Working closely with other designers gives us the opportunity to learn from their experience and enhance our own: how do they present their work to clients? What tools do they use to keep track of project milestones? How do they make sure to stay on budget? Not shying away from collaboration can introduce you to some new friends and improve the quality of your work. The more different the designers, the bigger the challenge and greater the potential to broaden your horizons.

In the first part of this series we’ve looked at the steps that must be taken at the beginning of a project to ensure that a successful collaboration is possible later on. We set the foundations of our team dynamic by determining clearly defined roles and explained how each member’s contribution will work towards the common goal.We setup a rough project plan. Finally, our team agreed upon collaboration tools and other project conventions.

Our fearless UX-men team is now ready to dive deeper into their quest for a rewarding user experience. Their team dynamics will be put to the test through rounds and rounds of feedback sessions.

Will they survive to design another day? Read the epic conclusion to find out!

Superhero assemblies

Design superheroes should focus on their role and give others space to do their thing. Throughout, teammates should keep each other updated on their progress, the approach they’ve used, the research they’ve completed, etc. Jon Whipple explains the benefits of keeping research (used here in a loose sense) pervasive in his article What Designers Know:

Research functions as a lubricant, reducing friction around contentious issues and providing consensus among designers, developers, and clients. The upshot is that a clearly defined result, commonly understood facts, and relevant data make design discussions easier.

In sum: short, daily meetings keep everyone updated when work is done in parallel.

If these aren’t a good cultural fit, consider handoff meetings. During a handoff meeting the person who just finished a portion of a project (the information architecture for instance) presents her work to the rest of the team. She explains what she learned from the client and her research, and gives an overview of the process that she followed. This gives the team the opportunity to make suggestions and ask her questions.

Afterwards, she presents her work to the client and explains that she’s ready to pass it off to the next team member to continue the work. In Whipple’s words, handoff meetings: “distribute research throughout the organization.” This allows everyone to feel equally included in the whole process and also helps teammates better accept and respond to criticism.

Unless they don’t, of course

The ego battle

Despite your best efforts – in the midst of the combat – the much-feared moment inevitably arrives: the ego battle! He’d like it darker, 3 pixels to the left, and with smaller text. You’d like to crop his head off. Relax! First, listen carefully to his point of view. Practice active listening. You’ve spent 100hrs perfecting this and he hasn’t, so you’ll need to explain your ideas in terms that he understands.

Communication skills are a great investment for any designer. Another valuable investment is an “invisible armor.” As Melisa Angulo-Javier explains, UX-men tend to be empaths. While this quality can help us relate to the end users, it also makes us further inclined to take criticism to heart. There are a lot of advantages (both personal and professional!) to being able to momentarily distance oneself from one’s creation, not the least of which is that we tend to make more rational decisions when we are cool, calm and collected.

You’re using all the right arguments to defend your decision and your teammate is still not moved by your discourse? Take three deep breaths and consider that you might be wrong. Yes, even a hero is wrong sometimes!

Ok. You thought about it. Still don’t agree? Agree to disagree and seek a middle ground. Is there a way to validate the options with the client or the end-users? A/B tests are a great way for choosing between two solutions. You can also make a temporary decision and test later on to see if your/your colleague’s hunch was right. For example, if I want to validate that users will notice my “buy now” button despite it being on the small side, I’ll devise a test where the user must add the product to the cart. If most of my test users find the button without a problem, then the design is on the right track.

No design is perfect and no UX-man can predict user behavior with absolute certainty. Simply document questionable design decisions throughout the project and you’ll have a short-list of objectives for the next round of design.

Giving feedback

What if you were on the other side of that ego battle: the one giving criticism? Here are a few ways to ensure your feedback will be well received:

First, remember that you are not the universal measure of how good or bad something is. Temporarily trade in your superhero persona for a more humble character and show respect for your teammates’s point of view.

Second, reflect on the type of feedback you want to give/receive. As mentioned by Zenhabit’s Tim Samoff in his article How to Give Kind Criticism, and Avoid Being Critical: “using criticism to help someone improve, to see a change affected, or to contribute to a discussion, are all good reasons for doing it.” If your reasons for delivering criticism include: to hurt someone, to vent frustrations, to boost your ego, or to challenge others you should reflect on the option of keeping quiet.

Third, employ tact to make sure your criticism is well received. Use kindness to show that you are empathic to the challenges faced by your hard-working teammate. If your tone of voice says “attack,” the person receiving the feedback will likely adopt a defensive stance. A great strategy is to focus on making positive suggestions. In other words, suggest ways in which the work can be improved and the rationale behind it: “If we increase the text size, these long paragraphs will be easier to read,” instead of simply pointing out what’s wrong with it: “The text is difficult to read.” In general: good suggestions tend to be more specific, which ensures that they are actionable.

The motto of every successful team should be to take advantage of each member’s skills and to help improve their contributions, not disempower them. A happy ending is possible. We just have to put our aside our egos for the good of the project.

The end

This is the walking off into the sunset part. The mission is accomplished. Users are happy. The world is safe.

Together, you’ve faced the challenge of respecting one another while working towards a common goal. You’ve mediated heated debates and ensured everyone’s contribution was appreciated. You’ve survived every team meeting. Now’s the time to reap the benefits of an accomplished mission and strengthen the bonds you’ve just created.

Before we end, we need to bring our design superheroes together one last time to celebrate and reflect. A project retrospective is an often-overlooked step in the healthy life of every superhero team. A retrospective is a meeting held after the delivery of a milestone or after the completion of the entire project. Originally found in projects managed using SCRUM development methodology, this type of meeting is a good addition to any venture. Retrospectives gives every team member the opportunity to express what he thought went well, what he thinks could be improved and what he’s learned from the project. The team effectively brainstorms together on ways to improve team-dynamics and the project plan.

If you’ve made it this far, you’ve surmounted difficult challenges and bested feedback-wielding foes. You’re likely dying to share with the world the incredibly awesome work you’ve just done. Just don’t forget to share the credit…there is no “I” in “UX teamwork,” after all!

The author wishes to thank Kent, Dorothée and Lindsay. They’re continuously teaching her the meaning of a great design team!

I was interviewed by Neil Briscoe for an article in IrishTimes.com: Is the love affair about to end? "Are cars as we know them to become a thing of the past?" asks the article. Where is the room for "Driving passion"? The question, Briscoe points out, is whether we can continue to have single people driving around, each in a ton and a half of metal.

A/B Tests are great if you’re focused on the right issues. However, many teams focus on the wrong problem. Even worse, they’ll focus on the wrong concept altogether, opting for incremental improvements instead of dramatic changes for the better.

More often than not, A/B tests are used to are a dog and pony show for the executives than to solve real problems.

Jared Spool has written a great article about this over at UIE:

In our study, we watched more than a dozen of the presenters’ company’s own customers attempt to buy products. While many were successful, a surprising number weren’t, even though this company is the biggest in its industry (and hailed by many as the most successful). Their site looks slick, but when folks sat down to use it for its primary goal, it’s design put up a ton of frustrating obstacles.

In many cases, the users thought they ordered the product they wanted, only to discover upon receipt that it wasn’t at all what they wanted. As we watched those shoppers make their orders, we could see that they would not get what they wanted.

…

The A/B tests they presented showed they were applying a ton of effort to optimize things that weren’t close to the things we saw preventing sales on their site. If the message was that A/B testing helps, I didn’t get that because I saw them futzing around with tweaking insignificant button text when there were huge deficiencies in the design that they still haven’t resolved.

Have you ever tried the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button on Google? It’s meant to take you directly to the result you want, rather than return a list of results. It’s a simple idea, and when it works it seems like magic.

But most of the time we are not so lucky. We submit a query and review the results, only to find they’re not quite what we were looking for. Occasionally, we review a further page or two of results, but in most cases it’s quicker just to enter a new query and try again. In fact, this pattern of behaviour is so common that techniques have been developed specifically to help us along this part of our information journey. In particular, three versions of as-you-type suggestions— auto-complete, auto-suggest, and instant results—subtly guide us in creating and...read more By Tony Russell-Rose

After 2 very similar posts in a very small timeframe, featuring Easel.ly and infogr.am respectively, I seem not to be able to follow the 'automatic infographics editing' scene fast enough.

Automatic resume infographics creator visualize.me has just launched Venngage [venngage.com], which aims to empower people to create beautiful infographics in minutes, so that "creating infographics [becomes] as easy as creating a Powerpoint presentation".

As a unique feature, Venngage's visual elements are displayed as pure HTML elements, which should positively influence SEO stats, page ranks and back links.

As with infogr.am, venngage is able to directly link custom data values to data-driven graphs, but offers more visualization techniques that go beyond the traditional pie chart, line graph and bar chart, and includes sophisticated techniques such as treemaps, bubble charts, word clouds, and the like. As with the other services, venngage offers the ability to combine a specific visual style with a range of configurable visualization techniques, along various editing features that range from color choices, labels and font types.

