Publications from Thinking and Making

Seven barriers to UX: The Organization doesn't VALUE design

Austin Govella — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 05:25:52 GMT

Part two of my series on the organizational barriers to good user experience is up on the Follow the UX Leader blog. We're starting our deep dive with the first barrier: your organization seems like it doesn't value design. If you're interested, I'd love to hear you feedback. "The seven barriers to UX: the organization doesn't value design."

Lean UX and Agile interview on Epic Bagel

Austin Govella — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 18:53:00 GMT

Epic Bagel's Jon Bolt and I took some time last week to sit down and talk (via Skype) about my experiences with agile, user experience, and lean UX. Jon's posted audio of the discussion on his blog: Lean UX and Agile with Austin Govella.

Win a copy of Blueprints for the web

He's also giving away two copies of Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web. Check the post for information on how to enter to win.

(When you're listening, you can hear me sniffling. It's not odd for allergies to plague my innocent, docile mind, but this time, it's because there was so much crap in the air from the wild fires. See, even when peril looms close, I continue my dedication to user experience and agile teams.)

Barriers to UX series on the Follow the UX Leader blog

Austin Govella — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 17:36:21 GMT

Lately, it seems like all my posts are more promotional than informational. Please bear with me. I'm trying to get the word out and share my experience and thinking with wider audiences. I'm still writing, but the posts publish at other places. A case in point: I've been a fan of Jeff Parks's Follow the UX Leader workshops since he launched them a couple of years ago. Recently, Jeff invited me to contribute to the Follow the UX Leader blog. I've started a series of posts that expand on organizational barriers to better user experience. I'm expanding on the barriers covered in my Big Design presentation, How to Farm Miracles. The first post went up last week, "Seven organizational barriers to designing better experiences". We plan to continue the series. The second post should go live in the next day or so, with more to follow.

More conversations; more feedback

One of the reasons I'm trying to publish in other venues, is I'm trying to get more feedback from a wider group of people. As I continue to refine my thinking and approach, real-world feedback from a diverse group of people is super important.

If you have any comments or feedback on anything I've been talking about, please leave a comment, or drop me an email at ag@agux.co. I'd love to talk about this with you. I really do sit up at night thinking about this stuff.

Site Architecture Stencil for OmniGraffle

Austin Govella — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 19:01:38 GMT

View a larger screenshot on Flickr.

I've used EightShapes's brilliant Unify deliverable system for about four years. It's excellent.

Out of the box, Unify is designed for use with Adobe InDesign. Lately, however, I've been site mapping in sweet, luscious OmniGraffle, and I created a Unify-inspired OmniGraffle stencil for making site maps.

But, there's one problem with lots of site maps.

In your typical site map, you show the page's title adjacent to the little box for that page. Unfortunately, clients and developers and designers don't always what kind of page the page will be. In other words, if you have a page titled, "Orders", it's not clear if that's a dashboard, a list of orders, or even a form form for adding an order.

So I added a line for every page on the site map where you can offer a _very_ brief description of the page.

If you'd like, feel free to download and use the site map stencil.

File Name	Version	Platform	Size	Download
Site Architecture.gstencil	0.6	OmniGraffle	138kb	Download

And if you have any ideas for making it better, please comment below, or -- better yet -- email me: austin.govella@gmail.com.

Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web, 2nd ed.

Austin Govella — Tue, 18 May 2010 23:07:57 GMT

Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think is the one, best book that teaches you to how to think about your users, and it always will be. If you're going to buy one and only one book, that would be the one.

However, if you're looking for the best introduction to user experience, Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web is the book you should buy. h2. A comprehensive introduction In Blueprints, we collected the key user experience issues and wrote an introduction to each. To that extent, I believe we've published the single, best, one-chapter introductions to business and user requirements, navigation, application flow, page layout, and search. We've also included the single best introduction to social media design you'll find anywhere. You'll learn how to approach each of these issues and how to best use personas, scenarios, site maps, wireframes, card sorts, and the ever-popular sitepath diagramming. This isn't a book about design. It's about the architecture behind the design. We take you from concepts, requirements, and needs all the way down to laying out the page and stop just short of individual page elements. This is the book to read if you're a product manager, engineer, visual designer, or student looking for a quick on-ramp into the world of user experience. h2. Learn the way you learn best As book-lovers, Christina and I wrote a book that would be both easy and a pleasure to read, warm, and inviting. It's obsessively crafted for reading and for readers; every point illustrated with clear examples. It's a quick read at approximately 250 pages, but almost half of the book consists of full-color screenshots and diagrams. We were obsessed with including visual examples for everything so you can see the concepts while you read them. h2. Not the first edition It's not the 1st edition. Not even close. The chapters on search, navigation, application flow, and social media are completely new. The rest of the chapters has been totally revamped, rethought, and re-explained with new examples from the modern world. (And several chapters from the first edition were cut entirely.) I'm really proud of the book we put together. So proud, that I never feel smarmy when I recommend it to people. If you're looking for an introduction to user experience, I heartily suggest you check out Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web.

The producers, making things, and monsters

Austin Govella — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:58:00 GMT

I've been _producing_ things for a long time. In college, I managed an art gallery and produced art shows and openings and cultural events. Haranguing a capoeira group, a grip of Brazilians on percussion and beer, an artist, his hangers on, catering, press releases, reservations, hanging and lighting the show, designing posters, ads, and a brochure for the show... that's an event of some scale. Lots of moving pieces, a chess game where you move each piece across the board until the day of the opening when you hope it's checkmate. I've produced several club nights where success depends on a long line of successful experiences that slowly build off each other so the community grows until you're overflowing a space full of happy, sweaty, sparkling people having a great time. Book shows, book DJs, book artists, celebrate birthdays, play requests, bounce assholes, guest-list nice people, smart people, special people. Pick films, drink specials, wardrobes, dates, event names, ticket prices... that's an event of some scale. Unlike an art show, this chess game is much longer, and instead of worrying about schedules, promotion, and competition on one day, you're looking at six months, and then a year, and then two years. And you don't need checkmate every night, but you need to maintain checkmate -- as much as possible -- over that entire period of time. Nothing I have ever done has ever matched the scale of putting together a book. Life-consuming. Grab a handful off your shelf and flip through the dedications. There's a reason so many are dedicated to spouses and families. These kind people pretend to look the other way for months while you read, write, research, celebrate, mourn, write again, edit, re-edit, start over, re-research, edit again, scream, stare mindlessly at the screen... and then? Then you go into layout where you edit, edit, annotate, change, delete, redo pictures, diagrams, captions. You repeat this process for every chapter. I've produced many things of some scale -- art shows, zines, literary journals, web applications, club nights, a poetry festival, concerts -- but nothing has prepared me for the massive scale of a book. And to be clear, it's really only half a book. The sheer amount of work, the vast expanse of detail, from commas to cover, pictures to precepts. It's not the writing. I wanted to be a writer when I was younger. I wrote a lot. My last semester at U.T. I produced a novella, two one-act plays, and two research papers. And it's not the editing. That same semester, I edited a literary journal, a zine, and a newspaper. It's not the design. That semester I produced a series of posters, newspaper ads, brochures, postcards, and several websites. It's not the quantity of work. It's the size of the body the work creates. I could fit a bunch of small things inside my head, comprehend their wholeness. But I can't fit a similar amount of work for a larger body inside my head. I can't fit the book in my head, much less all the moving parts that need attention. My entire life, that's how I've worked: cram everything about something into my head, take it part, reassemble it, and produce something. This project has been immune to that approach. And it's been driving me nuts. An important part of my writing process up till now was to read and re-read the entire piece from start to finish over and over again looking for the rough places. Where is the reader bumped out? What's too cute, too academic? What's not clear? What's missing? Does it flow from start to finish? I can't do that with this book. We can do that with individual chapters, but not with the entire thing. I expect that's what really scares me. The first edition was this wonderfully wrapped story about designing better websites. I know each chapter is pretty good. The content's fucking awesome. But, what if instead of one book it's just a collection of chapters? I think that's what worries me most. On the scale from the world's most beautiful man to Frankenstein's monster, I have no clear sense of where we are. I'm still going to bolt the neck on. And I think we're sewing on a different, nicer pair of hands. But I have no clue of whether the townspeople will scream or smile. Madness is always a matter of hindsight.

We tried to warn you: how organizations are architected to fail

Austin Govella — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 15:00:34 GMT

I’m in the midst of editing a series of articles on Failure for Boxes and Arrows. The series is based presentation organized by Christian Crumlish last year at the IA Summit in Las Vegas.

Boxes and Arrows just published part one of Peter Jones’s article about the organizational architecture of failure: We tried to warn you. It’s a really smart, really excellent look at how organizational “failures” reveal themselves as project failures.

It’s a coffee break read: grab your coffee, print it out, and read it.

I think it’s especially interesting because I.A. is an alignment discipline, helping align business, users, and technology. Its the failure of one or all of these to align that causes the kinds of failures Jones is writing about.

(Peter Jones blogs over at Design Dialogues and works at Redesign Research.)