• How to Win the UX War Within Your Organization [UX Booth - May 01, 2012] – When companies don’t care about user experience, it is clearly reflected in the products they create. Although everyone can agree that software should be intuitive, user-friendly, and aesthetically pleasing, many managers aren’t willing to invest the time and resources it takes to build something compelling. A large part of our job as UX advocates, then, is explaining design’s impact on the company as a whole. Determining which battles to win and which battles to lose – even intentionally — can help you win the UX war.
• 4 Key Insights From The 57-Day, Blitzkrieg Redesign Of Google+ [Co.Design - Apr 25, 2012] – Co.Design talked to Google+ lead designer Fred Gilbert to unpack the subtle brilliance behind their awesome redesign–a redesign that was completed in less than two months–and his notes are full of lessons that could hone the experience of almost any product.
• Firms Push Visual Note Taking to Spark Creativity, Sharpen Focus [Wall Street Journal - Apr 24, 2012] – Put down that smartphone; pick up that pencil. Employees are being encouraged by their companies to try visual note-taking to explain complicated concepts to colleagues and clients.

• In Silicon Valley, Designers Emerge As Rock Stars [Business Insider - Apr 13, 2012] – The new breed of “user experience” designers – part sketch artist, part programmer, with a dash of behavioral scientist thrown in – are some of the most sought-after employees in technology.
• More potent experiences come from ‘reductive’ design [Cisco Web Experience - Feb 19, 2012] – Sometimes, to create a high-quality experience, a product just needs some time to simmer.

  Soups, sauces, and consommé are the result of boiling down to an intensely flavorful product and technology can benefit from a similar process of distillation.

  The reductive process in cooking derives a more concentrated mixture with less volume than before the boiling but with a much greater quality. With frequent stirring, the impurities are brought to the surface and removed, leaving a more concentrated, and potent, product.

• Pinterest’s Founding Designer Shares His Dead-Simple Design Philosophy [Co.Design - Mar 07, 2012] – Design is shrinking the gap between what a product does and why it exists. Designing is not just about picking the right font or gradient. Stop thinking about design in terms of wire frames or visual style; it is about the product as a whole. Designing is figuring out the purpose of your product and how you orient everything else around it.
• How Apple’s Top Secret Product Development Process Works [The Next Web - Jan 24, 2012] – Many aspects of Apple’s product development process have long been shrouded in mystery. The process is discussed in a new book Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired – and Secretive – Company Really Works, by Adam Lashinsky, which is out now. The book talks about a variety of different aspects of Apple as a company; its philosophy, its hiring process and its legendary secrecy.
• Which One: Responsive Design, Device Experiences, or RESS? [Functioning Form - Feb 29, 2012] – As more organizations realize they need to invest heavily in multi-device Web designs, the inevitable question of “how” comes up. Responsive Web design, separate sites, or something in between?

• Out of the box [Vitamins - Sep, 2011] – Most phones come with flimsy manuals with complicated language and jargon. These books, which can live on a bookshelf actually contain the phone. Each page reveals the elements of the phone in the right order, helping the user to set up the sim card, the battery and even slide the case onto the phone. The second book is the main manual – the phone actually slots into this and becomes the center of attention. Arrows point to the exact locations the user should press, avoiding confusion and eliminating the feeling of being lost in a menu.
• Integrating UX into the Product Backlog [Boxes and Arrows - Feb 03, 2012] – Teams moving to agile often struggle to integrate agile with best practices in user-centered design (UCD) and user experience (UX) in general. Fortunately, using a UX Integration Matrix helps integrate UX and agile by including UX information and requirements right in the product backlog.

• How to Approach a Responsive Design [Upstatement - Jan 26, 2012] – Here at Upstatement, we experimented with how to solve design and layout problems within a responsive framework. We learned a helluva lot as we went, like how to choose the right design software, strategies for thinking through breakpoints, and some best practices for designing in the browser.
• The Eye of the Brainstorm [Cooper Journal - Jan 31, 2012] – While people think and behave differently when they are in large groups versus when they are alone, I also believe that people behave still differently when they are in the presence of only one other person. This is often overlooked, yet I believe that creative people can be at their most effective when they work in pairs.
• The Shift From Watching TV to Experiencing TV [ReadWriteWeb - Jan 25, 2012] – As more and more devices in your home get connected to the Internet, the user experience becomes increasingly important. It’s hard enough to use your PC sometimes, let alone fiddle with the remote on your Internet connected TV! So over the coming months we’ll be exploring the world of User Experience design (a.k.a. UX design). We’ll be interviewing UX experts and reviewing products that get it right – and some that get it wrong. We’ll start by looking at how the user experience of televisions is becoming more interactive and what this will mean to your TV consumption habits.

