Don’t call them users!

When we talk about creating Web sites and online experiences, we talk about users — as in, user experience, usability, user-focused design. The emergence of an entire discipline focused on end users has essentially revolutionized the Web industry (even though better serving your audience with intuitive content and design, if you really think about it, seems like a “no-duh”).

But there’s a debate simmering in the online and software communities about whom we as user experience professionals are really serving. It’s not really about who they are, but about what we call them. A number of influential people in the profession have spoken out (some vehemently) about dropping the word “user” when we think about and speak about … well, about the consumers of our work.

What’s in a word?

It seems nit-picky, but people are passionate about the word choice. Some argue that “user” bears too much resemblance to the term describing drug addicts. Others argue that it doesn’t do justice to who the person on the other side of the computer screen really is, and what he or she is out to accomplish when interacting with a site.

“The idea to design for a ‘user’ is so reductive and limiting that I think we should rid it … from our vocabulary and design practices forever!” says Pietro Turi, author of the site iamnotauser.com.

The problem is that “user” has become the anonymous and generic word for a faceless, nameless avatar of a person. A “user persona” is a made-up description of some fictional person we invent to try to get in the minds of people who use the sites we create. A “user account” is a bunch of numbers and gobbled code managed impersonally by an IT guy who doesn’t care about the frustrated flesh-and-blood having a breakdown in some cubicle somewhere because she can’t remember her password. (You might have guessed that the latter bears an uncanny resemblance to me.)

I’m fascinated by this debate as someone who is a linguist at heart and a writer by craft. I spend my days fighting for the honor of words endangered by misuse and disrespect. And I agree that we as Web experience designers and strategists must be deliberate about everything we do — including how we refer to the people we serve, if we really care about serving them with excellence.

Designing for earthlings

It’s difficult to find an alternative word that can serve as the all-encompassing description of our audience the way that “user” does. “User” reminds us that the person is more than a reader, more than a viewer. He or she can be a customer, a reader, a game-player, a journalist looking for more information. Depending on which discipline they’re most interested in, different experts have suggested substitutes — content people prefer “readers,” customer experience specialists advocate for “customer.” But therein lies one of the biggest challenges we face in Web: that specialists think and operate in silos, concerned with their own piece of the pie. UX specialists were meant to be the point of connection for everyone — the nucleus that holds everyone together to think about the cohesive experience of the — who are those people again?

There is a movement to switch to that very term: people. We design (and write) for people! Which we do … except, is the term descriptive enough? Do we design and write for just people, or for people who are information seekers and performers-of-tasks, people who are actively engaged in making our content and tools work for them?

I have been more mindful of avoiding the generic and careless term “user” as I map out strategies for successful content and design with my clients. Where possible I talk about “customers” (even when the audience may not yet be customers — I like to be aspirational). When I know the people we’re specifically creating sites for (as I often do in the B2B world), I call them that: the jewelers, the pharmacists, the employees.

Officially I am not taking a stand for or against “users.” But I do strive to keep in mind that these are real people, with real problems. They will each experience the site or application in a different way, based on their individual histories and perspectives. We can generalize but should never be dismissive of this fact: that our “users” are doing more than using. They’re learning, absorbing, solving problems, improving their lives. If we can strive for those goals with genuine humans in mind, we’ll transcend the semantics of the word and do our jobs well.

Written on June 21, 2010 by Stacey King Gordon in UX, Web, Web content strategy
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Paris, je t’aime

I not-so-recently returned from the 2010 Content Strategy Forum, the first-ever conference solely dedicated to interactive content strategy, held in Paris, France, April 15-16.

As soon as I saw the notice about Content Strategy Forum last fall I knew I wanted to find a way to attend. I’d recently made the decision to focus the direction of my business on content strategy, making it the basis for all the Web projects I do with my clients, and had planned for 2010 to be the year of immersing myself in the principles and the practice of the discipline. The chance to get in on the ground floor of this conference, network with the growing community, learn best practices, and get inspiration and insights I could take back and apply to my client projects was too good to pass up. Plus, you know, I could write the whole thing off.

I’d also never been to Paris before, and once I decided to attend the conference my husband and I saw it as a chance for our first trip away together since our daughter was born – April in Paris and a little us time. But the day after we arrived, the Iceland volcano blew its top, resulting in an ash cloud that grounded flights for many days and threatened to keep us embedded in Paris and eating crepes (and away from our 3-year-old daughter) for many weeks to come. What ensued was a madcap “Escape from Alcatraz” scenario that involved long lines, poorly spoken French and Spanish, European road food, unspeakably gorgeous countryside, and our eventual departure from Madrid back to the States.

