20 User Experience Books You Should Own
3 July 2009
UX By Design has a list of 20 UX books they feel every designer should own. See their post 20 User Experience Books You Should Own.
Designing Web Navigation is #4 on the list. I’m not sure if this is a ranked list or not, but it’s still nice to appear towards the top. AndI’m in good company–places 1-3 rightfully go to:
- Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World, by Peter Merholz
- Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning, by Dan Brown
- Contextual Design: A Customer-Centered Approach to Systems Designs (Interactive Technologies), by Hugh Beyer
The Myth of the Compromised Need?
17 June 2009
Jeppe Nicolaisen, from the Royal School of Library and Information Science, has an interesting forthcoming article in JASIST:
Nicolaisen, J. (in press). Compromised need and the label effect: An examination of claims and evidence Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 1-6 DOI: 10.1002/asi.21129
In a nutshell, he puts the empirical-ness of Taylor’s notion of the “compromised need” in doubt. To quickly review, according to Taylor an information need progresses through four levels when a seeker is looking for information:
- Visceral need – This is the actual, but unexpressed need for information
- Conscious need – The recognized need at a cognitive level
- Formalized need – A formal statement of the need
- Compromised need – This is the question as presented to the information system or intermediary. It called the compromised need because the inquirer must adapt the question to accommodate the available resources. This has also been called the label effect, because it has been assumed that seekers frequently fail to specify their true information needs, i.e., they use the wrong labels.
Taylor’s theory has been the inspiration for many user-centered studies in information retrieval and library science for the past three decades. It was even (part of ) the basis in my Information Search Experience model I presented at the IA Summit in 2004 in Austin. See my presentation: Information Search Experience: Emotions in Information Seeking.
But Nicolaisen finds problem after problem with studies that supposedly support the notion of the “compromised need” empirically. He is particularly critical of some works by Ingwersen, pointing out incorrect citations and interpretation of other studies. Yikes.
Nicolaisen concludes:
We have examined available studies of the compromised need / the label effect and have compared claims against evidence. The aim was to establish whether the compromised need / the label effect is a frequently occurring phenomenon or not. We found that the studies that reportedly had verified the phenomenon (Ingwersen & Kaae, [1980]; Ingwersen, [1982]; Belkin et al., [1982]; Belkin, [1984]; Nordlie, [1999]) all suffer from technical problems that put the claim of verification in doubt. Two other studies (Lynch, [1978]; Hauptman, [1987]) that report low percentages of questions changing from the initial query during large-scale studies of user-librarian negotiations might indicate that users are quite often asking for precisely what they want. Although it is difficult to imagine that so many users would have accepted leaving with unanswered information needs, the fact that the librarians did not conduct in-depth interviews, and therefore may have failed to discover users’ real information needs, preclude us from making definite conclusions. However, what we can conclude is that the compromised need / the label effect is not the empirical fact that it has otherwise been claimed to be.
Oops.
Experience Strategy @ Johnny Holland
6 June 2009
I previously reviewed Subject To Change on this blog. In reviewing the book with the UX book club, Steve Baty offers a good summary of experience stragtegy in a recent article on Johnny Holland.
Here’s Steve’s definition:
An experience strategy is that collection of activities that an organization chooses to undertake to deliver a series of (positive, exceptional) interactions which, when taken together, constitute an (product or service) offering that is superior in some meaningful, hard-to-replicate way; that is unique, distinct & distinguishable from that available from a competitor.
Check out Steve’s article for a play-by-play blow of this all-important concept.
C-Inspector: Task-Based Category Testing
12 May 2009
Steffen Schilb is at it again. First came CardSort. Now he’s developed another interesting tool to test your information architecture called C-Inspector:
“C–Inspector is a web–based application that helps you to test the information architecture of your website. By analyzing both quantitative and qualitative data collected through the remote test, you can gain insight into the users’ mental models and identify possible issues with labelling or grouping.”
I’ve not tried the tool myself yet, but it looks promising. The task-based approach would appear to give rich feedback on your IA. This isn’t new, though–the guys over at Optimal Usability also just recently launched TreeJack, which I got to see at the IA Summit in Memphis. It also takes a task-based approach.
Congratulations, Steffen.
