December 08, 2009
Posted in Work — no comments.
After working with several different clients from different countries, I’ve learned something very valuable. Each one of them was “addicted” somehow because of past projects, and you have to deal with it to achieve painless results. There is two situations that can happen often when working with this kind of client, (1) project’s beginning – easy to introduce your work process and best practices; (2) in the middle of the project – in my opinion the hardest way to change client’s mind about your work.
The Achilles’ heel
In most cases clients don’t have the proper knowledge about what you’re doing, or how it’s supposed to be done, they only expect good results within the schedule. In other cases, clients give you “opinions” and them expect to be correct about it.
I really think that this button should be in another place, I don’t like where it is and my associates are telling me that we should move it around.
A common phrase from a client.
Even if you have done a research, after meetings and meetings about usability and information flow, you think “How call I explain them why the button cannot be moved around”? Sometimes that isn’t a easy job to do.
Dealing with client’s opinion
In that case, the best thing to do is show clients all your research and notes about how you and your team came up with that result, the button position. If you have an usability test, for example, show them the recorded sessions, the participants opinions and progression, so you can defend your decisions.
Let’s say you don’t have a material to show clients, a good thing to do in this situation is a quick and simple “usability test”. Do a couple tests with them always defending your position. Let the clients feel like a user navigating through the web site and show them possible actions that most of users would do. That way they will noticed how things work in a different point of view.
This is only one of several situations that you can find during work. Defend your opinions with concrete materials and research results. Clients like to see things, not just hear them. Things like visual materials, flows, sketches, videos are great to assist you when defending your ideas.
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December 02, 2009
Posted in Book Review, Prototyping — no comments.
For the first time I could grab my hands on something really useful, a guide that helps you from scratch to a good level of knowledge and perspective. This book is for everyone, designers, developers, managers, and I even think clients should read it too. It is easy and fast to read. With its real case studies, you can feel how prototyping can really help you to reduce time, save money and do the right thing.
“Prototyping – A Practitioner’s Guide” book written by Todd Zaki Warfel is intelligently organized into three main sections.
- Section One theory and best practices of prototyping.
- Section Two method of prototyping.
- Section Three testing your prototyping.
Theory and best practices of prototyping
This is the most important section of this book in my opinion. If you don’t have any knowledge making prototypes or if this is your main responsibility at work, both will work for you.
Todd starts his book with the most important topic everyone should now, Chapter One – The Value of Prototyping. An amazing chapter that introduces how important prototyping is and what it can do for you, for your team, and for your client. And there is more, he tells you how to sell prototyping internally for your boss or client, perfect approach!
Next, two topics you can never forget, Prototyping Process and Guiding Principles. I can ensure you, as Todd does, if you apply these two topics into your prototyping life, things will be much easier, healthier, and less painful.
In Todd’s process you will notice that he emphasizes sketching all the time, and I have to agree with him. After I read the book, I’ll start my projects always with a simple sketch. Why? Because it saves a lot of time, effort while trying to explain features, reduce misinterpretation, and my favorite, it is free, everyone can use it, and it can be done everywhere you like.
After you managed the Prototyping Process it is time for some principles. These principles helps you to understand your audience, plan and create prototypes – that can be a paper prototype, a HTML prototype, or even a hi-fi Axure prototype. These principles are a good way for effective prototyping and avoid mistakes in the prototyping process.
Method of Prototyping
Now that Todd gives you the basis to understand what a prototype is and why you should do them, it is time to get your hands dirty and play with some sketches.
In this book, you will find six chapters describing different methods of prototyping. Each chapter shows strengths, weaknesses, how to prototype with each method, and additional resources like stencils for applications and useful links.
At the beginning of each chapter, there is a matrix which will help you evaluate the tool in question with several different methods and stages of prototyping. This is a really useful tool, it helps you to quickly choose what tool do you need for a given step of your work.
Todd covers the following tools:
- Paper prototyping
- PowerPoint and Keynote
- Visio
- Fireworks
- Axure RP Pro
- HTML
Testing your prototype
After you’ve learned what a prototype is, when to use it and to whom do it, how to sell to your boss and client, choose what tool suits you and your audience best, it is time to test them with real the people, the participants.
Todd describes a little about usability tests and how to take advantage of it after you are done with the prototyping phase. He also shows some common mistakes while performing usability tests with solutions to each one of them.
I’ve learned a lot from this last section of the book. Testing prototypes is not as easy as I thought it might be, you have to be carefully when choosing participants and creating a process to make the tests. Yes, usability test is not an event, it is a process.
Make use of tools like screen recording, audio and video recording. These are very useful tools for reviewing your notes and make sure to not miss any details while doing a usability test.
Additional resources
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December 01, 2009
Posted in Off Topic — one comment.
December, holiday season, parties, gifts, a new year is coming up, so why not a fresh new start here as well? That’s what I did.
When I first came up with this blog, my intention was to write about Information Architecture and Web Developing, and still is. But, as usual, my time to write was short and taken by projects and full time job. Fortunately (or not), I’m now a full time freelance and have the properly time to write here.
The first thing I did: a new WordPress template, tested and well coded. If you didn’t have the chance to see the first one, and I’m glad if you didn’t, you’re not missing anything. I want to make it simple, and easy to read, full customized and optimized for both web and mobile. I’m still working in the mobile version, so be patient.
I have other projects, like fluidIA and couple of secret ones. To give you a little taste of them, it is a simple, yet useful, WordPress plugin, a iPhone application and a rapid prototyping framework.
Hope you liked the new template, feel free to leave your thoughts about it.
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November 05, 2009
Posted in Information Architecture, User Interface — one comment.
I just received the invite to try the new orkut interface, and decided to write something about it since my blog’s focus is Information Architecture.
At first view, I didn’t felt a big change. The colors are the same, the structure changed a little bit, and everything is where it was before. That is something I like and dislike. Some of the changes and user interactions in the new orkut are very similar to Facebook, like invite friends to an application or even send them invites to try the new orkut.
Check out the major differences between the new orkut and the old one.
The user interface changes
The first thing I noticed is that orkut added the Google bar at the top, with the links to “Web”, “Maps”, “News”, “Groups” and more. This is nice, now I feel that I’m using a Google service. And also there is a new, easy, and fast way to access my orkut Settings. The old interface simply added it way down in the left column, very hard to find.
I loved the way they fixed orkut’s bar, now I can quickly find my Scraps, Photos and Videos with just a mouseover on the logo. And finally I have freedom with a bigger search input and it is also possible to search within orkut and the web – using the Google Search service of course.
It’s possible to change colors, tell what I’m up to, see suggested friends by orkut, check what’s new within my profile and follow my friend updates. Nothing new so far.
User interactions and Information Architecture
The first feature I used was “Friend suggestions by orkut”, it’s a cool way to find friends within your network without searching for them all the time. And here is the first big issue: I sent a request to friend and nothing happened. Weird. After some clicks I realized that the friend I was trying to add had reached his friends limit, but where is the error message?
OMG, something is really wrong here. I lose a few seconds trying to find the error message, and it was all the time at the top, and not next to the add friend action so I can quickly know what is going on. Weird…
Now my friend requests and testimonials are hidden in the “What’s new” section, with some ambiguous actions. To check a sent testimonial I can click on “{friend’s name} wrote you a testimonial” or in the word “view”, they do the same thing, opens the testimonial. Do I really need two ways to see the testimonial? I don’t think so.
So that’s the quick look into the new orkut interface. Please let me know what do you think about the changes.
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