DANIELMONTANO.UXDTOOLS.COM

Digest

Dan Montano — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 23:40:00 GMT

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 >>

Mobile Phones: A disruptive innovation on the horizon?

Dan Montano — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 21:02:03 GMT

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

Call for Papers - Usability 2009

Dan Montano — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 23:53:00 GMT

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!

How important is user testing? As important as loosing a few million dollars

Dan Montano — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 23:47:00 GMT

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

50-ish truths about innovation

Dan Montano — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 03:08:00 GMT

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

Graphjam on color blindness

Dan Montano — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 00:49:00 GMT

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

The growing need for marketing professionals to understand information architecture

Dan Montano — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 20:18:00 GMT

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

Chrome: 7 reasons for it and 7 reasons against it

Dan Montano — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 19:08:00 GMT

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 >> >>

About Daniel Montano - Recent Accomplishments in Information Architecture and User Experience Design

Dan Montano — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 01:13:00 GMT

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

Judy Estrin on innovation

Dan Montano — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 23:28:00 GMT

"Ms. Estrin argues that short-term thinking and a reluctance to take risks are causing a noticeable lag in innovation. She cites a variety of contributing factors. A decline in federal and university financing for research has dried up new ideas, she said." - Judy Estrin, author of "Closing the Innovation Gap"

Short-term thinking is a framework for evaluating innovation. The question is - have we reached a spot where we need to reconsider it?

Source:
New York Times - "Another Voice Warns of Innovation Slowdown" >>

Update:
This ZDNet article also features a video interview with Estrin >>

5 reasons to reconsider where you position your online ads

Dan Montano — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 03:04:00 GMT

I recently read an article about online ad placements and I was disappointed to learn that there are online advertisers that are still blogging and recommending that people place their online ads on the left side of the page (where the left side navigation usually is). The strategy is that by positioning the ads there people are more likely to click them.

I would anticipate the following results from a website that positions their ads where the left navigation usually is:

People will feel deceived by that tactic and they will resist clicking on the ads out of spite
Sneaky ad placements like these lower the trust value of your webpage
By association, ad-spam-layouts lower the trust value of the advertiser's products/services
It lowers the usability of the website
It will keep you out of online search engines that focus on webpage quality for their search results

Dan Montano authors a transdisciplinary blog about ways of thinking for the 21st century.

Designing for Persuasion

Dan Montano — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 17:19:00 GMT

Designing for persuasion really takes us back to the user. Most if not all the questions about designing persuasive interactive systems have a deep dependency on who the users are and what they value.

We should remember this when faced with the opportunity to attend a workshop (or read a book) on persuasive design. Most of these are usually based on generic ideas of users.Dan Montano authors a transdisciplinary blog about ways of thinking for the 21st century.

The Future of User Experience: User Researcher and Ethno-futurists

Dan Montano — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 15:05:00 GMT

User researchers are often faced with the opportunity to play a role similar to that of an ethno-futurist.

Ethno-futurists study people and their social environments to forecast possible patterns of change.

On the other hand, user researchers go out in the field to meet with users and gather information about how they use products and services. They learn about the user's goals, habits and usual tasks usually within the context of use. In short, they are performing ethnographic* research.

But along with the typical ethnographic research there is an opportunity for the analysis to be expanded to recognize current and expected trends of change. This type of analysis may call for the same methodologies used by ethno-futurists.

When this information is passed along to the information architects and interaction designers they can structure systems that are scalable and evolving to fit the expected patterns of user change.

*This is a variation of ethnography, the way in which anthropologists study groups of people to understand their culture. Dan Montano authors a transdisciplinary blog about ways of thinking for the 21st century.

Postmodern usability ?

Dan Montano — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 22:10:00 GMT

Quoting the latest issue of the Human-Computer Interaction special interest group:

"Some important, recent scholarship on usability studies has called for a
revamping of the methods we use when testing more complex systems....
Still other scholarship has focused on the usability profession. Lund asserts that we are
entering a postmodern usability era that requires a reassessment of our
disciplinary purpose...[1]"

IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication
Special Issue Focus: Technical Communication and Usability Studies
Sighci - Vol 33, Issue 4 (Aug 26, 2008).

[1] A. M. Lund, ?Post-modern usability.? Journal of Usability Studies,
vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 1?6, 2006. You can read this article online (PDF file)

This posting is related to a blog posting on my old blog:
"Postmodern concepts in contemporary life"

- Daniel-Montano ( a t ) uxdtools com

Beyond basic usability - domain comprehension

Dan Montano — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:46:00 GMT

Usability tests usually focus on how successful an user is in completing a specific task. While this is often enough for us to determine the success of a design it is not enough to determine if this actually helps the user accomplish their real goal.

Arguably, you can design an user interface that helps the user perform the wrong task in an intuitive and easy way.

Who is responsible for the user's domain knowledge?
The users themselves may or may not know that the task they are performing is the wrong one for their real goals. This lack of knowledge is usually related to a lack of domain comprehension.

This is complicated even further when even in user research sessions users state that they want to complete task X when that task is not the one that will get them closer to their goal.

This means that user experience practitioners need to keep a watchful eye to make sure the user has enough domain knowledge to make quality decisions as they interact with the system.

-Daniel Montano

Bilingual is not the same as bicultural

Dan Montano — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:59:00 GMT

I recently read a blog posting where an user experience company took inventory of the number of language spoken by their employees. The posting went on to connect this asset with an ability for multicultural understanding.

While linguistic literacy may help someone improve their cultural literacy I don't think linguistic literacy and cultural literacy are the same.

In other words, simply because you can speak/write a language it doesn't necessarily mean that you can also understand the cultural dynamics.

Cultures often develop unspoken symbolic interaction and other subtle nuances. These forms of communication are communicated in complex methods that may or may not include spoken/written language.

Glossary from Wikipedia:
- Cultural literacy
- Symbolic interaction

- Daniel Montano

Welcome to my user experience and innovation blog by Daniel Montano

Dan Montano — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 21:23:23 GMT

Welcome to my blog.

First, I should introduce myself. I am an user experience professional with over 10 years of work experience designing interfaces and systems.

I have worked in the following industries:
- Medical and Biotech (medical software and medical devices)
- Healthcare (hospital websites and web applications)
- Higher Education (college and university websites, web applications)
- Entertainment (promotional and marketing websites)

I have held the following job titles:
- Information Architect / Web Strategist
- Usability Specialist
- Human Factors Specialist
- Senior Web Designer

One of my passions and interests is the topic of innovation. I have spent my entire career working with innovation challenges and I am continuously learning about innovation strategies.

I hope that you enjoy reading the postings in this blog.

Best regards,

Daniel Montano
My LinkedIn profile - (If I already know you send me an invite - If I don't know you email me a note introducing yourself).
Email: Daniel-Montano { a t } uxdtools c o m
My personal blog: Framework 21 (a.k.a. Humane Systems Design)