The resulting infographic can be embedded (see rough example below), downloaded as an image, or linked to.

A few days ago, we posted the website Easel.ly, a new web-based service that aims to empower lay users to design infographic-like illustrations within the browser. Unfortunately, Easel.ly seems more apt in combining infographic-like images on a canvas, than to link real numerical data to a graphical form.

So here comes Infogr.am [infogr.am], another competitor towards semi-automatic, web-based infographics editing. Developed by a start-up based in Riga (Latvia), though now based in London, the online service offers a collection of infographic themes as well as different interactive chart types (e.g. bar graph, line chart, pie chart, matrix chart, and so on). Note that next to the basic visual style, they also offer some more 'humorist' approaches (such mapping the tongue of a frog as a horizontal bar). Users, which should include journalists, bloggers, data professionals, education, financial experts and designers, can then customize their infographic by adding multiple charts underneath each other, and configure them with their own personal data.

User-generated charts can then be embedded in third-party websites (see example below) or be linked to by dedicated URLs.

So will there be a time where all infographics will look really alike?

The movie "Epic time-lapse map of Europe" fast forwards a map from the year 1000 AD until 2003 to reveal the dynamic nature of Europe's borders, alliances, unions, territories, and occupied lands.

An alternative movie takes a bit longer, but contains useful textual annotations such as the actual year that is shown and the events that occurred.

The movie was made with "Centennia Historical Atlas" by Centennia Software.

Watch the movies below.

Via @tillnm.

Responsible responsive design demands responsive images—images whose dimensions and file size suit the viewport and bandwidth of the receiving device. As HTML provides no standard element to achieve this purpose, serving responsive images has meant using JavaScript trickery, and accepting that your solution will fail for some users. Then a few months ago, in response to an article here, a W3C Responsive Images Community Group formed—and proposed a simple-to-understand HTML picture element capable of serving responsive images. The group even delivered picture functionality to older browsers via two polyfills: namely, Scott Jehl’s Picturefill and Abban Dunne’s jQuery Picture. The WHATWG has responded by ignoring the community’s work on the picture element, and proposing a more complicated img set element. Which proposed standard is better, and for whom? Which will win? And what can you do to help avert an “us versus them” crisis that could hurt end-users and turn developers off to the standards process? ALA’s own Mat Marquis explains the ins and outs of responsive images and web standards at the turning point.

From Fast Company. We knew it.

“And there came a day, a day unlike any other, when Earth’s mightiest heroes and heroines found themselves united against…” – poor design, typographic crimes and the threat of confusing interfaces! Sounds great, doesn’t it? Successful teams can feed off each other’s creative drive to push innovative ideas forward resulting in amazing work. Poor team dynamics, however, can lead to Frankenstein creations. Overcoming these challenges enables a distributed team to author its own success story.

Just like the X-men who only succeed by uniting their forces, the “UX-men” (and women!) must also learn to work together in order to pull off projects that are far greater than their individual skills. The challenges and benefits of such collaborations stem from the same source: the diversity in backgrounds and perspective.

Diverse teams, with different “design upbringings,” can make collaboration difficult. Designers tend to be emotionally attached to their own work, their own ideas and – like it or not – working in a team teaches them to adjust that attachment: to take feedback, value perspective and relinquish control.

But this is far easier said than it’s done.

This two-part article looks at how you can optimize your team dynamic throughout a project. The first part will examine the steps you can take at the beginning of the collaboration to ensure all parties know their role and start off on the right foot. The following article will navigate the last stages of teamwork from surviving clashing egos to improving your design alliance from one project to the next.

The heroic mission

The foundation of any superhero design team is not something to be taken lightly. Each hero’s role should be well defined and in tune with their respective talent and skills: their super power. By clearly outlining responsibilities early on we prevent well-intentioned, do-it-alls from attempting to do, well, everything.

Next comes the most important part – the one thing that unites our heroes – the mission. Ensure the team’s objective is well defined so that all members share the same measure of success. When re-designing an existing website, for example, success can be measured by looking for an increase in conversion rates or purchases; an increase in new visitors; a decrease in the frequency of support calls; or a decrease in visits to the help page.

To that end, give your team the context necessary to understand your client’s objectives. Bring everyone around the table at least once so that they can hear the business case directly from the client and have the opportunity to ask their own questions. This not only gives the team a greater understanding of the client’s needs, it also makes them more committed to the outcome of the project.

Finally, acknowledge that one superhero may not be enough to save the day. After the goal has been established, delineate how individual teammates will work together towards attaining that goal. For instance, I can design an awesome sign up page that entices users to register using a quick and effortless process. My teammate can write equally awesome, easy-to-read copy that will inform the users why signing up is a great idea. Together, we make a great sign-up form that no user can resist!

A winning strategy

Even the best teams don’t go into battle without a strategy. Start by writing a proper project plan using your team’s best estimates. Your plan should map out all work phases and highlight the ones that can be done in parallel. Remember to make time for the often-forgotten research, testing, and presentation of your work. Further, plan time to integrate the client’s comments – especially in the beginning!

For longer projects, consider separating the process into milestones. This ensures that you get periodic sign-offs from your client throughout the project. It’s no fun discovering that the wireframes you used to build the visual design were never actually approved by the client.

…and now he wants something drastically different.

Keep your plan updated and make it visible. For longer projects, post the project plan in a public area such as a conference room. This ensures that everyone has a clear idea of where they’re headed and helps them anticipate timeline problems before they arise. For example, when faced with the addition of extra work that threatens to put a team behind schedule, teammates can collaboratively devise ways to make up for lost time by simplifying (or removing) less-important features.

If you’re looking for a more high-tech way of keeping everyone up-to-date, Freelance Switch has a great list of web-based applications that can help you set up a kick-ass project plan and to share it with your team.

My five favorite collaboration tools

• Dropbox Easy filesharing service with useful options such as image galleries.
• Pinterest Create collaborative pinboards and share inspiration, ideas and useful resources.
• Skype Video conference with teammates or clients and great share screen feature.
• Google Docs Share documentation and project plans. Shows timeline of revisions. Allows users to add comments.
• Behance Share your work with the design community. Ask questions. Get feedback. Discover what other great designers are doing.

Lastly, the start of a project is a good time to ensure that all superheroes are well equipped with collaboration tools and, further, that they share the same conventions for organizing and sharing their files. When we work on a solo project, we might be tempted to give into the bad habits of un-organizing our Photoshop layers or working on files without uploading them to the cloud. There’s no place for this in a successful team as someone else must be able to pick up where you left off at any time. Make sure that all team members know where to go to access all work being done on the project. Set up a file naming convention that will be common to the team. Avoid naming your files “webdesign-v2-final.psd”. Once there’s a couple “final” and “now-its-really-final” files in that folder, no one will know which one is the latest version. Either use dates in your file names or archive older items.

The saga continues…

Congratulations! We’ve united our UX-heros under one noble mission; we’ve set up the foundations of successful teamwork such as well-defined roles; and we’ve equipped our team with the necessary tools to their project survival. Come back for the sequel wherein our heroes go head-to-head in a heated ego battle! Learn useful tips for receiving and delivering constructive feedback and ensure your team reaches a happy ending. See you Thursday!

UX Booth would like to thank Jeremy Keith for the photo used as this article’s lead image.

With more than 55 million iPads in use around the world and more than 400 million smartphones sold in 2011, companies are increasingly thinking “mobile first” when developing their web and mobile app strategies.

Hotels.com, for example, offers not only a mobile-optimized website but mobile apps specific to both the iPad and iPhone.

Unfortunately, as companies rush to go mobile, they often overlook the importance of maintaining their global reach. That is, their mobile...read more By John Yunker

One of the most important things about any job search is knowing the companies that you are applying to. Jessica Greco has crafted a great post about researching your way into a new UX Job. Some very good points:

Research comparable jobs. If you’re the type to take on more responsibilities as they become necessary, you may be working at a higher level than your title indicates. Apply those research skills to publicly available job descriptions and salary surveys. How does your experience compare? You may be surprised to find out you’re being underpaid. Check out the data on DesignSalaries.org for information to sink your teeth into.

Prioritize your needs and wants. Is money most crucial, or do you have some wiggle room? Is it more important to be part of a team, or to work on more diverse projects? Do you want to work more closely with developers? Are you focused on making new connections, so you can eventually go freelance? Do you want to be part of a growing team that can provide you with a future management position?

Be honest with yourself. What’s essential, and what’s just nice to have? What do you really want out of your future? Any indecision on your part will effect lackluster results. Try to articulate what you really want before you begin your job hunt.

Read on.

Every March for the past six years, our MX: Managing Experience conference has brought together a growing community of managers, directors, and VPs of experience design teams (and their bosses) to discuss the unique challenges they face. 

This year's sold out conference featured speakers from GE, eBay, Intel, Flickr, Salesforce.com, Sony, and Forrester Research, representing an excellent mix of examples of the role experience design is playing in the world's largest companies. This year's talks explored a range of topics from the journey to becoming a UX leader, to how design is used in tandem with user experience to drive revenue, and to what challenges and opportunities lie in the years ahead. 

As usual, we're sharing the talks and hope you enjoy them. 

Dane Howard, eBay | What is a VizKitchen? How ‘preViz’ Is Helping Shape Billion Dollar Businesses

If you prefer to watch the MX 2012 talks on the free Adaptive Path iPad app, they'll be available as soon as the update is approved. In the meantime, you can download the app and watch talks from MX 2011 and UX Week 2011.

Need the resume to get the UX job you love? I’m offering the Usability Counts UX Resume Template an editable User Experience resume in Microsoft Word format.

It will include comments and annotations to give you tips on how to write your resume. You’ll also get a list of 30 other recommended articles for developing your User Experience career. It might not get you a job, but it should give you ideas on how to better structure your career history and accomplishments.

You just have to fill out a 3o-second form — I’ll be involved an event where we give you tips on how to write your resume, and interview for great UX Jobs.

I promise I won’t spam you with Luxury Watch advertisements or sell your email address to Jared Spool.

Download The Usability Counts Resume Template.

Need that resume and career advice to get the UX job you love?

I’m offering the Usability Counts UX Resume Template an editable User Experience resume in Microsoft Word format.

It will include comments and annotations to give you tips on how to write your resume. You’ll also get a list of 30 other recommended articles for developing your User Experience career. It might not get you a job, but it should give you ideas on how to better structure your career history and accomplishments. Included is a career guide of curated content from the Usability Counts blog (maybe soon to be an ebook).

You just have to fill out a 30-second form — I’ll be involved an event where we give you tips on how to write your resume, and interview for great UX Jobs.

I promise I won’t spam you with Luxury Watch advertisements or sell your email address to Jared Spool. Just download the UX Drinking Game to make me feel better.

Nothing needs to be said. Click here to view all the videos.

The UK has come up with design principles for their government services. Progress is afoot. 

DIY kits to build web-connected things. 

Neato: responsive wireframes. 

A tool to pump out models digitally.

Information is food. 

Welcome to the era of design. 

Fun cross-platform interaction, the concept. And the real deal. 

Can continuous improvement be hazardous to your organization's health? 

Cue sad trombone. A sad lesson in collaborative innovation. 

User experience is strategy, not design, says Peterme. What do you think?

FatFonts [fatfonts.org] is a novel numeric typeface for data visualization purposes. The design of FatFonts is based on Arabic numerals, but the amount of ink (i.e. dark pixels) used for each digit is proportional to its quantitative value. This font enables the reading of numerical data while still preserving an overall visual context.

The typeface was developed by Miguel Nacenta, Uta Hinrichs and Sheelagh Carpendale at the University of Calgary. In the online gallery several case studies are documented on how this font can be used for good used. More detailed information about these examples can be found in their academic paper (PDF), while more interactive examples can be viewed here.

The fonts themselves can be downloaded here.

Via @eagereyes.

San Diego-based start-up Easel.ly [easel.ly] is offering a beta service that allows lay people to design and implement their own "infographics" via an online editor. The user-based customization of infographics seems to be the next phase after the automatic generation of infographics, and has already been promised by community websites like visual.ly.

For now, easel.ly allows users to drag and drop predefined and uploaded vector images on pre-designed canvases and themes for easy creation and customization of infographics. According to the founders Patrick Alcoke and Neil Harris, all themes have been designed by graphic designers to ensure the highest quality for their users to start with.

The service is currently still in beta and thus free. The editor also resembles more an online vector shape canvas with a library of flashy infographic imagery, than a workable tool that makes the mapping of numerical values to believable shapes more efficient or compelling. Yet, we'll need to see what the future brings.

Are you worried about how customers in other countries will react to your product or service? Not really sure who your international customers even are, or what they want and need? To find out, it might be time to pop outside the domestic market and conduct an international user research study.

Understanding international customers is more critical than ever as emerging market economies continue their rapid expansion. With Internet and mobile usage in particular, the recent adoption rates have been astonishing. China reported 513 million Internet users by the end of 2011¹—an increase of 30% since 2009—with nearly 70% of them accessing the Internet using handheld devices. Meanwhile, in the next decade seven emerging economies including China, India, and Brazil, are on track to...read more By Liang Zhang, Pamela Walshe, Elizabeth Shelly