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Tag: Advice

Posted
March 5, 2018
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Advice, User Experiences
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Prototyping Mistakes

A prototyping tool

I just published a new article on UXmatters, Avoiding Common Prototyping Mistakes. This topic came from my repeated experience making these mistakes when prototyping. There are so many great, new prototyping tools out there. It seems new tools are popping up every week.

The great thing about these new prototyping tools is that they make it so easy to create realistic looking and interactive prototypes. However, the problem is that it’s very easy to get carried away by trying to show too much in the prototype. You think, “I’ll show how this works. Well then I guess I might as well show this too.” The next thing you know, you’ve spent hours creating something really impressive but really complicated.

In this article I discuss and provide solutions for these six prototyping problems:

  • Jumping too soon into prototyping
  • Failing to plan what to prototype
  • Prototyping at the wrong fidelity
  • Getting carried away by creating too much
  • Failure to explain types of prototypes
  • Not creating a guide for navigating the prototype

 

Check out Avoiding Common Prototyping Mistakes on UXmatters.

Posted
January 8, 2018
Category
Advice, Publications, User Experiences
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Tips for Delivering Bad News to Clients

Ugly software interface

Your Baby is Ugly!

That’s the title of the article I just published on UXmatters,  in which I give advice on how to soften the blow of delivering bad news to clients. Let’s face it, when we perform an expert evaluation, usability testing, or user research on an existing product – most of what we find is problems with the current product. Clients don’t pay us to tell them how great their products are. If they’ve hired us, it’s to find problems that can be fixed. But there are ways to make it easier to deliver bad news. In this article I provide the following advice:

  • Get the stakeholders to admit that it’s ugly first
  • Get everyone to buy into your research methods upfront
  • Encourage stakeholders to observe the research
  • Blame the bad news on the participants
  • Back up your findings with metrics
  • Present recordings and quotations
  • Don’t beat your audience over the head
  • Emphasize your expertise
  • Back up your findings with examples of best practices
  • Show your stakeholders they’re not alone
  • Position it as providing recommendations, not pointing out problems
  • Mention the positive aspects too
  • Deliver your findings in person
  • Prioritize the problems they should solve
  • Provide a plan for addressing the problems

You can find more details about this advice in my latest article, Your Baby is Ugly.

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