So because of our tardiness and the insanity involved with getting back, I’ve barely had a chance to think much about my experience with the conference until a couple of weeks ago, when I finally revisited my notes in order to prepare for a short recap of the event for the May San Francisco Content Strategy Meetup. I wanted to share a few of the highlights of my two days there.

A conference just for us

I typically attend conferences either to gather news and trends about the industries I’m working in or reporting on (which means I have ended up at plenty of events surrounded by jewelers, hospital administrators and pharmacists). Or, I go to conferences to glean some insight into skills I want to learn or the overall trends of my business, which means I’ve found myself surrounded by interaction designers or Web programmers. I’ve always feel like an impostor at conferences.

I was nearly done with the first day of the conference when the lightning bolt hit me. This was the first conference I’ve ever been to where everybody in the room was just like me. We were doing an exercise that involved wireframing, but in addition to thinking about the user interface design we had to collaborate on where the messaging went on the page. What did we want to communicate to the customer? What did she want to know first, based on her persona and her goals? I looked up to see my small group thinking hard about copy and the order of messaging, and it dawned on me: “This has never happened to me before!”

Spending two days with people all over the world (170 attendees from 18 different countries) who focus every day on Web content was exhilarating to say the least, and worth the trip in itself. I felt much like I suspect the people who attended the very first An Event Apart must have felt — that I was witnessing the seeding of something that would be very important for the future of our industry.

My takeaways

Led by some of the biggest names in the content strategy world, the workshops and sessions covered a lot of territory. Here are a few of the biggest takeaways for me from my two days in Paris.

There’s a strategy to doing the content analysis.
I attended a hands-on workshop about performing the content analysis Thursday morning, led by Rachel Lovinger of Razorfish and Karen McGrane of Bond Art + Science. It was my first session of the conference, and we worked together in small groups to organize and begin a site inventory in about 10 or 15 minutes.

This exercise brought to light two things: first, there’s more than one way to skin a cat, and second, cross-cultural differences can influence that. (As an example, my own little team was comprised of two folks from eBay Europe and a French content strategist; as the lone American, I found that my approach of jumping in with both feet and figuring out organization and categories as I went along was counter to my German teammate’s more careful and structured approach.)

Rachel and Karen provided a list of variables to consider as you plan your content analysis:

  1. How deep do you need to go?
  2. How do you ensure you see examples of all the different content types?
  3. What are the common pathways that users are likely to take?
  4. Can you find content that has been lost or hidden?

Be in the room from the get-go.
The second workshop, “Evolution of Content,” studied how the folks at IQ Content in Ireland are using the agile software development approach to perform user experience projects for clients — which essentially means that rather than working in silos all their team members, including the content strategist, IA, interaction designer and visual designer, work collaboratively.

Presenters Elizabeth McGuane and Randall Snare talked about the vital importance of having the content strategist or analyst in the room from day one — present at the kickoff meeting with the client and participating actively in the discussion about the site strategy. “How well I’m able to tell the story is dependent on my client engagement and ability to explain reasons for decisions to clients,” Randall said. If she isn’t presented from the first moment as a core member of the team, clients are less inclined to engage with her and listen to her recommendations.

Content evaluation is essential and ongoing
The “Evaluating Content” session by Clare O’Brien at CDA was one of the sessions I was most looking forward to. I’d been reading about CDA’s process for testing and evaluating the effectiveness of content (they call it CUT, or content usefulness toolkit) in the online communities and am fascinated by the process of using metrics to determine content’s direction.

Clare started out by declaring: “Our data burden is stalling our learning process.” In new media, we’ve invented metrics that are supposed to tell us how we’re doing, but that they don’t really tell us what the problem is or how to solve it. People believe that it’s still OK to put any old content into a Web site, and aren’t making the connection between poor content and poor results, she said.

Thirty-nine percent of today’s marketers who are spending a lot of money online are dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with the conversion rates they are achieving — in the world of conventional media, heads would be rolling from better results than that. A Forrester study recently concluded: “Marketers inevitably discover that the marketing metrics in place today fail to tell the full story about their customers.”

