UX Montreal

(English version follows.)

User Experience is a continually evolving set of disciplines including: information architecture, interaction design, content strategy and user research — to name a few. How can we help our clients, managers and colleagues navigate the UX landscape? Which of your tactics have been successful? How can we best express the risks and benefits in order to arrive at better decisions?

Register now (it’s free!) and join us on April 28, at Divan Orange, 4234 Bd. St-Laurent, from 5:30pm to 8pm. This event is limited to 30 participants. Sessions will be recorded whenever possible and recordings made available on here on uxmtl.ca. Drinks and snacks will be available for purchase.

Come listen, learn, and share your experience at the next UXTalk!

We all agreed that using UI design patterns could significantly speed up both design and production processes. But not many patterns seem to exist for UX design. If you have any, please share them with us!

Some participants mentioned their use of UI patterns as a form of shorthand when it came to communicating designs within teams, building pattern libraries to share them. For very big and geographically dispersed teams, pattern libraries have solved the major problems of too many designers working on similar problems in different places and contributed to increased efficiency. On the flipside, when a pattern becomes obsolete “We have an anti-pattern library growing!” And when the threshold of acceptable commonality is reached “Then everyone’s personal tastes and history takes over!”

“You choose a library and then you build your own because you can’t help it.”

When it comes to innovation, whether a pattern helps or hinders the process seems largely dependent on the reasons which caused us to create and use the pattern in the first place:

- Human factors (physical/cognitive and social/cultural)

- Technological and materiel constraints (opportunities, limitations, medium-dependent interactions)

- Success (proven or perceived)

We all seemed to agree that changing technological and material constraints could lead to the emergence of new patterns. The current flagship for a “shifting paradigm” (although I would like to suggest that this is a perspective which is actually lagging behind the shift which already occurred ages ago elsewhere in the world) is of course the Iphone which offers up realms of possibilities for both interface, interaction and experience design thanks to touch-screen input, mobility, geolocalisation and a hardcore style guide.  “Iphone got us to scroll to get to the newest”

“If one app makes me want every other app to do the same…”

The next UXtalk – How can we sell UX? – is on Wednesday April 28. You can reserve your spot here: http://uxtalk-3.eventbrite.com/

Many User Interface design “patterns” are simply designs based on existing conventions found elsewhere. A very good example of this would be the “calendar” with its presentation of time, analogue to the paper calendars we’ve been using for decades. While analogue conventions serve as points of reference for the user we should also be aware of their culturally and contextually-bound aspects and limitations.

Others, both in UI and UX, come from what a few participants termed “machine” or “system” constraints. Such root causes are not always apparent and indeed we argued that a good designer would (should?) appreciate the constraint as an opportunity for creativity.

A great example of such a constraint is the “Shopping Cart”. As Steph Troeth explained, “It was often understood that we took navigation away so that people wouldn’t get lost in the buying process, or because we wanted to streamline their buying activity. In reality, it was just tricky to manage sessions.  Programmatically, it wasn’t an easy task to keep different states of user actions. For example, using the “back” button could completely mess up your buying experience. It wasn’t until session management made progress that we were able to get better both technically and from the UX perspective.“

Yet another category of design patterns are designs that become patterns via repeated selection. Whether the reasons for choosing them are because they have proved to be “successful” via measurement or community assent or whether they are assumed to be successful for other reasons such as market leadership, brand reputation, newness or personal taste, we could argue that some of them end up becoming patterns in spite of themselves. Do you agree?

Coming next: How do design patterns help/hinder design processes and innovation?

Last Wednesday’s UXTalk in Montreal brought together around 30 people to discuss the topic of Design & UX Patterns. What I’m starting to like a whole lot about these talks is just how multidisciplinary the folks that come to them are. Web, mobile, gaming, content, strategy and marketing people came by to talk with each other. We got through a lot of questions and I think we came up with some interesting answers. Here are some of the things we discussed:

-          UX Design Patterns, what are they?

-          Where do design patterns come from?

-          How do they help/hinder design processes and innovation?

-          How do they get changed/evolve?

UX Design Patterns, what are they?

Not the same as “User Interface design patterns”, although the latter may certainly be used to construct User Experience (or to speed design and production processes up, more on this coming soon.)

We came to a very clear distinction between “UI patterns” and “UX patterns”. Think of the difference between them as that between a sign up form for a service and the experience that leads a user to sign up for a service, or the difference between saying a room “must have 2 windows”  and saying a room “has to let enough light into it.” See Christopher Alexander (Wikipedia) and http://www.patternlanguage.com/ for much more on pattern theory. We seemed to agree we need both UX and UI design patterns.

Coming next: Where do UI and UX design patterns come from?

(English follows.)

Que sont les modèles de design ? Dans quels contextes sont-ils utiles ? Devraient-ils être considérés comme des “standards” ?

Voici quelques unes des questions que nous nous poserons la semaine prochaine au cours de notre UXTalk #2 consacré aux “Modèles de design et de UX”. À travers le partage de nos expériences et de nos ressources collectives, le but de cette discussion est d’arriver à établir un cadre pour savoir quand utiliser des modèles, et quand les éviter.

Voici une liste de ressources pour vous donner le ton de la discussion :

• ui-Patterns.com
• uipatterns.net
• wearecolourblind.com
• patterntap
• Welie
• Quince
• On Flickr: Chris Messina’s design patterns collection and Peter Morville’s search patterns collection

Enregistrez-vous (c’est gratuit) et rejoignez-nous au Divan Orange, 4234 Bd. St-Laurent, le 24 mars de 17h30 à 20h. Des boissons et des snacks sont disponibles au bar.

Cet évènement est limité à 30 participants, la session sera enregistrée autant que possible et publiée ici sur uxmtl.ca.

Venez écouter, partager et apprendre !

These are some of the questions we’ll be discussing next week at UXTalk #2 on March 24 on “Design & UX Patterns”. Through sharing our collective experiences and resources, the goal of this month’s UXTalk is to arrive at a feasible framework for when we use patterns, and when we should not.

Here are some resources already on our list to get you in the mood for conversation:

• ui-Patterns.com
• uipatterns.net
• wearecolourblind.com
• patterntap
• Welie
• Quince
• On Flickr: Chris Messina’s design patterns collection and Peter Morville’s search patterns collection

Register (it’s free!) and join us on March 24, at Divan Orange, 4234 Bd. St-Laurent, from 5:30pm to 8pm. Drinks and snacks will be available for purchase.

The event is limited to 30 participants, sessions will be recorded whenever possible and recordings made available on here on uxmtl.ca.

Come listen, share and learn!

The above title is a reference to several things that I heard at the first UXTalk on Feb 24^th in Montreal. Firstly, it’s a reference to a belief that as people we can split ourselves into separate “rational” and “emotional” parts. An example of this great dividing principle as it is stereotypically seen to operate in the UX design space was given by one participant who has been working as a designer for 15 years “…design is emotional and engineering is rational.” And even more interesting, another participant suggested “I can probably say most designers do not work for the actual web site, they work for their portfolio. It takes 3 UX people to break a designer.”

Aside from my personal opinion that “breaking” people – whether they are designers or engineers isn’t really a good thing to be doing to anyone, what does this say about the actual power of emotionality vs. rationality? Especially when it comes to convincing clients about the value of what we do for them? “It’s like a love affair. It’s about seduction. It’s not what you’re actually going to do. What we pitched is never what we’re going to do”

“In the end, the person who pitched the crazy idea wins (the contract Ed.)”

“You’re selling a dream, but if afterwards the dream becomes a nightmare. It was so beautiful…”.

“What we’re winning now are people who got sold on this big thing and now they’re coming back. And those pitches are so easy!”

“What we figured out kind of works is making sure that design is part of accompanying the client.”

People who do UX are very aware of these issues. I’ve found those I know personally are often themselves somewhat on the knife-edge of this so-called rational/emotional split. Should we work more at integration? Let me know.

