Being business savvy as a UX designer will help you land advertised job opportunities easily. Below you will find a curated list of business strategies UX designers should know that will help them navigate the competitive market.

Leverage Artificial Intelligence

The world of artificial intelligence cuts across multiple industries. One of the best ways to leverage the power of AI is by using it to increase sales, improve productivity, and gain a competitive edge. You can attend coding bootcamp like General Assembly or Thinkful to master artificial intelligence. You can also decide to hire experts in AI to help you achieve your goals.

Conduct Competitive Analysis

It’s paramount to conduct in-depth research regarding your competitors before entering the market. This will help establish your niche, as you will easily identify the gap in the industry. Through research, you may also be able to identify ways to improve on your competitors’ services or products. You can also evaluate their success and failures and come up with new ways to operate.

The world of design is ever-changing. There is always a need to improve user experience in the market. To be a successful UX designer, you must invest ample time in finding out about competitors before delving into the market.

Curate Templates

The best way to get ahead in the market is by making your work effective and efficient. To ensure you produce quality content fast, you should rely on custom templates. Instead of starting from scratch when a new client approaches, you can rely on these set structures. Building your personalized templates or design systems will help you control time, labor, and quality.

Pricing Strategy

As a professional, you may keep your prices relatively low to attract customers, or price them beyond standards and cut off the ordinary customer. It’s a bit challenging to put a price on creativity, but you can draw a lot of information from other businesses or competitors.

Some businesses and experts in UX design started by under-quoting their services and slowly worked up to their level of success. This does not have to be your strategy. Ensure you have a proper business plan in place to ensure you can meet your long-term goals.

Review Your Performance

You have to have a structure in place to ensure you are improving on your craft. It’s important to ensure your design ideations positively impact a company’s profit. You can obtain data on the company’s website customer experience. It’s easy to establish by checking the number of customers visiting and the amount of time they spend on the site.

Increase Services

In addition to offering UX design services, you can go further and include web development or SEO services to your portfolio. Most companies prefer having one umbrella company delivering all their website solutions. Therefore, adding other services to your portfolio will help you stand out in the market.

Improve Customer Service

It’s always essential to review your client’s level of satisfaction. This will help you in improving the types of services you deliver. There are multiple professionals and businesses who have built their reputations based on customer service. If you are an established company, outsourcing a customer service team might be the best option.

Build Customer Loyalty

One of the cornerstones of success is retaining existing clients. It is much easier to maintain a relationship with an existing client than to work on acquiring a new one. Ensure the loyalty of your clients by rewarding them. You can create a customer loyalty program, improve customer service, or prioritize feedback. Most companies offer their clients discounts on certain services or during specific months.

Conclusion

Keeping your skills up-to-date as a UX designer cannot be overlooked. The world of design is always booming with new technology, methods, and approaches to improve user experience. Failure to develop a proper business strategy that keeps you informed can easily result in losses.

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the field of web design and development has a job growth rate of 13 percent, which shows promising growth. Fostering the best practices to succeed can help you thrive, whether you are working as a freelancer, in a startup, or an established company.

About the author: Daisy Waithereo Wambua is a seasoned writer with a decade of experience in writing, proofreading, and editing. She has spoken at Maseno University to help young women explore new careers and learn more about technology. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Communications and Public Relations, a Certificate in Web Development, and a Master’s Degree in International Studies.

Posted by: Situated Research

The post Business Strategies UX Designers Should Know appeared first on Situated Research.

Uber did not allow you to pre-book a taxi. Amazon started out by selling books only. Google was just a search engine. McDonald’s got rid of cutlery. And somehow we still believe that for a product to be successful it must do many things.

There are usually two cases — new products trying to convince the market that they are worth it and companies with established products that offer more than needed.

A big mistake new companies do is trying to offer everything their competitors have, believing this way they will attract more interest and gain customers. And on the other side, established companies which believe that more products and resources spent will always result in better results. So I would like to show you why offering too much is a psychological problem and how new products can nail it by focusing on one thing they are good at.

For new products you have to change behaviour first

As we might know, humans are creatures of habits. And if we already have well-established patterns, and most of the times we do, it will be hard for a new company to convince us that we must buy their “innovative product” or make a switch to something else.

We can call a product “innovation” when it changes people’s habits. For example, the iPhone is an innovation. So for your product to become a habit, it has to do a straightforward thing but do it great. Why? Because it is much easier to adopt a new technology if the learning curve is low and the reward is high for what it does.

