Metric UX

Exnovation, the Iceberg Model, and Expertise is Over-valued Oct 26, 2020

I want to share a few totally unrelated pieces of thinking that caught my eye. This will be a shorty but I think you’ll find it interesting.

1

I am taken with this concept of exnovation, which is the counterbalance of innovation. To constantly make something new, you have to dismantle the old; to organize your team around iterating and innovating you need to systematize the dismantling. This is from a post on Medium by the Politics for Tomorrow, who - in the same spirit of championing failure with slogans like “fail cheaply” or “move fast and break things” - demonstrate the necessity of embracing the phasing-out of stuff by showing it as part of a larger system of innovation.

They discovered that stabilizing the new is not enough to achieve systemic change. In order to embed innovation in an existing “regime” or status quo, non-sustainable technologies and the related systems, infrastructures and livelihoods around these technologies had to be phased out in a deliberate and socially responsible way.

Super cool.

2

Subject matter expertise in product design is over-valued. In his advice in hiring a head of product, Rich Mironov describes some of the biases subject-matter experts have in design decision making - usually having to do with lack of respect for the need for constant discovery. “I know about advertising, so I know ….” etc.

This should probably resonate with you all who value the process and rituals of user experience design, where good design is the result of disciplined practice. This then emphasizes the value of solid practitioners, an de-emphasizes the value of experts.

3

Perhaps the best way to sum-up my gripes with personas is that personas are easier to get wrong than right, and wrong personas are more likely to inspire resistance rather than empathy. This insight originated with a post from Christin Roman. In their conclusion they suggest alternatives - but honestly in my conclusion the value of any kind of user archetype is a red herring.

4

The near future of remote work is going to be very, very messy. It starts with the illusion that a remote worker moving somewhere with a cheaper cost of living will get to keep their salary, and then it will be encumbered by a struggle for privacy. I mostly just want to share this snippet from an article by the Economist (paywall):

Already the gig economy has shown that it is out of date. Now new prickly questions about workers’ rights and responsibilities loom: can firms monitor remote workers to assess their productivity? Who is liable if employees injure themselves at home? Any sense that white-collar workers are getting perks will create simmering resentment in the rest of the workforce.

5

What underlies patterns in user behavior? Structure. Specific touchpoints in an existing process, organizational pressures, policies and rules of thumb, or even rituals. I don’t know how best to credit this post without an author, but the folks at Eco Challenge (?) added levels of thinking to the familiar Iceberg model. This is interesting to me because I suppose I never really said aloud what this makes obvious: patterns are supported by the things we, or our predecessors, made. That means we can improve or unmake them. This is a powerful observation.

End

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The Value of Design in Hard Times Mar 23, 2020

When the market’s taken a spill, when your earned revenue is down — people aren’t leaving their homes, folks have lost work, uncertainty leads to spending scarcity - then the easiest line-items to cut are those that involve external consultants. You need to preserve your budget to take care of your colleagues, your business, your livelihoods.

But constraint, especially when that constraint is sudden, unpredictable, and symptomatic of problems widely outside of your control (or even the control of your industry, or your country) - constraint causes strategic tunnel vision focused entirely on stemming the blood flow. All the constellations in your worldview blur while you focus on a small point in the sky.

This is sane.

But one of the things you’re not doing now - or doing less of - is aggressively trying to understand how the service landscape has changed. This is the landscape where the service you provide, and your products, dot grainy plains that stretch far to the horizon. It is the landscape of your users’ journeys - all of them.

Your organization or business exists because the services you provide intercept these journeys. They do not exist for any other reason.

That landscape has changed. It has changed dramatically. What once was - let’s say - a pastoral, sprawling lawn, is now an archipelago. The journeys have been existentially upset and are newly adapting for if not survival then a new reality, like neurons branching.

If you yourself or your colleagues aren’t surveying your service landscape, then while you focus to triage the wound, you aren’t questioning - or, if you are, you can’t answer - whether your services will still be in demand. Do your users’ journeys still follow the same path?

It is not just that design is reconnaissance: design is intelligence.

How differently, then, do you value the role of service design? How differently do you prioritize your colleague, or your consultant, or the time you all allocate as a team to shift your attention to the window?

Remember: the user experience is a metric.

A heads-up about frequency of these emails and podcasts: I am going to begin publishing three times per week, starting this week 👋, and I want to be super honest about my motives. First, I think I provide a small, free, niche, useful service in these little thought blops, and I really like doing it. It scratches a super creative itch for me.

But really, in the interest of oh-shoot-look-what-the-pandemic-is-doing-to-jobs, I want to be able to better leverage some of the audience I’ve built to help sponsor Metric, find new small consulting retainers or research contracts, and suchlike. In other words, my job to be done is to find certainty in this uncertain moment.

If you would like to help “produce” Metric, which I thank you or your organization at the end of the podcast, the deets are below.

Consider liking (❤) this issue of Metric if this made you think. Please take the time. If you haven’t already, please subscribefor free. Help produce this work for $5 per month or $30 per year.

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Photo by Tai's Captures on Unsplash

— M.

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What is the difference between UX and CX? Mar 09, 2020

Let’s be clear, many folks have thrown-in. This question has loads of answers, and this writeup will likely not make it to the top of the search engines. So, what more is there to say? This: it’s not the answer that matters so much as is the philosophy that shapes it.

The answer — and, sure, let me be so bold as to say the right answer — is this: the difference between user experience and customer experience is scope. The customer is a category of user defined by the transaction. Not all users are customers; all customers are users.*

So, how as Metricians do we understand this question?

If we start with the core practical principle that the user experience is a metric, and if we agree to agree that our metric is some fuzzy holistic math — good or bad — we work to push up and to the right, then what’s the real function of using “user” as the adjective here?

What we’re describing is the experience of a given role. Our users are people who, well, use our service. It’s an exercise in seeing just how vague we can be, but most of the time “user” works. When we’re working to understand our place in a larger ecosystem of services, imagined as a journey from a bird’s-eye view where a person moves from one service to another service to our service to another even further on in pursuit of some greater motivation, that they use our service is all we can really say for certain.

It’s only in the performance of designing for that user experience that, flying closer, we perceive the path isn’t solid but an obstacle course with touchpoints haphazardly spaced. The journey is an act not just of traversing from one to the other but the choice of how to traverse. These angles of approach — hopping, skipping, crawling, swinging — are variables in the fuzzy math that determine whether the user experience is positive or poor.

A variety of roles emerge on closer inspection, like looking at light through a prism. A single “user” early in their engagement with our service begins — let’s say — as a “subscriber,” for which we must consider the subscriber experience; they then pay to place an ad in some content, after which they become an “advertiser.” The advertiser experience includes a storefront and transaction, during which they too become a “customer.” A poor customer experience has detrimental impact on the user’s confidence in our service, part of which is defined by the quality of their experience as an advertiser. At no time, by the way, does this person stop being a subscriber.

What does it mean for the overall business when the customer experience is poor, the subscriber experience is alright, and the advertiser experience is good?

This downside-up rabbithole reality defines the UX problems inherent in news, where I presently spend the majority of my time. Ultimately, it is the “user” experience, that higher level fuzzy cumulative, that correlates with business success - but designing to keep that UX in the black is a strategic mess.

But this is true for you, too, wherever your niche. The awareness of this problem of scope is a mark of experience.

It is easy to conflate these roles I describe with personas, but they are not the same. A role in this way is defined by a job to be done that is contained within the motivating job to be done that set the user on this journey in the first place. The work is to first understand why folks use your service, then scope-in to identify the jobs within jobs: it’s how we design for those that ensure when users leave our realm for the next service on their journey that they don’t stumble on their way.

So, next time, when someone asks you the difference between UX and CX - you can now give them the choice to see how deep this rabbithole really goes.

* Some of you thinky service-design folk might write in that the one who pays for a service is not always the user of the service. I get where you’re going, but let me stop you right there. I think you’re wrong, but let me save the why for another writing.

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Metric is a podcast, too, which includes audio versions of these writeups and other chats. Subscribe to Metric on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher, and all the usual places.

Remember that the user experience is a metric.

Your pal,Michael

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Gutenberg doesn't disrupt WordPress Feb 03, 2020

Gutenberg isn’t a breakthrough innovation that made WordPress better. It’s a disruptive innovation making WordPress more affordable and accessible. — Mark Uraine, “Disrupting WordPress”

A couple weeks ago I read Mark Uraine’s writeup about the disruptive role Gutenberg — the new block-based editor (and system of editor-extensibility) — performs for WordPress, the open-source juggernaut powering a third of the web. It nails why the WordPress community has been so hyped (and it’s in a language I speak):

Why would anyone want to change this? The short answer is expressed best in the quote, “If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.” Software must evolve or it becomes archaic and dies. This bring us to the concept of disruptive innovation, originally conceived by Clayton Christensen. Disruptive innovation describes the process when a more simplified product or service begins to take root in an industry and advances up the market because of its ease of use and/or less expensive entry point. … The great companies plan for this. In fact they make efforts to self-disrupt, or innovate in ways that cause their own service or product to be disrupted. … WordPress has reached this intersection.

— and for many folks, Gutenberg represents that self-disruption. It is a shot of espresso. A spurt of vitality intended to make the sluggish, successful ol’ man spry. It’s a little bit of good magic that wards off the heebie jeebies.

I think Mark’s is the best argument for Gutenberg there is.

I’m also not convinced. I want to use “Disrupting WordPress” as an opportunity to demonstrate how to think about innovation, so I am going to start by putting the kibosh on the idea that Gutenberg is the saving grace the community around it thinks.

Is Gutenberg disruptive? No - at least not like that.

Product is a window

Clay Christensen’s disruptive innovation is key to the point I want to make, and that is that we should be skeptical about the consensus assumption that what has to change about WordPress is the way content is created.

I phrase it like this because Gutenberg really is more than a UI: it represents a fairly different content model beyond just how pieces of content are chunked together by end-users, but how that content is treated in the database, and how developers interface with all that new tissue. Moreover, the ad hoc governance that has organized around Gutenberg to help ensure its inclusivity and accessibility is functionally of greater importance than the Gutenberg codebase altogether.

It makes sense that because there are plenty of usability studies betraying WordPress’s ease-of-use as a myth, that we-the-community target these usability problems with our innova-sers. Ease-of-use is a killer differentiator when you choose one product over another - but usability is flavor, not sustenance.

Disruption requires identifying a misalignment between a person’s core job-to-be-done and the service they’re provided.

The secret to winning the innovation game lies in understanding what causes customers to make choices that help them achieve progress on something they are struggling with in their lives. To get to the right answers, Christensen says, executives should be asking: What job would consumers want to hire a product to do? — Interview by Dina Gerdeman with Clay Christensen

The product — and the features of the product — don’t fundamentally matter unless the user needs something that you can provide them.

Is the WordPress user’s core job to be done to have a usable content-creation experience? No. It’s not even to create content in the first place. Rather, the core job of the WordPress user is to — for example — provide candle-junkies like me with candles, and make a living from it. “WordPress” isn’t really part of that function. It just happens to be the means to an end. The interface, the content, even WordPress itself are ephemeral. While easing the work involved in creating content improves a holistic user experience, it’s not enough.

The reason Squarespace (et al.) has room to succeed in an internet dominated by WordPress is not because it has a better page-builder, it’s because for some users it is easier to envision their end goal met on the far-side of the Squarespace gauntlet. By looking at Squarespace, they can “see” their next candle-funded beach vacation.

Product is a window.

Broad applicability is a marketing challenge

Listen closely to the ubiquitous Squarespace ads on any podast. Right (!), they mention ease of page-building - but they underscore the reason why such ease is valuable: so you can be done with that page-building s**t and continue on with your remarkable life.

The job-to-be-done is “to have a successful business.” Squarespace provides the service of getting you there faster with an easy page-builder. The page-builder is the how, and the ease is the differentiator - the cherry on top. People don’t choose the cherry, though. The Squarespace business model depends on how well they can match the job people have to the service they provide.

WordPress has been successful precisely because its service aligns well with gajillions of jobs. This I think compounds the difficulty the WordPress community has in communicating meaningfully granular services that are afforded to alternatives. Specificity helps evangelism.

Rather than 1 job to address (“you need to become a dope ass participant in the blogosphere?”) there are 30 million — the difficulty of communicating that job/service alignment at scale is a real obstacle.

It is easy to imagine and vouch for WordPress’s wide servicability, but it’s hard to communicate to the individual who is choosing between it and Squarespace.

Product is a window, and users’ vision through the WordPress window is a little obscured.

This is, in part, why the ecosystem of professional WordPress development companies thrives: these companies, like Ninja Forms, identify a niche of jobs-to-be-done and serve them specifically.

Tangent: seeing Ninja Forms in terms of job/service alignment

To go on a brief tangent, the job Ninja Forms serves isn’t really the demonstrable need to manage web forms. They are facilitating people’s need to control how their users connect with them. Forms, and — specifically — forms through WordPress are choices about how and to what niche to provide that service.

Consider then how WordPress isn’t spiritually part of the job/service alignment between the job-to-be-done of the Ninja Form user and the service provided by that team. They’re not really married to that platform, they just have a good working relationship. WordPress is an important technical constraint, but it’s a means to an end. It’s ephemeral.

The WordPress community’s research problem

By increasing WordPress’s extensibility through new APIs, even by adding new hot-right-now features into Gutenberg, the WP core team are addressing the jobs-to-be-done of those professional WordPress developers more directly than any WordPress end user - who I’m arguing doesn’t really care about the ease of use of the editor (they care insofar that the editor doesn’t get in their way).

And why is that? Well, I think it’s because developers are WordPress’s strongest feedback loop.

Mark Uraine even made a comment about how usability studies revealed pain points in WordPress’s editor, but I haven’t been convinced otherwise that the WordPress core decision makers have anything other than usability studies about existing features.

Problem.

Usability studies reveal touchpoints in a user journey that need to be addressed. A tree needs to be moved off the sidewalk, or a pothole needs to be filled. But usability studies don’t question whether the user should be on this path in the first place.

Disruption, after all, is born from Insight. Insight is the byproduct of strong research, particularly around users’ jobs-to-be-done, and I just don’t think the WordPress community has any of that.

If they did, I frankly think folks would be less hyped about Gutenberg.

Gutenberg is fine. The work there is about addressing the need to reduce in WordPress the number of steps between the user and their published content. That’s the right move to support a status quo.

It’s not disruptive. It disrupts nothing. It improves existing.

This past year has seen remarkable and laudable collaboration around governance and accessibility in WordPress, which are the right foci that address real problems around the community, its users, and inclusivity. The next WordPress community movement should be around establishing a strong research program that can provide the research-derived Insight necessary for WordPress’s future.

Without sufficient qualitative research, don’t expect WordPress to self-disrupt any time soon.

Liking (❤) this issue of Metric helps signal to the great algorithms in the sky that this writeup is worth your time. Please take the time. If you haven’t already, please subscribe.

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Remember that the user experience is a metric.

— Michael (@schoeyfield)

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UX Design is Morally Gray Dec 13, 2019

Folks tend to disagree with me whenever I say that user experience design is morally gray: there is no inherent requirement to making user experiences people like and prefer to competing experiences that leave users — morally or ethically — better off. Ethical design is a qualifier.

