What qualities do the best UX professionals have?
Humility.
You must be humble enough to recognize your own human limitations,
including the cognitive biases that you bring to the table. You must be
humble enough to recognize the best idea whether it is your own or
someone else’s. You must be humble enough to learn from subject matter
experts or users or business stakeholders. You must be humble enough to
take constructive criticism without taking it personally. And you must
be humble enough to understand where your strengths end and those of
your team begin.
How would you describe your user experience design philosophy in one sentence?
The best thing about users is they eventually all die. Users come to a design with certain expectations, until they don’t anymore.
Good design is invisible. If a design draws focus to itself, instead of the users’ objective, it is not a good design.
Risk averse companies produce crap.
Design is not immune to Sturgeon’s Law. Sturgeon’s Law: 99% of everything is crap. How do you prevent your design from being in that 99%?
What qualities do the best UX professionals have?
Dan SafferThe ability to quickly see to the actual problem, not just the issues that result from that problem.The ability to visualize that problem.The ability to generate multiple solutions to the problem, then discuss the pros and cons of each.The a…
What is the difference between information architecture and user experience design?
Information Architecture is a component of User Experience Design. IA is focused on the organization and “findability” of content which are important elements of designing the overall user experience.
What are the differences between UX, Interaction, UI and graphic/visual designers? Are these distinctions helpful or damaging to our field?
The new term going forward is likely to be Product Designer.
If you want to qualify it, you could say Digital Product Designer, but since nearly everything we make and buy in the future will have some sort of technology and code component, that is probably redundant.
I’ve renamed my team to the Product Design team and moved all their titles to product designers, and many other tech companies are now making that transition as well. The Facebook design team call themselves product designers, and many new startups and VCs are asking for product design. It’s a term that is better suited than UX, UI, UED, IA or IxD inside the corporate structure, and is a term that requires the designer to be focused and held accountable on the thing that they make: a product. It’s a term that also allows one to be multi-skilled or multi-faceted for their design work, so it creates a nice transition path for those whose skills may have been too siloed or walled off over the past decade. And yet the term is forgiving enough to not require those skills today while still being able to evolve as time moves on and people get better at this thing we call design.
It puts the designer on par with product managers as well for those in larger corporations, and while a lot of people say engineering or development, they really mean product engineering or product development, so it levels the playing field for designers in that context as well.
It allows business folks and recruiters to easily understand what you do while being broad enough to mean you can make something like software apps for desktop or mobile, design the Kinect, or build something like a robotic vacuum cleaner.
People get products, and in the end, product designers will be beholden to businesses in the same way that graphic designers are beholden to advertising. Our jobs exist to make money, and we exist in a corporate or capitalist environment. Otherwise we’d simply be artists.
What is the most designer-friendly and intuitive wireframing and/or UX app?
Andrew PetersNEW ANSWERSketch!Bohemian Coding – Sketch 3….OLD ANSWER: ADOBE FIREWORKS – without a doubt is the best wireframe and prototype design app. Unlike all the other tools, it was designed specifically for screen design and prototyping. It is…
What is the most designer-friendly and intuitive wireframing and/or UX app?
Mark LittlewoodBalsamiq just rocks. Anything more polished or complicated just seems to be a waste of focused effort – why spend time polishing something that is never going to be used. Spend the extra resource making real products.See Questions On Quora
What is the most designer-friendly and intuitive wireframing and/or UX app?
Omnigraffle, because it’s the one that gives a huge amount of tools in a very efficient, fast and cost-effective package, with an impressive flexibility:
- You can use it for IA
- You can use it for Wireframes, from high-level to detailed ones
- You can use it for prototypes
- You can use it for presentations
- You can use it to draw diagrams and graphs
- You can import seamlessly data into Keynote
- You can export do clickable PDF
- You can export to hierarchic HTML (and then you can add note-taking javascript)
- You can build your shapes, patterns, stencils
- You can use it to build any PDF
Basically, any User Experience Designer or Interaction Designer need is covered with just one tool. 😉
However, even if I usually suggest this to every UXD/IxD, sometimes other tools are better for the environment they are put in:
- Balsamiq: great for collaboration and integration of early prototypes, it’s harder to go into details
- Axure: great for quick sketches, it’s harder to build custom interfaces outside the “normal” widgets
- Keynote: very effective for visuals and interactive demos, it’s harder when you need to move on from its constraints and you need to keep somewhere the stencils you keep using
- HTML/CSS: very effective when there’s a strong knowledge of programming within the team, it’s slower than a proper prototyping/wireframing tool when comparing two experts head-to-head
- Illustrator: great for its flexibility, but it’s harder when you need to create long and exhaustive documents.
- Fireworks: excellent tool for moving from prototype to visual, works marvels if the same person is doing these two phases, good support for symbols abstraction, adherent to the Adobe UI, it a little complex exactly because it covers a wide range of tasks and has the risk of making “too good” visuals.
Each one of these tools is usually preferred to Omnigraffle when there’s already some kind of proficiency: if you already know a software, you usually work in that software.
I’d however suggest to any UX designer to get skilled in Omnigraffle too (and maybe a couple more) to have always the best alternative. 😉
What books can help me become well versed in UI, UX and usability standards?
Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think” (http://amzn.to/dOHEfI) and Donald Norman’s “The Design of Everyday Things” (http://amzn.to/ertWm7) are the two best books to start with in my opinion. Both have reached ‘required reading’ status within the usability and UX fields.
What’s the best way to recruit great UI/UX designers to an enterprise software startup?
For the last 5 years, I’ve been working at Salesforce.com as a designer and design manager. In that time, our team has grown from 8 UX people to nearly 40 highly qualified and highly productive UX professionals. There are several factors that I believe are key to attracting great designers in the enterprise space:
- Find designers that thrive on challenging design problems. Enterprise software offers a cornucopia of complex problems to solve.
- Create a collaborative atmosphere where designers can learn from each other and where they play a significant role in the product development lifecycle from product definition through to production.
- Seek out recent graduates from top schools. We have had great candidates from CMU, Stanford and Berkeley. Consider taking on summer interns to help develop a relationship with the school and its students.
- Don’t settle for “B” players. Top talent attracts top talent. Keep your standards high and don’t compromise.
- Ship great products often! Great designers want to build a portfolio of work that actually made it to market. Too many enterprise companies have release cycles measured in years, not weeks or months.
These are just a few of the things that I think help Salesforce.com attract great UX talent. There are many more factors such as company culture, being a leader in your space, and having a clear company objective that also play a big part in attracting top talent. Best of luck to you.