It was a fantastic quarter for the company and I’m especially thankful for the word of mouth advertising network. In the past three months we’ve been working on:

• Auspice Corporation - defining the user experience and designing a browser-based application for both mobile and desktop delivery that will be used across the cable industry.
• Harvard University - delivering a top-level assessment of a large-scale query tool.
• Harvard University - defining the user experience and delivering a comprehensive top-level information architecture and content mapping strategy for the entire finance division.
• CSO (CSOonline.com) - designing the user experience and developing a standards-compliant set of front-end templates for the new CSOonline.com
• Vantel Pearls - delivering enhancements to the back-end order entry process and delivering a booking report for demonstrators.
• Apex Properties - continued the design and development of a new corporate Web strategy

The new quarter looks to continue with great success as we respond to RFPs for major learning institutions and corporate marketing divisions. We’d love to hear from you and look forward to helping you solve any user experience problems.

Talent is a gift.

I see my son’s illustration or my friend’s design work or a beautiful font choice and I wonder what it is that makes the talent click into place.

My love for usable, user-centric design spawns from a deep understanding in Customer Service. That’s right, customer service.

In a conversation with a good friend of mine today I had the opportunity to relate a story surrounding the feeling of desperation one can have when placed overseas on a project without the tools or communication lines one needs to perform simple administrative functions (i.e. payroll services and expense report management). It can be said that a student traveling overseas, thousands of miles away from home, can feel the same sense of internal desperation.

Our employees, our customers and our friends need the support of a solid and well-planned user experience. This includes making sure that the Information Architecture is planned for almost any audience scenario, and NOT that of the department from which it comes.

Case in point: Department leadership at a large company is faced with the task of presenting a large volume of information and administrative tools online to assist in the remote life events of a field employee.

The employee goes on their trip (or logs in remotely from home) and is immediately challenged with finding what they need without the support of their employer. Imagine being up at a regular business hour, say, 09:00 AM where YOU are and the company for which you work is still bundled up in their sheets and blankets. Your task is to download a form for your tax records, but the company put it in an obscure location, never to be seen again. Oh, and don’t bother searching for it. The company forgot to put in the proper meta data to help you get it.

Paying attention to an audience’s needs is what user-centric design is all about. Sure, it’s great if you’re pleased to show off a fancy new trick to your design or have a killer layout, but don’t let your IA kill the experience and leave your employees in the dust.

It’s a weekend. Go enjoy it.

It’s funny when we get into a debate with a client about their own audience. We often find out in these situations how much both sides don’t know about the customer.

In these cases, we lean on both the statistical data and the experience we’ve collected and take a shot at running tests to see how close we can get. We usually get pretty darned close.

But what happens if the client isn’t willing to disclose certain information or the audience is not allowed to see the new interface design until it goes out to beta?

Design to the user.

It’s at the point where I say this in my sleep. I design user experience. It’s based on the user and their experience. End of story. I don’t design applications or Web sites or software UI to meet the specifications of a machine or a database. That’s left to the capable hands of the back-end development team.

What I expect them to return to me is the data the USER needs in order to make the EXPERIENCE as painless as possible.

Our lives are filled with applications that spit out millions of data points and while a user’s interaction is much more savvy on the Web than it was ten years ago, it’s not so savvy as to correctly guess at what they’re supposed to do without some sort of roadmap.

It’s still ok to hold hands and it’s still ok to give them a map.

Keep the user experience useful.

Quite possibly beneath every site map or content plan we’ve ever done lives a piece of information that doesn’t belong where it is. We obviously did not do this on purpose.

We set out, of course, to put things in their place and without any bias other than their content requirements. How is it, then, that content or links end up in a random place? Is it because it was overlooked? Probably, it’s a case of the “parent trap”. The parent trap occurs when a piece of information is lacking enough substance to make it either on its own or fit better into a higher level category. In some cases, it may even be that this rogue information belongs as not its own section, but within another page or piece of functionality.

It would be easier to lump things into categories and let users drill down and find it, but that is clearly not our job. Our job is to stop a potential parent trap.

Create Methods to the Madness

As you facilitate a session with your client to dig deep into foreign content, make sure that you’re asking the right questions:

• Are you going to match this content to a function?
• Will the content be used for cross-promotion? If so, where in the application or site will it need to link?
• What is the relative nature of this content to its parent tree?
• Can this content be misconstrued to another meaning when found by a new customer/user?

Often times, by digging deeper in your content or navigation schema meetings, you’ll get to the bottom of the placement for new or uncategorized information types.

And, if you get stuck, make sure that you do a review before you hit the construction phase of your engagement in an effort to cut down on the cycles and revisions.

In the earliest days of my Web design experience, I was asked to create online visions of what would be the future. For some of my clients, when I explained what I did and how I did it, I’m sure they felt it was like reading a 1950’s Sci-Fi comic book with a sense of fear (of where there money was going) and wonder (how they were going to update it).

My current job is much different. I am a traffic cop. I still get to design and discuss branding with clients, I exercise my brain daily about the best ways to lay out the pieces that will create the customer’s online experience. But my biggest contribution these days is that of the traffic cop.

Wait, let me elaborate: I have always been a traffic cop, but these days I do it about 80% of my time rather than the 20% of 10 years ago. Why?

The Web and all of the applications which run on it are not always designed with the customer experience in mind. I believe this is because of the rush to get products in our instant-on world, and the race to the bank once something starts selling. Unfortunately, and I know you know what I’m going to say: that’s not too good for the long-term relationship.

A customer is not a one-time event. To me, a customer is someone you want learning your streets (and street names). The customer should know Hooper’s General Store and which way it is to get to Sesame Street without a Tom Tom or a BlackBerry GPS product.

You know… there’s nothing wrong with changing the storefronts and sprucing up the street lamps (especially for the holidays), but when you take an existing site or application and tear up the roads and change the street names without explaining it to the customer, you’re in for a lot of accidents. Take a moment to think of the traffic cop on your team. Their job is to make sure the flow works and doesn’t create havoc for the customer.

Trust me, they’ll seriously appreciate the help.