The temptation is always there for manufacturers to add functionality to things — since conventional logic suggests that more must be better. What takes real genius is to leave things out — Rory Sutherland

Back in 2006, McDonald’s saw its growth stall. The fast-food chain decided that the problem was its limited menu, so it tried out many new items and ended up doubling the offerings. But sales hardly budged. Finally, in 2016, it took a new track. It went back to basics, dropped most of those additional items, and instead extended its popular breakfast offerings. Sales finally jumped, with same-store revenue up 6% in 2017, and the stock rose by 40% — Tiffani Bova, HBR

The learning curve must be low

To change a behaviour, it easier done if the learning curve of your product is low. As I wrote in a previous article — 10 Small Design Mistakes We Still Make — if we find something that does the job, and does it great, we will almost never make a switch to another service or product, even if it is a little bit better. Why? It’s in our nature to stay with the familiar and we don’t like taking risks of learning something only to realise it is not something we needed.

Once a person nails down the use of your product, they will rarely switch to something else.

How to make the learning curve lower? User metaphors.

People learn faster when an app’s interface and actions are metaphors for familiar experiences. The experiences may come from the digital or real world. Metaphors work well in because people interact with the screen. They move views out of the way to expose content beneath. They drag and swipe content. People toggle switches, move sliders, and scroll through picker values.

Always try to learn what other apps are your core customers using on a daily basis. This will allow to design similar experiences and remove any friction or create uncomfortable learning situations.

Choice overload

Another reason why many products fail or companies can’t get new users is because they offer too many options — features, services or products. And by overwhelming your users with too much stuff, people will always choose to stick with what works currently for them or choose not to buy anything else. This process is called overchoice or choice overload.

Choice overload is a cognitive process in which people have a difficult time making a decision when faced with many options — Wikipedia

The phenomenon of overchoice occurs when many similar choices are available. Making a decision becomes overwhelming due to the many potential outcomes and risks that may result from making the wrong choice. Having too many approximately equally good options is mentally draining because each option must be weighed against alternatives to select the best one. This can be easily seen and experienced when you buy, literally, anything for your house (dishwasher, microwave, washing machine, vacuum, etc.)

When Nike called Apple

You can fit all Apple’s products on a table, and it still surpassed Google as the most valuable company on the planet. How is that possible? They had a well-established philosophy that almost never changed — get rid of crappy stuff. Moreover, that philosophy helped Nike to become one of the greatest brands alongside Apple too. When Mark Parker became the CEO of Nike, he had a phone call with Steve Jobs and asked him:

“Do you have any advice?” Parker asked Jobs. “Well, just one thing,” said Jobs. “Nike makes some of the best products in the world. Products that you lust after. But you also make a lot of crap. Just get rid of the crappy stuff and focus on the good stuff.” Jobs paused and Parker filled the quiet with a chuckle. But Jobs didn’t laugh. He was serious. “He was absolutely right,” said Parker. “We had to edit.” — Source: Forbes

How Apple does it

Apple doesn’t invent a new product or product category. Almost all the time, all of Apple’s products have been recreations of existing products. Apple did not invent the MP3 player (Walkman), the smartphone (Ericsson R380), the tablet (Microsoft). Instead, Apple reinvented all of them and made them better.

Our goals are very simple — to design and make better products. If we can’t make something that is better, we won’t do it — Jonathan Ive, Chief Design Officer of Apple

When you do one thing but great, you add an extra drop of confidence and loyalty into your customer’s heart. This way, when you launch every year a better product, it becomes harder for the customer to make a switch because you earned their trust in doing one but a great thing.

Good is the enemy of great. And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great. We don’t have great schools, principally because we have good schools. We don’t have great government, principally because we have good government. Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life― Jim Collins

Minimise the decision-making process

Another reason why Apple is so successful is that it has only one product in its category. It minimises the decision-making process for the consumer by making things simple.

Apple doesn’t have five iPhone models to choose from. It has only one — this year’s latest version. What about additional choice? Very simple — big or small. In case you don’t have the budget you can always buy the previous models with the same thinking model. And while this may seem to limit the company’s potential, given the number of smartphones available on the market, the truth is the reverse.

Time’s magazine did a consumer research for over 30 years, in which consumers constantly tell them that while choice is nice, in reality, people want the process of choosing a tech product to be simple and not complicated.