Clare recommended treating content evaluation as a continual process:

  • Start by setting benchmarks at the very beginning of a project and asking clients what they expect from their online property.
  • Establish an analytics program that tests how people’s behavior with the site actually.
  • Use a variety of techniques to perform ongoing content evaluation – click tracking, heat tracking, surveys and multivariate testing included.
  • Advocate for testing real copy instead of lorem ipsum in usability testing. This is huge — especially since clients and UX people often worry users will “get hung up on the words.” But as Clare said: “Maybe they should be!”

Editorial strategy: solving the Day 2 problem
Jeff McIntyre, one of my favorite content strategy voices online, addressed what happens after a content strategy is in place and the site launches. “The Web design industry in North America is largely designed around selling patches of blue sky,” he said — meaning that agencies often promise a utopia without acknowledging the work it will take to maintain the squeaky clean, shiny streets.

We have to treat “post-launch” as a phase, Jeff said — and that’s where editorial strategy comes in. While many companies balk at thinking of their Web site as a magazine or at thinking about themselves as being in the publishing business, Jeff argued that they very much  are — and that they need to start thinking that way, putting an editorial calendar and process into place to keep the site fresh and accurate.

Thinking from the outside in
Joyce Hostyn of Open Text talked in “Holistic Customer Experiences” about how so many of our user and customer experience problems start — because a company thinks about process and systems first before they figure out the experience they want a customer to have. She compared customer experience to the layers of an onion — experience is the outer ring, then interactions, then touchpoints and processes, then systems at the inner core.

“Misery moments happen when you take the perspective from the inside out. Magic moments happen when you start with the overall experience you want to deliver and drive inward,” Joyce said.

She compared this to the way Disney creates a magical experience in everything they do, because they started with an emotional theme that they then base all decisions on to create magic in every last detail. Closer to home, she talks about mapping out the experience of a software upgrade for a user — planning from the experience level helps to bridge any silos and create a seamless upgrade process for the end user.

A few of Joyce’s other observations:

  • Companies have a hard time seeing content as part of a customer experience. They see usability and design as important, but don’t consider content.
  • Starting with an experience and a theme helps us write user experiences with real heart — something largely missing from Web content today.
  • A product or service is a means to an end. The value lies in the story, and that’s what we’re here to create.
  • You have to consider the backstory as well. A lot of that is happening outside the company-owned interaction points — such as in conversations happening in other places that drive perceptions about a company.
  • We have to think about memories as well as experiences. Not only do we care about what messages we are delivering, but also how people remember the messages, because that is arguably just as or more important.

There’s work to be done!
The afternoon keynote was my first time hearing Kristina Halvorson, content strategy’s superstar, speak, and it was a moving and entertaining experience — very easy to see why she has had success winning hearts and minds with her message about the importance of content strategy. Kristina admitted that, as much as she speaks to large crowds each month, she was nervous speaking to a room of content strategists. It was a momumental occasion, and time for a major call to action.

In her speech “Banging the Big Drums,” Kristina gave everyone in the room their marching orders. The next year is our opportunity to not only talk about content strategy, spread the word, educate our clients, make our case … it’s our chance to build case studies. Let’s do things the right way and then document the results. Show the world the value of content strategy. We’re struggling to insert ourselves into our rightful place in the process, and to get clients to understand the value of investing in content. We have to prove that it’s worth it.

What’s next?

We are on the map. Now we take over the world.

Once we all escaped from Europe (and the Europeans were finally able to find seats on a train back home), conference attendees already started talking about 2011 — the location and the theme and substance. Most likely 2010 was the beginning of a whole docket of content strategy conferences that will spring up on the calendar, and so it remains to be seen where we’ll be off to next year. The 2010 conference seemed to be about establishing the legitimacy of the practice — we’re here, what we’re saying makes sense, we’re shaping the future of this together. Hopefully next year we’ll make enough progress that the programs will start delving into the particulars, the best practices, the professional nuances of content strategy.

Download the 2010 Content Strategy Forum presentations on SlideShare.

Written on May 27, 2010 by Stacey King Gordon in Web content strategy
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Five meaningless phrases to never use again in B2B copy (if you can help it)

The CEO is on the phone to review the copy his marketing team and I have been working on for six weeks. This is the first time we’ve been able to get him on the phone for a meeting that hasn’t been rescheduled four times and ultimately canceled. The pressure is on.

We sent the CEO (let’s call him Stu) copy to review ahead of time, but he seems not to have seen it before. He’s skimming the opening paragraphs. I hear whispering on the other end of the phone and realize he’s moving his lips as he reads.

