Six Circles - An experience design framework
This ebook has taken far too long to write but at last it is finally finished. The beauty of self-publishing is also the major problem with it – nobody pushes you, you aren’t paid and for all you know nobody will read it once it’s published. I wanted to see how the many different aspects of the book may develop conversations within the user experience community.
Elements of the book have already aged, but the principles continue, even though the examples may not! However, I hope you enjoy the read and I am really interested to know your thoughts, either here or on twitter. Currently it is only an ePub available for mobile devices but if the demand is there, other versions will be made available.
Download Six Circles for Epub readers
(See the comments section below for browser-based ePub readers)
Some accompanying thoughts
In the last year I have seen how the different elements of the Six Circles transcend user experience, into the fields of brand strategy, service design and customer experience. It is my view that in ten years time we will be talking about what we do today in very different terms due to the contexts that we have to design for, using technology that is only beginning to become pervasive in our physical environment. I predict that UX and Service Design will cease to be differentiated, as they will be so entwined it would be too difficult, and potentially inefficient to separate into different disciplines.
I have seen enough of touch and tablet usage, mobile devices, ‘Everyware’ (and even Microsoft’s shift of it’s Windows 8 platform towards the touch paradigm) to feel that we are in for an exciting decade ahead.
Call it the legacy of Steve Jobs, but what he has left us with is a global population who are more instantly engaged with technology than we could have imagined ten years ago. To allow the very young and very old to interact with content through the same device is a stunning achievement, and for the interface and interaction designers to be able to support a richer experience is truly exciting.
Unfortunately companies are still catching up, fearful of failure and what they perceive as risk. Watching their competitors to see who makes the first move but the time for businesses to be brave and bold is now. There is not much time remaining for some businesses to make use of the power of meaningful, rich experiences delivered by brands that satisfy the culture and contextual uses of the users. Those companies that achieve this will simply dominate at a rate that is faster due to the networked society.
But all the talk of technology misses the point. It is the human needs, desires and emotions and their interactions with each other that create our insights that in turn drive innovation and success for companies. These experiences make the difference. It is the quality of experience that is the differentiator for any company in a crowded market.
Solving people problems will inevitably solve business problems. The challenge is to get businesses to believe in it, and trust those to deliver on the promise of user centred design. But with a process that is understood and a philosophy that appeals to many, there is alot we can do to ensure the business world adopts a path to greater product development, that builds on the needs and wants of people at its core.Tweet
UX Design Framework - Persuasion
Previously I have written about Content, Behaviour, Visual Design and Interaction. The fifth element – Persuasion, is a part of the UX design framework that has many darker, or manipulative connotations. Some would say that persuasion does not align itself well with the ethics of designing for the user.
But as BJ Fogg in his book, Persuasive Technology, says:
The answer to the question – Is persuasion unethical? Is neither yes or no. It depends upon how persuasion is used…The designers intent, method of persuasion and outcomes help to determine the ethics of persuasive technology…If a human were using this strategy to persuade would it be ethical? We expect ethical persuasion to include elements of empathy and reciprocity but with interactive technology there is no emotional reciprocity.
Which is why we sometimes feel cheated when technology fails to deliver an experience that is empathetic, and why as designers we need to be more aware of these potential pitfalls.
Here persuasion is explored in terms of design principles that influence people and factors of motivation – competition, cooperation and recognition. These characteristics also give products that are connected (from social networks to mobile applications) the power to persuade.
Engagement and Optimisation: Architecture for optimisation
How do you construct the architecture of a site or web application you are designing to give an optimised experience? When talking about architecture it is not specifically about the technical implementation but more the concept of a site being able to exist in multiple areas, accessible from multiple paths and able to accommodate different user interactions.
An optimised architecture must be;
Adaptable – to adapt to different user needs (how they arrive to the product, via search, email, bookmarks or referrals)
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Be aware that users arrive deep into the content a site offers. Every page should have the ability to act like a landing page. Ensure the user’s initial intent is satisfied by clear calls to action, signposting and visual clues to get them started and motivated to continue on site. Group pages together and see what percentage of the total audience arrive at them to give you an idea of how to shape and model the content around their wants and needs. Offer numerous opportunities for varied paths of navigation, from different user types. Read more… |
Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click?
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The human brain is complex but this book manages to break it down into parts that we can relate to and is a very accessible and quick book to read.The author, Dr Susan Weinschenk, tells of us having three brains in one. Which certainly explains why it is so necessary to embark on research – with three brains how can we ever second guess our users?
She lays out how this complex system works but also states that the unconscious mind makes many of the decisions in our lives. By influencing the unconscious mind though design techniques, we can effectively persuade users to interact with our sites and become more engaged.
The book is not really a practical, by the numbers guide, but more about the concepts of why users do the things they do. As such its worth buying and an enjoyable read that gives us insights that are backed up with actual contemporary research. |
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Sacca, Twitter and why should we care?
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Last month, at The Next Web 2009, Chris Sacca – investor in Twitter, was interviewed on stage and also chaired a panel about the Twitter ecosystem. The following post is a combination of his comments. Before being a major investor in Twitter, Sacca worked for Google, where he ran the the alternative access division, whose ambitious aim was to get everybody connected to the internet. They mostly focused on user experience and solving user problems. |
What Google does
 Bradley Horowitz at The Next Web 09 courtesy ofDailyM |
After Jeff Jarvis had his take on Google we had somebody from the inside – Bradley Horowitz.Horowitz was the man who advised Yahoo to buy Flickr and after redefining his role there he made them acquire Delicious. Previously he had formed Virage (video categorization engine) and sold it to Autonomy after dropping out of his degree at MIT Medialab where he worked on image categorisation technologies. Read more… |
Tipping point – beyond 2.0
 Jeff Jarvis (left) and Andrew Keen courtesy of Ann Helmond
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Jeff Jarvis (author of What Would Google Do?) and Andrew Keen (author of The Cult of the Amateur) painted opposing views of the techno-cultural landscape. Keen actually regarded Jarvis as a ‘cheerleader’ for Google although Jarvis himself said he used the company as an example for changes in the real world. |
Impact of Web 2.0 on Search
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Ricardo Baeza-Yates gave us Yahoo’s view that they do not believe in black boxes as a way to solve the complexities of search but that its more about what can be learnt from users.
Of course nothing new here but he gave a holistic view about how Yahoo is addressing the different areas of the conundrum. |
Engagement and optimisation: Defining behaviours
Photo by Nicholas Nova
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The second of a seven part post about optimising a site to create a more engaged audience. Here we look at user behaviour and how methods used help ensure you address user needs. Previously: Success metrics |
Engagement and optimisation: Success Metrics
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You hear alot about engagement, and not just in the UX community.
How do you engage your website users? What exactly constitutes the different parts of a website’s content that will attract people and make the website an enjoyable experience for them and a profitable one for your business?
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Do you see numbers or people?
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I recently attended a training course where we were taught how to interpret figures in web analytics software. We learnt about the different reports to use in specific situations and where to look for trends and behaviours. All massively valuable and seen in Google Analytics, Omniture and WebTrends amongst others.
Remember – the figures are only a part of the solution |
Holistic concept models: an ROI blueprint
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I read a post recently that illustrated how concept models are rarely used in the right way and are often misunderstood. Are they really worth doing at all?
Now seems a good time to expand on the tool that Dan Brown has popularised through his book Communicating Design. Not as simply a stand alone tool but one that can provide a blueprint for giving solid ROI on design, analytics and testing. |
Creating user centred taxonomies
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When you organise content on a web site, how can you be confident its relevant and clear for your users? The following walk-through tells of how you can ensure you build a site with users’ interests at heart.
What is a taxonomy? The term ‘taxonomy’ is a bit of a misnomer, having its origins in Biological study denoting sub-species within a species classification. However, in the business sense of the word, taxonomies can encompass a whole range of different elements that, broadly speaking, are ways of classifying content under categories recognised by a user group. |
Tools and techniques for managing website evolution
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This post started from the ideas of a two-part post written last year by Seth Gottlieb & Brice Dunwoodie. It made me think about a list of tools and techniques that content editors could use whilst editing in a collaborative environment. The post is a point of reference for those involved in the daily running and development of sites that are continually evolving. |
The answer is in the interface
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A recent article by Alex Iskold brilliantly captures the separations of where we imagine semantic search should be and the reality. Even if it were trying to knock Google off a top spot, what he highlights is that it would be an unnecessary exercise. Google does its thing very well. Few would argue with that. Alex suggests that semantic search should do something completely different… |
User paths for conversion - elements in engagement
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This image was shown during Peter Moville’s talk about IA 3.0. What is interesting about it is how he linked this to Christopher Alexander’s text about design in architecture and also Peter Merholz’s essay Metadata for the Masses. In which he highlights ‘desire lines’ how paving is built once you see the paths that people tread.
