10 ways to bake UX into your company culture
With all the talk about UX these days, it's sometimes easy to get it confused with user-interface (UI) design. For example, someone might say, "Hey, I like X's website better than Y's because it has a better UX". Translation: 'X's website is more visually attractive'.
But here's an important point to consider: User-Experience is everything about your product/brand that a user experiences.
That might seem really obvious and not-too-insightful. Here's what I really mean by it; Your Chief Financial Officer doesn't impact UX whatsoever because customers generally has no idea what the financial status of a company is (excluding publicly traded companies, of course) and even if they do it has to be very poor for it to affect their choice to use your product.
This is what really goes into a user-experience. And it can't be done by one person, your entire team has to live and breath UX. This post isn't meant to explain UX methods, like research or testing. Instead, it's meant to discuss all of the different components of a company that affect the experience a user has with your product.
We work with a lot of companies and organizations at Headspace. For many of them, the process goes like this: Sadly, this is the way economics work for these organizations. But there's a better way. Instead of blowing your entire budget on just the website relaunch, spend 50% of it. Then spread the other 50% evenly across the next 3 years so that by the time the 3 years are up, your website isn't in too bad shape. This leaves many website owners left wondering: What the heck do I do after the website is launched? Here's a check list: There's a ton of stuff you can be measuring every day or every week. Google Analytics contains a wealth of information about your website traffic. Don't just focus on traffic alone, although this is an indicator of how your website is performing. Look at…
I gave an hour presentation at the Professional Development Summit on April 29th regarding UX design, and just wanted to share the presentation for all those interested. Enjoy and leave any questions or comments below!
It's with great sadness we announce the departure of Amy Wheaton from the Headspace team, who is moving on to a client-side role with Ascenta to drive their internet marketing. Amy was our first non-geek hire at Headspace, taking the account director role back in the spring of 2010. She helped get our client-services side up-to-snuff providing project and account management services for our clients. In addition to her outstanding copywriting and research skills, we'll miss her biting sarcasm and sense of humour. We wish Amy the best of luck in her new position! Below are some random musings from our team on their favourite Amy memories, or amories. Note: Finding ones I can actually publish was difficult, so they are kept intentionally vague. "her encounter with 'no pants man' and other street life of Alderney" Nick "that she outranked me for filthiest mind in the office (and apparently won that coveted prize in school)" Kyle "Her use of the office champagne room" Brian "When she called everyone 'dog faces'" The following post is guest content provided by the team at Software Advice, who hosted a recent discussion with Lean Analytics author Alistair Croll at SXSW in Austin. When launching a new company or marketing campaign, your major concern shouldn't bewhether or not you can execute on the plan. It should be whether the idea is worth investing in at all. This was the major theme behind a discussion my company hosted recently with “Lean Analytics” author Alistair Croll. He suggests that instead of believing the mantra “if you build it, they will come,” companies should instead say, “if they would come, you should build it.” Fortunately, today we have access to enormous amounts of behavioral data that can answer this latter assertion. I regularly review and write about technology that analyzes such data from social media, so I wanted to know more about strategizing around such insights. We shot the video during this year's SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. Croll was in town leading a workshop called “Advanced Social Media Monitoring.” We discussed how companies can use data to test the riskiest…
I was recently asked by an interviewee what I think makes a good developer great. It's an interesting question, because since I'm only a pseudo-developer, what gives me the right to answer that question? Well, the fact that I hire and employ developers means that I need to be able to recognize talent, as well as attract and retain great developers, not just good ones. So without further ado, here is my list of eight qualities I look for in a developer: Many people think developers are a nerdy bunch whose idea of creativity is making clever Star Wars puns in place of lorum ipsum text when they are adding placeholder copy to a website.…
We've been beefing up our scoping process at Headspace to make sure that when we provide a quote on a new project, it's as accurate as possible from the initial estimate. By spending more time and energy upfront, we're hoping to avoid the awkwardness of addendums and budget discussions midstream as we work through a site design or app build. There is nothing - NOTHING - more uncomfortable to discuss than money, and even more so when you're in the depths of a project, or almost finished, and you have to go back to the client to let them know you'll need additional budget to finish the job. So many factors can cause a project to go over budget - scope creep, additional feature or functionality requests, a full moon. Sometimes it's completely unavoidable. But it's still never a fun topic to bring up to any client. Every agency has a different approach when it comes to billing. Some lowball their initial estimate to get clients in the door and then issue addendums aplenty during the process. Some mark up estimates like crazy, adding contingency buffers like they're going out of style,…
Kickoff meetings with our clients are crucial for helping us get to know each other. They get to meet the team that will be working on their new website, app, or strategy. We get an in-depth view of their business, their website objectives, and perhaps most importantly, how they want their brand to be portrayed. We always like to ask clients to put a face on their brand, a personality. We ask them things like: Putting a face on your brand - not your customers or your target market, but your actual brand - is an interesting exercise. So often, clients will say that their brand is cool, casual, friendly, and approachable. And then we look at their current website, advertising materials, and collateral they've been using, and often discover that it's none of those things. No…
When we sit with a new client to discuss what they want their website to look like, the two adjectives we hear most often are "clean and simple". This isn't a shocker. I don't think too many clients are on the hunt for "messy and cluttered". But interestingly, during the design process, what starts off as "clean and simple" can quickly veer into cluttered territory - and it can be hard to pull a site back from the precipice of disaster once that line has been crossed. Clean and simple does not mean easy. In fact, a truly clean design can be the hardest kind to maintain. It's like buying white furniture. That white couch looks gorgeous in the showroom, doesn't it? Bring it home to your kids and your dog and your coffee-drinking self, and before you know it, it's unrecognizable. So, you're getting ready to build a website. You have a ton of information to share but you really want it to be clean and simple. How do you do both? A good web design and development studio will be able to suggest some solutions for you, but here are a couple of…
Many business owners and marketing professionals are used to hearing the term "UX" (short for User Experience) thrown around a lot in recent years. Some may think it's just an industry buzzword with no real meaning. Well, I can say it's not. Here's all you need to know to get the gist of UX: User Experience Design is not web design or usability. It's not information architecture, nor is it business and content strategy…it's all of those things combined. UX takes into account a user's total experience when they interact with your product or brand. It is not strictly tied to websites - it could also apply to a storefront or exhibition. However, it's most commonly linked with interacting with digital experiences. There are several sub-disciplines of UX, basically split into two main categories: UX Strategy and UX Design. Image Credit: Taken from Killer UX Design by Sitepoint UX Strategy is all about the very high-level aspects of a project. It asks questions like:
I launched my new site, now what?
Measure
Presentation on User Centric Design from PD Summit
Farewell, Ames
Guest Post: Lean Analytics - Video Chat with Alastair Croll
8 ways good developers become great
Now, I recognize that some developers just have the gift to create mind-bending technology and usually end up being employed by Google, Facebook or Apple. No matter how good I think I am at something, I will always find others who are better, who just have "it". So my list is not taking into account technical genius, but rather qualities that any working professional can work towards improving. 1. Be creative
Measure twice, cut once
What does your brand really say?
Clean and simple.
UX Design - a real thing or just a pretentious buzzword?
Questions we ask