• Why Best Buy is Going out of Business…Gradually [Forbes - Jan 01, 2012] – I’m not shilling for Amazon or any other successful online retailer here. My point is much more basic. Amazon neither invented nor appropriated its basic strategies from Best Buy or anyone else. It simply does what consumers want. Best Buy does what would be most convenient for the company for consumers to want but don’t, then crosses its fingers and prays. That’s not a strategy – or not a winning strategy, in any case, now that retail consumers aren’t stuck with the store closest to home.
• A Journey Across the Main Stream: Games for My Mother-in-Law [Gamasutra - Sep 01, 2010] – Veteran LucasArts and Telltale Games designer Dave Grossman says gaming’s limited appeal could come down to “some very basic assumptions we make about the audience versus the actual thought processes of that audience.” So he tested Telltale’s Sam & Max adventure game series on his mother-in-law.
• The 5 Hardest Jobs to Fill in 2012 [Inc. - Dec 19, 2011] – After engineers, the biggest challenge for companies is finding high-quality creative design and user-experience talent. Since almost every company is trying to create a highly compelling user experience that keeps people engaged with their product, it is tough to find people who have this type of experience (especially with mobile devices including tablets) and a demonstrated track record of success.

• The Messy Art Of UX Sketching [Smashing UX Design - Dec 13, 2011] – Many articles discuss the power of sketching and why you should do it, but they don’t go into the how or the methods involved. Sketching seems straightforward, but there are certain ways to do it effectively. In this article, we’ll cover a collection of tools and techniques that I (and many other UX and design folks) use every day.
• A Cane For The Blind Improves Social Interactions, Sunday Strolls [Co.Exist] – As scientists make slow and steady progress on sensors to help the blind see and move, this cane helps them say hi to friends.
• A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design [Worry Dream - Nov 08, 2011] – This matters, because visions matter. Visions give people a direction and inspire people to act, and a group of inspired people is the most powerful force in the world. If you’re a young person setting off to realize a vision, or an old person setting off to fund one, I really want it to be something worthwhile. Something that genuinely improves how we interact.

• The Anatomy of an Experience Map [Adaptive Path - Nov 30, 2011] – Experience maps have become more prominent over the past few years, largely because companies are realizing the interconnectedness of the cross-channel experience. It’s becoming increasingly useful to gain insight in order to orchestrate service touchpoints over time and space.
• Using Storyboards and Sentiment Charts to Quantify Customer Experience [UXmatters - Nov 07, 2011] – In the fields of user experience and service design, we use storyboards to illustrate our solutions, so clients can walk in the shoes of their customers, staff, or community and see our solutions as we see them. Storyboards are appealing at an aesthetic level, but are trickier to use in persuading clients who are more used to cold, hard numbers, charts, and tables. Offering more tangible measures of customer sentiment helps clients make connections between the experiences we depict and the sorts of technology, financial, and resource decisions that are necessary to make those experiences happen.
• Team WhiteBoarding with Twiddla – Painless Team Collaboration for the Web – Mark up websites, graphics, and photos, or start brainstorming on a blank canvas. Browse the web with your friends or make that conference call more productive than ever. No plug-ins, downloads, or firewall voodoo – it’s all here, ready to go when you are. Browser-agnostic, user-friendly.

• How our social circles influence what we do, where we go, and how we decide (Video) [Adaptive Path UX Week 2011 - Aug 25, 2011] – In this talk, you will hear stories that illustrate the social patterns in our lives, and how businesses can use that knowledge to build new products, market themselves in more relevant ways, and create experiences that people value. Paul will share stories about how people we are close to, and people we’ve never met, may or may not influence us, and explain how norms learned from people’s local culture impact how much they can be influenced. His goal is for you to walk away with concrete ideas about building great products built around social behavior.
• UX, It’s Time to Define CXO [UX Magazine - Oct 28, 2011] – But now that the CXO title has been around for a few years, I ask you: what does the CXO really do and how have things changed for us? How have we, as a profession, taken ownership of this role? What are you doing differently now that you have a CXO in your organization, and does that CXO even have a UX background? Furthermore, how do we ensure the CXO seat is filled by UX, and what skills does someone need to fill it?
• An Event Apart: Design Principles [Functioning Form - Oct 24, 2011] – In his Design Principles presentation at An Event Apart in Washington DC 2011 Jeremy Keith outlined the design principles behind the World Wide Web and how they continue to shape its future. Here are my notes from his talk:

• Getting the first click right [Measuring Usability - Oct 19, 2011] – Few things affect task success more than the navigation of website. If users can’t find what they’re looking for, not much else matters. If it were easy to get the navigation right, there wouldn’t be books and a profession dedicated to it.

