to Building Mobile Web Apps
http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1264Mobile Web Apps – Good for business but are they good for UX?
http://cvil.ly/2011/02/03/mobile-web-apps-good-for-business-but-are-they-good-for-ux/

Using Power Structure and Gestalt for Visual Hierarchy
http://sixrevisions.com/web_design/using-power-structure-and-gestalt-for-visual-hierarchy/

Designing a Reason to Come Back
http://johnnyholland.org/2011/02/01/designing-a-reason-to-come-back/

Inspirato Destination Guide
http://www.inspirato.com/Destination/Summary

It’s very rare, these days, that I go though my RSS feeds without coming across an article relating to content. It’s a sign of how much further to the forefront content has become in the digital landscape.

So, how intertwined is content with the user experience? It is completely wrapped up in it, In my opinion. However, in many organisations the content team is a different team to the UX and Design teams, oftentimes with different priorities.

Before I go any further, I had better explain what I mean by the user experience trinity! I believe that the user’s experience is made up of 3 primary elements: UX, Design and UI (or front-end/client-side) Development.

UX

What we would see as the role undertaken by a user experience (UX/IA/UEA.. whatever) professional. The flow and features of a site. How the pages hang together and the architecture of each individual page. Drawing on usability and ethnographic research to craft a site/application/product that meets the needs to the user and the needs of the business.

Design

The visual and aesthetics of a site. Does the visual style reflect the brand? Does is match the user’s, and the market’s, perception of the brand and its values? Is the visual tone of voice meeting the needs of the site? Does each page have a proper design balance? Are the appropriate visual treatments being given to the important areas on a page?

UI Development

This is physical manifestation of the experience. How does the site feel? What happens when a button is clicked? How quickly do overlays render? This is all about interaction design and the mechanics of the experience – the tactical nature of the interface (even more important in this world of touch based technology).

It’s at the intersection of all three of these ( ‘UX ∩ Design ∩ UI Dev’ if I remember my set theory correctly!) that I believe we find the sweet spot of the user experience.

It’s only when all three disciplines work together, each bringing their distinct point of view to the table, that the best experiences are crafted.

So, that’s my UX trinity. But of late I’m wondering if we need a 4th set?

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Wikipedia defines a symposium as “a drinking party (from Greek sympotein, ‘to drink together’)”, so I’d like to start by stating that, while I’m a big fan of drinking together, this is not what I’m referring to! What I’m referring to is the format, often taken in the academic world, of meeting to discuss and share ideas around a particular theme.

So, what does this have to do with user experience?

I work in a large FTSE 100 organisation, but regardless of size, as a UX person in an organisation one of the biggest headaches is sharing your work with everyone that feels they have a say in what you are doing (and that’s generally a long list). Sharing work is definitely not a bad thing – getting a broad spectrum of people giving you feedback gives you interesting and different perspectives.

However, were you to individually sit down with everyone that asked to see/feedback on what you are working on, you would spend 99.7% of your time taking people through the work you’ve been done, and the remaining 0.3% of your time evolving it and/or moving on to the next thing!

A technique that I’ve used, successfully, is to hold a symposium. We take over a large room for half a day, and stick all of our work on the walls. We then invite as wide an audience as possible to pop in at any stage during the symposium, and have a look at our work.

We present the various streams of work as areas on the wall, where deliverables are shown, and the person/people who worked on them are there to talk people through the posters, answer question and gather feedback. These ‘station’ type areas could be at a page level, or present the results of some research.

I believe that there are a number of advantages to this format:

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Alex Horstmann’s user experience, usability, design, eCommerce and design bookmarks for November 18th.

• Weary of online booking, clients return to travel agents – USATODAY.com
  Vacationers who hire Suzanne Burr book their travel the old-fashioned way. They tell Burr where they want to go and what they need when they arrive, and leave it to her to make it happen.
• Google AdWords: Website Optimizer Help
  This handy calculator helps you estimate the potential duration of your experiment. Try out various numbers of combinations and see how they affect the length of the experiment. For pages with very high traffic, the differences may be negligible.
• The Battle Between Thoughts and Emotions in Persuasion — PsyBlog
  Nowadays people tend to use 'I think' and 'I feel' interchangeably. For some this is a linguistic faux pas, but what about psychologically? Does it make any difference whether what you say is couched in 'thinking' or 'feeling' terms?
• Mobile User Experience Trends on the Horizon | UX Magazine
  The majority of the world's digital experiences now happen through mobile devices linked by wireless networks. It is this untethered medium that is defining future trends in user behavior, sweeping away the legacy of interaction methods established for fixed computing scenarios.
• Verified by Visa and Mastercard SecureCode are broken and need to be fixed | cxpartners
  Verified by Visa and Mastercard SecureCode are broken. At cxpartners we’ve watched hundred of users on e-commerce websites and seen some serious trust and usability issues that are hurting e-commerce. Our clients have seen conversion rates drop because of it. E-consultancy published an article over a year ago with specific examples of 3D secure harming sales.
• Failure by Design / FINCH
  Losses feel worse than gains feel good. Rationally we should treat losses and gains the same. But that isn’t the way we are built. Consider how people make decisions when buying and selling stocks. Most people will sell stocks that go up in value, but they will tend to hold onto stocks long term that are going down in value. Selling the losing stock will make the loss tangible and the feeling of that is much worse to deal with. No one wants to lose. It’s painful.1
• Introduction | The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web
  Robert Bringhurst’s book The Elements of Typographic Style is on many a designer’s bookshelf and is considered to be a classic in the field. Indeed the renowned typographer Hermann Zapf proclaims the book to be a must for everybody in the graphic arts, and especially for our new friends entering the field.

Please do feel free to suggest other related (and unrelated ones)!