Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Fred Beecher

Fred Beecher — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:59 GMT

Sarah:
Thanks for the brain-food! When we create a new site or application for a limited, specific audience, my company puts together an adoption plan to help the client roll out the new site to their users. I had never thought of consciously creating a metaphor to aid adoption like this, but I will quite likely do that in the future, though!

Fred Beecher — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 20:52:38 GMT

William Zinsser’s On Writing Well is my grammatical weapon of choice. It focuses on what I would term “concision with style and persuasiveness,” which is always appropriate for the Web.

Fred Beecher — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 20:27:58 GMT

At one of the many Web 2.0 panels at the IA Summit this year, one audience member defined it as “being able to do cool sh*t without having to reload the page.” Simplistic as this sounds, I think that this is where the immediate business value of Web 2.0 really lies.

For example, I frequently work on projects aimed at helping the client increase lead generation. On projects like this, balancing business goals with user expectations is a crucial and delicate process. Clients want highly-qualified leads; users don’t want to have to enter a ton of information. A “boring” Web 2.0 contact form can make this happen by asking a single, user-focused qualification question (e.g., what kind of info are you looking for?) and then presenting different follow-on questions as an immediate result of that selection.

This is a very simple capability of Web 2.0 technologies, but the degree to which it reduces barriers to conversion while still meeting business goals is, I’d say, revolutionary (and profitable!).

Fred Beecher — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:16 GMT

Stephen… I whole-heartedly agree with the points you make. Excellent article.

In my experience, increased use of rapid prototyping techniques makes having an intelligible prototype all the more important. I’ve used Axure for about a year, and of course I get the “it needs more colors” comment, but the most significant thing that I’ve noticed is that prototype test participants are unsure of whether they have completed a task if you use genericized page types. When I take the time to put in fake data that matches the tasks in the test, users have a lot more confidence about whether they’ve found what they’re looking for. It helps prototype tests more definitively answer the question, “is this usable?” This leads me to believe that a new rapid prototyping best practice would be to complete the prototype tasks *first* and then begin working on the prototype. This could increase rapidity even further.

Fred Beecher — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:23 GMT

Andrea,

At the ‘06 IA Summit, Steve Mulder gave a presentation about bringing more science to persona creation, in which he advocated (and this is a gross oversimplification here) that personas be developed and then validated/updated through surveys & research. Your insightful comments about using analytics data to validate a heuristic analysis got me to thinking that this same data could be used to either create or validate personas. I’m not sure if this is something you’ll be covering in Part 2, but it seems like another good use for this data.

- F.

Fred Beecher — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:51:32 GMT

Ji,

I’ve been using Axure for a relatively long while now and I can tell you that there is pretty much no interaction I can’t prototype in that tool outside of drag and drop. There is a lot of facility for making the pages highly interactive without page loads, and this has allowed me to get a good idea of how usable an interaction is before it’s been fully designed.

Scott, there are a few inaccuracies in your discussion of Axure’s features. First, it does include a facility for creating page flows (scenario design). Admittedly, it’s rudimentary, but it’s been good enough for my purposes. Second, it does allow for limited data interaction. Axure has one page variable that it can play with, and you can make user interactions set the value of this variable. You can then set interactive elements on the page to react to this variable.

Regarding Axure as a Visio replacement, it *has* replaced Visio for me, nearly. The only thing I continue to use Visio for is site maps. And that’s fine with me. : )

One more thing… I think it’s important to note the cost of iRise… while it is a really excellent tool, it costs around $150,000. I’m not kidding and that’s not a typo. My company was looking into that vs. Axure and we contacted a rep who gave us this figure. We are no longer looking at iRise. : )

Fred Beecher — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:38 GMT

Axure runs pretty well under XP/Parallels on my Mac Book Pro. : )

Fred Beecher — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 18:48:23 GMT

My company, which is very conscious about paying its consultants what they are worth, recently asked me to comment on the salary ranges for our UXP consultants. I said they looked a little off and pointed the HR manager to the 2006 IAI IA Salary Survey (http://iainstitute.org/pg/salary_survey_2006.php). He took a look. Meanwhile, I overachieved and downloaded the .XLS file of the data and filtered & sorted it to be relevant to our geographical area. He looked at it this version and quickly saw that our ranges were a little low (based on years of experience).

Giving him that data had a direct effect on the raises we got this year. Data *proves* what you’re worth. Words just don’t carry as much weight.

Fred Beecher — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 09:42:37 GMT

Enlightening article, Kyle! I’m glad to see so much press being devoted to prototyping lately. I’m a huge fan of that particular practice (Axure being my weapon of choice).

And I have to admit that I suffer from many of the misperceptions about PDF prototyping that you mention. :) Most of my experience doing PDF prototyping has been trying to use Visio’s byzantine layering system to get the interactivity going, and then hoping Acrobat picks it all up. For me, it’s much faster to use Axure. At my company, I recommend that we use Axure for any project that either a) is highly dynamic or b) will require remote testing.

But what you’re saying is that we can do all that in Acrobat… I should take a closer look, as previously I have regarded Acrobat as a necessary (and insanely bloated) evil. One thing I’m *not* clear on though is how to do dynamic layering within Acrobat itself. Would I need to import images of the layer or something like that? Please don’t make me create a Visio layer. Just… please. : )

(Also, your hand-drawn interactive prototypes are fabulous!)

Fred Beecher — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 21:39:52 GMT

As Andrea said, the distinction between SAM and SAR is a great one to make, but I think stopping at just distinguishing between them doesn’t go quite far enough. These two measurements can actually complement each other, and that’s where the real value of combining UXP techniques with Web analytics data lies. While you talk about how SAM can extract some meaning from a raw SAR, the SAR can also support the SAM. If your SAR is close to your SAM, then that offers a strong argument that what you observed with a small sample of users during user testing bears out across the entire user community (maybe not technically “construct validity, but damn close!).

Fred Beecher — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 21:46:03 GMT

This is a fabulous discussion to be having. Prototyping is of *crucial* importance to the craft of modern user experience design. However, I have to take issue with this approach because it’s not just XHTML you need to actually create a wireframe that you can *see* (rather than having to interpret), you need to know CSS too (which isn’t too bad). Even the code above references classes. To do a richly interactive prototype (as opposed to just static wireframes), you’d need to know JavaScript as well. I know you suggest that other team members do this, but then you’ve got three people wireframing where before you had one.

I strongly believe that as UX designers we need to be aware of code, understand it to a certain degree, understand its capabilities & limitations, etc., but we don’t need to be able to write it. If you can, awesome. I’m probably a little jealous of you. : )

I *love* the sketching >>> prototyping (repeat) process. That is very accurate and useful. Sketching is where we do design, and prototyping is where we document or represent that design. From what is described above, it seems like that representation is either *more* abstract than a sketch (when *less* should be the goal) or simply more expensive to produce than a wireframe or tool-built (yes I read your other article : ) prototype.

So what, to UXDs, is the real and true benefit of prototyping in this way?