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Sketching is a really, really important part of the UCD process, in my opinion. It allows us to communicate, and get feedback on, ideas and approaches quickly and with little cost.

However, not everyone is initially comfortable doing it. People may feel that they can’t really draw, and are uncomfortable sharing rough sketches, as they feel that it isn’t good enough. You can tell people all you like that fidelity is not important, that it’s about communicating an idea – but that doesn’t always work.

I believe that, in order to move a team to a more sketch led culture, this is the first hurdle that must be overcome. An idea that I got from my colleague and friend Lee McIvor (@leemcivor) is to play a form of Pictionary. And this is exactly what we do at our team meetings here at TUI.

I choose a different theme each time (brand names, cities, household items), write a dozen or so on pieces of paper, split the group into 2 teams and start the game. The teams play head to head, the first to guess the answer correctly gets a point. It’s a playful way of showing that sketching is about conveying a concept quickly and not worrying about fidelity.

This technique not only breaks down that sketching barrier, but it also helps to bring the teams together more. Most of all, it’s fun, and that’s important.

However, it’s just the first step to instilling a sketching culture; the next step is making sure that the process has a sketching step and project plans give time for this.

Image courtesy of magicmarie at stock.xchng

Alex Horstmann’s user experience, usability, design, eCommerce and design bookmarks for November 23rd.

• James-Lange theory – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  The James-Lange theory refers to a hypothesis on the origin and nature of emotions and is one of the earliest theories of emotion, developed independently by two 19th-century scholars, William James and Carl Lange.
• Web Content That Persuades and Motivates :: UXmatters
  There are several key elements that are missing from a large number of Web sites, and these missing elements often lead to bad user experiences and the total ineffectiveness of those sites.
• » Design Jam London 1 Johnny Holland – It’s all about interaction » Blog Archive
  Design Jams are one or two day design sessions, during which people team up to solve engaging UX challenges. While conferences and talks are very popular in the UX community, we don’t have many events for actual collaboration, like the ‘hackdays’ enjoyed by the development community. Only a few UX designers participate in hackdays or open-source design initiatives –  how can we change this and get UX designers more involved? How can we introduce them to open collaboration formats? The idea of an event to get designers together to learn from each other while working on actual problems was born. Design Jams champion open-source thinking & sharing and are non-profit, run by local volunteers. The London team are Desigan Chinniah, Johanna Kolllmann, Joe Lanman and Franco Papeschi.
• E-commerce (A-Z of user experience design resources)
• Bounce Rate Demystified
• Agile UX in Practice | Agile UX
  Agile development and user experience can work brillantly together… well, but how?<br />
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  Even if the effort related to Agile User Experience (Agile UX) continues throughout the project (with “just in time” designing and user testing) the User Experience foundations must be initiated at the very beginning of the project, during the first sprints.
• Stressed Out About Holiday Shopping? Your Customers Are! | experience matters
  Regardless of their budget though, consumers told us that holiday shopping is stressful. Of course there are obvious reasons like crowded malls, outrageously chaotic traffic conditions and increased family obligations, but consumers face other speed bumps that companies can help with.

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

Alex Horstmann’s user experience, usability, design, eCommerce and design bookmarks for November 19th.

• How To Use the “Seven Deadly Sins” to Turn Visitors into Customers
  Since the beginning of time, people have exploited the human desire to sin so that they could achieve their goals. Finding out what causes people to sin helps us understand the triggers which prompt people to take an action. The Web has made it even easier to exploit these tendencies to sin, in order to build user engagement and excitement about your service or product. In this article we’ll show examples of how successful companies exploit the tendency to conduct all the famous Seven Deadly Sins, and in turn generate momentum with their website visitors. Ready? Let’s roll.
• Expedia Acquires FlightTrack App Developer Mobiata
  Expedia has just announced that it has acquired developer Mobiata, the creator of popular mobile travel application FlightTrack. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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

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:

More

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)!