Rod Motta - User Experience Visual Designer » Design Guidelines

Identifying Users’ Trigger Words

Rod Motta — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 20:57:42 +0000

Jarred Spool wrote an interesting article, back in 2004, about the right trigger words for your user.

Do you want to find out what those words are? Start by asking them. Visiting your users in their natural environments is probably the best way to start.

Jarred’s team found that personas are a great way to communicate trigger words to everyone on the design team. A persona is a detailed description of a user the team wants to ensure is successful on the site. Listing, within the persona, the trigger words that person would use helps us, the designers, understand how the users’ own language will impact the final design.

According to Jarred, his team never conducted a usability test that didn’t yield tremendous insight into how users react to the links the team is using. It becomes obvious immediately when links are missing the clues the users need to go forward.

This powerful trio — field studies, personas, and usability testing — are a great way to start identifying the trigger words that work for your users.

Web resolutions for mobile devices

Rod Motta — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 06:11:13 +0000

Here’s a list of web resolutions popular on mobile devices as of February 2011 presented by Uxbooth.com with their published article, Considerations for Mobile Web Design (Part 2): Dimensions, by David Leggett. The author explains a few points about display dimensions and solutions for layout design.

Keeping best practices in mind when creating an optimal call to action

Rod Motta — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 19:57:18 +0000

The design of a call to action can be broken down into 4 simple elements — size, shape, color, and position. Each plays a vital part in determining how effective the call to action is in directing the user.

Don’t make your users work or think, or they’ll leave. It’s not that they aren’t smart, it’s that they want access to information quickly without spending unnecessary time searching for it.

Don’t overdo it with multiple, competing calls to action on every page. Decide what your primary target is and then define a clear objective per page. Your content should have answered, “What’s in it for me?” and your call to action should now answer, “What do I do now?”

Adding “beautiful” enhancements to our designs

Rod Motta — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 05:35:08 +0000

We, designers, need to consider two things when adding “beautiful” enhancements to our designs.

Responsive and intuitive page elements
Branding and consistency of theme.

Focusing on these two things will give every pixel in a design a purpose and will contribute to the website’s overall usability. Sure, eye candy is important, but it isn’t everything, and that for a design to be truly beautiful, it has to be functional, have purpose and contribute in some way to the website’s intuitiveness, usefulness and branding. All of these things contribute to the overall effect of a design.

The power of personas – a fun cartoon explanation

Rod Motta — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 22:10:59 +0000

Check out this awesome job of explaining user personas through a fun comic created by Brad Colbow. Some topics are more easily understood when presented this way. (at least for me). The comic style brings what is essentially a “slightly” dry subject to life.

A list of more resources about user personas and mental models are listed at the end of the post.

But seriously, we need more ponies on our websites ;-P

Quick thought on Web vs Desktop design process

Rod Motta — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 02:39:32 +0000

There is a world of differences to consider when designing for web or designing for desktop applications:

From fundamental interactions to keyboard driven navigational paradigms to accessibility issues to screen layout to basic behavior and reaction of buttons, links, etc…we have to consider that a product with a rich client and a web client are two completely separate applications striving to assist the user in meeting the same goals. Of course, it is a little more complicated than that but perhaps it get us going in the right direction.

The four layers of design

Rod Motta — Sat, 09 May 2009 00:11:57 +0000

According to Bill Buxton on the article On Engineering and Design: An Open Letter, it might be useful to think of design in terms of four layers, each demanding a progressively larger investment.

Design awareness can and ideally should be something that every employee of a company makes their best effort to acquire. I would say exactly the same thing about technology awareness. In the corporate culture I dream about, there would be a balance between the two—along with a healthy respect for best business practices—in every employee.
Design literacy is also something that can be acquired with a bit more effort by any employee, regardless of background. If your company has employees who suffer from “Apple (AAPL) envy” in terms of the nature of the products that they produce, building such literacy is a very real and useful step in helping combat that particular affliction. Designers need technological literacy, too, and both need an equal dose of business acumen. Without this, none of us has any right to complain about not being understood by those in other disciplines. We all need to be able to handle multiple directions.
Design thinking is something that takes even more of an investment, requiring a level of competence that—with dedication and practice—can be acquired by anyone, to a reasonable degree. Cognitive science makes it clear that the strategies designers use in approaching problems or questions are different (not “better”) than those employed by those trained in engineering disciplines. Both strategies are complementary. Given the complexity of the problems that confront us, it seems to me that expanding our collective arsenal of techniques is something we could all benefit from.
Design practice, however, is not something available to everyone. This is a full-time job for highly trained professionals. It requires people who have invested just as much to acquire their set of skills as the computer scientists have put in for theirs. Yes, there are exceptions. There always are on both sides of the table. But it is risky, if not foolhardy, to generalize from the exception.

The importance of User Personas

Rod Motta — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 06:10:28 +0000

According to Alan Cooper, author of About Face 3.0 with Robert Riemann and David Cronin, “The persona is a powerful, multipurpose design tool that helps overcome several problems that currently plague the development of digital products. Personas help designers:

Determine what a product should do and how it should behave.
Communicate with stakeholders, developers, and other designers.
Build consensus and commitment to the design.
Measure the design’s effectiveness.
Contribute to other product-related efforts such as marketing and sales plans.”

User Interface Guidelines

Rod Motta — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 06:29:16 +0000

This is a great list of references for user interface design and usability guidelines: