This week in the ux-clinic discussion group:

I’m a single usability engineer serving over 100 programmers across a dozen ongoing projects.  I focus on a couple projects at once, but have large amount of miscellaneous work that comes to me from the other projects.

My major challenge is that the project teams I work with generally have haphazard schedules themselves.  So, its hard to plan my own time given that uncertainty. And to make this even more fun I have a new team member joining and will need to manage both our time.

Planning and organization are not my strengths, so I need techniques that are easy to use!

Yours,
–  Coming Up For Air

This week in the ux-clinic discussion group:

I’ve been asked by the boss to do a usability review of all of websites, and to report the results directly to him. Happy as I was that he’s interested, as I’m working I get that “you’re going to bust us” look from all of the programmers and designers I’ve been working with, as I’m now a kind of UI enforcer.  How do I do the job of reviewing the work for head honcho, without being someone people are afraid or resentful of?

– Signed, the rookie on the force

This week in the ux-clinic discussion group:

We’re a start-up of veteran designers and software developers, building a cutting edge – home music system (think wireless). One big debate we’re having is how to approach the problem of satisfying both user populations: novice consumers and expert audiophiles. Both user groups are important to us, but their needs, and the assumptions we can make in designing for them, are so divergent, we’re struggling with how best to approach the problem.

Should we:

I’d love to hear how other folks have dealt with this problem, even if just “we made it up as we went”

– Signed, SPD, split-personality design

This week in the ux-clinic discussion group:

My UX group consists of 7 designers and a manager. In the last year our company has found new work with more front-end design. So we need new talent but they’re hard to find.

Currently we use freelance designers significantly – they are willing to do extra work (they’re usually not booked 100% and work on weekends), seldom complain about planning, don’t ask for any educational budget, time for internal meetings or complain about company design process.

Now, among our project managers the question has risen why we don’t continue hiring external designers instead of finding additional internal staff.

Who has faced this situation before and can tell me how they dealt with this?

– Signed, An “innie” in an “outie” org

This week in the ux-clinic discussion group:

We’re early on a project and doing lots of prototypes and crazy UI exploration. But as the design manager, I know its almost time to turn the corner and focus. My problem is my team is in love with how they’re working, and I don’t know how to harvest the idea farm, without killing the morale of all the farmers.

How do I turn down the velocity on idea generation without turning it off? We need to get at least one level deeper in focus and stop thinking broadly, but I don’t know how to safely make that happen.

– Harvesting the idea farm

This week in the ux-clinic discussion group:

We’re supposed to be designing a short tutorial for an on-line banking web-app. One of our designers made a kick-ass prototype that centers on humor (excellent cartoons of dropped ATM cards, customers crying after early withdrawls, etc.) – but the rest of the team is afraid to use it. Everyone from marketing to management has no experience using humor in design, and I need some help.

I think it’s totally appropriate, but I can’t for the life of me think of other examples where humor has been used in mainstream designs.

Can humor be appropriate in design? How do you decide when? Do you know of any examples of mainstream designs that use humor, even in documentation or support? Or are there good reasons why 99% of all design work everywhere is humorless?

This week in the ux-clinic discussion group:

I’m on young team that has finally admitted to itself that a much-hyped feature of the last release (2.0) is actually quite bad. As in, on one can even figure it out to fully realize how bad it is bad. The problem is, everyone is all thumbs when it comes to what to do about it. The business folks want us to leave it in (the evil feature is still part of the marketing literature), but us UI folks are all for tearing it out – the problem is, how?How do you make the argument to throw away weeks/months of work? How do you message this to customers when something that was there disappears? I need the playbook for how to cut a bad, previously shipped, feature.

– Signed, Cut-less in Chicago

This week in the ux-clinic discussion group:

Recently, I switched from working on consumer websites, to the more staid, practical, button-down world of accounting software. As in, accounting software for accountants. In reviewing all the usability classics, I’ve noticed how focused on the pick-up-and-play side of things most of it is.Aside from the odd mention of Fitts Law and the number of clicks required to perform a task, there’s little coverage given to designing for efficiency, especially expert efficiency, in interface design.Anyone have experience with designing for performance, not ease of learning, as job #1? What tips and/or references can the list offer that might help me adjust my mindset to this new set of demands? Is it even possible to make such data entry software a pleasure to use?

– Working beyond don’t make me think

This week in the ux-clinic discussion group:

We’re a pair of UX folks (a designer and a usability engineer). We’ve teamed up to turn our team around, but despite our awesome talent combo, we’re spinning our wheels. The team had the good sense to hire both of us, but is fixated on tiny, short term, miniature UI developments. Big architecture work is added to the schedule easily, but all the UI bits are “tweak this”, “improve that”, or “provide a basic UI for new feature blah”.

Our team is smart and leaders are good – but they’ve never taken, or witnessed, a big bet on UI, despite the customer centric project goals. How do we use our powers, design or usability, to change our leadership psychology so that sizable UI/UX investments are part of the game?

— Superhero UX vs. the conservatives

This week in the ux-clinic discussion group:

I work for a large medical software company that attempts to follow a strict engineering process (partly for ISO certification). All logged bugs are supposed to be tied to a requirement (we use ReqPro), but managers aren’t sure what to do with “visual” bugs because visuals aren’t included in the official requirements docs.

So the big question is: What is the best way to fit the visual/UI deliverables into the engineering process?

Specifically:

This week in the ux-clinic discussion group:

Right now, our company is growing by leaps and bounds and an initiative has been put forth to reduce the time it takes a new hire to become productive. My question really is what approach have others seen work when it comes to getting new hires (fresh out of college/grad school) up to speed as usability engineers or designers?

