Sometimes the form doesn’t follow function and usability must be sacrificed for the sake of beautiful design and business goals. The iPhone is an example.
Over the last several years, entry-level UX salaries have dropped, while pay for experienced user experience staff has been more stable. (Updated to 2019.)
To develop UX insights and skills, define how many hours you should spend observing actual user behavior each year. Junior staff need more hours; senior people can get by with fewer annual user-exposure hours.
Not every design and content change generates immediate or significant increases in conversion rates, but they may affect conversion rates in the long run.
Google Analytics is filled with very useful information for UX Strategists defining a baseline and tracking trends in order to define goals, strategies, and concepts for a brighter tomorrow.
Across a thousand UX professionals we found high job satisfaction and extreme diversity in terms of hugely varying educational background, 210 job titles, and wide-ranging work roles and activities.
Quality assurance impacts the user experience: when things don’t work, users question their understanding and develop superstitions and inefficient workarounds.
Enemies of usability claim that because 'the experts disagree,' they can safely ignore user advocates' expertise and run with whatever design they personally prefer.
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.
Having a specialized usability person is best, but smaller design teams can still benefit when designers do their own user testing and other usability work.
Having a good designer doesn't eliminate the need for a systematic usability process. Risk reduction and quality improvement both require user testing and other usability methods.
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 evangelism strategies that help a usability group get established in a company are different from the ones needed to create a full-fledged usability culture.
Yes, it is possible for white-collar workers to work smarter and become more productive. While intranet usability provides substantial initial gains, workflow usability can go much further and will save millions of jobs.
Better prioritization, fewer interruptions, and concentrated information that's easy to find and manage helps people become more productive and stop wasting their colleagues' time.
On average across many test tasks, users fail 35% of the time when using websites. This is 100,000 times worse than six sigma's requirement, but Web usability can still benefit from a six sigma quality approach.
Usability improvements can save time-on-task, but critics argue that this is not the same as saving money. Others worry that productivity gains cause unemployment. Neither is correct: usable design saves money and saves jobs.
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.
Dual career ladders are important in user experience. Don't force talented UX professionals to become managers if their growth path would instead benefit from focusing on UX craft.
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.
At the beginning of a new project, identify the level of UX effort needed, and the key deliverables you aim to produce. Identify known and missing knowledge about users and tasks to uncover gaps before they bite you.
When stakeholders observe user research sessions, the credibility and acceptance of findings will increase. Since they are busy, make it easy to participate and work on increasing the value they get out of going.
We investigated current trends in design-team ratios, specifically: What's the typical number of designers and researchers in an organization relative to the number of developers?
UX professionals should engage in all Scrum ceremonies. Here are tips for what UX should contribute to stand-ups, backlog refinement, sprint planning, sprint review, and retrospectives.
The user experience field is plagued by vocabulary inflation: repeatedly replacing well-known terminology with new fancy words that cause miscommunication.
Advice on how to balance breadth and depth of skill within the many different subdisciplines of the user experience profession. You can't be great at everything, so how do you choose where to specialize in your UX career?
At the Virtual UX Conference, Jakob Nielsen was asked whether it's best for a UX professional's career to seek a management role or to pursue deeper and stronger levels of expertise.
We asked a group of user experience professionals what makes for efficient UX leadership in their experience. Answers differed, but included a lot of soft skills.
After each sprint, the team should have a retrospective session to identify what went well or not so well. The sailboat metaphor is a nice way to structure such retrospectives.
Great design doesn't just happen. Rather, the organization must build 6 pillars that carry UX to success: capabilities, executive support, teams, resources, process, and schedule.
UX workshops can drive projects forward and build consensus, but are only a valuable use of time when the agenda is defined from the goals you want to achieve. Here's a 3-step process for designing a useful workshop agenda in UX projects.
Create a team mission statement collaboratively with your team. Make sure everybody understands what a mission statement is and abstract the core purpose and value of your team by identifying themes in stories of value about your team.
Our UX-maturity model has 6 stages that cover processes, design, research, leadership support, and longevity of UX. Use our quiz to get an idea of your organization’s UX maturity.
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.
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.
Treat your goal to implement DesignOps like a design problem: Collect evidence that demonstrates where the true design-team challenges lie and align DesignOps efforts accordingly.
Our latest research on UX careers looks into specialization, explores unique backgrounds of practitioners entering the field, and details the skills and responsibilities needed to work in UX today.
Because the field is being defined in real time, practitioners often have questions about what Design Operations means, and how to establish DesignOps practices.
UX practitioners associate the term “service blueprinting” with an artifact, framework, or collaborative tool. Those surveyed used service blueprints early on or near the end of the product-design lifecycle.
As part of an Agile team, UX professionals should participate in all Scrum ceremonies in order to maintain open communication, influence product success, and productively contribute to the team.
Retrospectives allow design teams to reflect on their work process and discuss what went well and what needs to be improved. These learnings can be translated into an action plan for future work.