“OK, I’m not a writer, so I’m certainly not an expert,” he begins, and we brace ourselves.

“What I really want these readers to know, above anything else, is that we’re innovative. I want you to get that word into the headline. Innovative.”

I prickle a little at this but keep my cool. Of course, his marketing team and I have done a lot of analysis to learn what this customer base is really interested in, and innovation is only part of it.

But what I really want Stu to understand is that just because he uses the word “innovation” in his web content doesn’t mean that prospective customers are going to believe he can solve their problems better than the next guy.

Even superheroes need the Justice League

We as B2B marketers fall into a trap with our customer communications. We feel like we have to come across as formal and distinguished in the way we talk about our company and products. We want to sound like experts, and we want people to think we’re the best.

But there are only so many words and phrases in the English language that help us get those points across, and when we set out to write the language to convey our distinction, we inevitably turn to the same toolbox of terms.

I’m as guilty of it as the next copywriter. It’s worse when it’s what the client thinks he wants. (In this case, if Stu is happy, everyone is happy, so the marketing team thinks “innovation” is a small price to pay.)

It’s not that there is anything inherently wrong with this word, or its B2B jargon counterparts. As someone who has spent a great deal of time with every thesaurus I can find searching for alternatives, I can vouch for the fact that we use the words so frequently because they’re the most powerful, accurate and appropriate ones out there.

The problem lies more in the fact that as writers and marketers, we expect these words and phrases to carry the weight of our meaning and messaging, to work tirelessly as Men of Steel to save the world and solidly communicate the differentiating value of a company or product. A tall order for little words, as important-sounding as they may be.

The ideal would be if these words never appeared again in B2B marketing copy. But that’s highly unlikely. I would bet you money that sometime in the next two days I myself will use one of them in a client assignment. I’ll try hard not to, but sometimes it’s unavoidable.

But what we as marketers can do is to avoid letting the words rest on their own laurels — because they are so overused, customers breeze right past them. They have ceased to have meaning.

So even if we use them, we have to make them work harder. Why is your company innovative? Let’s illustrate it, right upfront — we have technology that no one else has, that gives you the highest productivity or accuracy in the industry and solves your problems incomparably. We solve problems differently than any other company, and here’s exactly how and precisely what it means for you as the customer. Amazing! When you approach it this way, you don’t really even need to use the word “innovative.” You’re already saying it, and in a way that means so much more to customers.

And now: the B2B copywriting Razzie Awards

Here they are — the five oft-used B2B words and phrases that I challenge you and myself to avoid using from this moment forward:

  1. Innovative. This word is not only overused, most of the time it’s not used properly. There’s a philosophical debate going on in the patent world over whether an invention should be considered innovative if it doesn’t truly change the world or chart a new course for technology. If you have a couple of extra features that make your product a cut above the other products doing basically the same thing on the market, you’re not really innovating.
  2. State-of-the-art. Also “world-class” and “best-of-breed.” They’re pretty words that attempt to elevate a product into the upper echelon of its category. But by themselves they’re empty words. When everyone in your category claims to have “state-of-the-art” or “best-of-breed,” they stop meaning anything.
  3. The leading provider of … The problem with this phrase is twofold. First, it isn’t always true. If you’re like most B2B companies, you may lead the category with one or two products, but your competitors have No. 1 slots for other products. But the real problem is that it’s an inward-facing term. A lot of “About Us” pages start with this: we’re the leading provider of XYZ. Good for you! But what does it mean for customers? Lose the term and lead with a customer-focused proposition.
  4. Combined experience of 200,000 years. I always smirk when I see a company talk about how their executive team has combined experience of 50, 100, or 200 years. What does that even mean? If you put the number of years in the workforce of everyone in your company together, sure, you’ll have a really big number taking you back to prehistoric days. Talk about the fact that your team knows the industry deeply and applies that knowledge to solving customer problems. Readers aren’t impressed by simple arithmetic.
  5. Solutions that give customers what they really need. OK, this is a tough one. First, as someone who writes for the software industry, I understand that “solutions” isn’t just a jargony word for “product.” Well, it is actually, but there’s a reason behind it. Companies are trying to communicate that they bundle a product (the software) with consultative services, installation, support, etc. They don’t want you to think you’re just buying a box with some discs in it and will be flying solo from now on. I honestly don’t have a problem with “solutions,” expect that somewhere in the copy I’ve starting making a stand for at least one time calling it what it really is. Software. It’s better for SEO (that’s how customers think of it and search for it), and it’s better for clarity. Let’s not hide it. We’re in the software business.