The first issue of the Journal of Information Architecture (JofIA) has finally arrived. I contributed a piece on uncertainty. Here’s the table of contents:
- Dorte Madsen
Editorial: Shall We Dance?
pp. 1-5 - Gianluca Brugnoli
Connecting the Dots of User Experience
pp. 6-15 - Helena Francke
Towards an Architectural Document Analysis
pp. 16-36 - Andrew Hinton
The Machineries of Context
pp. 37-47 - James Kalbach
On Uncertainty in Information Architecture
pp. 48-55
It was a long time coming and a lot of people put a ton of work into the launch of the journal. Congratulations to everyone involved.
Auftritt im Fools Garden – Sa. 2.5.
1 May 2009
Hallo an alle, die in Hamburg sind.
Meine Band–Helmut and the Lampshades–wird morgen am Samstag den 2.5. mit unserem neuen Programm im Fools Garden auftreten.
-> Spoken-Word: Jazz-Arrangements zu den Erzählungen, so wie Songs von Neil Young und eigene Stücke.
Mehr Details auf unserer Website: http://lampshadejazz.wordpress.com/
Jan over at The Hot Strudel pointed this out. Thanks, Jan.
As a term and concept in business, “design thinking” has been around for a while. See for instance Victor Lombardi’s collection of design thinking-related materials. In the Spring of 2008, the Harvard Business Review finally picked up on the topic. Tim Brown wrote an excellent article simply entitled “Design Thinking”. He writes:
“Historically, design has been treated as a downstream step in the development process—the point where designers, who have played no earlier role in the substantive work of innovation, come along and put a beautiful wrapper around the idea. To be sure, this approach has stimulated market growth in many areas by making new products and technologies aesthetically attractive and therefore more desirable to consumers or by enhancing brand perception through smart, evocative advertising and communication strategies. During the latter half of the twentieth century design became an increasingly valuable competitive asset in, for example, the consumer electronics, automotive, and consumer packaged goods industries. But in most others it remained a late-stage add-on.
Now, however, rather than asking designers to make an already developed idea more attractive to consumers, companies are asking them to create ideas that better meet consumers’ needs and desires. The former role is tactical, and results in limited value creation; the latter is strategic, and leads to dramatic new forms of value.
Moreover, as economies in the developed world shift from industrial manufacturing to knowledge work and service delivery, innovation’s terrain is expanding. Its objectives are no longer just physical products; they are new sorts of processes, services, IT-powered interactions, entertainments, and ways of communicating and collaborating—exactly the kinds of human-centered activities in which design thinking can make a decisive difference.”
Seems someone in the European Commission might have read Tim’s HBR article, or at least the literature around the connection between design and innovation. The EC is currently working on a document called “Design as a driver of user-centred innovation,” which provides an analysis of the rationale for making design an integral part of European innovation policy.
See: http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/newsroom/cf/itemlongdetail.cfm?item_id=3054〈=en
“The results are compelling: companies that invest in design tend to be more innovative, more profitable and grow faster than those who do not. At a macro-economic level, there is a strong positive correlation between the use of design and national competitiveness.
Although often associated with aesthetics and the ‘looks’ of products only, the application of design is in reality much broader. User needs, aspirations and abilities are the starting point and focus of design activities. With a potential to integrate for example environmental, safety and accessibility considerations — in addition to economic — into products, services and systems, design is an area which deserves public attention.
Design as a driver and enabler of innovation complements more traditional innovation activities such as research. In the current economic climate, where resources for innovation are scarce, design and other non-technological innovation drivers, such as organisational development, employee-involvement and branding, become particularly relevant. They often are less capital intensive and have shorter pay-back periods than for example technological research, but still have the potential to drive competitiveness.
Potential barriers exist to better use of design for innovation in Europe. Design as a tool for innovation has developed rapidly in recent years, resulting notably in concepts such as strategic design, design management and design thinking. Innovation policy and support, as well as education systems, have not yet caught up with these developments. Companies that lack experience of design — particularly SMEs, low-tech companies and companies not located in big cities where design businesses tend to concentrate — often do not know where to turn for professional help in the area of design. Design businesses are generally very small, a factor affecting their marketing and influencing powers.”
It’s good to see design and design thinking being taken seriously by large, influential organizations like the EC.
Tricia Ryan, an instructional designer at Laureate Higher Education Group, Inc. where she develops courses for Walden University, picked up my Commercial Ethnography presentation from the Euro IA Summit in Amsterdam and used it for a class. Here’s the online synched slideshow of my presentation.
Those of you who know me will recognize that that’s not my voice. Someone at Walden U. wrote and spoke the text in the video above. Kinda weird to see my slides and have someone else talk to them. But, whatever–I’m just happy someone else is interested in the subject.

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