This is an important distinction and nuance to design work that is critical to accept if we intend to push best practice in a more deliberately ethical direction. It empowers individual designers, teams, companies, entire verticals, even disciplines to differentiate themselves by choosing to design ethically.

Assuming that good user experience design work has good intentions is dangerous — and naive.

This also means we must divorce the relationship by what we do (design to improve the user experience) from how we do it (ethically, or not). It means that to be ethical we must choose to be so at each step of the design process, at each touchpoint between conception and performance of a service.

To frame ethical user experience design like this make it easier to appreciate how difficult it is to create an ethical product or service. Perhaps not by intent — we all think we’re the heroes of our own story — but because the design of a thing is the culmination of a hundred decisions, hard ones. The CEO in the business of providing an ethical service might fail because of decisions made in engineering, or because they chose to design to optimize a conversion metric instead of some other made-up number.

It is for this reason we need to make time and resources available to design the design process, creating systems of checks and balances not just for quality assurance that a button can be pressed, but for ethical stresses.

Liking (❤) this issue of Metric helps signal to the great algorithms in the sky that this writeup is worth your time. Please take the time. If you haven’t already, please subscribe.

Metric is a podcast, too, which includes audio versions of these writeups and other chats. Look for Metric UX in your favorite podcatcher.

Remember that the user experience is a metric.

Michael

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Can jobs-to-be-done replace "Front End Developer"? Nov 11, 2019

The “front end” is pretty nebulous. What makes a good front end developer? Its definitions, and so its answers, are all over the place. It’s not just the introduction of new front end frameworks that have changed how we talk about it, but in terms of the discipline of designing websites we have begun to think differently: in components, in services. We can see front end in flux in Ernie Hsiung’s “A fictitious, somewhat farcical conversation between me and the JavaScript programming language,” where Ernie as a front end developer — a successful front ender, look at his resume — imagines having an existential crisis because the front end changed while he was busy being a boss (a good one).

Our understanding of the front end as a place no longer holds up to scrutiny. We cannot define it by a specific suite of tools, a kind of user expertise, or even that — if anything — front end development requires a browser.

If we talk about the front end in terms of distance from a user, the “front” specifically being the interface between the user and the service provided, then we ought to accept that voice user interfaces (among other examples) challenge the notion that the front end has any tangible component at all.

Even here, we are cherry-picking a particular kind of user, one that is at the tail-end of a complex service provision - presumably outside the “provision” circle of the Venn Diagram altogether. We’ll call this person “end user.” But again, using “front end” as a descriptor of that distance from a user — while accepting there are no constraints on technology or medium (like a browser) — should be applicable to the RESTful API that I design for consumption by a variety of user interfaces. The consumer is my end user. When I design the interface for that user, am I performing “front end development?”

What I am trying to illustrate is that when we are thinking about user experience and service design, paradigms like “front end” and “back end” no longer align with an understanding of service clusters, ecosystems, or - frankly - users. These kind of identifiers are ephemeral and, as such, pose a problem to companies who organize themselves around these concepts.

You long time Metric readers and listeners — “Metricians?” — might find this latter concern familiar. The practice of thinking in services reveals that same ephemeral nature around the product itself, given that the product is just a tool in a larger service provision, it is thus — like a tool — replaceable. Choosing to design organizations around products will shape the way in which said organizations develop, which is probably against the grain of good service design. Hot take, I know.

So, practically, as service providers who make products that require engineers, how do we hire after we thought-spiral ourselves away from terms like “front end developer?”

I think there is an implied solution. In 2017, Rob Schade at Strategyn suggested a new kind of role called the “Job Manager” in “Product Managers are Obsolete; focus on the Job-to-be-Done.” As an alternative to a Product Manager, the Job Manager focused on the design and development of solutions for a given job-to-be-done.

If you need a refresher, a job-to-be-done describes a task where the user has a demonstrable need for the solution you provide. That is, if I need talk shop and further develop my own thinking about service design, a company like Substack provides a solution for my shop-talking need. The product — the newsletter editor and mailer that Substack provides — is a means to an end, not the end, and not necessarily crucial to my job to be done.

In this example, rather than there being a Product Manager in charge of the newsletter editor, there would be a Job Manager overseeing the entire service Substack provides that connects me to you. These circles overlap, but the lens is very different.

I think there is room then for “Job Designers” and “Job Developers.” These are the design workers who, alongside the Job Manager, provide the company’s solution for a specific job to be done.

A huge benefit, you argue, for “front end” is that even if the definition is super loose it implies some kind of big umbrella of skills around which people can identify. Maybe that is, regardless of which framework compiles them, something to do with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. There is nothing about “Job Developer” that implies what that person does.

I agree. While I think it’s liberating to disassociate the technology from the service provided, it makes this s**t hard in a different way.

Rather, I think there’s room for specialization, in the way that “front end” and “back end” are technically specializations of just “developer.” This specialization is also implied by jobs to be done.

A job to be done is composed of jobs to be done. In the job that is “understand the civic role I have in my community,” there is a subsequent job that is “see the agenda for upcoming city council meetings in my email.” There are jobs that imply the interface, so there is a role in the service provision to provide that service to that interface. Make up a title that works. Surely “interface developer” — or, even, “civic interface developer” — has more semantic meaning that “front end.”

That’s sort of about the point where I stop caring and let you all figure it out. Titles. Some projects need only one developer, others need one hundred. Few job titles really hold up to the scrutiny — I’m looking at you, Business Analyst 1 — and “front end” or “back end” won’t solve that.

More importantly, a jobs-to-be-done approach to role-making is still fundamentally about spatial relationship to the user. These kinds of roles are user centric - all of them. Whereas “front end” and “back end” might describe distance from a user, all job-to-be-done style roles imply the user in their very description. Each job solution has a userbase, and so fundamental skills like empathy, data-driven decision making, and user advocacy (privacy, accessibility, usability) are part of each job - regardless of where they are in the stack.

Liking (❤) this issue of Metric is a super way to brighten my day. It helps signal to the great algorithms in the sky that this writeup is worth a few minutes of your time.

Metric is a podcast, too, which includes audio versions of these writeups and other chats. Look for “Metric UX” in your favorite podcatcher.

Remember that the user experience is a metric.

Michael Schofield

Get full access to Metric by Michael Schofield at metricpodcast.com/subscribe

The Temporal Midpoint of the Sprint Oct 21, 2019

The two-week sprint is totally arbitrary. We adopt the convention without really questioning the wisdom, but by such dogma of what’s-good-for-the-gander bake someone else’s practice into our organizational infrastructure. The thinking is that two weeks is just about the right time to prototype, test, scrutinize, and deliver a feature. But, is it?

All it took was David Grant raising that question as part of the Facebook Journalism Accelerator about this time last year for those of us at WhereBy.Us to concede the point and, within a week or two, consolidate to one-week sprints. Basecamp, just being Basecamp, shrugs the sprint convention all together, and just published a book that largely makes it clear we’re all just navel-gazing guppies trying to emulate other startups.

Shape Up, that book ☝️, made me question what practical reason do we actually need backlogs, or sprints, which was a refreshing reality check. I admit I find doing away with the backlog compelling - but that’s another writeup. Sprints, though?

While reading about Basecamp’s six-week cycles, it dawned on me that the key feature of the sprint is its temporal midpoint. That is, given any deadline, your activity declines until you’re midway through a milestone before climbing. Why? You realize time is running out.

This is described by Daniel H. Pink as the “Uh-oh Effect” in When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing:

After the first meeting there is a period of prolonged inertia, then a sudden transition followed by a new, more productive direction.

Human culture is organized around temporal milestones — the beginnings, middles, and ends of things — and so, subsequently, are our moods, hopes, productivity, and the like.

The sprint is an arbitrary division of time we tend to conflate with the timeline of a deliverable, but after about a year of one-week sprints I argue the deliverable is the least important aspect. Rather, the sprint is a structure for sustainably pacing our team’s movement through a service provision by placing temporal milestones at advantageous points.