    As for the second part of the phrase, “what they really need” — well, that’s one of my lazy fall-backs. What it’s trying to say is, “We really listen to you and customize your solution for your needs.” But it’s lazy. Take it a step further. What do customers really need? Thirty percent of their time back? More money? A happier work life? Take the time to find out. Your customers will notice.

So what about Stu? Well, we gave him “innovative.” But the rest of the copy on the page worked hard to make it meaningful. My guess is that customers will notice the substance — the quantifiable proof points, the copy focused on their specific challenges — and glance right over the word “innovative.” And I’m OK with that.

Written on March 23, 2010 by Stacey King Gordon in Business communications, copywriting
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Five ways to finesse your Web forms

As an active Web user, you most likely fill out several forms online every day, at a minimum. Forms are how we interact online, and they’re very much a part of our personal and professional lives, like it or not.

So why, as ubiquitous as they are, do so many Web forms leave us feeling frustrated? Why do so many users abandon  a form before they’re finished filling it out? Why does Luke Wroblewski, the man who literally wrote the book on Web form design and usability, feel like he has the right to stand up in front of several hundred Web designers (as he did at An Event Apart in San Francisco last December) and tell us that our forms “look like a poo storm?”

Forms are everywhere, and most of them are ineffective at best, downright unusable at worst. Even veteran Web users struggle to fill them out sometimes. Wroblewski explains the convoluted process that often turns the horse into a hobbled camel: regardless of who initially designs the form, marketing, sales, and IT all have a stake in what it inevitably becomes, each adding their own touches and requirements to it. And often nobody is minding the store to make sure the final form achieves its primary goal: getting users to complete it.

Here are some tips – from Wroblewski’s AEA presentation as well as a couple of my own — for the next time you have to manage the design of a Web form:

  1. Resist the urge to ask for every last detail. It’s understandable why it happens. The rare opportunity to get prospects to turn over information about themselves gets your salespeople and marketing teams salivating. But do you really need to ask for a person’s fax number? How about street address? What’s the least amount of information you can collect at this moment? People are more likely to fill out the form if they don’t have to labor over it. Consider each field and requested piece of information carefully before including it. And don’t forget to tell users how you’re planning to use the data, Wroblewski says — people won’t give you an email address or phone number if you’re planning to sell it to someone else or spam them repeatedly.
  2. Think linearly. How does the user’s eyes move through the form? Chances are, they do not naturally jump back and forth between side-by-side fields. Users tend to scan down the left side of the page, so your form should be designed accordingly, Wroblewski says. If you do need to jump around, use strong visual cues to draw users’ eyes to where you want them to go next. And by all means, avoid placing the “Clear All” button where users expect the “Submit” button to be — the biggest faux pas of Web form design is to stick a button in a user’s natural flow that will wipe out all of their hard work instead of rewarding them. It’s quite possible they’ll be so disgusted that they won’t bother filling the form out again after that.
  3. Don’t break with convention. Because we fill out so many of these things, we’ve all become very accustomed to the design standards of Web forms. Occasionally a talented interaction designer finds a way to tighten up space and give a form a truly unique look that also functions well. But often those who set out to build a better mousetrap fail in their attempts. Certain conventions work, so stick with them. For example, a trend is to place the field labels inside the fields. Designers also try placing them to the right or left, or underneath the field. But Wroblewski says studies show that users complete a form 10 times faster when the labels are placed above the field. Smart, thoughtful design is always welcome, but it’s not always necessary to innovate when a convention works perfectly.
  4. Treat the form as a holistic experience. Users get to the form from someplace, and when they finish the form they expect to be taken someplace else. People who create forms sometimes forget this, and focus more on the form itself than on the entire user flow. When sending the user to the form, be careful to only make promises based on reality — let users know what to expect and exactly what they will get from filling out the form. If using a multiple-part form, consider using a progress indicator, and make sure it’s accurate. (Wroblewski uses Fidelity.com as an example of a four-step progress indicator bar that misleads users by failing to mention the requirement to create an account in the middle of filling out the form, a major disruption in the flow.) And by all means spend as much time considering the confirmation page and process as you do the actual form. Users want to know they were successful, and want to be able to do something next as an immediate reward for their efforts.
  5. Use a writer. I’ve known some IT people who were great with words. Designers too. But much of the time, forms need content help. Instructions, labels and buttons often don’t communicate clearly what exactly users should do. Calls to action are unclear or nonexistent. And the opportunity to provide context-based help (such as pop-ups explaining what the information is for or why the company is requesting it) is often overlooked. An experienced Web writer can help you see the form from the user’s point of view and craft language that will make your form successful.
Written on March 10, 2010 by Stacey King Gordon in UX, Web, Web content strategy
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The Right Way to Wireframe: reflection on a hands-on workshop

As with many books and classes that begin with the words “The Right Way to …”, the moral of this pre-conference workshop put on by four well-known UX thought leaders was that — you guessed it — there is no “right way” to wireframe.