How Walkman did it

Akio Morita, with his business partner Masaru Ibuka, founded Sony in 1946. Large magnetic tape recorders were the company’s first area of focus, later followed by the first pocket radio. But perhaps his most significant moment of genius involved the creation of the Sony Walkman, the ancestor of the iPod.

In market research, the Walkman aroused very little interest and quite a lot of hostility. ‘Why would I want to walk about with music playing in my head?’ was a typical response. Morita ignored this.

How was the idea of Walkman born?

The request for the Walkman had initially come from the 70-year-old Ibuka, the honorary chairman of Sony at that time. Ibuka wanted a small device that would allow him to listen to a full-length opera on his many flights between Tokyo and the US.

Morita asked Sony’s engineers to work on the idea, and they succeeded in achieving what he had briefed them to create — a miniature stereo cassette-player. But they also had managed to include a recording function in the Walkman. However, Morita told them to remove it.

Now, why would you remove a feature that costs an insignificant amount of resources and adds a trivial amount to the final price? Sony’s engineers recommended going with a microphone and recorder because it would add value to the final product. This also means more ways to use the Walkman for.

But Morita argued that a recorder would only confuse the end consumer. “For what is this device? Dictation? Should I record live music? Should I take interviews with it? Should I record my vinyl?”

By narrowing the perceived uses of the device, Sony ensured that the device could do only one thing: listen to music. This way it would be easier for people to adopt a new behaviour, since there was only one thing to adopt. This way you can also understand why the iPods became so popular too.

How others do it

On the other side, giving examples of big brands like Apple, Sony and McDonald’s is easy when they are already prominent and successful, but there are also small companies that started with one feature only and are doing great. A company I admire, Bonsai — a tool for freelancers to send proposals & invoices, contracts, track expenses and projects — is a perfect example.

How did the company start? When they launched for the first time on Product Hunt I remember only one thing they promised — send beautiful and bullet proof contracts. Because of that, many people were attracted to the product. Not too many companies offered the ability to send designer like contracts. Also, it was a core problem that most freelancers were and are struggling with.

So what about them now? With time and patience they have become an all in one solution for freelancers. Starting small and perfecting a feature allowed this company to grow into what they are now today. And you can see that it was easy for early adopters to use the tool because the learning curve was low — only one feature. And once people got used to the product, it became easier to adopt other features too and make the switch entirely.

The philosophy of simplicity

This philosophy of keeping it simple is applied not only to a product’s features, or how many products your company sells. This type of thinking applies to everything. From the way you do business to they way you think. It’s not that you decide one day to cut down useless features of your product to only one and suddenly the sales will skyrocket. To achieve that type of simplicity, you have to know what is or are the biggest needs of your customers and not deviate from your goal with useless noise.

Growth is best achieved by making things simpler for your customer rather than for you — Tiffani Bova

Written by: Eugen Eşanu (via Medium)
Posted by: Situated Research

The post Why Great Products Do Only One Thing appeared first on Situated Research.

The sky is falling! Social media is the new scapegoat of the month. Headlines claim it is ruining our relationships, dismantling our society, destroying our very lives! In particular, the most frequent victims are presumed to be teenagers. Sometimes the accused culprit is not social media, but the phones that make it so accessible. Is it true? Only time will tell … but in the ’50s, the demon was comic books; in the ’60s, rock and roll; and in the ’80s, video games. My mother was convinced that my love of comic books and science fiction was going to rot my brain. Now, of course, these things are mainstream and no longer the sole domain of teens. But there’s always a new thing for people to worry about or blame for the decline and fall of civilization.

I’m particularly sensitized to that criticism of video games. I designed and programmed my first computer game in college in 1976 – in fact, inspired by that very love of science fiction I had as a child. When I graduated in 1980, my first job out of college was entering the then-infant video game industry. I’ve never left. So when pundits blamed games for destroying society, even causing teen violence and rebellion, I took it personally. I’ve always felt that video games can be magical, marvelous entertainment. I hoped that one day they’d be seen as not just safe, but actually good for us. That day is finally here.

Virtual treatment, real results

For many years now, researchers and doctors have gradually built up solid scientifically verified evidence that existing games can improve the lives of the people who play them. At the same time, increasing numbers of games have been created with the idea of ‘boosting health’ as a direct goal.

