Free eBook: Six Circles – An Experience Design Framework

As technology has advanced, the importance of how humans interact with systems, machines, and each other, have also advanced into a fusion of disciplines, coalescing under the banner of “user experience.” And though “experience” is a vast and abstract notion that is highly contingent on the user, successful experiences in either service or product design are ultimately based upon solid design principles.

James Kelway started the eBook Six Circles – An Experience Design Framework as an enquiry into how different design principles can be applied to the field of digital product design. This led him to identify six core themes—the “Six Circles”:

• Persuasion
• Behavior
• Visual design
• Usability
• Interaction
• Content

Good products and services combine these themes into better experiences; they induce or entice users into engaging, and guide and assist them as they work through the experiences to reach their…read more
By UX Magazine Staff

UX Magazine

Metamemory and the User Experience

An article published in Science Magazine in June provides evidence that the Internet has become an “external part” of our memory systems. Rather than remembering information, we seem to have “outsourced” this effortful task to an entity other than ourselves.

On the face of it, this is not an astounding finding in that psychologists have demonstrated for over 30 years that we use outside sources, such as family or team members, to supplement our less-than-perfect memories. What makes this research remarkable, and of interest to the UX community, is that the researchers found that when we expect to be able to access information in the future, we tend to have reduced memory for the actual information, but enhanced memory for where to find the information. Thus, while we do measurably worse at remembering that the capital of Vermont is Montpellier, we apparently remember with…read more
By Cassandra Moore

UX Magazine

6 Disciplines for Reaching Customer Experience Maturity

Most companies say they want to differentiate themselves based on a superior customer experience. But the reality is very few manage to provide an experience that truly differentiates a brand from competitors. Consider the health insurance industry: as a group, this entire industry is in its customer experience infancy, earning a “very poor” rating of just 53 (on a 100-point scale) in Forrester’s annual Customer Experience Index study.

So how can organizations excel at customer experience and advance to higher levels of maturity? And how can they sustain those advances once they’ve made them? The basis for organizational maturity in any field stems from adopting and consistently performing a set of sound, repeatable practices that lead to excellence. In the world of customer experience, maturity is about the extent to which an organization routinely performs the practices required to design, implement, and manage customer experience in a disciplined way.

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UX Magazine

First Look at the Google Catalogs User Experience

Google Catalogs is a new iPad app that presents shoppers with a consistent user interface to a wide variety of retail catalogs. Shoppers can quickly flip through exquisite catalog imagery, view coordinated product layouts and individual products, save favorites and, of course, purchase products.

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UX Magazine

Rethinking the Television Experience

Have you ever felt it’s harder to find something to watch on television now than it was when there were fewer choices? This can partly be attributed to the dilution of content quality, but a greater problem is that operating a television and discovering content is much more complicated than it used to be.

Television, Evolved

For fifty years, watching television was as simple as turning on the set and flipping through limited, regularly scheduled programs. Technological improvements have made this experience easier by eliminating the need to adjust your antenna, introducing remote controls, and adding geographically and topically diverse channels, among other advances.

The introduction of the VCR likely represented the first technological advance for television that also introduced significant user confusion. The advantages of recording a show and watching it at your own convenience are obvious, but the “TV/VCR” button that switched back and forth between scheduled and recorded programming baffled some users to the point of abandoning VCR technology altogether.

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UX Magazine

The Citizen Experience Needs Us

The user experience field is named after its intended beneficiaries. Users, end-users, customers—all of our terms for people are commercial or pragmatic, which stands to reason since most of us spend most of our time creating or improving experiences on behalf of profit-oriented businesses.

Lately, I’ve started thinking that our view of the human as a “user” is incomplete. Yes, interacting with interfaces does come down to using technology, but just as “customer” is a more comprehensive term in the commercial realm, we need another term to describe other important relationships in people’s lives.

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UX Magazine

The Elements of Player Experience

Video games are breaking out of the roles they’ve traditionally occupied and are moving into spaces where they collide with UX design. There are games that serve as social glue between old friends, and games that bring strangers together to collaborate on solving problems. There are games that help people meet their life goals, and games that let people reward others for meeting theirs. There are games that facilitate creative self-expression, help people understand the news, train doctors to save lives, and advocate for human rights. As they expand into these realms, the lines separating game design from software UX design are growing fuzzier and less important.

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UX Magazine

Personas: The Foundation of a Great User Experience

Today’s consumers are demanding more from companies. Customers expect products, services, and information that are timely and catered to their specific needs and desires. Traditionally, companies develop and market products based on market segmentation and demographics, assuming that the features, functionality and messaging will meet the needs of all of the customers in that demographic—a “one size fits all” mentality. However, as the marketplace shifts from a mass manufacturing to a mass customization model, customers needs and desires are more accurately identified through the development of personas rather than through demographic data.

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UX Magazine

Experience Is What We Make It

Making something deceptively simple is not as valuable as providing a clear and coherent narrative through a complex reality.
     - Martin Thomas

A common adage is that, unlike PCs, mobile devices are used to fill “the in-between moments.” The nature of the “in-between” is unclear, but it’s implied that real life is something altogether different. Work, study, and other “serious things” like tax returns and mortgage applications all happen in front of a PC. Mobile is therefore relegated to the realm of distraction. Stuck at a bus stop, or in line at the bank? Why not play a game, take a quiz, or read the latest headline? Today’s app stores satisfy these needs with wide collections of games, news, and infotainment—bright, colourful diversions carefully optimized for short bursts of engagement.

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UX Magazine

VA – Can You Dig It? The ’70s Soul Experience (BoxSet) (2001) (Lossless)

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