Success Through Experimentation

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I’ve spent a lot of time recently learning how to take all the knowledge I know about crafting User Experiences and turning that into articulated knowledge and practical applications. Every once in a while there’s something that excites me about UX and design that manifests itself into everyday life, and one of those is when I bought a new pair of jeans from Hollister. If you haven’t seen the “athletic skinny” cut before as pictured above, don’t fret, I’ll explain that to you and show how experimentation leads to business success.

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In the context of software engineering, web design and mobile design there are many approaches to marry the work of designers with developers. Many times the right approach is the one that helps you set your team’s rhythm, working harmoniously and delivering to your clients. Even so, it’s worth having a peek at other approaches and stealing some of their values and processes to improve your own. In this post we’ll discuss one approach, what design means to me and hopefully you’ll be able to take something away from it.

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Most of us will be familiar with this phrase:

The customer is always right.

So, what does it really mean? More importantly for those in design and UX can we learn something from it? After all, most people who have spent a bit of time dabbling in this field have probably heard the term CX – Customer eXperience – used before.
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I recently (by recently I mean about a month ago!) went to a local Meetup hosted by RealUX at Valtech UK in Manchester to see a presentation about the User Experience of Television at the BBC. If you don’t know what the BBC is then you may have to get out from under your rock and see http://www.bbc.co.uk/. They mentioned this framework and it really struck me as a way to make my life with clients and designing easier and I’d love to share it here.
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How to Keep your Users in Control

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There’s nothing worse than logging into an online service, attempting to carry out a task that was supposed to be simple, and then getting frustrated at how there doesn’t seem to be a way to do what you want. What’s even worse is when your screen is cluttered with buttons and alerts that don’t seem to make sense. Control and Visibility are some of Nielson’s Heuristics and I’d like to share with you an example that personally threw me off track and how it might be addressed.

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Wake Up Early and Beat Stress

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When you’re a baby you do nothing but sleep; that sounds amazing to me right now to be honest! As you get older we know that young kids and teenagers love to stay up late when they can for a variety of reasons, usually whatever they’re passionate about at the time. The stereotype of young adults is to hang on to this habit a little whilst getting just enough sleep to wake up for work the next day. As for me, I grew up enjoying the peaceful mornings and I’ll tell you why it kicks ass.

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Taking it Easy

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There can be a lot of meaning behind the phrase “taking it easy”. You wouldn’t think it at first since it’s pretty common, at least from what I’ve experienced. It can be positive where you’ve put in a lot of hard work and can reap the benefits, or it can be negative to relieve yourself from stress or frustration. Even failure. I’d like to share with you my experiences so far, and how to truly get that feel good feeling when you take it easy.

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Serf Single Config File

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Shameless plug: I’ve recently posted a blog about Serf, a wonderful application orchestration tool from Hashicorp, and how you can start automatically bootstrapping your cluster. 

http://www.cakesolutions.net/teamblogs/serfs-single-configuration-file

In case you’re wondering about the featured image of a Tirimisu, it has nothing to do with this post and it was bloody delicious!

Chuck’s This Week in UX #3

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Hola a todos to the third edition of Chuck’s this week in UX! Also known as #chucksTWIX this is a weekly (and sometimes fortnightly) blog series dedicated to shedding light on articles and videos I found to give some new angle or insight on the UX industry. From small tips and tricks to earth shattering discoveries, this is my week in UX.

In this edition – do you design for the disabled and impaired..?

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