* Beginning: the beginning of the sprint is a fresh start. It’s like New Year’s Day. We make good initial progress keeping our resolutions. We’re hopeful.

* Midpoint: the midpoint of the sprint is the ticking clock. It is, no lie, a stressor. It’s designed to make you go oh, shoot, and be honest with yourself and your squad about your progress.

* Ending: the ending of the sprint is the dropping of the curtain. Time’s up, we touch base, we fist bump, we move on.

Temporal milestones have different emotional tones and the midpoint tends to be the more anxious. Knowing this, however, allows you to design for those emotions, providing another project management tool for templating a mentally healthy sprint.

For instance, if the anxiety of the temporal midpoint is related to the build-up of to-do items you scramble get on top of, what if we just reduce the number of to-do items? Without reducing velocity, if you cut the sprint in half — from two weeks to one week — you move-up the temporal midpoint significantly, which not only reduces the number of to-do items that got away, but literally reduces the stress period between midpoint and temporal ending.

This is anecdotal but I’ll make a note to check the numbers, but I believe the temporal boon of the one-week sprint is a factor behind the increased “greenness” of the company’s team health. At a glance this feels counter intuitive, because surely one-week sprints equate to higher stress, but the reality is that in that same two-week period we have twice the emotional highs (beginning and ending milestones), and our milestone-related emotional lows are much briefer.

Liking (❤) this issue of Metric is a super way to brighten my day. It helps signal to the great algorithms in the sky that this writeup is worth a few minutes of your time.

Metric is a podcast, too, which includes audio versions of these writeups and other chats. Look for “Metric UX” in your favorite podcatcher.

Remember that the user experience is a metric.

Michael Schofield

Get full access to Metric by Michael Schofield at metricpodcast.com/subscribe

The Service Reactor Sep 09, 2019

We pitch this idea of operational user research as a means to scale and democratize user experience design practice across an organization. For decision makers already familiar with our user-centric-business gospel — reminder: aggregation theory demonstrates how the user experience is the differentiator for services that have no cost of distribution (because the internet is free); or: good UX is good business — but are concerned about costs, then all they need to hear is how a few tweaks to the workflow and a Google spreadsheet can get the wheels turning with little to no overhead.

It’s easyish to imagine how making the tools to curate feedback you’re already intercepting (emails, reviews, comments on Facebook) easy to use will over time aggregate a robust catalog of that feedback, which decision makers can use to gut-check their ideas.

That hot return on a small investment is why no-frills ResearchOps is hard to argue against. We often stop our evangelizing there.

The long game is interesting, though. Spin something like this up then take a gander at your organization’s RPG skill tree, where a few experience points and a snowball-effect leads you to the service reactor.

The service reactor is this work-in-progress model to demonstrate how a virtuous user research cycle and a commitment to discovery-validated delivery will generate enough proven insights to power a small city.

That’s a lot of made-up vocabulary designed to just consolidate this s**t to a single sentence, so let’s break this down.

* A “virtuous user research cycle” describes a system where your effort to make sense of some data results in the design of the next test to perform, the results of which return to the system.

* “Discovery-validated delivery” is a requirement that end-user facing features of a product or service won’t be pursued until their demonstrable need and solution can be proven by existing user research.

A chain reaction beginning by cataloging raw data — survey answers, interview transcripts, a/b results, and so on — creates tactical and strategic insights, some aspects of which require more validation thus foreshadowing the next round of tests. Like a nuclear reactor, discovery-validated delivery creates pressure to perform those tests, which continues the chain reaction.

The chief product of the service reactor are insights that we use to validate our business decisions. At small scales, examples of these insights are:

* evidence we need to rethink our menu structure because it’s confusing users,

* indication that users need a way to opt-in to plain-text emails,

* validation that this call-to-action works better than that one.

But as the catalog grows over time, new patterns emerge among unrelated sets of data, and that compounding value directly correlates to the scale of new insights. These are demonstrable proof that there is need among the userbase for entirely new services, let alone features. What’s more, because the service reactor creates insights as the byproduct of a process rather than insights that are specifically sought-out, the resulting service ideas may be orthogonal to your existing service provisions.

This is the drill maker getting into the business of designing entertainment units*. A service reactor powers the “innovation mill.”

The most important ethic I’m trying to convey with the service reactor is that while it is a vision to motivate an organization’s investment in ResearchOps, it is fundamentally user centric. Over time, there is no part of a service or product that is not derived from user research. The reactor ionizes the air with user centricity. You can’t help but breathe.

Note: The drill metaphor is one of the core fables to the jobs-to-be-done approach to design thinking. It basically explains how the drill-maker that is most successful when their drill is an aisle filled with other drills is the one who realizes that people aren’t buying a drill but the mounted television on the wall. The drill is a means to the end. What I’m saying is that an orthogonal business for the drill-maker is in entertainment units: both drill and furniture are means to an end when the job-to-be-done is to relax in a finished living room.

Liking (❤) this issue of Metric is a super way to brighten my day. It helps signal to the great algorithms in the sky that this writeup is worth a few minutes of your day.

Metric is a podcast, too, which includes audio versions of these writeups and other chats. You’ll find it in your favorite podcatcher.

Remember that the user experience is a metric.

Michael Schofield

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Spark Joy Mar 18, 2019

In this episode of Metric: the UX Podcast,we talk about how we deal with signal overload and notification fatigue in our design work (and in life), and our strategies for staying sane in a super neurotic discipline.

Follow Metric: the UX Podcast on Twitter @metricpodcast
Follow Michael on Twitter @schoeyfield
Follow Tim on Twitter @uxbear

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What UX Can Learn from Ouija Boards Mar 11, 2019

In this episode of Metric: the UX Podcast, we investigate what ouija boards and World War 1 teach us about design solutions, that innovation lies in not immediately thinking that the problem can be solved by an app.
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Follow Michael on Twitter @schoeyfield
Follow Tim on Twitter @uxbear

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Questions UXers should ask in Job Interviews Mar 04, 2019

In this episode of Metric, we talk about questions UXers should ask during job interviews, and what about that interview or organization are red flags.

In the gloss, look for chatter about the origins of our usernames, how to pronounce "schoeyfield" (and how that's not my last name!), and a game recommendation for Ninja Theory's Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice.

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Thirsty UXers Feb 18, 2019

How do you get the experience you need -- or want -- to take that next step in your career? In this episode of Metric: the User Experience Podcast, Michael Schofield and Tim Broadwater try to define how they want to evolve their career - and how one goes about getting that experience if it's not an obvious step-up from the current job.

This episode has been transcribed (!). You can find the transcription at metricpodcast.com.

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Follow Tim on Twitter @uxbear

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French Creek Freddie Feb 11, 2019

What can regional ground hogs teach us about UX design? In this episode of Metric, we talk about designing services and products that have a demonstrable need. Hear everything you ever wanted to know about about projects that never get off, the shelf of domain-name good intentions, that there are alternatives to Punxsutawney Phil.

Tim Broadwater is @uxbear on Twitter

Michael Schofield is @schoeyfield on Twitter

Metric is @metricpodcast on Twitter.

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The Persona Zoo Feb 04, 2019

In this episode of Metric, we pick up where we left off in 65: Mazes and Monsters and hit the user archetypes known as whales, fish, and barnacles - the persona zoo! We start with a travelogue about visiting creepy Facebook in Menlo Park. Eventually we delve into jobs to be done and critique of personas.

Follow Tim Broadwater on Twitter: @uxbear

Follow Michael Schofield on Twitter: @schoeyfield

Heck, follow Metric on Twitter: @metricpodcast

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Mazes and Monsters Feb 04, 2019

This episode of Metric is about tabletop game design and play testing. Enter the awkward ass world of Michael explaining to Tim his slack-based Dungeons & Dragons campaign. Hear Tim's crazy interesting foray into play testing and its cross-overs with user onboarding.
In addition to the banter, we touch on:

NUIs: natural user interfaces
lessons learned by other industries about how games onboard users
Tom Hanks in Mazes and Monsters

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Fitness and Gamification (?) - and Goth LARPing Jan 23, 2019

How do you title this episode? Tim Broadwater and Michael Schofield expertly tangent between fitness, gamification of health, tabletop games,

Follow Michael on Twitter: @schoeyfield

Follow Tim on Twitter: @uxbear

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Measure the Future Oct 08, 2018

Jason Griffey on ethically designing a service to heatmap physical spaces that respects users' privacy - on open software, to boot. Jason Griffey is a librarian, technologist, consultant, writer and speaker, an Affiliate Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University where he studies decentralization, access to information, intellectual property, and more.

A transcript of this show fully marked-up with links and the like will be available at at www.metricpodcast.com.

Follow Michael on Twitter: @schoeyfield

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62: Service Design and User Experience Design Apr 30, 2018

This episode of Metric: The User Experience Design Podcast is a no-guester: a shorty, but a goodie. It's about how to talk about service design and user experience design in the same sentence - which nobody can seem to figure out how to do coherently without writing a whole article!

Also, I wrote a whole article.

A transcript of this show fully marked-up with links and the like is at www.metricpodcast.com.

Follow Michael on Twitter: @schoeyfield

Support Metric on Patreon: patreon.com/michaelschofield

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61: Personal Information in the name of "User Experience" with Donna Lanclos Mar 26, 2018

In this episode of Metric: The User Experience Podcast, Donna Lanclos - an unaplogetic anthropologist and folklorist - talks about the ethics of gathering personal data in the name of good UX, and how that's incredibly complicated to justify. We chat about learning analytics in universities, the concept of "UX Washing", and privacy as a social justice issue.

A transcript of this show fully marked-up with links and the like will be found at www.metricpodcast.com in the next couple of days.

Follow Michael on Twitter: @schoeyfield

Support this podcast on Patreon: patreon.com/michaelschofield

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60: The Worth of UX Certification to Tim Broadwater Mar 05, 2018

In this episode of Metric: The User Experience Podcast, I chat with friend-of-the-show Tim Broadwater, a UX Master Certificate recipient, about the value of User Experience Certification, or even that of a more traditional route through college.

This covers everything across the diversification of UX roles, leadership and management, and -- of course -- Scream Queens.

A transcript of this show fully marked-up with links and the like can be found at www.metricpodcast.com

Follow Michael on Twitter: @schoeyfield

Support this podcast on Patreon: patreon.com/michaelschofield

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Writing for the User Experience with Rebecca Blakiston - A LibUX Webinar Jul 10, 2017

Join Rebecca Blakiston -- author of books on on usability testing and writing with clarity; Library Journal mover and shaker -- as she talks shop and makes the case for content strategy, using active and authentic voice, removing unnecessary words, writing meaningful titles/headings, using parallelism, and more.

Our volunteer expert

Rebecca Blakiston (@blakistonr) is the team lead for Web Design & User Experience at the University of Arizona Libraries. She is the author of two books: Usability Testing: a Practical Guide for Librarians, and Writing Effectively in Print and on the Web: a Practical Guide for Librarians. She's also the Chair of the University Libraries Section, Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL ULS). In 2016, she was named a Library Journal Mover and Shaker.

She's super. We've had beers.

Register: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/writing-for-the-user-experience-with-rebecca-blakiston-a-libux-webinar-tickets-35945982401

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On design in user stories and user experience departments Apr 25, 2017

One more over coffee edition of Metric before a string of interviews to round-out the month of April. In this episode:

What role does photoshop play in UX?
Should "design" be part of a user story?
What are the necessary technical abilities for doing UX?
What are your thoughts on UX Departments

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Over Coffee: Ugh, UX Ph.D's Apr 19, 2017

This episode of Metric is a little special: no guests, no post, just loaded questions and loaded answers. In the actual recording I was thinking about calling it "coffee break," but I over-thought this and now feel like that suggests it's a super short episode. It's not. It's regular length. So, we're going with "over coffee" -- which it was!

This episode, I tackle three questions about UX Certification, a UX Ph.D who sucks at visual design, and Guerrilla Usability Testing.

Enjoy.

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Andy Priestner Apr 09, 2017

Andy Priestner is a global trainer and consultant on user experience, leadership, social media, and LEGO Serious Play. He's the originator and chair of UXLibs, among many things a best-in-show UX conference, as well as the title of the book he edited with Matt Borg.

In this episode, we were able to wrangle our timezones and chat about the upcoming conference, as well as Futurelib -- an open innovation program exploring the future role of academic libraries within the University of Cambridge through ethnographic studies -- and, really, what prompted Andy to resign.

4:00 - About the "team challenge" at UXLibs, plus shout-outs to Ned Potter, Matt Borg, and Donna Lanclos.
9:04 - The state of user experience design in these institutions
11:55 - What happened with Futurelib
18:02 - Andy on leaving his job and going freelance
20:48 - The Tracker Project: eye-tracking people in libraries with glasses

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Personas, Jobs to be Done - oh, and LITA Mar 21, 2017

Recently, LITA embarked on a big persona-making project in order to better align their services to the needs of their members, the results of which they just revealed. This provides a solid talking point to introduce conceptual problems with personas and introduce a potentially better-suited approach: jobs to be done.

00:43 - LITA created a bunch of personas
2:14 - What does LITA actually want?
3:39 - Personas are more noise than signal
5:37 - Personas are best as a demographic snapshot
6:05 - The User Story
7:35 - The Job Story
8:04 - Jobs to be Done
11:36 - So what jobs do LITA personas need done?
14:04 - What should LITA do, then?
15:44 - Support Metric: https://patreon.com/libux
16:42 - How to enter for our giveaway: a copy of Practical Design Discovery by Dan Brown.

Twitter: @metricpodcast

Facebook: LibUX

Join us on Slack: https://libux.herokuapp.com

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The Accessibility Tree Mar 15, 2017

If you thought your grip on web accessibility couldn't get any looser, let's talk about the Accessibility Tree. This is a hostful episode Amanda and Michael.

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Trey Gordner and Stephen Bateman from Koios Feb 27, 2017

This week on Metric we are joined by Trey Gordner and Stephen Batemen from Koios, who are designing services that amplify the discoverability and searchability of libraries with real emphasis on the end-user experience. We chat about startup opportunities in this space, the opportunity and danger of "interface aggregation," the design of their new service Libre (www.readlibre.com), and more.

These two were super fun to interview.

Koios: https://koios.co
Libre: https://readlibre.com
Trey Gordner is @darthgordner
Stephen Batemen is @IAmBateman
Amanda L. Goodman is @godaisies
Michael Schofield is @schoeyfield
Metric is @metricpodcast

Support Metric on Patreon for early access, new pilot podcasts, "swraffle" entries, and more. https://patreon.com/libux

February's Swag-raffle ("swraffle") for Tesla Amazing Magnetic Notes is still on! Patreon supporters at the $2+ level are automatically entered, but you can also earn an entry by honestly reviewing Metric in your podcatcher of choice and shooting @metricpodcast a screenshot. Thanks!

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Your front end is doomed Feb 22, 2017

Metric alum Emily King swings by again to chat about conversational UIs and "interface aggregation" -- front ends other than yours using metadata and API to connect with your site, so that users don't actually have to visit your site directly.

Please rate and share! These little gestures go a long way.

You can reach out to Emily at @emilykingatcsn on Twitter, I am @schoeyfield, and Metric is @metricpodcast.

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LITA Persona Task Force Feb 13, 2017

This week Amanda L. Goodman (@godaisies) gives you a peek into the work of the LITA Persona Task Force, who are charged with defining and developing personas that are to be used in growing membership in the Library and Information Technology Association.

We — LibUX — are producing our first ever free webinar this Thursday, February 16th, at 1 pm with Metric alum Tim Broadwater, a UI designer and certified UX developer that has worked for Fortune 500 companies, grant-based education initiatives, and higher-ed. It’s called UX Quackery, which will focus on the prevailing dishonest practices that exist in the field of UX, and what we can do to weed-out the quacls. Toootally free and I think it will be really special. Check it out at libux.co/events.

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When Native Apps are Unethical Jan 17, 2017

This episode of Metric is very much a companion to last week’s post on consciously infusing the ethics of the organization into design decisions.

There is an opportunity for institutions that are positioned — either actively or by reputation — as intellectual and moral community cores (libraries) to exert greater if not just more obvious influence on the filters through which patrons access content.Critical Librarianship in the Design of Libraries

It’s been an upward battle for accessibility wresting a seat at the design table even though it’s core to the user experience. It’s now time to pull-up a chair for ethical considerations.

It’s been almost three years since I amended the UX Honeycomb with “ethical”.

Notes

The ethics of good design: a principle for the connected age by Aaron Weyenberg

Good design is ethical. The product places the user’s interest at the center of its purpose. Any effort to influence the user’s agency or behavior is in the spirit of their own positive wellbeing, and the wellbeing of those around them.Aaron Weyenberg

Listen and subscribe

If you like, you can download the MP3 or subscribe to LibUX on Stitcher, iTunes, YouTube, Soundcloud, Google Music, or just plug our feed straight into your podcatcher of choice.

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The Nintendo Switch Jan 09, 2017

Even if you’re not much of a gamer, the modular design of the Nintendo Switch is super compelling. What you see in its reveal is an experience that moves not just between your living room screen and your backpack, but one that adapts to different social contexts.

Its controllers — joycons — peal off, can attach to a more conventional lean-back controller, or pop-on to the sides of the screen when you leave the house, or divvied-up between friends for — you know — some roof co-op (watch the video, really). What’s more, there’s a really good likelihood that joycons might be able to be switched out for alternate designs.

Nintendo’s really selling the experience here.

In this episode Chad Haefele, Tim Broadwater, and I totally conjecture about the user experience of the Switch and the nostalgia market.

Notes

Remediation is the process through which the characteristics and approaches of competing media are imitated, altered, and critiqued in a new medium… (or) the representation of one medium in another.Meredith Davis

Tim Broadwater’s Remediation Toolkit
Tim Broadwater’s Interaction Model Artifacts
Chad Haefele and Brandon Carper’s podcast about the intersection of video games, user experience, and instructional design: Gamification Unlocked

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Links Should Open in the Same Window [Redux] Nov 21, 2016

Hey there. Michael Schofield here - thank you so much for tuning in to another Metric - a pretty good podcast about design and the user experience.

This episode is a redux! I just recently updated the most popular post I’ve ever written called “Links Should Open in the Same Window” - because they should, you savages.

I’m going to read it to ya. I’m proud of it.

And hey, would you mind rating us in iTunes? It’s a pretty good show. And if you think so, we could use your help to bring Metric to the attention of some new ears! That would be super kind of you.

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The Election as a Design Problem Nov 14, 2016

Can we talk about the voting process as a user experience problem?

Our — the LibUX — approach to the user experience is that UX is a metric, a plottable, predictable, and improvable measurement of the end-user’s cumulative experience of your service. And we care because we have seen that actively investing in a good user experience has positive returns on the measurements your business or organization cares about. Is it foot traffic, is it database usage, is it income.

So, if we can apply this to civic participation, where we want people to vote — that’s the number we care about, voter turnout — can we then approach the challenge of improving this number by improving the user experience of voting?

This episode is brought to you by Audible.com Snag a free audiobook -- these things can be like 30 bucks! -- and a free, no-strings 30-day trial of Audible. It's an awesome service and it supports the show. We would really, really apreciate it.

https://audibletrial.com/metric

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On Burnout Nov 07, 2016

On this episode of Metric, a podcast about design and user experience, guests Camille Thomas, Charles Villard, and Tim Broadwater join panel-up with Michael to kvetch and commiserate about burnout - oy.

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The Coffinettes Nov 01, 2016

Each Halloween I get a little nostalgic for the best Halloweens I had ever had back when I was a punk rocker. Join me -- your pal, Michael Schofield -- in this special Halloween episode where I reminisce a little bittersweetly and dig-up old recordings of my band - The Coffinettes.

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A Thorough-as-hell Intro to the Kano Model Oct 17, 2016

The Kano Model is a tool for visualizing the relationship among features in a meaningful way. It's awesome. You'll need to use your imagination a bit, but stick with it: it's -- and I totally mean this -- the most useful UX method ever.

Find show notes at http://libux.co.

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Library Usage and Trends Sep 27, 2016

In this episode I'm joined by not one but two (!) guests. Carli Spina (@carlispina) and Emily King (@emilykingatcsn) come on the show to talk about the 2016 Library Usage and Trends Report published earlier this month by the Pew Research Center.

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Carousels Are Okay Sep 19, 2016

What's up! Let's make some enemies and defend the use of carousels on behalf of actually good user experiences - maybe. Thank you for your kind reviews! Your brief reviews wherever you listen to LibUX make it easier to discover it.

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Mark Dodgson Talks about Bluespark's Awesome Process Sep 14, 2016

The very cool Mark Dodsgon from Bluespark joins me for this week's episode! Bluespark is the team behind many a library website, including Indiana University Libraries, which I wrote about recently. I pretty much just let him talk about Bluespark's design process, which is super interesting.

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Crafting Websites with Design Triggers (Repeat) Aug 28, 2016

Hey, listeners! This week's episode is an oldie but a goodie. I used all my available storage on libsyn for August being so on point with this weekly show, that I can't upload anything new until the first full week of September. So, from the archives, I present to you one of my favorite topics: design triggers.

A design trigger is a pattern meant to appeal to behavior and cognitive biases observed in users. Big data and the user experience boom has provided a lot of information about how people actually use the web, which designs work, and–although creepy–how it is possible to cobble together an effective site designed to social engineer users.

Please rate, review, and share to help other designers find LibUX.

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Library Service Design with Joe Marquez Aug 22, 2016

In their January design trends episode, Michael and Amanda guessed that this year would begin the library service design zeitgeist wherein seven months later ALA published Library Service Design, written by Joe Marquez and Annie Downey. #CalledIt. In this episode of the podcast, Joe and Michael talk about service design, the role of the UX designer, organizational inertia and inherited ecology, blueprinting, and a lot more.

Please like, subscribe, and review. We appreciate it!

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Circulating Ideas #99 - Cecily Walker Aug 17, 2016

Circulating Ideas' host Steve Thomas generously allowed us to share the audio! We were stoked to guest-host.

Guest hosts Michael Schofield and Amanda L. Goodman from LibUX chat with Cecily Walker from Vancouver Public Library.

Cecily Walker is a librarian at Vancouver Public Library, where she focuses on user experience, community digital projects, digital collections, and the intersection of social justice, technology, and public librarianship. It was her frustration with the way that software was designed to meet the needs of highly technical users rather than the general public that led her to user experience, but it was her love of information, intellectual freedom, and commitment to social justice that led her back to librarianship. Cecily can be found on Twitter (@skeskali) where she frequently holds court on any number of subjects, but especially lipstick.

Michael Schofield and Amanda L. Goodman host the LibUX podcast.

SHOW NOTES

This Vancouver
“UX, consideration, and a CMMI-based model” [Coral Sheldon-Hess]
“Mindspring’s 14 Deadly Sins”
Cecily on Twitter

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042 - Answer to the Ultimate Question Aug 08, 2016

As the summer winds down, Amanda and Michael reunite to get cracking on the Fall schedule of all things Team LibUX - but first they just need to catch up. Really! It's been awhile. We chat about carousels, summer redesigns, copyright, and more.

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041 - Steve Thomas Bears Witness Aug 03, 2016

Fresh from a Summer's hiatus, this week on LibUX we -- Amanda and Michael -- talk shop with Steve Thomas, host of the popular podcast Circulating Ideas, about the process and grind of podcasting, metrics, quality, and monetization.

Michael decided it would be a great time to try a brand new system of recording, which mucks with the audio, and rounds-out the last three minutes of the podcast with hellfire, the dreaded back button, and a very gracious guest. Lord help us. We hope you have fun.

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W3R - Thursday, June 9 Jun 09, 2016

It is Thursday, June 9th. You’re tuned in to W3 Radio (MP3), your weekly newscast about the world wide web in under ten minutes.

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040 - Tim Broadwater, UX Architect Jun 06, 2016

Tim is an artist and front-end developer, presently the UX Architect at West Virginia University Libraries and several times certified by the Nielsen Norman Group. He’s written two articles for LibUX ( “Value vs. Feasibility” / “Why am I doing this to our users?” ), and he’s been super amazing to work with.

I asked to pick his brain about his experience in NN/g’s certification programs and the burgeoning UX degree field – and I am left feeling pretty good about the state of library user experience design.

If you like, you can download the MP3 or subscribe to LibUX on Stitcher,iTunes, Google Play Music, or just plug our feed straight into your podcatcher of choice. Help us out and say something nice. Your sharing and positive reviews are the best marketing we could ask for.

Here are the pulls

3:50 – UX Certifications and the burgeoning UX degree field
9:22 – Are we at peak UX?

I know a handful of professionals who are great web developers and great designers …, and they refer to themselves as UX designers or UX architects, however they have never once conducted any type of usability study or intercept or any type of evaluation that involves their users – they don’t meet their users, ever. I think the term gets broadly applied to where it becomes a buzzword.Tim Broadwater

15:55 – Pitching user research to stakeholders
16:35 – Tim’s case study

We can shoot from the hip over and over and over again and sometimes we get an “okay” success, but … most of the time we get an absolute failure. How do we go forward? We have to make decisions based on user data. … Our target audience is constantly changing so we have to always be able to take the pulse.Tim Broadwater

20:21 – We — Michael and Tim — love the hamburger menu. Unashamedly. And it’s going to be around for years.

I can’t deny [the hamburger menu] affords a certain amount of convenience in terms of design because of the … complexity of maintaining a front-end framework that must be as malleable [as a libraries’ must be] to adapt to so many different kinds of applications and so many different kinds of users.Michael Schofield

28:50 – This has become Navigation UX Talk with Tim and Mike.
34:03 – Left navigation? Ugh! As if!

I think left hanf navigation is kind of a lazy way to deal with your secondary tier navigation. There are so many different options now that are out there. I think what we’re seeing now is that with long scrolling pages and different kind of navigation items or navigations that are sticky, staying on the page, … there are different ways to get to the same information and it’s more important to evaluate what works best for you or your users, as oppose to playing it safe or going with your peers.Tim Broadwater

Why do all higher-education websites look the same? Because we’re all looking at each other’s for peer research! No one is looking at apartments.com, which has this great search box functionality and I would argue that’s a perfect example for a library website … – and it uses the hamburger icon as well.Tim Broadwater

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W3R - Thursday, June 2 Jun 02, 2016

Progress toward HTML5 DRM continues; whether Trust API is the end of passwords; the Internet of Things is way big; internet giants pledge to remove hate speech and promote "independent counter-narratives" #bigbrother; Chrome 51 updates; people use ad blockers to make the web cheaper; Sublime Text 3! Who knew?; push for encryption law falters; MySpace was hacked; Americans increasingly mobile-data-plan only; and some new APIs.

Thanks for giving my new podcast -- W3 Radio -- a spin. You can help it find its footing by leaving a nice review, telling your friends, and subscribing. I'm Michael Schofield (@schoeyfield).

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039 - Jean Felisme May 30, 2016

Jean Felisme is an entrepreneur, speaker, WordCamp Miami organizer, and developer at the School of Computing and Information Sciences at Florida International University.

I’ve known Jean Felisme for awhile through WordCamp Miami. We see each other quite a bit at meetups and he’s a ton of fun – he’s also been pretty hardcore about evangelizing freelance. Recently he made the switch from freelance into the very special niche that is the higher-ed web, so when he was just six weeks into his new position at the School of Computing and Information Sciences at Florida International University I took the opportunity to pick his brain.

Hope you enjoy.

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Promo for W3 Radio May 29, 2016

Do you need your web design news right now in ten minutes or less? Well it’s just your luck that soon I Michael Schofield am starting a new podcast W3 Radio - bite sized best-of the world wide web. You’ll soon be able to tune in to W3 Radio on your pod catcher of choice and real soon at w3radio.com.
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038 - Tim Spalding May 17, 2016

Tim Spalding (LibraryThing and TinyCat) is on this episode of the podcast in which we are critical of library software, libraries' relationships with vendors, designing and developing TinyCat, and much more.

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037 - [Terrifying] Voice User Interfaces with Jason Griffey May 10, 2016

3:34 – There is a Revolution Ahead and it Has a Voice

What if we didn’t need to learn arcane commands? What if you could use the most effective and powerful communication tool ever invented? This tool evolved over millions of years and allows you to express complex ideas in very compact and data dense ways yet can be nuanced to the width of a hair [2]. What is this tool? It is our voice.Brian Roemmele

5:16 – Hound

8:46 – We talk about the benefits of the data-crunching power behind the Amazon Echo in Amazon web services compared to Apple’s Siri.
10:10 – IBM Watson‘s API and developer community
11:30 – HTML5 Web Speech API

She saw this as an entity, as a person – not as a thing, but as a conversational partner!Jason Griffey, on his daughter’s reaction to Alexa

17:00 – It’s all about empathizing with the things we use! We tend to think voice interfaces are cool because it makes doing hard programm-y things easier, but the tangential thing they bring is company, community.
18:45 – On interfaces responding to your tone of voice.
21:19 – Have we seen any of this implemented in libraries or at the higher-ed level?
24:00 – On gender

It is no accident that every single one we have named that is commercially available and sold to people — Cortana, Siri, Google Now, and Alexa — those are female gendered. These are all bots that are the result of someone building them, they are all gendered in a way that I think is problematic.Jason Griffey

30:23 – Creating a personality that would anticipate the personality you need at at that time!

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036 - Penelope Singer Apr 13, 2016

Michael talks shop with Penelope Singer (@pushingvision) -- an awesome UI designer at a major vendor -- about cross-platform and cross-media brand, animations, material design, cats, and anticipatory design.

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035 - Lisa Rabey Mar 07, 2016

Amanda and I interview Lisa Rabey ( Twitter ) ( Journal ) about how the trials of the job hunt for library technologists are exacerbated by employers’ unrealistic expectations for unicorns — full-stack engineers* who work the reference desk — given that, well, libraries aren’t really sure what they need.

This lack of definition is really a detriment. Her recent writing on this — “I Want to be a XXX Librarian” / Part Two / Part Three / Part Four — exposes just how goofy the job titles are, let alone their descriptions, unearthed and logged over the course of more than a hundred applications.

What libraries think they want versus what they actually need is the big thing nobody actually talks about.LISA RABEY

We asked her to swing by though because we echoed similar frustrations back in Episode 008: Hiring a Web Librarian, where we gawp at the b******t of being expected to keep-up with the rapid pace of technology outside of the job for which one is intended to use it. We bring it up again later in this episode.

Loads here. Lots of wisdom.

Segments

5:40 – TThe lack of consistent vocabulary to describe the kind of position employers are trying to hire for

7:17 – On “unicorns”

9:30 – Degree requirements and pay

13:55 – Leaving the library world into doing back-end, server, or front-end development

15:40 – Lisa’s current plan of attack

18:00 – On Bootcamps and learning to code

24:05 – Wisdom for librarians on the job hunt

29:50 – Advice to people making hiring decisions

34:45 – Getting in touch with Lisa

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034: How "UX as a Measurement" Leads to "Service Design" Feb 29, 2016

You might remember that in our 2016 Design Predictions episode, my number one was that we are going to see an explosion of “Service Design” in writeups, job descriptions, and the like. I hadn’t really heard about Service Design until winter 2015, but as I was editing this episode — a recut of a talk from June prior — my spiel about conceptualizing the user experience as a measurement led into a totally unintended talk about service design. This makes sense, because when we think about UX as a measurement we are thinking about holistic experiences that transcend the screen which reflect back at us the quality of the services we provide.

As usual, you support us by helping us get the word out: share a link and take a moment to leave a nice review. Thanks!

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"So, exactly how goth is the user experience?" Feb 26, 2016

The third episode in our new question-and-answer bonus series raises more questions than anything. Meg Ecclestone stumbles into a blooper reel. We hope you enjoy.

0:32 – “I worry about the state of virtual reality for libraries.”

0:45 – “I always tell people that in librarianship we need to dream smaller, but you have dreamed very small, Michael. Very small indeed.”

2:16 – “How goth is the state of library user experience?”

3:35 – Meg and Michael go to camp.

This is so Hot Topic.MEG ECCLESTONE

5:05 – We are clearly off topic.

7:48 – “On Friday, April 16th, Deathrock came to town.”

You can subscribe to LibUX on Stitcher, iTunes, or plug our feed right into your podcatcher of choice. Help us out and say something nice. You can find every podcast on www.libux.co.

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"Why are library websites so hard to get right?" Feb 11, 2016

The second question asked in our new question-and-answer bonus series. Meg Ecclestone and Michael Schofield talk about the plight of library web design.

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A UX Shop for One with Stephen Francoeur Feb 08, 2016

Stephen Francoeur is among the first user experience librarians and in this episode he shares his insight about thriving as a one-person UX shop. We talk about organizational buy-in, how best to pitch and communicate UX work, as well as a super interesting tear on imposter syndrome. For show notes, articles, and more episodes, visit www.libux.co.

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What can libraries learn from the FANG playbook? Jan 25, 2016

We read "The FANG Playbook" on Stratechery by Ben Thompson, which inspires some thoughts about the opportunity for libraries to exert control over the user experience and their negotiations with vendors, because libraries supply the commodity vendors want: patrons.

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"What research techniques and tools are actually used in library UX work?" Jan 18, 2016

In a new question-and-answer bonus series, Meg Ecclestone and Michael mull over one user experience topic at a time. This week, "what research techniques and tools are actually used in library UX work?"

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2016 Trends for Library Web Design Jan 11, 2016

Our first podcast of the new year kicks off with our predictions for trends in library web design. We're stoked to see how we tally-up at the end of the year.

1. 2:19 - "Service Design" will be the new "User Experience Design"
2. 4:39 - the future of WordPress is JavaScript
3. 5:07 - the library app is finally dead - moreover the app in general as something distinct from the web will bottom-out its unpopularity
4. 9:41 - more predictive / anticipatory services
5. 12:16 - maturing API Driven Design (inspired by [Tim Broadwater](http://twitter.com/tim_broadwater))
6. 15:54 - web animation everywhere you look (follow [Rachel Nabors](http://twitter.com/rachelnabors))
7. 16:51 - #libweb drops the carousel, embraces the gigantor hero-unit search
8. 19:12 - design around time, as in just-in-time information
9. 20:11 - the market for prototyping tools explodes
10. 22:18 - Slack. Just Slack.

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The Future of WordPress is JavaScript Dec 21, 2015

Amanda and Michael talk about what it means now that the architecture for making API endpoints easier was added to WordPress 4.4 alongside the announcement of Calypso, the JavaScript front-end of WordPress-dot-com websites. Also, we mull over how WordPress gives libraries more negotiating power and options in the vendor space, as well as learning jQuery before JavaScript - we like it.

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Brianna Marshall and Cameron Cook Dec 15, 2015

Brianna Marshall and Cameron Cook talk content strategy, humor, LITA Forum, and the redesign of Research Data Services at UW-Madison.

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Ebookalypse Oct 21, 2015

Okay, so, ebook readership is fine regardless of misread data about its doom, but as of 2015 it still has yet to pull meaningfully away from print. Amanda and Michael talk about the negative impact of poor user experience on business - except for one outlier: Amazon Kindle self-published books.

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20 Questions Oct 05, 2015

Michael was grilled by #LIS3267 about what it's like to do web design, the future of libraries, maintaining work / life balance in a highly disrupted field, and other slightly neurotic grad-student things. Here are some of the gems and Amanda's take!

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WordPress for Libraries with Chad Haefele Aug 31, 2015

Chad Haefele joins Amanda and Michael to talk about his book WordPress for Libraries, usability testing using tools from Optimal Workshop, and the inglorious fate of Google Wave.

Find show notes and more podcasts and articles like this at www.libux.co.

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Anticipatory Design Jul 13, 2015

Update: fixed audio! This week Amanda and Michael muse about Anticipatory Design, and whether it is possible - and ethical - to craft a user experience so personalized through data and context that it ultimately eliminates choice.

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A sketch of a customer journey map which includes a user story — **The User Experience (Part Two)** Jun 23, 2015
This is the second part to a talk given June 3, 2015, called The User Experience (here’s part one!).

Show Notes and Snippets

What is a “heuristic evaluation”?

The Truth about Carousels and Other Antipatterns by me — Michael Schofield

UX, consideration, and a CMMI-based Model by Coral Sheldon-Hess

When an organization is well and truly steeped in UX, with total awareness of and buy-in on user-centered thinking, its staff enact those principles, whether they’re facing patrons or not. In short, UX thinking makes a person considerate. Coral Sheldon-Hess

Heuristic Evaluations in Reverse by Bohyun Kim

A **customer journey map** may be the most bang for your buck

The customer journey begins with a user story: as a _____, I want to _____, so that _____.”

Increasingly, the journey often begins online and is punctuated by time and potential disenchantment before the patron even enters the building Michael Schofield

X\O Participatory Design by the University of Michigan Libraries UX Department

A High Functioning Research Website

Libraries are approaching their **mobile moment**. Whether it’s true for you now, it will definitely be true for you later. … Navigation must flow. The content must be worth it. Everything must be fast. There is no place for b******t. Michael Schofield

Make sweeping improvements to the user experience by knowing a little about how people read the web.

The LibUX Core Content Audit

LibGuides — How Usable is the Three Column Layout? — on LibUX

Where your patrons spend most of their time influences their basic expectations of the library. Being user-centric demands that we are aware and don’t scoff at the habits our users have. Convention matters.Michael Schofield

The most relevant trends libraries should watch are in e-commerce.

When people talk about the size of websites in bytes, think in terms of seconds

After 10 seconds, there is a missed opportunity. You will never know how many patrons you failed to reach, but the data suggests it’s a lot.

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The DELIGHTful Episode Jun 15, 2015

The DELIGHTful Episode was the second we ever recorded, but otherwise lost until recently. We read Jim Shamlin's "Satisfaction, Delight, Disappointment, and Shock." We talk about inspiring delight through customer service and novelty. Other gems: we like Treehouse, jingles, book lists, WordPress, and free dessert.

www.libux.co

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