Blog: UX professionals
What UX owes to journalism
User Experience design is an interesting mix between many work areas, including cognitive psychology, marketing, graphic design, coding and many more. Among those roots that still inspire me on an everyday basis as a UX, I wanted to focus today on my early days passion for journalism and what it brings to my practice as a consultant.
UX in change management
I have recently worked as a UX specialist on a project in a very difficult and fascinating context. The project itself was an internal financial application, and looked quite simple at a first glance. What made it so particular was its history. The new project was launched after one full year of development and without any consultation of users of the existing system. As a result, users from offices all around the world rejected the new tool, sometimes without even trying to use it. Challenging experience. In this case, as often, UX was far from just wireframing pretty widgets. It was a profound redesign of the system, and a deep rework on the relationship around the project. Creating a positive communication with users, making focused changes to the interface and testing them became the strongest vector of change management and acceptance of the new system.
The business analysis part of UX
BA or UX? BA vs. UX (if we believe some project management and job-title oriented blogs)? Where does business analysis stop, and where does user experience start? As a UX specialist in Geneva, Switzerland, I have worked both on projects involving business analysts, and on projects for which they were not part of the team. Whether we need BAs and/or UXs is not a question anymore, and having BA insights is a great advantage for starting the UX part of a project. Instead, I wish to focus this article on the similarities that exist between the two roles, and on this business analysis part of UX that we, as usability consultants, often, and more and more, integrate as a part of our mission.
Top 5 qualities for a UX
What are the most important qualities for a UX professional? Our profession is still a work in progress, and rich with plenty diverse profiles. Getting to know more and more other UX specialists, I was curious about the qualities and skills they may think are the most important for our job. I have conducted a survey research over the last few months to try and find an answer to this question, and gather UX professionals opinion on which qualities they think are important to work on this position. Main qualities in the top 5 include communication, empathy and curiosity…
Main qualities and skills for a UX/UI?
A quick focused casual form to better understand what are the main qualities and skill sets people in the IT-industry associate with a UX/UI consultant. Help the answer be as complete as possible by saring this link to your contacts:
http://goo.gl/forms/4iCvaMgdvH
(for full page and mobile-optimized view)
The full report on the collected answers will be available here soon. Thanks!
World Usability Day @Geneva
Last Thursday was the World Usability Day: events in 40 countries all over the world happened to promote UX and design thinking. In Geneva, a full-day event was organized by Telono, a well-known local company specialized in UX and user testing. The first part of the day was a training, but I has the chance to be invited to the Afterwork. Nicolas Nova, from Near Future Laboratory, first presented Ethnography and interaction design: how to get to know users to come up with better designs. Then Florian Egger, founder of Telono, presented slides about multi-channel customer experience. Both conferences were very interesting (thank you for that!) and I especially agree with two ideas: