A colleague wrote:

I wanted to ask your advice:

I was giving a user experience (UX) presentation to a higher level manager recently, and talked about the importance of us providing UX Expert support and also providing UX education at a basic level on testing, card sorts, and other techniques.

Then the manager said: “Wait a minute, aren’t providing Expert services and UX education at odds with each other? Is UX something that should be left to the pros, or not? If it’s such a complex field that we need professionals, why are we teaching that anyone can do it? Aren’t we deprofessionalizing the field? And can’t “bad UX” performed by a newbie be WORSE than no UX at all? Should we provide UX education to the pros, and just awareness to everyone else?”

I was caught a little off guard. I’ve always thought that some UX is always better than no UX, and that have people learn the techniques is a great start to getting people to care. But their opinion was—some UX is dangerous in the wrong hands. And we’re undermining ourselves by doing both.

Can you provide UX services and teach at the same time? Or do you need to choose?

My colleague was correct. Some user experience skills are always better than no user experience skills.

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The post Hiring UX Experts Versus Giving Your Team Their Own UX Skills first appeared on UX Central.

My search for a framework for simple design started when I began studying the work of John Maeda, a computer scientist, graphic designer, and former President of Rhode Island School of Design. Maeda’s book The Laws of Simplicity presents ten laws that constitute simplicity, and he expounds on how each law contributes to things feeling simple. Inspired by his work, I took a few of his laws and created a three-step method that you can apply to design thinking. I can only hope that my distillation of his ten laws down to three steps would make him proud.

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The post Simplify Your UX Through Reduction first appeared on UX Central.

During this golden age of design that we are experiencing, it is becoming increasingly important to address such situations. Even though the profession of User Experience is rapidly maturing, many executive sponsors of our efforts still look at User Experience as some sort of magic pixie dust. UX experts come in, sprinkle it about, and all is well. This mentality does not leave a lot of room for UX folks to fail to hit the mark the first time out. Such expectations may be unfair, but more and more, this is becoming the reality. Design, especially Web page design, is now becoming a commodity. Business leaders understand that User Experience is critical, but there is also a growing sense that what we do is totally repeatable.

The challenging opportunity that UX professionals face is to be able to step up and provide real leadership—helping a business group to understand how to take their requirements and transform them not just into an elegant design, but a design that accommodates the way people actually work.

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The post When a Design Does Not Hold Up in Actual Usage first appeared on UX Central.

When you order a short latte with a dollop of whipped cream at a coffeehouse you are customizing based on your tastes. When you tailor an app, program, or anything you are interacting with it to get it just right, you are customizing as well. It can take a while and requires some effort on your part to get it how you want it.

Personalization, on the other hand, is when an app, piece of software, or your favorite music streamer adapts itself based on the knowledge it already has about you, without you having to put much forth much effort at all: it just happens.

The idea behind personalization is to tailor the experience from the moment it begins, whether that’s using an espresso maker, a Jacuzzi, or an app. Indeed, it’s mobile technology that has brought personalization to the fore. When UX customization started on the desktop, there were severe limits with the diversity of customization—frequently put forth by the website itself.

These limitations were stripped away when technologies such as Flash and Ajax burst onto the scene alongside web interfaces that mirrored Graphical User Interface (GUI) APIs of client-based software. The decrease in limitations on customization provided designers with the ability to place limits on the levels of customization themselves. This allowed for the user-initiated modification of interfaces within the shape scheme that adhered to the defined constraints.

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The post Personalization: The Pillar of the Mobile User Experience first appeared on UX Central.

The following experts have contributed answers to this edition of Ask UXmatters:

• Peter Bogaards — Evangelist, Editor, and Coach at Informaat Experience Design
• Pabini Gabriel-Petit — Principal Consultant at Strategic UX; Publisher and Editor in Chief, UXmatters; Founding Director of Interaction Design Association (IxDA); UXmatters columnist
• Cory Lebson — Principal Consultant at Lebsontech; Author of UX Careers Handbook (forthcoming); Past President, User Experience Professionals’ Association (UXPA)
• Gavin Lew — Executive Vice President of User Experience at GfK
• Baruch Sachs — Senior Director, User Experience at Pegasystems; UXmatters columnist
• Whitney Quesenbery — Director of the Center for Civic Design; Consultant at Whitney Interactive Design; Author and Expert at Rosenfeld Media; UXmatters columnist
• Janet M. Six — Principal at Lone Star Interaction Design; UXmatters Managing Editor and columnist

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The post Inspiration for UX Design from the Arts and Sciences first appeared on UX Central.

To understand the whole of a book it is necessary to grasp its individual words and sentences, but those words and sentences only have meaning within the larger context of the book, hence interpretation must be a matter of constant revision: revising one’s sense of the whole as one grasps the individual parts, and revising one’s sense of the parts as the meaning of the whole emerges. – Paul Kidder – Professor of Philosophy in Gadamer for Architects

The process Paul Kidder identifies in Gadamer for Architects is known as the “hermeneutic circle.” Central to this process is understanding both the bigger picture in relation to the details and the details in relation to the bigger picture. This understanding grows and changes as we continue to come across additional details, whether the big picture is a UX project or something as simple as reading a book.

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The post Hermeneutics for Designers first appeared on UX Central.

“A decade-long global decline in productivity growth threatens future competitiveness, profitability, wages, and living standards in both mature and emerging economies,” The Conference Board announced in its 2015 report on global productivity. The report was backed up by analysis from the Wall Street Journal which found productivity in the US had halved between the 1990s and the 2000s.

“A detailed analysis of different metrics since the mid-2000s shows the primary problem with productivity is not inefficient workers,” said Bart van Ark, The Conference Board chief economist. “Rather, companies and countries appear increasingly unable to translate investments in technology and innovation into timely gains in output.”

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The post Is the Internet hurting productivity? first appeared on UX Central.

Buttons work like door knobs. People wouldn’t be able to use doors efficiently if door knobs weren’t placed in a consistent area. But because they are, everyone with a hand can walk through doors without much thought. The placement standard of door knobs across doors creates an unconscious habit in people.

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The post How Button Placement Standards Reinforce User Habits first appeared on UX Central.

If your job depends on getting a definite answer to this question, then you should start using the System Usability Scale.

The System Usability Scale (SUS) was invented by John Brooke who, in 1986, created this ‘quick and dirty’ usability scale to evaluate practically any kind of system.

The SUS has been tried and tested throughout almost 30 years of use, and has proven itself to be a dependable method of evaluating the usability of systems compared to industry standards.

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The post How To Use The System Usability Scale (SUS) To Evaluate The Usability Of Your Website first appeared on UX Central.

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The post Dropdowns Should be the UI of Last Resort first appeared on UX Central.