If we look at online behaviour, user paths give us a solid idea of routes to content, where they return to and where they tend to go next. Human behaviour tends to follow patterns, see this article about mobile phone usage for an example of how predictable we tend to be. Read more… |
Building a metadata schema
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A year ago I was involved in a major restructure of 7 major websites. Each had a new taxonomy and controlled vocabulary created. A clear vision of the direction of each site was drawn up and site maps and wireframes produced. The one problem we had, was there wasn’t a generic metadata schema that was adhered to. It was a combination of ad hoc, legacy tags. Some originated from the SEO team and some from the developers and database administrators on each site. |
Optimising images to ensure findability
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Tagging images at source enables a standard to be reached when all images are used during a production process, both for print and online. If they are tagged properly, valuable metadata can be captured inside the JPEG file that can be read by applications later, either on or off line. Read more… |
Design principles for building user engagement
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Luke Wroblewski – Content Page Design Best Practices One of the talks at the IA Summit was by Luke Wroblewski, author of two books and various resources published on his site. If you can see/hear the presentation at this location, I would urge you to do so. There will be something in there I have missed! The content he shared, was an insightful window into how we design pages and how the business requirements of a page may actually work against it. It really reminded me about the mechanics of persuasion, and he highlighted some insights explicitly. The following observations were made by Wroblewski. Read more… |
Managing taxonomies
This post is reflective of the business environment I work in, notably in the B2B publishing sector. However, I feel that all sites would benefit from this approach if they use a site search technology, a CMS and a specialised group of individuals.
Taxonomies on business-to-business websites are industry based around the communities that interact with their content. The problem that many sites find is that the content can evolve and the taxonomy can not adjust to changes in what the content creators produce, or with what advertisers wish to sponsor, with regards to useful popular content. Read more…Tweet
Ambient Findability
I guess you could say this is a meme map of Morville’s observations, research and his ability to see into the future of the trends of Internet based technologies.
Its an interesting, and enlightening, discussion about what we as humans want and need from technology. It seems the text is intended to propagate more discussions and in turn discoveries around the subject of findability and technology. The book certainly makes you think about where we are heading as a society, but also the importance of the products we use and how they become integral to our lives.
Being able to orientate ourselves is a natural human instinct. In the 21st century, findability is a concept that we must ensure is present in the products that are developed (have a look at this great article about its importance just published here on A List Apart).
Its an inspirational read for many reasons, never trying to present answers, but certainly showing the questions that we need to answer if we are to harness the information monster we have created.
You should expect to read something that will present concepts and not case studies or solutions to problems. This book is about the bigger picture and the troubles of information management we face as a society.
Verdict: A philosophical study of where we are, and where we are going that proves Morville is at the forefront of thought leadership when it comes to Information Architecture.
Persuasion Architecture - getting the ROI on IA
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Persuasion Architecture has been around for years, Bryan Eisenberg (and his brother Jeffrey) founded the term and has been successfully establishing it as a concept and a measurable process. However, in a recent post, he states that after 7 years we still must be aware of usability and optimising the user experience. Regardless of the passage of time, sites still struggle to be successful. Read more… |
Wireframes - illustrating design strategy
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The powerful thing about the wire frame is that it removes many emotive aspects of design that will cause division amongst clients. There are no uses of branding , colours or elements of graphic interest on a good wire frame. When they are stripped back to absolute functional essentials it is much easier to explain exactly why key elements are placed in certain areas on the page. |
ComputerWeekly.com- An IA case study
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This was not so much a redesign, or even a relaunch, but more of a resurrection of a site that had become tired, old and ineffective. Its many shortcomings were highlighted with the onslaught of the new generation of sites from competitors that used user-generated content and a more social networking approach to their presentation layer. As this site represented the best of computer related business journalism, it was apt that it should be the company’s first site that underwent a complete overhaul from the ground up. |
Making metrics work
The importance of web metrics has always been self-evident in the world of SEO. It is the measurement of key performance indicators, obvious to all, as clear as day in fact. This transparency and the credence of web analytics is a powerful companion to IA strategies, convincing the client is so much easier when real figures can be shown that highlight user behavior. Often it enables you to get over bigger cultural hurdles that your project needs to overthrow, to enable it to be a success.
Beware of the stakeholders one-eyed view…
Metadata - signposts in the wilderness
Peter Morville’s book – Ambient Findability, is as much a philosophical muse as a book about the current state of play in the world of search and the future technologies. What he does say however is that the power of metadata is something that we can not underplay the importance of.
I recently have compiled a Metadata schema for the company I work for. Based on the Dublin Core set of rules for metadata and also the IPTC set for news (and PRISM and MIME for file formats) it endeavors to produce a set of metadata standards that can be used for text, images and video or audio file types. Obviously these days tagging your files is an involved process, how do you go about tagging an image for example, Google have made a game of it here
Tags and folksonomies will always be fraught without a metadata approach that has been thought through and applied systematically. It also underpins a good information architecture. Categorization will be successful when metadata has been carefully considered.
Once implemented finding will become an easy task. Content that has taken time and money to create can now be found, enjoyed and re-purposed. Saving money, increasing productivity and giving the user an enjoyable experience.
Now surely everybody can see the business value in investing in metadata and information architecture??Tweet
