Chapter II, 31st July 2010 - 6th August 2010
Guidance on Style Guides: Lessons Learned
When defining the UX of a software product, stopping at wireframes or graphical mockups is not enough. Content is King. Having a great UI with poor, inappropriate content, designed UXs will fail miserably. Extensibility is Desired. Especially on the Web side, the extremely dynamic growth of software implies extending UIs to cope with new features.
Hence, Style Guides come to help maintaining consistency after UX design. In this article on the STC Usability SIG Newsletter discusses some key points to be taken when creating a Style Guide.
Complementarily to this post, this week's readings also focused on more things about style guides:
- A List Apart's advice on writing style guides, as well as their own style guide;
- BBC's revamp of their CMS;
- UX Booth's guide to content strategy.
Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Disability
Access to information without barriers is a Human Right. Consequently, most countries have legislation to enforce it, ranging from non-discrimination in work, to barrier-free buildings, and accessible Web sites.
This article at the Federal Register delineates the strategy for updating USA's laws on this subject, specifically centred on how to legislate the requirement for Websites that provide information and services to the public.
One of the biggest eye-openers in the proposal is that they are aiming not just to governmental agencies and offices, but also at enforcing accessibility on privately-owned services that provide public services, such as online shopping.
I really really wish that this kind of hands-on governmental initiatives are pushed forward and enforced throughout the world.
Micro-Interactions vs. Macro-Interactions
A rogue blog post discussing a particularly interesting aspect of UX: how user gratification is reached by taking into account the macro and the micro in available interactions.
Markus delves into discussing several macro properties of UIs, such as consistency among screens (or pages), among navigation, etc., by means of task analysis, wireframing, information architecture, and other common practices of the User Experience Design process. So far so good.
But he correctly points out that, despite of the macro, the details of the micro are oft left out of UxD. I agree with him when he states that describing micro interactions, such as widgets' behaviours, are really difficult to attain with wireframes, storyboards, or even textual descriptions. His proposal of the micro is to delve into small usable prototypes which can be interacted with.
The gist that comes from this post: It's all in the details.
Five Indispensable Skills for UX Mastery
The last article I will discuss in this post concerns a UX skill set that every UX designer must learn, master, and bend: sketching, storytelling, critiquing, presenting, and facilitating. Jared goes into detail in his latest instalment at UIE Brain Sparks, for each one of these skills.While a really interesting read, I'd have to add a 6th indispensable skill: writing. It's embedded in the entire UxD process, and as important as sketches. I'd dare to say that acquiring proper writing skills is tougher than four of the five original skills. Mastering the presenting skill is probably the toughest of all, since it encompasses a bit of all other skills, as well as the writing one.
Still, all of them come from practicing, reading, thinking, and willing to learn. In this spirit, here's two more articles related to these questions:
- Does Language Influence Culture? This provocative article from the WSJ discusses the profound issues of language and culture, and how they are intertwined. It is a must read, if you do user research, especially when cross-cultural;
- How to Read Body Language. This article at wikiHow centres on learning to understand people just by watching them (both actively and passively). These techniques are really fashionable now due to the Lie to me TV series, but they do oft make different in UX, particularly when facilitating in user interviews and usability tests: the body speaks more truths than what the user says.
(that's it for now. next week I'll definitely have more to share.)