But during this four-hour workshop, we as participants did witness how lots and lots of sketching, pitching and critiquing, and collaborative problem-solving can turn out several different approaches that all solved the same problem in different and creative ways.

Churning out ideas — lots of ideas
I took the workshop because I increasingly am playing the role of an IA and UX designer, and see it as an important part of the content strategy work I’m doing. But I’m first and foremost a word person, and naturally freeze up when called upon to visually organize and prioritize ideas — terrified I’m going to do it wrong and not quite confident in the process I use.

I learn by doing and seeing others do, so hands-on workshops are ideal for me, and this one was no different. The first thing we did was break into four different groups (some of which were large enough that they broke into subgroups) based on wireframing tool of preference. I use Omnigraffle for site maps and (I was embarrassed to admit, until I learned later in the session that many others were in the same boat) often turn to Adobe InDesign for wireframing simply because it’s comfortable. But I’ve been very interested in Axure for some time, and now that the software has a Mac beta version I wanted to learn more about how to use it — so I aligned myself with the Axure group. (Other participants grouped into groups using Omnigraffle, FireWorks, and Balsmiq. The point of all that was that there are many different ways to skin a cat, and they all work fine.)

We received basic requirements — personas for two different types of users, as well as basic background about the organization we were designing for, and some rough and somewhat vague must-haves, leaving things mostly open to interpretation. Then it was time to sketch.

Six to eight thumbnail sketches. Five minutes. No rules. GO. Of course I froze. I’m a verbal thinker, and would much rather have listed requirements and ideas first, before starting to draw. But the sketching was a fantastic exercise for two reasons:

  • It got us thinking in terms of blocking out areas, shapes, relationships, rather than thinking detail — because there was no time for detail. In retrospect, I think about the Graphic Design Cookbook and its basic building blocks inspiring designers to explore thousands of possibilities.
  • It got us used to the idea that sketching is the first thing UX designers do, and that they do it for a long time. They start with thumbnails and move on to more detailed sketches, but they may go through dozens, even hundreds, of pieces of paper before they are happy enough with a solution to put it into wireframing software. Thinking on paper helps designers stay loose and open to ideas, and makes evolution much more possible than it would be in the software.

When our workshop leaders showed their wireframing processes in videos at the end of the workshop, I was actually relived to see that one of them is a verbal thinker like me — he starts with writing out all his ideas and requirements in long, messy lists. But all four of them sketched and sketched for days before moving on. Sketching is essential.

Design becomes collective
Next, we engaged in a process similar to what burgeoning architects go through in architecture school: “design studio,” where everyone gets a chance to put his or her sketches up on the wall and pitch concepts. As a team we agreed on which pieces we like, and then we started sketching layouts based on the elements and concepts that worked for us.

At that point, we took our sketches to another group and presented to them, collecting their positive and critical feedback that we took back to our table to further iterate the design. Before our eyes we watched our wireframes become further refine. As somebody who tends to work alone, I always enjoy being reminded of how collaboration and feedback can continue to make a solution better and better.

We regrouped, drafted our final sketches, and then it was time to design the wireframes in Axure. While our group’s noble volunteer worked the software, the workshoppers passed out beers, which we all continued to sip as each group presented our electronic wireframes and talked through our solutions.

Having walked and talked through the process, I feel more comfortable wearing a wireframer’s shoes now. Especially inspiring were the videos documenting the unique process of each of the UXers running the workshop … confirming that there is, indeed, no single “right way” to wireframe, but that it all involves a lot of iteration, noodling, paper, sticky notes and time.

Russ Unger (@russu):

Will Evans (@semanticwill):

Todd Zaki Warfel (@zakiwarfel):

Written on February 19, 2010 by Stacey King Gordon in Design, UX
Tags: , , , , - 3 Comments
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