Roadmaps cover future work and vision, but this can be done at different scopes, from everything related to the product to only the UX activities and priorities, possibly narrowed to a sub-specialty of UX.
A roadmap documents upcoming and future priorities for your user experience. The process starts with gathering goals, proceeds through the creation and sharing of the UX roadmap, and never ends, since the last step is to update.
Research with people who are learning Design Thinking shows that they progress in a nonlinear manner through 4 phases of increasing competency and confidence. Understanding these phases helps both learners and educators/managers.
UX staff can be organized in two ways: centralized or decentralized (or a hybrid). The teams can also report into different parts of the bigger organization. There is currently no single best practice for these team-structure questions.
Collaboratively create a UX roadmap in a workshop setting by guiding participants through activities that familiarize them with the project goals, context, and inputs and that identify key roadmap themes and priorities.
A survey of people in user experience and product management shows that these professionals disagree on who should be responsible for many key tasks, like doing discoveries and early design.
UX professionals often work hard to convince stakeholders to support UX research and design efforts. Recognizing who your key stakeholders are and how they impact your work is the first step to building fruitful stakeholder relationships.
Do AI products have good user experience? Only partly, and to get better, we need to focus AI more on human needs than on what's technically possible. But AI can also help UX professionals do their job better, which will improve usability more widely.
A design system is a set of standards to manage design at scale by reducing redundancy while creating a shared language and visual consistency across pages and channels.
Redesigning a user interface can be done in many smaller incremental releases, or as one big complete redo. Big change is risky, but necessary in 3 cases.
To create a roadmap, inputs are gathered and clustered into themes, then prioritized and visualized. This article covers 6 key steps to roadmapping that can be applied to any scope or industry.
Roadmaps that include UX work can have 3 scopes: product, field, and specialty. Understanding these and their benefits can focus your process, effort, and goals.
Create an aspirational view of the experience users will have with your product, service, or organization in the future. This isn't fluff, but will guide a unified design strategy. Here are 5 steps to creating a UX vision.
Benchmark your UX by first determining appropriate metrics and a study methodology. Then track these metrics across different releases of your product by running studies that follow the same established methodology.
Roadmaps cover future work and vision, but this can be done at different scopes, from everything related to the product to only the UX activities and priorities, possibly narrowed to a sub-specialty of UX.
A roadmap documents upcoming and future priorities for your user experience. The process starts with gathering goals, proceeds through the creation and sharing of the UX roadmap, and never ends, since the last step is to update.
Research with people who are learning Design Thinking shows that they progress in a nonlinear manner through 4 phases of increasing competency and confidence. Understanding these phases helps both learners and educators/managers.
UX staff can be organized in two ways: centralized or decentralized (or a hybrid). The teams can also report into different parts of the bigger organization. There is currently no single best practice for these team-structure questions.
Do AI products have good user experience? Only partly, and to get better, we need to focus AI more on human needs than on what's technically possible. But AI can also help UX professionals do their job better, which will improve usability more widely.
Redesigning a user interface can be done in many smaller incremental releases, or as one big complete redo. Big change is risky, but necessary in 3 cases.
Create an aspirational view of the experience users will have with your product, service, or organization in the future. This isn't fluff, but will guide a unified design strategy. Here are 5 steps to creating a UX vision.
The total customer journey and user experience quality will benefit from considering market research and user research to be highly related, and to integrate the two, instead of keeping different kinds of research teams from collaborating.
At the Virtual UX Conference, Jakob Nielsen answered audience questions on how UX changes with the downturn in the world economy and what new industries will benefit from UX.
How has the field of user experience changed over the last 30 years, how will it continue to change, and what can we expect for the uptake of technology innovations?
Human-centered design has 4 principles: understand the problem, the people, and the system, and do iterative design. But what if you don't have time to do all 4 steps?
Is it possible to do all user-experience work 100% remotely? At the first Virtual UX Conference, Jakob Nielsen answered this question in an audience Q&A session.
If a website or company is big and famous, should you copy their design for your own site? Likely not, because good UX depends on context, and your situation could be quite different than a world-famous company's circumstances.
We asked a group of UX professionals what they think will happen to the field over the next 5 years. Will design get better? Worse? (Nobody thought this.) Or something completely new?
Any time you release a new user interface design, you'll get complaints. This doesn't mean that the new design is worse than the old design; it simply means that it's new, and users don't like to learn different ways of doing things. Tips for reducing change aversion (you can't avoid it completely).
What's worth the most: field studies or user tests? Depends on your company's usability maturity, but user testing is the safe bet if you can do only one thing.
When a multinational company produces a localized country site, usability is often lost. Local advertising agencies design good-looking sites that don't communicate.
User testing on 3 continents confirmed that the main usability guidelines hold worldwide, but many other considerations exist to better support international users.
Although successful websites typically have high usability, average sites can hurt their business by copying design elements that don't work well in other contexts.
Users hate change, so it's usually best to stay with a familiar design and evolve it gradually. In the long run, however, incrementalism eventually destroys cohesiveness, calling for a new UI architecture.
TiVo ran 12 user tests in 12 weeks while designing its new website. As TiVo's experience shows, frequent and regular testing keeps the design usability focused.
Bad content, bad links, bad navigation, bad category pages... which is worst for business? In these examples, bad content takes the prize for costing the company the most money.
The average business metrics improvement after a usability redesign is now 83%. This is substantially less than 6 years ago, but ROI remains high because usability is still cheap relative to gains.
AJAX, rich Internet UIs, mashups, communities, and user-generated content often add more complexity than they're worth. They divert design resources and prove that what's hyped is rarely what's most profitable.
The more engaged users are, the more features an application can sustain. But most users have low commitment -- especially to websites, which must focus on simplicity, rather than features.
Several usability findings lead directly to higher sales and increased customer loyalty. These design tactics should be your first priority when updating your website.
Although the gains don't fall into traditional profit columns, there are clear arguments for improving usability of non-commercial websites and intranets. In one example, a state agency could get an ROI of 22,000% by fixing a basic usability problem.
An organization that reaches the 'managed UX' stage still has far to go to reach UX nirvana. Attaining these higher maturity levels requires many years of effort.
As their UX approach matures, organizations typically progress through the same sequence of stages, from initial hostility to widespread reliance on user research.
The fads and big deals that get the press coverage are not important for running a workhorse website. To serve your customers, it's far better to emphasize simplicity and quality than to chase buzzwords.
Search engines extract too much of the Web's value, leaving too little for the websites that actually create the content. Liberation from search dependency is a strategic imperative for both websites and software vendors.
The Internet is growing at an annualized rate of 18% and now has one billion users. A second billion users will follow in the next ten years, bringing a dramatic change in worldwide usability needs.
