From my other blog at DanMontano.com

From "eyeballs" to people
Summary: Focusing on "eyeballs" looking at ads or web traffic is a myopic way of thinking about successful advertisements.  Read the full blog posting >>

The value of user experience
Summary: Sometimes when the economy goes South we have to remind our company stakeholders about the value of user experience in today's marketplace. This list shows some of the value user experience professionals deliver. Read the full blog posting >>

It's official. I'm moving out of this blog.

The new version of this blog is within my own website.

Hmmm....let's see:

"Besides taking 30% of any sale price, Apple controls what appears on its phone Apps Store. And that's really annoying some people."- Guardian UK

While in London, someone unveils a similar looking phone up with a key difference: "there will be no attempt to lock down the system to prevent people running whatever applications they like."- Guardian UK


- Daniel Montano

Join 800+ industry professionals in Portland,
Oregon, USA for the UPA International Conference - "Bringing Usability to
Life , Making everyday things better", June 8-12, 2009.

This is an excellent opportunity for you to share your knowledge and
experience with others who care about usability.

Call for Submissions - Due by Friday, October 3.
Please submit your proposals online for presentations, papers, panels,
experienced practitioner topics, tutorials, workshops and more at:
UPA 2009 Submissions!

User research and user testing are not "nice to have" processes that user experience professionals do. They have a real value. Not applying these important processes could lead to very serious problems for design companies, their clients, the customers and other partners involved.

Next time someone in your company wants to cut corners on user research, or usability testing, point them to the Wall Street Journal's article on J.Crew's website usability issues. This article outlines the types frustrations J.Crew web users had to deal with. It also mentions how J.Crew ended up loosing millions of dollars because of these issues.

General examples of possible loss for the design client:
- revenue lost in sales
- loss of stock value, investors and capital
- staff time spent addressing user frustrations
- money previously invested in software/web development and design
- money invested in correcting the problems through redesign
- money that needs to be re-invested in branding and P.R. after a series of issues

It's also bad for the design agency
The design agencies that cut corners and end up designing faulty products can easily end up being bankrupt after a widely publicized mistake like this.

Vendor partner guilt by association ?
If you are a vendor providing products or services used in the failed project your product and brand may also be at risk of sharing the blame - regardless, of guilt or innocence.

People forget
If you think people will forget about user experience mistakes of this magnitude, you are probably right - but your competitors will not.

References:
Visit the the Wall Street Journal blog article

Related blog posting : usabilitycounts.com

- Daniel Montano
Visit my other blog: Framework 21

Nadeem Shabir over at his blog Virtual Chaos has done us the favor of summarizing 50-ish truths about innovation.

He compiled the list from a book by Max Mckeown called, The Truth About Innovation.

I'm listing here a few of them as a teaser. You can read the others at Nadeem's blog.

• Truth 13: Cure apathy by sharing purpose
• Truth 16: Different structural strokes for different folks
• Truth 19: Everyone can learn to think better
• Truth 34: Little differences make a big difference
• Truth 36: Madonna knows more than your boss
• Truth 37: Meeting of minds not mindless meetings
• Truth 41: People judge your first, then your ideas
• Truth 44: Reinventing the wheel is a good thing
• Truth 45: Second can be better than first
• Truth 53: What you know can hurt you
• Truth 55: You can’t control waves so learn to surf

Nadeem's blog: VirtualChaos

- Daniel Montano, Visit my other blog: Framework 21

I found this graph on GraphJam...(by the way, I think they mean "population").


Image source: http://graphjam.com/
- Daniel Montano, Visit my other blog: Framework 21

I have noticed a few blog postings out there where a marketing professionals talk-down the importance of user experience design and often make comments based on basic misunderstandings about our disciplines.

Marketing professionals are "users" of information architecture. Asides from their physical usage on the systems we design they are also users on the bigger picture of the marketplace.

This is what needs to happen in order to improve the understanding with marketing:

• Information architects (IA's) need to understand and explain how marketers can use information architecture for their marketing purposes
• Since marketers have a wide range of duties, the IA's need to understand the specific goals and tasks that marketers perform and how IA can help them accomplish each one of those goals
• IA's need to clarify the most often mis-understood aspects of our profession
• Companies need to invest the time to allow this alignment
  

Some of the most recent misunderstandings I've encountered recently, (I am paraphrasing):

• "User experience design is just web design"
• "User personas are the same as marketing segmentation"
• "Marketing research is the same as user research"
  
• "User experience design doesn't deal with business process"
• "Information architecture does not help to persuade the customer"
  

Why this is important
The understanding between these two departments (User experience and marketing) is not only important to success in our marketplace, but it can be a marketing advantage.

Consultation
I will make my consultation services available for any companies that have encountered this type of issue and need guidance on how to best integrate their user experience team with their marketing team.

Daniel Montano
Contact: Daniel-Montano@uxdtools.com

PC World has published an article providing us a high-level review of the new browser Chrome.

It's definitively worth reading.

Source: PC World - Visit the original article >> >>

Some of My Recent Professional Accomplishments

- Defined the information architecture for a set of 3 hospitals (3,000+ pages). The new information architecture, CMS structure, user interface (among other efforts) helped to achieve the following:

• - a 1400% increase in daily visitors and 1700% increase in traffic sources
• - search engine ranking also went from 150 to number 1 on many keywords
• - saw a 470% increase in physician referrals per month within 4 months of the site launch

- Designed a "Health Library" that gained exclusive design contracts for my employer. Translated the Health Library into Spanish and expanded the client's target market. The Health Library also gained national exposure for the client's products and services.

- Worked with a FORTUNE 100 company. Used information architecture to organize 200+ medical devices and improve access, reduce data entry time, and improve safety and ease of use

- Structured the Information architecture for the nation's largest community college (20,000+ pages)

UPDATE: 10-4-2008
My new blog is located at my website http://danmontano.com
My personal blog covering cognitive science and theory, sustainability and design is called Framework 21
On Linkedin