Fast action games like Call of Duty have been found to improve visual perception and the ability to make correct decisions quickly. Other research has shown promise in using a game to treat the underlying causes of depression. It’s possible that games may be able to diagnose the onset of degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, and perhaps even slow their progression.

Games have shown promise in the realm of physical fitness, too. Starting 20 years ago, the arcade game Dance Dance Revolution was credited with getting a lot of passive couch potatoes up, moving, and losing weight, and it’s still spawning sequels. Games on mobile phones like Zombies, Run! and Pokémon Go have encouraged players to get out and move in the world, and many track their exercise and calorie expenditure as they do so. VR holds promise here too, with the chance to get your exercise by racing the Tour de France on your exercise bike, or by flying like a bird. There are even current ventures bringing gameplay to gym class and possibly making dodgeball fun even for nerds!

Doctors with joysticks

It turns out that doctors in training, like most people these days, are often avid game players. That has presented a great opportunity for using them as part of their medical education. Although games have yet to replace classes, they’ve been shown to help laparoscopic surgeons reduce errors by 37 percent while increasing their speed by 27 percent when used as warm-up exercises. When you consider that athletes, musicians, dancers, and others who need to do precision work with their muscles all limber up before their tasks, it makes sense that the right kind of practice helps surgeons, too.

Other companies are rushing to use VR to train anesthesiologists or to give caregivers a first-hand sense of how their patients with macular degeneration see the world. The VR simulations aren’t all games, but the vast majority of VR engineers are coming from the games industry.

Prescribing play

Perhaps the most exciting application of games in the modern world are the ways in which doctors are using games to treat their patients. Realistic war games have helped soldiers recover from PTSD by simulating the experiences that trigger their problem, a method to gradually desensitize them to reduce their symptoms long term. Other games have been used in similar ways in conjunction with therapy to treat phobias like fear of heights, flying, and spiders. And currently, virtual reality games have shown great promise in pain relief for acute pain, reducing or even eliminating the need for narcotics when changing the dressings on burn victims. VR is also showing promise in helping stroke victims recover control over their movement, and in relieving the perception of pain in “phantom limbs” experienced by amputation patients.

Last September saw the FDA approval of a mobile phone app to be used (in conjunction with therapy) to treat addiction. The developers call their app a “Prescription Digital Therapeutic” and, although it’s not a game, it’s a big step to have software approved to treat something as serious as Substance Abuse Disorder.

But a real game designed to be an active treatment for ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) was not far behind. By December, the FDA gave preliminary clearance to a video game made by a team consisting of both game developers and neuroscientists from UCSF. In a large controlled trial of children and teens diagnosed with ADHD, the group who used the game showed significant improvement compared to a control group. The team hopes that soon it will become the first game to win FDA approval on the same terms as a prescription drug. In style, the game is part racing game, part Pokémon Snap, but with many unique twists to improve attention and focus.

We are moving into a future where games train our doctors, monitor our health, and treat our illnesses. It may seem a bit outrageous now, but if comic books led me into a career making video games and often become the basis of mainstream movies, why can’t video games inspire the next generation of doctors and become the basis of medical treatment? Video games are intimately connected to learning, attention, and the brain. It isn’t an accident that they are also proving to be useful to our mental and physical health. Maybe they’ll even be able to reverse my dreaded comic book brain rot!

This is part of a series of columns written by developers speaking at the Game Developers Conference in March.

Noah Falstein is a freelance game designer and producer, and was one of the first 10 employees at LucasArts Entertainment and Dreamworks Interactive. Last year he left Google after serving four years as their Chief Game Designer.

Written by: Noah Falstein, via Rolling Stone
Posted by: Situated Research

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First, usability testing is of critical importance for reducing the number of support calls from users. Poor usability is a major reason why users call software technical support lines, and every software industry executive knows how expensive product support can be. In addition, charging users for support increases their potential dissatisfaction with the product. If users find it easy to use your product, they will not need to call for technical support as often.

Second, incorporating usability tests is an important part of the development process to reduce training costs, especially for software produced for in-house use. A highly usable product is much easier for users to learn than others where usability was not a high priority. Users learn features more quickly, retain their knowledge longer, and are more productive: which directly correlates to decreased training costs and higher efficiency.

Third, usability testing improves user acceptance. Acceptance is the culmination of a number of factors, including usability, utility, and likability. For retail products, user acceptance often directly correlates to repeat buying and customer loyalty, which means users are more likely to recommend the product to others. For internal applications, user acceptance correlates to a willingness to use the software to perform the tasks for which it was designed, which helps increase productivity. Increasing usability is one of the factors that can contribute to increased user acceptance and satisfaction.

Why Wait?

Many clients contact us once their product is ready to be published. They start panicking because they didn’t conduct testing and want to get quick feedback before their product goes to market. There are many issues with waiting until the end of the design process to start usability testing; however, the largest is cost.

Software designers and project managers often worry that initiating a user-centered design process and performing proper usability testing will require unacceptable amounts of time and money. The reality is that the cost in time and money spent focusing on your users is often relatively small, and certainly when compared to the cost of not doing so. Research has shown that problems are exponentially more expensive to fix the later in the development process they are found: fixing a problem in the concept stage is much cheaper than fixing a problem late in design, which is much cheaper than fixing a problem once a product has launched.

Consider, for example, the cost in time and money of making design revisions late in the development cycle as opposed to earlier, when the product is still in the planning stage. If you wait until the beta period to expose users to the product for purposes of usability testing, you may find yourself dismantling parts of the program that took a lot of time to develop. And waiting until the product is actually released and then making changes based on negative feedback or supporting a poor design could make the cost immeasurably higher due to high product-support costs or poor reception by users.

A reasonable usability study usually can be performed in a short period of time, and can greatly reduce the time and cost of making changes late in the development cycle. The cost of performing testing will vary depending on the nature of your product and the parts of the interface that you would like to test. When executed properly, usability studies can fit well with a large variety of development methods, including iterative and agile design methods. Various usability tests can fit well on projects that require both quick feedback on particular design features, and longitudinal data that informs design throughout the development process.

You can think of usability testing just like you do code testing. Successful project managers account for testing and quality assurance when planning out a project. They don’t see it as something extra that must be tacked on to the project schedule and budget. Rather, project managers accept code testing as a cost of doing business because the alternative is much more expensive and results in an inferior product. The same applies to usability testing.

Usability can help differentiate your products from those of your competitors. If two products are substantially equal in utility, the product with higher usability will probably be regarded as superior.

Finally, remember that every product gets tested for usability—eventually. Users perform usability testing on your product every time they use it, and they render their verdict through their continued use or lack thereof. By testing the product before releasing it to market, you can help ensure that users’ experiences with the product will be positive.

To learn more about usability research and testing, check out our services or reach out to discuss your project.

Written by: Michel Ann Sharritt, Situated Research
Posted by: Situated Research

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The fabled “promise” of virtual reality is expansive. At its loftiest, we’ve been promised not only changes to how we live and how we consume entertainment, but also to how we work.

After all, tech loves a good workplace trend.

In a general sense, incorporating virtual reality into business could mean things like escape from the physical confines of a desk, or the limit of how many monitors you could stick on that desk, or the general lack of aesthetics associated with cubicles, let’s say.

At the moment, there seems to be two ends of the spectrum developing — VR to help you get work done with other people, and VR to help you get away from, perhaps, those same people later on in the day.

One instance of the latter example is Icelandic company Breakroom. They’re still in early days, but the idea behind Breakroom stems from the proliferation of open-concept offices — the kind popularized by tech companies as markers of innovation and avant-garde thinking, and the same that the Harvard Business Review, among others, have said are now negatively impacting privacy,productivity, and workplace satisfaction.

One of Breakroom’s founders, Diðrik Steinsson, drew inspiration from having to work in an open office space himself. The idea behind Breakroom is that a worker in such an office might have a headmounted display like the Oculus Rift at his or her desk, and when it’s time to really focus on something for a few hours, they can put it on and go into a virtual environment with multiple, manipulatable browser windows, and integration with Google Apps, and Office 365, and get some work done — all while sitting somewhere scenic like a grassy field, or the moon. (Some co-workers will push you there.)

“I see it as a fortress of solitude for people,” Steinsson said. And he’s betting workers will be wearing some type of HMD eventually, even if it’s not within the next 10 years.

The flip side of this, to a degree, is a virtual reality application like AltspaceVR. The social VR app lets users enter its virtual world as robot avatar to socialize. It’s not necessarily aimed at businesses or the enterprise, but CEO Eric Romo said they’ve been using it for functions like business meetings and even job candidate interviews.

Romo emphasizes the value of nonverbal communication. A conference call, for example, can be awkward. People talk over each other, and it’s difficult to get a read on the other people present when all nonverbal cues like facial expressions and body language are absent. Romo said the experience of meeting and interacting with others is more effective when things like head movements are getting translated into VR.

Altspace has features like private and multi user web browsers — so, multiple people could, for example, look at code together. The use cases from consumer to enterprise slide back and forth a little like this: Romo said that if you want to show off vacation pictures, there’s no reason why they couldn’t be slide decks.

Somewhere in between those two examples, there’s something like the demo UC Davis’ Institute for Data Analysis and Visualisation Oliver Kreylos put together in 2014. It’s 3D-captured data of an office that includes 2D desktop apps.

But to eventually get these or other virtual reality tools into the business world, there are still some hurdles to jump, like nailing down inputs, or even just supplying every worker with not only an HMD, but also a Kinect sensor and Leap Motion sensor in order to translate more movement into VR. It also raises bigger questions as to what does all this really solve?

“When you want to introduce a technology like VR into some sort of business process, it’s really got to have some sort of overall benefit,” said Gartner analyst Brian Blau. “Some of these behavior replacement cycles — one of the things that you’ll find is that often times they’re more incremental than they are revolutionary.”

Introducing something like VR into a business environment would be revolutionary in the sense that it would be a change of device, software, and user interface, all at once.

What he asks is what are the steps? What are the actions being changed? Being able to answer those questions could be a determining factor in whether virtual reality ever takes hold in the enterprise.

He said more general uses are harder to make an argument for. Take a meeting, for the example — over the years, tech surrounding the ways in which people meet has ranged from phone calls, to conference calls, to video calls, to video calls on mobile devices — so what’s the big value add of virtual reality?

Romo submits the nonverbal cues, and the basic malleability of a virtual reality environment, the ability to turn a space into whatever it is a user might need.

Still, Blau sees more potential in purpose-built VR tools. Think data visualisation, training, prototyping and design.

Another consideration is what what happens after introducing something like an HMD into an office worker’s everyday use.

Computer Vision Syndrome is already rampant. Though, Dr. Dominick Maino, a professor at Illinois College of Optometry/Illinois Eye Institute, who specializes in pediatrics and binocular Vision, and has done research on vision and 3D graphics, said that if anything, introducing VR into workplaces would probably end up sacrificing a lot of vision problems relating to faulty binocular vision. Those will be the kinds of problems that need to get fixed before actually being able to use a VR tool.

Still, this is all probably a ways off. Breakroom is about to start testing its product. Altspace is focusing mostly on consumer use, but crafting a product that could be used otherwise in business.

Now, if only VR could offer a fix for the big business problems — like the “reply all” email thread.

[This article from TechRepublic focuses on the uses of presence technology to both separate and connect people in the workplace; I think the Breakroom VR application by MureVR is particularly interesting; you can watch a 6:13 minute video about it on YouTube.]

Written by: Erin Carson, TechRepublic (via Presence)
Posted by: Situated Research

The post From Privacy to Productivity: A Look at How Virtual Reality Could Change the Way We Work appeared first on Situated Research.

This is also applicable for digital products and services. In the digital world we not only need to develop useful and high quality products, but also delightful user experience throughout the whole process of obtaining and using that product. So it is essential to know your users, their thoughts and concerns, their lifestyle, and clearly visualize how your product fits into their lives and workflow. This is what user personas are for. Personas help you keep the end user in mind throughout the whole development and design process.

What is a user persona?

A user persona is a fictional character that represents a cluster of end users with similar characteristics, including purchasing behavior, character traits, interests, etc. Although personas are imaginary individuals, but they are developed using quantitative and qualitative user research data and represent typical end users. User personas should be as realistic as possible to aptly express the major needs and wants, expectations and frustrations of the customer group. This is a great way to solve many dilemmas during the design and development process, when you need a side eye with an unbiased opinion. When you have a defined user persona, you can have a clear picture of what he or she would prefer in a given situation.

User persona development is very often confused with market segmentation and sometimes they are even referred to as synonyms. There are similarities between these two categories, but they certainly are not the same. Segmentation is first of all a marketing tool used to research and identify customer groups with common characteristics (usually demographical and geographical). It doesn’t focus on an individual customer and their stories. