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re:log [opendatacity.de] by German data designers OpenDataCity reveals the movements of about 6,700 different electronic devices during re:publica 2013, a prestigious European conference on the topic of Digital Society.

A dynamic map of the conference location shows the approximate locations of the devices when they were connected to the local WiFi hotspots. An interactive timeline underneath allows to explore the dynamic changes over time, while a rectangular area can be drawn to more specifically highlight and follow a smaller amount of dots.

The visualization was based on tracking the MAC addresses of the devices according to the WiFi hotspot they were connected to. This data, which can be downloaded, was fully anonymized, yet the authors mention their desire to allow people to look up their own MAC address in the future.

Map Stack [stamen.com] by Stamen Design aims to make it radically simpler for lay people to design completely unique, personalized maps.

The online visual map design service provides easy access to the color, opacity and brightness of any map background, road, label, or satellite imagery. Users can also create custom-made image overlays and layer effects, or layers that are used as cut-out masks for other layers.

Currently, the default styles include minimalistic black/white, watercolor or 3D-like terrain, which can all be freely changed and fine-tuned.

Kristina Halvorson issued a strong call-to-action during her opening keynote at this year’s Confab Minneapolis event, saying: “Part of my job as a content strategist is to get people on board with content strategy. You are a salesperson.” Through the next two days of Confab, speakers provided tools to make this challenging dream a reality.

A few weeks ago, I had the great pleasure of interviewing two Confab speakers, Jonathon Khan and Melanie Moran, in preparation for my attendance of Confab Minneapolis. While writing the introduction for that interview, I spent some time reflecting on why Confab is such a meaningful conference to me:

[Speakers at Confab] talk about writing from the perspective of thinkers – journalists, creatives, researchers, and readers – instead of merely dwelling on its marketing value. It’s a whole new world, connecting writing to design, turning copy into content.

Kristina’s call-to-action during this year’s event – “You are a salesperson” – especially rang true. As an independent content strategist, I work with three types of clients:

1. Clients who know what I do and value it
2. Clients with a rough idea and interest in what I do, and
3. Clients who simply don’t “get” content strategy.

By far, the third category is the most difficult: in addition to doing my job as a strategist, I have to teach these clients about governance, content creation, content curation, and content modeling. I also have to continually prove my own value. It’s the single most frustrating aspect of my work.

Communication techniques

Fortunately, this year’s speakers also taught me how to value both my clients who understand my work, and the clients who need me to be their guide. It’s advice I’m excited to put into practice.

Show them you care

Some clients love content strategy, but that doesn’t mean everyone’s on board. The easiest way to get people invested in content strategy is to listen, not speak. Listening shows clients that we want to understand the problem at hand. Stakeholders may not care about content strategy, but they do care about finding a solution to their problem. Once they hear their solution lies in a content audit, authoring guidelines, a governance plan, etc, they’ll jump on board. We might call it content strategy; they just call it “what works.”

Ask the right questions

During her keynote, Kristina focused on the top 10 issues that content strategists face. Many clients want future-friendly, multi-channel, single-source, magical-unicorn-meat content. It’s depressing to be the bearer of bad news, telling clients they need to trudge through the boring world of organizing content before they get to the fun “future” stuff. The solution is to remind clients that we’ll get to the future-friendly, multi-channel, single-source, magical-unicorn-meat content by starting with simple questions, such as: why do we need it; what already exists; and where is it?

Find your voice

The first step in building a content strategy isn’t necessarily a big, expensive, full-site, multi-channel redesign. Tiffani Jones Brown explained the value of starting small in her talk, Voice Lessons: Finding Your Company’s Personality. Voice is a combination of personality, energy, and the experiences clients have with your company – all the words that represent a brand. Before touching a page on the website, it helps to reassure clients that we’re not starting from scratch; we’re making a record of, and using, their own, personalized language.

Be Honest

One of the most valuable talks I heard at Confab this year was Ahava Leibtag’s talk, Winning the Work: Making the Case for Content Strategy. Ahava drilled down to the heart of a common content strategy concern: what if I’m not right for the job? Her advice? Be honest. In a worst case scenario, you are freeing up your time for projects to which you’re better suited. And in a best case scenario, the client decides to work with you, and has reasonable expectations! In addition, every prospective client appreciates working with someone who recognizes their own strengths and weaknesses.

Put the “Strategy” in content strategy

Many clients fear the unknown of “content strategy,” and they want to see either a process, or a list of deliverables, neither of which come naturally to a flexible content strategy. In Responsive Web Projects: How to Plan a Successful Discovery Process Steve Fisher and Alaine Mackenzie offered some suggestions for helping to create a process that clients can understand… even if the process doesn’t exactly match the sample one that ships with Microsoft Project.

Stay out of the silo

“Silos are for farming, not content strategy,” Steve Fisher told us. It’s easier said than done. Even as a proponent of knocking down silos between development, content strategy, and design, content strategists occasionally advocate for silos when working with management! A “heads down” approach and preference to work with clients who already “get” content strategy builds a wall between the strategist and the client; part of breaking silo walls down is teaching clients what they don’t understand.

Get started

Every conference leaves my head awhirl with new plans to change the way I work with my own clients. Starting now, I’m getting out of my private “content-knowledgeable” silo and advocating for content strategy. Feel free to follow my lead with these first steps:

1. Provide some therapy for new clients. Ask them what keeps them awake at night, and how they feel about their content.
2. Offer content strategy as the solution, not the issue. For clients who haven’t worked with a content strategist before, this will help frame the process.
3. Talk about the process. The process is flexible and ever changing, but it does exist.
4. Stay honest, stay optimistic. It’s easy to get jaded when “selling” your skills, particularly if you feel like you’re doing false advertising. Instead, engage in honest discussions with new clients; that’s enough to sell the value of content strategy!

The post A Confab Recap appeared first on UX Booth.

In addition to English and Chinese, my book is now also available in Japanese.

If you require a short url to link to this article, please use http://ignco.de/536

If you liked this, you'll love my book. It's called Designed for Use: Create Usable Interfaces for Applications and the Web. In it, I cover the whole design process, from user research and sketching to usability tests and A/B testing. But I don't just explain techniques, I also talk about concepts like discoverability, when and how to use animations, what we can learn from video games, and much more.

You can find out more about it (and order it directly, printed or as a DRM-free ebook) on the Pragmatic Programmers website. A Chinese translation is available from Amazon.cn.

» Ughck. Images. In a follow-up to his ALA article Mo’ Pixels, Mo’ Problems, Dave Rupert talks about all the progress we've made toward responsive image solutions — by which he means no progress has been made.

By Steven Hoober Published: June 17, 2013 “We need many tools and should use the best tool we can for any one design or communication task.” There are several ways to approach the design of interactive systems and an ever larger number of specialized products to help UX professionals do their work. But I think there is a bit of a gap between some well-discussed practices that many of these new tools support and the way many UX professionals actually do their work. Several times a week, someone I know or follow discusses the value of designing in the browser—that is, opening a text editor and creating HTML as the first step of detailed design. This might be great, except:

By Marnie Andrews and April L. de Vries Published: June 17, 2013 “Take the classic focus group and turn it into a continuous customer feedback program—a program of recurring sessions that feed your product team the qualitative research it needs.” In this first part of our series of articles about customer feedback programs, we’ll describe how to take the classic focus group and turn it into a continuous customer feedback program—a program of recurring sessions that feed your product team the qualitative research it needs. We’ll draw from our own experience running such programs at IBM. The goal of a continuous customer feedback program is to engage real users in conversations about your product. As a UX researcher, you can conduct a customer feedback program to accomplish the following objectives:

By Janet M. Six Published: June 17, 2013 Send your questions to Ask UXmatters and get answers from some of the top professionals in UX. In this edition of Ask UXmatters, our experts discuss some factors that are currently impacting trends in retail UX strategy. In my monthly column, Ask UXmatters, our panel of UX experts answers our readers’ questions about a variety of user experience matters. To get answers to your own questions about UX strategy, design, user research, or any other topic of interest to UX professionals in an upcoming edition of Ask UXmatters, please send your questions to: ask.uxmatters@uxmatters.com.

By Ben Werner Published: June 17, 2013 “Since customer experience (CX) is so important, shouldn’t we all want to know how our digital products, services, and interactions compare to those of our competitors?” In the current era of business, the customer is more important than ever before. Check out analysts’ recent work on the financial performance of companies that get it versus those that don’t. It’s eye opening. Brands like Amazon who innovate their business to provide the highest-quality, easy, personalized interactions to their customers are taking their markets by storm. Since customer experience (CX) is so important, shouldn’t we all want to know how our digital products, services, and interactions compare to those of our competitors? Are they sparkling examples of interactive delight that rival those of the CX champions or more like the punch-in-the-face customers get when they deal with health-plan providers?

By Debarshi Gupta Biswas Published: June 17, 2013 “Moving technical writing to the cloud has major appeal for compelling reasons, including lower up-front costs, the immediate availability of software tools, easier collaboration among coauthors, seamless content reviews, and varied storage options.” Cloud-based computing is arguably one of the most popular developments in the realm of computing in recent years. It has ushered in a radical shift from the pre-cloud era, when IT’s installation, configuration, and management of applications in an enterprise required a significant amount of time and money. Times have changed. By harnessing the indomitable power of the Web, applications running on remote servers are now available via the Web browser, thereby eliminating the need to install them on local computers. In today’s cloud-driven world, users usually purchase a monthly subscription rather than what may seem like an exorbitant licensing fee, eliminating the need to wait for the installation or configuration of applications.

Our dear old Apple Inc has unveiled iOS 7: a radical overhaul of the company’s mobile design language and a renewed emphasis on how apps feel in motion over how they look on a static screen.

This presents third party software developers with a challenge: since graphical ornamentation has dominated the platform for such a long time, how do we migrate our products to the new world? And how do we migrate our selves? After all, we all liked the old look and spent years learning from it and emulating it. How could we have been wrong to do so?

We weren’t. I hate to say this, but there’s no universal truth in design. The old style wasn’t fatally flawed, and that’s not why it reached the end of its life at Apple. Product design is a tangled nest of features, storytelling, fashion, marketing, and technological constraint. It’s applied psychology. So it’s important to acknowledge where our love for the baubled aesthetic of iPhone OS 1.0 through iOS 6.1.4 came from, where our current displeasure is sourced, and why we need to adapt.

Why did we love the old style? It’s pretty simple: we love shiny, rounded surfaces and bright colors, and the old OS had those in spades. It was one of the most visually decorative operating systems of all time, and our appreciation for it was as natural and universal as our love of warm weather, vocal harmonies, and the smell of ripe strawberries. It looks great in screenshots.

iOS 7 has a lot less of that roundness and shininess. It doesn’t look like the hood (or the interior) of a classic car any longer. In motion and interactivity it’s way cooler and bubblier than the iPhone has ever been before, so you can tell why Apple has pushed video demos so hard on their marketing site, but it’s lacking some of the characteristics we found so appealing. It has fewer bulging surfaces as the old plastic buttons and toolbars are smoothed out. It has fewer rounded corners as more screen elements stretch from edge to edge.

But honestly, of all the changes we’ve seen, how many are contrary to the basic psychology of visual design? Nothing unveiled at WWDC 2013 actually makes you cringe (and don’t make me link to pictures that will actually make you cringe to prove you a hyperbole abuser). It has more of the bright colors we love. The old inner shadows, drop shadows, bevels, and gradients that muted the old aesthetic are gone. It’s the first truly Retina iPhone OS, and more than just allowing the team to use smaller fonts while retaining legibility, it makes each pixel work harder to earn its keep. Color and shape do all the talking now, and the blurred translucency of the interface allows the color to permeate the screen more than ever before.

Where keyboards, pickers, and action sheets were once imposing screen elements with a lot of personality of their own, they now reflect the personality of their environment. Your bright red app won’t have a dull blue-gray keyboard anymore; it’ll have a light red keyboard as the bits of UI beneath it shine through. If your app uses a lot of wood textures, the standard action sheets won’t look out of character because they’re no longer plastic. No matter what you do with your apps, iOS 7’s default visual language will be a better complement.

But even if you accept my assertion that the new visual style is not inherently ugly, how do you explain the strong gut reaction against it? Why are so many of us calling foul? Why is it going to be so hard for us to adjust?

Familiarity bias. Familiarity bias and loss aversion. We love what we know and we’re afraid of what we don’t, so we don’t want to see our old friend replaced with this new thing. It’s irrational, but it’s human nature. When we look at our parents and grandparents we don’t see a crowd of pudgy gray-haired wrinkle factories… we see our history. We love them even when they start smelling weird and wheezing all the time. We wouldn’t dream of replacing them.

Our mistaking a familiarity bias for inherent superiority is where our gut reaction against iOS 7 comes from. It’s a kind of xenophobia. Apple took our beloved iPhone and gave it back to us a stranger. Still walks and talks the same, still the heart and soul we love; just not the face we knew.

This rejection of the unfamiliar will fade over time, just as the weirdness fades after a friend changes their hairstyle or starts wearing glasses. The casual and uncommitted user, the person who bought an iPhone because their friends all have one, will embrace the change pretty easily. But as people who live and breathe iOS, our transition will be harder.

How do we transition our work? The same way we did it in the first place. The majority of good UI design done in the world is done in service of making something new feel like something familiar. That’s why we follow platform guidelines and idioms: familiarity is intuitiveness. We want to make our customers feel as comfortable using our apps as they do using the ones that came with the phone, so we cater to the platform rather than inventing UI from whole cloth.

Apple just reset the baseline for what is considered native. They’re changing the definition of familiarity. Like a government moving to the metric system or ridding itself of the penny, this change will cause a lot of difficulty for small businesses and piss off a lot of old-timers. But it’s ultimately for the best. iOS 7 is a new platform for us, and it’s time to port our iOS 6 apps.

Best to embrace it, the good and the bad, and get back to work.

Yup. That’s about right.

Very cool.

» Google Changes Rankings of Smartphone Search Results Google has started decreasing the ranking of sites with misconfigured mobile content redirects and errors. Highly recommended for any developer who cares about site rankings in Google (i.e. all of them).

A great video. Worth watching.

A couple of years ago, I was interviewed by Venture Beat for an article about Google Plus. I firmly believed that large-scale user adoption for the social network was around the corner. It seemed to have a great feature set, and with their search engine they could drive significant traffic to the social network.

It hasn’t really happened.

The only people I see on my feed are Chris Pirillo, Robert Scoble, and three Google employees I know. With its relaunch, I don’t know now if Plus is ever going to take off.

Some features, like viewing the content, seem to be a direct rip-off of Pinterest. Google Hangouts look great when you first use it, but chat isn’t very usable with repeat usage. A lot of the products released during Google’s #io13 were beautiful and not usable at the same time, and they all seem to lack a social component.

A lot of Google’s products have that same social disconnect. They can’t seem to bridge the gap between using their data to optimize a tool and how to use it to encourage social interaction in many of their applications.

They design products that lack emotional connection

Very few people I meet say they “love” their Google products. And that’s the problem.

Their Android phones are usable. They like using Google search (or use it by default). They use the mail products. But when I ask if they “love their phone,” there’s usually a pause. They’ll love a feature or two, but do not have an emotional connection to the product itself.

Great products create emotional connections that go beyond their utility. People love their iPhones and love them so much that they buy other Apple products. Driving their BMW or Audi is an “experience.” This shows in Net Promoter Scores, where Apple scores in the high 70′s range with many of Google’s services at the bottom of the charts.

Emotional connection can’t be measured. It can’t be optimized through A/B testing, it is discovered through qualitative research.

I watched a grandmother interact with her grandchild electronically — the use of FaceTime to visit with someone who’s three time zones away, and doing it in a way that you could see the human value in their interactions was amazing. That moment for me was a realization that the product had become a way to enable human experiences. The technology itself had disappeared from the process.

Emotional connection is important because it gives companies leeway on building products that aren’t as successful.

iTunes isn’t easy to use. iCloud may have widespread user adoption, but confuses the user. Ping was shut down. However, it doesn’t hurt the larger brand, because consumers have an emotional connection with Apple and most of their core products.

There’s not a single Google tool I have an emotional connection with when I use it. I’m typing this on a Chromebook. It’s nice, but I don’t love it. I have Gmail. It’s easy to use, but I don’t need it. I wrote this in Google Docs, but I could use other tools. I use Google search because it has more indexed pages, but I could Bing.

I need my iPhone. It’s emotionally connected to my life and makes my life easier. Therein lies the difference.

They design everything to be more efficient, not more delightful

Google design new tools or redesigns tools that already exist and make them much better. That’s not a bad thing, but they’re designing for efficiency and not delight.

Maps is a great improvement over previous applications (better than Mapquest and Yahoo). Search finds content you want or need, and can almost predict what you are looking for (better than AltaVista or Lycos). Their advertising tools are great at drilling down to what is the best return on investment for your dollar if you’re a small business. Google tests everything, because removing that one extra click could mean making millions of dollars.

They are great with taking vast amounts of data and presenting it in a way that we find useful, at optimizing searches so there’s always one less click. They hide complexity so we can find that page about the “hamster dance” right now.  But not everything about the web is about utility.  Humans like discovering new things, searching and playing.

This requires developing a human connection.

The best discovery platforms show us not what we were looking for, but what we didn’t expect to find.

Facebook has a lot of that element: I’m not looking to find the photos of my friend’s party when I get there, I’m looking to find out my friends’ attendance. Pinterest is about discovering that new handbag. Instagram is about sharing our lives, one photo at a time. That’s why each has succeeded — there’s a particular human connection that goes past “is it a hammer or screwdriver” that Google seems to miss.

They doesn’t understand the environment they exist in

This is an example of Google Hangouts within context of my second screen. The multiple windows clutter the screen, and make it hard to manage chats. This is an example of something that you see only with ethnographic research i.e. watching people in their own environments.

This is especially evident in the Google Hangouts application. As chat windows open up, window after window appears at the bottom of the screen. If you’re chatting with several people, you could have up to six windows competing for your attention at the bottom of your monitor.

The problem? Chatting is something that is often a passive activity that you do in between all of the other work you do on your computer. You may be chatting with someone at work, a friend, or maybe even sending files. It’s something that happens “in between the raindrops,” the other work you are doing. It might be happening on a second screen at home while watching television, or at work, or while waiting for a friend. It’s a passive asynchronous distraction, not an active task.

Multiple chat windows works for Facebook because it happens within the context of a single environment — the Facebook browser tab. Once you hide this browser window, it’s out of sight and mind, but still accessible. Several other applications that I use, including Skype and Adium, all minimize screen real estate but still add notifications within the Mac OS X dock — out of sight until I want to solve it, within context.

Messaging software is not something you can actively test in a usability lab, because it’s unnatural there. Most of the time, when testing software this way, you are focused on certain tasks. They have to be tested under real world conditions (read: on-site visits) over hours or days of study of many real world users.

Many of the applications you use Google for (Maps, Search, Mail come to mind), are oriented to single tasks where the user’s attention is focused. The applications where the user’s attention is so unfocused (Hangouts and Google Plus) are where Google is struggling.

They know too much about us, and that makes us uncomfortable

Google has taken vast amounts of data and made it extremely manageable, even if it means dancing on the edge of violating our privacy.

The best example of this is Google Maps versus Apple Maps. The first version of Apple Maps was destined to be a trainwreck because Apple didn’t know they were solving a data problem, not a user experience problem. Users don’t want three dimensional renditions of their neighborhood — they want directions from 8th Avenue and Judah Street to Stockton Street and Columbus Avenue, and they want to know if they should be driving, taking a bus, or riding a bicycle, not what buildings they’re going to pass on the way. And they want to know it now.

That takes managing a vast amount of data. Which is exactly what Google is best at, and isn’t Apple’s core competency. Apple’s busy trying to fix it, but Google has a several year head start, and their culture is built around values that make it easy.

With many of Google’s services, cognitive dissonance is required: collecting that information is of great utility, but it requires collecting more information than we are comfortable with. We justify it in the moment (“How do I get to North Beach from Inner Sunset safely so I can have a drink at Tony Nik’s?”), and get upset about it when the usage of that data is disclosed (“Do they really track every time I do a search for a bar?”). The people that work there are comfortable with this because they believe this information should be open.

Google employees don’t have the same concerns about privacy as normal people because they are surrounded by unlimited access to data every day. It’s their culture.

You could almost say that Google’s mantra of “Don’t be evil” is in direct conflict with who they are as a company: primarily an ad-driven business that optimizes everything based on knowing every user’s behavior and storing it, forever. Many of their tools feed into this goal, and this is why Google Plus is such a painful fail. They understand the value of social data.

The failure seems to be that while they understand the value of social data, they can’t figure out how to use it to actually engage users in social interactions. It’s quite ironic, really.

Their mantra comes off of a disingenuous when compared to their core business. Users inherently distrust the company because we don’t want one organization knowing so much about us.

As much as Google wants to be soft, fuzzy and social, they almost can’t. Google Glass is a great example — there will be a successful technology that will come out just like it, but it won’t be from Google because of privacy concerns. Which leads to the next point.

They don’t hire the people they are designing for

The average technology worker in Silicon Valley has more in common with a farmer in Africa than a housewife in Iowa.

When you live in the Valley, you forget that not everyone uses iPads, Smartphones or all kinds of other technology. A lot of people make do with their three year old desktops, and they stay off “The Facebook.” I see this in Seattle, where there seems to be significantly less use of technology than in San Francisco.

This problem is especially exacerbated at Google.

The employee referral rates I have heard are in the high 75 to 80 percent range. People that work at Google are referring people that are like them, which creates a very homogenous culture. They are smart people, a lot of them from Stanford and Harvard, and they are probably great problem-solvers. But they aren’t hiring people from different backgrounds, with different viewpoints, and it’s creating a culture that is less about making truly diverse products and more about feeding the machine. This is a problem faced not only by Google, but by every company in Silicon Valley.

They have lost the connection to “the common man.” The common man doesn’t make $150,000 to $250,000 a year and take a company bus everyday down to Mountain View. They are insurance sales-people, car mechanics, housewives, and teachers that go home after work to watch “CSI: Miami”, not explore the town with Google Glass. They are my parents that have learned how to use an iPad, but do it to play Words With Friends.

An example of a market missed with Google Hangout is FaceTime users. Google might capture that market because they offer group video chat, the only major platform to do this for free. They will succeed not because of the emotional connection, but because they are the freely available option. Thus their success will be accidental because they aren’t aiming for that market.

Apple’s FaceTime promotional content emphasizes pictures of families.

Google Hangouts emphasizes friends, without a single image showing family.

The most telling point: view the FaceTime and Google Hangouts marketing, side by side. FaceTime emphasizes children and family without even mentioning who you’re calling. Google Hangouts emphasizes friends over family, and has twice as many screenshots of chats than faces.

To design for consumers, you have to have people on your team that are the target audience so you can design for it. The users have to live it.

Many other places, like Apple, Facebook, and MySpace (during their height), have that: the people that are in product development are also the target audience.

Jony Ive, for example, succeeds because he reflects a segment of the population that loves simple, well-designed products. Facebook first attracted an Ivy League, more affluent audience because that was their initial product team. They understand their target audience because they are their target audience.

Can Google build an emotional connection with their customers?

I don’t know if they can ever fix it. Many of the issues above are ingrained in their culture, and culture is really hard to change if you’re as big as Google.

Great companies develop brands that have an emotional connection with their customers, and this is something that marketers talk about endlessly when constructing their marketing programs. I saw this at Jobvite — the most devoted had an emotional connection with their product, and would bring it with them wherever they went. They were evangelical about their devotion to their product through thick and thin.

Google doesn’t seem to have it, because that’s not how they have built their company. You can’t optimize for culture.

But it does create opportunity for other startups. It’s a great cautionary tale when designing stuff for people — you have to not only understand them, you have to be them to really understand their needs.

» Why Do We Need Responsive Images? 72% Less Image Weight. We all need to step up our responsive development game and start thinking more about page weight. The most obvious place to start? Images. ℅ @respimg

My initial foray into UX frustrated me. Although my job title suggested that I made products easier for end-users, I actually spent a lot of time selling user experience to clients, stakeholders, and colleagues. I knew I needed to broaden my focus, but I didn’t know where to start. And that’s when I discovered The Business Model Canvas.

The story behind what we today know as the Business Model Canvas is an interesting one. Originally created as a conceptual framework for Alexander Osterwalder’s PhD project, it later became the subject of an entire book called Business Model Generation, co-authored with Yves Pigneur. Today, both the book and the canvas allow those of us without business training (including yours truly) to better understand sustainable business practices.

My application of the Business Model Canvas is likely atypical, though. Instead of using the canvas to aid clients, I wondered: what if I looked at my role as a business itself? After all, I need resources to operate (a budget, my supervisors’ time, my colleagues’ expertise); I have customers (people to whom I provide value); I have costs (my time, materials, stress). Could understanding all these things help me design more efficiently?

Introspection

To follow my logic, it’s useful to first understand how the business model canvas is laid out.

Divided into nine parts, it includes:

• Key partners – Who supports you?
• Key activities – What do you do to create value?
• Key resources – What do you require?
• Customers – For whom do you create value?
• Value – What problems do you solve? What needs do you address?
• Channels – How do you communicate your value?
• Customer relationships – How you interact with customers?
• Revenue – What do you get?
• Costs – What do you give?

Using the original book’s sequel (Business Model You) as a guide, I thought critically about my role within my organization. Rather than rigorously weigh all nine considerations here, though – something for which the book is much better suited – let’s look at three in particular: customers, value provided, and key channels.

Customers: not just the end-user

While it’s relatively easy to assume that our customers are the same as the customers of the company for which we work, this isn’t strictly the case. As the book defines them, customers are anyone for whom we’re creating value, including:

• Clients and stakeholders, who rely on us for our expertise;
• End-users, who rely on us to represent their needs;
• Software developers, who rely on us to clarify interactions and interfaces;
• Other members of the design team, who rely on us for user research; and, finally,
• Colleagues in quality assurance, who rely on us for specifications and clarifications.

Notice that end-users are only one item on the list. Notice, also, that colleagues are customers too. Couple this with the fact that we practice user-centered design and it becomes increasingly obvious why it’s part of our job to consider our team and their benefit.

User experience design isn’t limited to human-computer interaction; it includes human-human interaction as well. Before filling out the canvas, I instinctively knew this – that my responsibility did not end with “end users” – however, I didn’t know what I could do to serve them more effectively. That’s when I considered value propositions.

Value: not just deliverables

Just as clients tend to think of our work as deliverables, designers often think of our work as different activities: holding workshops, conducting interviews, writing scenarios, making wireframes. Yet one of the biggest mistakes we can make is to assume that the activities we conduct are the same thing as the value we provide.

When I sat down to determine the value I provided, I was stumped. I could only think of – dare I say it – clichés. Yeesh. “Making things easy to use,” “generating empathy,” etc. I needed to break it down.

To determine the value I provided to others, I started with a list of what I was currently doing at work: conducting user interviews, diagramming mental models, building low-fidelity prototypes, tracing mind maps, putting together personas. Next, I considered my reasoning for each activity. Why did I interview project stakeholders?, for example. Then I asked myself: So what?

Repeatedly. Until I hit something.

This resulted in the following table:

Activity	I do this to…	So that…
User interviews	Build empathy for customers	We avoid building a product “for everyone”
Mental Model Diagram	Determine our feature fit	Stakeholders can see gaps
Low-fidelity prototype	Share the vision	Everyone can agree to the product direction, sooner

Does interviewing customers before designing reduce the risk of product-market mismatch? Does one particular kind of prototype make it easier to adapt the design vision? You don’t know until you think it through.

Next, I considered the value provided by each of these activities for my customers:

Activity	Value to client	Value to developers	Value to designers
Mental Model Diagram	Risk reduction. This helps clients see gaps in their offering (where they might lose competitive edge or profit)	Convenience. This allows developers to more easily write user stories by providing user motivations.	Cost reduction. This provides designers with context so they can more quickly make design decisions.

Notice how the value differs depending upon the customer. Finding the right way to phrase the value we provide for a given audience is, simply put, a user-centered way of thinking. It requires asking the right questions and actually listening to the answers. In this case, we just have to add business constraints, and organizational fit to our list of topics to listen out for.

Communicating this way signals that we have a wide skillset. When I sit down at a meeting, I sometimes sense that a new client considers the role of designer to be analogous to that of an aesthetician: the person responsible for adding “color” to an interface. Communicating my role in terms of value signals that I think broadly. It raises expectations.

Key channels: stop waiting for recognition

The third realization I had when filling out the canvas was that I was often waiting for people to become curious about what I did instead of communicating my own value. Channels are the methods we use to communicate to customers. They afford three things:

• Awareness of the value we provide. They allow us to spread the word about what we can offer (and listen to others to see where its needed most).
• The value itself. Channels allow us to deliver the value we promise.
• Customer support after we’ve delivered our value.

Most importantly, this exercise helped me realize that I needed to start doing things resonated most with each of my customers. To that end, I might:

• Demo something I did in the company demo meeting and talk about the value to developers
• Share a usability test recording
• Make a cheat-sheet of my activities’ benefits for the sales team, or
• Write articles about our process for the company website so clients could learn more about what UX means for business

Making the sale

To there you have it: the business model of a UX Team of One. Selling UX – especially within an organisation – is a complex topic. Whole books have been written on the subject. The three insights above resulted from reconsidering my value and what I could improve on.

I eventually came to realize I needed a plan for communicating value to different groups of people I work with, and that I had to stop waiting and start doing. I also came to accept that there were areas in which I needed help – such as translating my reasoning for UX activities into business terms. I’m currently working on writing out all these benefits, with the help of an experienced consultant.

The business model canvas hasn’t made my job any easier to do, but it has helped me prioritize. Communicating value is a journey. I recommend filling out the canvas for yourself and seeing which boxes are most difficult to fill (yours might differ from my 3 key learnings) or with which you could use some help. I have no doubt you’ll find the result rewarding.

Related resources

On UX within organizations

• User Experience is Not Enough
• Selling UX
• Communicating the UX Value Proposition

On UX benefits

• Overview of UX activities and their benefits
• The ROI (Return on Investment) of User Experience

On the Business Model Canvas

• Business Model You – an adaption of the canvas for individuals
• Lean Canvas – A business model canvas alternative for startups
• Business Model Canvas for User Experience Design – an alternative focusing on the user

The post A User Experience Business of One appeared first on UX Booth.

Desktop fonts in Adobe Typekit Four years ago, we set out to on a goal to bring great typography to the web. Now, we’re taking the next step in our evolution: desktop fonts and web fonts together in a single Typekit subscription. On June 17, we’ll be making 175 beautiful font families from the Typekit library available for desktop use. You’ll be able to sync them to your computer and use them in all your applications for web mockups, print design, word processing, and more. Want a sneak peek? Ben made a screencast showing how it works. Let us know what you think!

Mathew Magain is a UX Designer down under (Australia) and runs UX Mastery. He put together this great video explaining UX Design. Cheers.