1. The phrase “user-friendly” is fundamentally meaningless, and allows us to sweep a lot of important things under the rug. Users have particular needs in specific circumstances. How they can meet those needs with the technology needs to be obvious – to *them*.

2. Technology does its best work when it’s organized around what the users will do with it. You can see this dramatically in many government sites. The IRS, for example, has a very nice, complete, list of all the forms you might need to fill out. There’s no navigation for “What forms you need to figure out your income tax” that would take you through the process of determining what forms you need and print them out. Intuit and H&R Block are very grateful for this oversight.

3. When you’re working on the UX of something, you need to remember that these tools are going to *do* something. Those actions, the paths they follow, the effects they have, the time they occupy, are all elements of the Design and must be considered.

4. Make sure you’re solving the right problem. Design with tasks in mind – limit what you can do on any one element to articulate most important aspects, ensure that everything has a call-to-action

5. Impose visual hierarchy – use visual and content contrast to provide scan-ability; solutions should be reviewed in thumbnail versions as well as monochromatic versions to ensure hierarchy is clear.

6. Watch ‘em use it – ask target users to accomplish specific task with think out loud exercises in their context (home, office, etc.), this of course implies that one needs to build some form of prototype.

7. First impressions count but so does the second, third… – make people want to return and design for how that experience should be different. This is where serendipity should be embraced.

8. Deliver an integrated experience – immerse yourself in all the details like email experiences, how search engines see it, etc… but be careful of “edge cases” where doing a few things really well is more important than a lot not well done.
9. It’s never done – iterate, ask for feedback, allow for future generation

10. Users, users, users,… – get outside of your beliefs and be curious about how your users receive, interpret and respond to solutions, but make sure you can identify very specific users. Innovation will come from extreme users but refinement will come from familiar users. In other words: design for everyone is design for no one.

Probably a couple people from management and the marketing department and other stakeholders use it for a while and decide that it’s exactly what they spec’d and it seems really pretty to them.

User Acceptance Testing is usually the opposite of User Experience Strategy.

We’ve always known that a customer’s understanding and reaction is not the same as the business’s. You can’t say “Buy this, it will be really good for P&G if you do.” You have to reach into their minds and tell them why it will benefit *them*. One of the least valued, but most important, aspects of the digital worlds is that it allows multiple viewpoints to find ways to express and to be heard. The more angles you can bring to bear as you create new intersections in that web, the more complete and useful it is to all concerned.

You’re being heavily pursued for a Very Important Position by a company, so you start your research by going to their site to look around. Every click is a surprise and at the end of your exploring, you still aren’t 100% sure what business these people think they’re in. Do you continue talking to them?

Would you hire a salesman who went around with a perpetual scowl on his face, refused to tell prospects what he was selling, didn’t tell people what made your widgets different from and better than all other widgets, or wouldn’t discuss pricing with them? Would you expect such a salesman to perform well?

Bad User Experience drives people away, thinking poorly of you. Good User Experience holds onto them and leads them to think well of you and your company.

Your site is the only face your company has online. Make sure it’s welcoming.

If you want usability information, you must have use. If you want pertinent use, then it must be used by people who you want to use it, under circumstances where their responses are not guided by someone else’s opinions.

These questions are unanswerable precisely because the answer is about the experience. What’s it like to love someone? What’s it like to watch the sun set?

Statistics don’t give us useful information about experience questions. They can show what we did next, what we did before, how we did what we did. They can’t give you any information about why. You may decide you don’t need experience design and sales on your toy store site may skyrocket but it could be because you’re the only online source for Whoopee Super Xmas Toy, and parents don’t care how miserable you make them as long as they can get a WSXT delivered in time. On December 26, your sales will plummet, and you’ll probably write it off to the usual post-Christmas slump. A good experience design could have held on to those customers for you. But the numbers wouldn’t show you why they were still around.

Experience is critical. It will result in good higher numbers of conversions, returns, click-throughs, and so on. But you’re never going to be able to actually get causal data. The best you can do is get correlative data. And it’s easier, cheaper, and more productive to talk to actual customers and people you would expect to be customers. Sit in comfy chairs with one at a time and coffee and pastries and talk to them, just as if they were humans. You’d be amazed what they’ll tell you.

And Experience Design isn’t an event. Even if you do break it into process elements, it happens repeatedly throughout the course of development. You can’t do a study before you start and build a product relying on those results and say you’ve incorporated user-centered design principles. You can’t do a testing cycle at the end of development and call it UX. Just like good development, UX is iterative.

Of course, you don’t have to do any of this. Unless you need customers.

So now there’s another frontier in the quest to change the world. The Web is still a tool that most people and businesses think is defined by engineering and art. There are many adjunct tools available because of it, but way too often, we miss the central piece: the user, the customer, the market, the person. The Web is above all a form of communication. That’s why it’s called a medium. And communication only happens on the receiving end. On the sending end, it’s just noise. If you want to make a point and reach your audience, you need to pay attention to your rhetoric, and electronic rhetoric is called User Experience.

Well, not so much, no. Heuristic Reviews are technically a check to see if a site conforms to the rules that have been developed for the best way to do things in any field. In UX, heuristics include things like consistent navigation, findable information, obvious paths, clear labelling, and the like. There are many lists available of the heuristics in the field, you could probably do a heuristic review yourself, if it was really all you needed.

Usually, that isn’t what you need. You need an expert review. What does an expert give you that’s more than knowing the rules? An expert knows when and how rules don’t apply. Experts can determine situations in which adhering to the heuristics will actually not serve you or your business as well as a little judicious rule breaking.

Experts know that heuristics are a starting point, and experience and insight are critical for the best outcome.

If you want a real review with important information and not just a checklist, get an expert.