Prior to the first UX talk on Feb 24^th we held a twitter poll about which topics people said they were most interested in. “Process” won out [ by 50% (21 votes) ] How much we ended up actually talking about processes that night is debateable;-) Agile and rapid iterative processes got some mentions. It seems that “doing UX” is a contact sport and I wonder if some of us might be sometimes looking to “process” as a way to armour ourselves.

“On est front line,” and up against a number of seemingly irreconcilable conditions, some which are clients who are actually paying for our services: “Make it just like this site. Jazzy, funky, sexy for $5000 in two days – it’s gotta be the next Facebook. Prove me wrong.” People doing UX often need to help companies/clients translate their objectives into what they need as well as what they think they want.

I’m a firm believer that initial conditions dictate the form that things will tend to end up in, especially when those things start off being intangible. The UX design space (there, I said it again) is filled with them: client/company values and objectives, budgets, personnel and of course the users themselves. What I heard at the first UXTalk is that right now it’s mainly the client/company objectives which condition the way the remaining intangibles get addressed (or not). But doing UX demands we address the rest just as well. Presently,“Chances are – on arrive à la fin sans argent… “?

Here in Montreal it seems we’re sometimes dealing with people who have a “traditional vision of the web” (Do you agree? and if so please tell me what that means;-)) and that «you have to do a lot of evangelisation to tell clients that you should do less, spend less.”

Coming soon: C’est comme une histoire d’amour, rationnelle et émotionnelle

24 people attended the first UXTalk on Feb 24^th

7 (and a half!?) of them said they were actually “responsible for the user experience” in their company while the others cited a wide range of job titles, activities and roles. Here are just a few: usability expert, ergonomist, product manager, content strategist, copywriter, interaction designer, researcher, CEO,…

I thought this was really interesting. Various organisations all over the world are presently debating definitions of these titles as well us the ubiquitous and now trendy acronym “UX.”  Everyone present seemed to agree that they were “doing UX.”

Here’s my conclusion from the 1^st UXTalk: UX is not a job title, it’s a design space, a perspective-taking way of considering products and services and it’s also everyone’s responsibility. “Ça peut pas être un trip personnel.”

Coming soon: Processes are everywhere, not all of them are broken.

7 (et demi !?) d’entre eux déclarèrent qu’ils étaient “responsables de l’expérience utilisateur” dans leur compagnie, alors que les autres ont cité un large éventail de postes, d’activités et de rôles. En voici quelques uns : expert en usabilité, ergonome, gestionnaire de produit, rédacteur, concepteur d’interaction, chercheur, dirigeant…

J’ai trouvé cela particulièrement intéressant. Diverses organisations, partout dans le monde, débattent présentement de la définition de ces titres ainsi que de cet acronyme omniprésent et très tendance de “UX”. Tous les participants semblaient s’accorder qu’ils “faisaient du UX”.

Voici mes conclusions pour ce premier UXTalk : UX n’est pas un titre, c’est un espace de conception, une façon de prendre du recul sur les produits et les services, et c’est aussi la responsabilité de chacun. “Ça ne peut pas être un trip personnel.”

Article à venir : les processus sont partout, ils ne sont pas tous défectueux.

Thanks to everyone who attended! Here’s a preview of what we talked about. I’m thinking that each one is a great topic in and of itself so I’m going to post more under each one in the coming days. That will keep me busy until the next UX Talk!

We’re also looking for feedback about this first event. Let us know what you think in the comments section of this post.

- Who was at the first UXTalk? : Well, we have more people than we might think who are doing UX in MTL!

- Processes are everywhere, not all of them are broken

- C’est comme une histoire d’amour, rationnelle et émotionnelle

- Agile comes from a specific context, that’s why it needs to be adapted to the context we want to use it in

- UX is about big pictures, longer term and getting buy-in BEFORE we go to development

- Don’t just throw something out there and fix it later! That’s crazy!

- How is your company/client making money? Here’s where UX can help

- The raw and the cooked data. Some people can make numbers say anything!