  First impressions matter in life and that’s also the case with website navigation. Research has shown that when users first click is down the right path, 87% eventually succeed. When they click down an incorrect path, only 46% eventually succeed.

• The 10 principles of interaction design [.Net - Oct 19, 2011] – I got my start as an interaction designer during the first internet bubble. Since then I’ve worked on interactive marketing and products for everything including finance, automotive, electronics, packaged consumer goods, pharmaceuticals and healthcare. In that time and experience I have come to know that there are a few key things that make good interaction designs and designers. Here are 10 of them.
• Storyboarding & UX – part 2: creating your own [Johnny Holland - Oct 17, 2011] – When thinking about storyboarding, most people fixate on their ability – or perceived inability — to draw. What is far more important is working out the point you wish to make with your storyboard, and the actual story that will carry that point from your storyboard across the room and into the hearts and minds of your audience. In this article explores the value of establishing a reason for the storyboard first, and then how you can create a storyboard using the thinking you’re already using and the skills you already have.

• Sunni Brown: Doodlers, unite! [TED - Mar, 2011] – Studies show that sketching and doodling improve our comprehension — and our creative thinking. So why do we still feel embarrassed when we’re caught doodling in a meeting? Sunni Brown says: Doodlers, unite! She makes the case for unlocking your brain via pad and pen.
• Conversation Techniques For Designers [Smashing UX Design - Sep 29, 2011] – In this article, we’ll examine the role of conversation in the design process, and how the words we use shape the products we ship. We’ll outline nine ways by which designers can maintain a consistent design conversation during a project, helping to create a better product.
• Organize anything, together. | Trello – Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. In one glance, Trello tells you what’s being worked on, who’s working on what, and where something is in a process.

• Shelf Life of Social Media Links Only 3 Hours [Hubspot - Sep 08, 2011] – When it comes to link sharing in social media, it turns out it’s not about where you share it — it’s about what you share. New research from URL shortening service bitly focuses on how long a link is “alive” before people stop engaging with it and whether it matters what kind of content it is or where it was shared. Winners are using direct links (instead of shorteners) and Youtube.
• Design Research: Why You Need it [Cooper Journal - Mar 03, 2003] – A design research phase consists of three main activities: stakeholder interviews, domain research, and user interviews. Some combination of all three makes for a successful phase. The length of each activity depends on the complexity of the product. More is always better, but effective design research can be gathered in a relatively short amount of time. Typically, one to three weeks is sufficient for most business and domain products, while complex enterprise systems with multiple interfaces require a longer research period.
• How Good Designers Think [Harvard Business Review - Apr 26, 2011] – Firstly, good designers don’t tend to think about consumers; they think about people and what they want and need. Secondly, good designers like observing — really looking at what people do rather than simply relying on what they say they do. Thirdly, they bring expertise in other categories and industries to bear on problems in others. Fourthly, good designers look at what might all change in the short, medium and long-term, by engaging with the best trends and forecasting intelligence. And lastly, good designers pressure test their conclusions by consulting with other cultural interpreters from a broad range of other disciplines.

• Social Design [Facebook Developers] – Social Design is a way of thinking about product design that puts social experiences at the core. Create these social experiences with the features available on Facebook Platform.
• Google Web Fonts – Hundreds of free, open-source fonts optimized for the web.

• Observing Customers Drives Innovation [ZURB - Aug 02, 2011] – Innovation comes from observing customers. That’s all. You’ll find tons of product opportunities to capitalize on by observing how people are accomplishing everyday tasks. OXO comes to mind as a company that drives innovation from observing their customers. 
• The Eight Pillars of Innovation [Think Quarterly by Google - Q3, 2011] – Our growing Google workforce comes to us from all over the world, bringing with them vastly different experiences and backgrounds. A set of strong common principles for a company makes it possible for all its employees to work as one and move forward together. We just need to continue to say “yes”and resist a culture of “no”, accept the inevitability of failures, and continue iterating until we get things right.
• An Empirical Evaluation of the System Usability Scale [International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction (Volume 24, Issue 6) - Jul 30, 2008] – This article presents nearly 10 year’s worth of System Usability Scale (SUS) data collected on numerous products in all phases of the development lifecycle. The SUS, developed by Brooke (1996), reflected a strong need in the usability community for a tool that could quickly and easily collect a user’s subjective rating of a product’s usability. The data in this study indicate that the SUS fulfills that need. Results from the analysis of this large number of SUS scores show that the SUS is a highly robust and versatile tool for usability professionals. The article presents these results and discusses their implications, describes nontraditional uses of the SUS, explains a proposed modification to the SUS to provide an adjective rating that correlates with a given score, and provides details of what constitutes an acceptable SUS score.
• A CRAP way to improve usability [Userfocus - Aug 01, 2011] – Visual design is often dismissed as eye candy. In fact, we can use four key principles of visual design to create more usable interfaces. These principles are Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity.

• Usability Testing with 5 Users [Alertbox - Mar 19, 2000] – Some people think that usability is very costly and complex and that user tests should be reserved for the rare web design project with a huge budget and a lavish time schedule. Not true. Elaborate usability tests are a waste of resources. The best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford.

• What Do You Have to Do to Get Your Way? [UX Magazine - May 19, 2011] – UX Magazine attended the 2011 IA Summit in Denver this year to interview conference speakers and attendees. In this video, interviewees respond to the question:When you’re working on a project, what do you have to do to get your way?
• The Fight for Better Experiences: Are you winning or losing? [UX Magazine - Jun 11, 2011] – UX Magazine attended the 2011 IA Summit in Denver this year to interview conference speakers and attendees. In this video, interviewees respond to the question:In the fight for better experiences, are you winning or losing?

• Our Interview With Dieter Rams, The Greatest Designer Alive [Video] [Co.Design - May 26, 2011] – A rare opportunity to sit down with the man who defined what Apple could be — decades before Jony Ive ever turned on a computer.

• Designing for decision making – not the same as workflow [GroupVisual.io] – Visualization actually requires a whole different set of skills than UI and web design. Fundamentally, visualization is about decision making – understanding the information and its context better so that you can ask better questions, get better answers, and make better choices. UI design is workflow – like a data entry form, a website shopping cart, or trying to figure out how to reset the bullet formatting in Powerpoint.
• Doodle: easy scheduling – Doodle eliminates the chaos that comes from scheduling and saves you a lot of time and energy when you’re trying to find a time to bring a number of people together. Instead of using just one option, you can propose several dates and times and the participants can indicate their availability online. With one look, you’ll be able to see what the best time is for the meeting, and this works with any calendar system that is being used.

• Awsum Shoes: Is it ethical to fix grammatical and spelling errors in reviews? [Slate Magazine - May 10, 2011] – According to Panos Ipeirotis, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business who studies consumer reviews on the Internet, the first review will lure more travelers. In a recent blog post, Ipeirotis discussed his research showing that well-written reviews help sell products, even when the write-ups are negative. Atrocious wireless connectivity? Who cares, so long as Wi-Fi is properly capitalized.
• Perfecting Your Personas [User Interface Engineering - Jan 13, 2005] – A persona is a user archetype you can use to help guide decisions about product features, navigation, interactions, and even visual design. By designing for the archetype — whose goals and behavior patterns you understand very well — you can satisfy the broader group of people represented by that archetype.
• Greplin – Greplin is a personal search engine that allows you to search all your online data in one easy place. Greplin indexes the information you create on different websites (like Gmail, Twitter and Facebook) and provides lightning fast search of all your information.
• Twapper Keeper – “We save tweets” – Archive Tweets
• Flesch-Kincaid Readability Index Calculator – Flesch-Kincaid readability index calculator
• 100 Things You Should Know About People: #54 — The Average Reading Level In the USA Is Grade 8 [What Makes Them Click - Jan 23, 2011] – The Flesch-Kincaid Reading Score — The most common formula for calculating the readability of a particular passage of text is the Flesch-Kincaid method. The method gives you a Reading Ease formula and also a reading grade level score.
• What is Interaction? Are There Different Types? [Dubberly - Jan 01, 2009] – When we discuss computer-human interaction and design for interaction, do we agree on the meaning of the term “interaction” Has the subject been fully explored? Is the definition settled?
• Sketching in Mockups [Balsamiq UX Blog - Apr 28, 2011] – This is where thumbnail sketching steps in. I hardly ever start full scale on a wireframe. Before I have the chance to even think about the details I work with thumbnail sketches. It’s like zooming 20 feet away from the thing you’re designing, blurring your eyes, and just seeing the major elements of the page. The idea with thumbnail sketching is to draw a smallish representation of your design, roughing out boxes and greeking lines of text to get an idea of what your interface will look like. You actually don’t even need text to sketch the interface, just scribbled lines. You can use text captions to describe what’s happening in the story.
• The Usability of Passwords [Baekdal - Aug 11, 2007] – Security companies and IT people constantly tells us that we should use complex and difficult passwords. This is bad advice, because you can actually make usable, easy to remember and highly secure passwords. In fact, usable passwords are often far better than complex ones.
• User Research Is Unnatural (But That’s Okay), Part I [UX Matters - Apr 05, 2011] – From the perspective of a participant, user research is not very natural. We ask participants to try to act naturally in the artificial environment of a lab, or we impose ourselves on their environment and hope our presence doesn’t affect their behavior. We often forget how unnatural user research can be and what effect it can have on participants.
• The Ultimate Guide To A/B Testing [Smashing Magazine - Ju 24, 2010] – At its core, A/B testing is exactly what it sounds like: you have two versions of an element (A and B) and a metric that defines success. To determine which version is better, you subject both versions to experimentation simultaneously. In the end, you measure which version was more successful and select that version for real-world use.
• Why We Need Storytellers at the Heart of Product Development [UX Magazine - Apr 14, 2011] – So whether you are at a small start up or a large organization, whether you are a founder, executive, technologist, designer, manager, or marketer, ask yourself this: do you know your product’s story? And perhaps more importantly, who creates your product story?
• NounProject – icon set
• Poll Everywhere – Poll Everywhere replaces expensive proprietary audience response hardware with standard web technology. It’s the easiest way to gather live responses in any venue: conferences, presentations, classrooms, radio, tv, print — anywhere. It can help you to raise money by letting people pledge via text messaging. And because it works internationally with texting, web, or Twitter, its simplicity and flexibility are earning rave reviews.
• Free UX Goodies: Persona Template [Orange Bus - Apr 03, 2011] – Personas are a crucial step in our process to keep decisions grounded and centred around the audience. They help to provoke questions which will challenge decisions, helping the whole team understand the audience being designed for and shaping the design of the site.
• Creating Great Design Principles: 6 Counter-intuitive Tests [User Interface Engineering - Mar 01, 2011] – Great design principles help designers learn more about their design and make critical decisions about what they’re building.

One of the many reasons why I enjoy working for Blackboard is because of its mission. Who doesn’t want to be part of a company that seeks to better the education experience? The work is fulfilling and challenging. But over a year ago I found myself asking the existential question: is my work making a difference?

Business experts like Jack Welch or the late Peter Drucker might tell me that I need to have a set of objectives, values, and/or principles that can help define what it means for me to make a difference at Blackboard. With this in mind, I set out to work with my User Experience (UX) team to identify some principles. Our UX team has a variety of roles – content design, instructional design, product design, and user interface design. What ties these varied roles together? Well, in our own ways, we seek to build quality products to enhance our customers’ teaching and learning experiences.

But what does it mean to design a quality experience, and do the people who design and build product features have a shared understanding of what this means? When testing our designs with users, one of the tools we use asks participants to choose five descriptive words that exemplify their experience with the feature tested. We took these positive words and conducted a card sort among team members. That is, we asked everyone on the team to take these thirty adjectives and place them into logical groupings. What we came up with were five groupings which formed the five principles we use today: reliable, useful, delightful, engaging, and simple.

What do we do with these words? Well, that’s the fun part. Because the UX team works with a diverse set of stakeholders, including both colleagues and customers, we seek to measure our designs against these principles. How do we do it? Well, we get feedback a few ways. Internally, when project teams discuss new features, we ask folks to define what each principle means for a given feature or target user. For instance, our content and instructional design teams created a rubric where they rate how well the documentation they create meets these principles. Then they use a peer review process to determine how well they meet these principles.

The use of these principles has also impacted our conversations. It’s been refreshing to hear stories of our engineers speaking to their team saying, “This (feature) is just not delightful enough.”

We also involve our customers. When we conduct research activities, such as usability tests, we ask participants to rate to what extent the tested features met each design principle.

We’ve been getting some great data that we can act on, but we still have some work to do. We know there are some areas of the product where we have hit a homerun, and others where we have work to do in order to stack up against these principles. But at the end of the day, we are committed to bring our customers a teaching and learning experience that is reliable, useful, delightful, engaging, and simple.

I’ll be speaking about Blackboard’s design principles with a colleague at this year’s Information Architecture Summit in Denver. Be sure to attend!

Tags: [Blackboard, Education, design principles, educational technology,Partial Recall]