You Might Make a Great UX Designer At Viget If…
When I was a kid, I never thought to myself, "Man, when I grow up, I want to be a UX designer … " I'm not sure that the title even existed then. Yet, here I am, many years later, working as one at Viget. The different paths people take before they eventually determine this is the proper field for them are too numerous to count. While UX designers (or whatever official title is cool this week) come from all different backgrounds and educations, I think there are certain qualities many of them have that lead them down this particular path in the first place. These are qualities that I see in both myself and my fellow UX designers here at Viget. If you possess these qualities, you could be a good fit here, too.
You might make a great UX designer at Viget if …
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Reframing UX: It’s About Designing Products
I'm in awe of my Viget colleagues, as I am of extraordinarily creative people generally. But I'm especially in awe of my user experience colleagues, and it took me a while to figure out why.
I blame the user experience community for this -- I think UX sells itself short.
Before I came to Viget, user experience seemed to me to be defined by its relationship to visual design and by its deliverables (wireframes, site maps, content inventory, etc.). But user experience at its core is not about visual design, wireframes, or content strategy as ends to themselves. User experience is about defining and designing products.
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User Interview Tips for Non-UX Designers
Talking to users is an important part of the design process because it provides us with the opportunity to gain insight and validate our ideas. If we have a solid understanding of what users need to achieve and the challenges they face, we can make better design decisions and craft stronger solutions.
Sometimes it is necessary for other team members, such as a project manager, to jump in and help conduct an interview. For individuals that don’t have experience conducting interviews with users, this can feel like a daunting task.
By keeping a few key points in mind, however, you can conduct an interview that will lead to insightful results.
Omnigraffle Stencil for Clickable Form Elements
One of the things that slightly bugs me about Omnigraffle is that it doesn't have built-in objects for basic HTML form elements that behave like real ones. I would love to have these to add a little more realism to my wireframes and possibly extend them to work inside of a more full-on prototype with "real" forms. So, I recently took a shot at creating some clickable form elements for myself using a combination of Applescript and the custom data feature.
Warning: What I hacked together works, but its not foolproof. I've included some notes below that should help you in using this stencil.
Download the Stencil (Viget.FormElements.gstencil, 156 K)
Checkboxes
- These can be clicked on to toggle between checked and unchecked states.
- The label is stored as "value" within the object's data.
- The state (checked or unchecked) is stored in the object's data and can be keyed off of for further prototyping.
Radio Buttons
- These can be clicked to change the selection in a group of radio buttons.
- The label is stored as "value" within the object's data. The state (selected or unselected) is stored within each object's data and can be keyed off of for further prototyping.
- They are grouped together as a table, so it's easy to add new rows or columns of radio buttons.
- The unselected radio image is a separate object that needs to live behind the table and can't be grouped with the radio buttons (sorry, it'll break the script).
- To create multiple groups of radio button on the same canvas, you'll need to give each group a unique name. The table has a data item "groupName" currently set to "Fruits". Each object in the table has a data item "group" - also currently set to "Fruits". Both of these need to be changed when another radio group is created.
Drop Downs
- The option that will be displayed when the dropdown is collapsed is stored as "defaultOption" within the object's data. When it's expanded, "allOptions" will be displayed.
- A lot of the styling is contained within the script, so if you want to tweak the styling, I would suggest looking at the script to see how styles are being applied.
- The value that is selected is not passed back to the parent object, so this element is not set up for further prototyping. It is good for showing the list of drop down options without using another layer.
I've also included some buttons and text fields in the stencil. I'm sure there are improvements that can be made to these, so everyone should feel free to use and modify this stencil. If anyone creates something better (especially a dropdown that fully "works"), I'd love to hear about it.
Running Online Divide-the-Dollar Studies using WebSort
Divide-the-Dollar is one of my favorite elicitation techniques. If you're not familiar, this technique is used to understand what people value – and in what proportion. Participants in the exercise divide a pool of money (or poker chips, sometimes) among a set of options, making judgments and trade-offs.
The Problem
I don't use Divide-the-Dollar as much as I could. Why?
First and most critically, there are very few online tools that can be used to orchestrate the exercise. Many of our clients and their customers are remote, so we tend to rely on online apps when we can. The main online app that is designed for this purpose – MindCanvas – is expensive and possibly unsupported. While it's possible to build a spreadsheet to manage the logic and capture the data, the experience is rough at best when working with end users.
Second, running onsite tests with a human moderator is expensive and incurs a lot of overhead. Scheduling, dealing with no-shows, and conducting the exercise all eat into budget and schedule. It doesn't scale well and discourages quick, guerrilla-style studies.
So the problem is technical: the tools aren't there. But on my commute in to work, I realized there was a way to do this if I thought about the problem differently.
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