How long does it typically take a new hire in your company to be completing projects on their own?  What topics are included in your training program and what format do those training sessions take (e.g., lecture style, one-on-one w/ a mentor, hands-on “lab” type training, etc.)?

This week in the ux-clinic discussion group:

While managing a small design team how does one manage both a strong design vision, and maintain a sense of collaboration and team ownership over that vision at the same time? How do you keep your team of real designers from becoming production crafts people when the design vision is quite strong from the beginning? Let’s assume for this thread that the strong vision is internal to the design teams and held and managed by the design manager.

This week in the ux-clinic discussion group:

One of the bad habits in my company is the drive-by critique: we throw so much criticism at UI that it’s common for people who show a prototype or new design at a meeting to get pounded on by everyone: tons of questions and criticisms, and downright cynicism. It’s not personal – it’s the flavor of the group, but for folks who have to show creative work it’s just not fun. After a few minutes of critique, the discussion usually moves on to other things, leaving the designer on the floor.

How do you change the flavor of how critiques are done? Or is this just part of working on UI in this industry? We have to show our work to groups, but there has to be a better way.

This week in the ux-clinic discussion forum:

I’m an information designer and developer, aka technical writer. I’ve recently been told that the v1 of our new product will not have context-sensitive help. The engineering team lead says “too bad; no one reads the documentation anyhow.”

I believe it’s impossible to design a totally intuitive UI, since everyone’s intuitive is different, and frankly, we’re not perfect as designers anyway. I think this means documentation has an important role – but since it’s my job, maybe I’m biased 🙂

So I’m curious about how other organizations either include documentation / support as a first order part of the experience, or how they justify depricating it given how often even the best designs fail their users. Is documentation something easily cut on your projects? How do you justify (or argue against) this?

– Help with help

This week in the ux-clinic discussion forum:

I’m a lead designer (manage team of 5 usability and design folks) who was told last week to merge with another UX team. I’ll be the overall manager, but I’ve never managed a group this large. My team services about 10 projects across the company, and we’re a centralized and self-contained org.

I see 3 options:

1) Keep the org flat for awhile. Until I see a path, stay with one manager (me) and 10+ reports.

2) Split into a design team and a usability team. I’d be the uber UX manager, with one design lead and one usability lead.

3) Cross-discipline. I’d mix roles on both teams, with two UX leads, and some designers and usability engineers reporting to each of them.

Opinions?

This week in the ux-clinic discussion forum – the horror of the small screen:

“WooHoo! We just shipped a massive redesign of our online banking website. 6 months of work finally launched and we’ve been partying like mad. The bad news is that the launch was so successful, our CEO has committed us to making a mobile version of the site: cell phones, PDA, you name it, we need to design a version of the site that works on these tiny formats.

Mind you, this was never a requirement – we fought over this months ago and all agreed we wouldn’t do this. But ha ha – now we are.

Has anyone been in this situation and can give advice on how to plan/manage/shape/design so that it doesn’t suck? Our organization has never tried to do this before and I fear they’ll expect an experience as good as the full site, which is impossible.”

– Signed, The horror of the small screen

This week in the ux-clinic discussion forum – Leading the design skunkworks:

My UX team is convinced that to achieve their goals they need to go underground – go off and build a prototype, on their own, and show it to th team only when they have something amazing. They don’t want to partner or negotiate: they want to create their blue sky vision and return, so to speak, from the mountain.

Historically i’ve been a politician between UX and the rest of the org, but I would like to try a skunkworks approach, however I’ve never done this sort of thing before. If we go too far on our own, why will anyone listen? How do we keep the project underground? I’m looking for a primer on leading the secret design effort.

– Leading design skunkworks

This week in the ux-clinic discussion forum – Blog-‘O-Rama:

We’re a tragically hip start-up and recently we’ve gone blog-mad. There’s pressure to reframe much of our website into blog style designs, most notably, by designing pages in blog chronology style. This makes sense some of the time, like for press releases, but for other parts of the site it makes no sense at all (page about our executive team that isn’t updated often). What’s are some good guideliens for going blog/chronology centric, but also for staying away?

-Blog-‘O-rama

This week in the ux-clinic discussion forum – Death by comparison:

I’m a usability engineer on a major web site. Our senior managers are addicted to data. Hard core data. They make all decisions based on metrics and what the call “the metric function” – the equation that best determines what success is.

So when it comes to usability, the only studies they’re interested in are comparative ones, where I do A/B testing, or in some cases A/B/C testing. Even when we prototype or experiment, they always want the data housed in comparative data.

How do I get them out of this data rut and recognize that usability engineering involves more than generating numbers to put in charts? Or is this how most of the tech sector sees usability: a number factory?

This week in the ux-clinic discussion forum– Being the UX hero:

Our group is in the process of launching a new version of our external website, but the solo developer left before it was finished. He claims it’s 90% done. No UX priniciples were used up to this point (we were busy on actual products). None of us have time to take it over, but we have a budget to bring in someone else.

I have two fears / opportunities:

1) There’s an opportunity to teach my org a few things about how UX should be done. If we bring someone in, will they be seen as the heroic talent, saving the day, and not my UX team?

2) If the day is saved, by us or by a contractor, I don’ t want the wrong lesson to be learned. I want to make sure that everyone understands this is not the right way to go about designing things (apply design magic dust in the last stretch). So how do I get design involved without teaching management and the org the wrong lesson?

– Being the UX hero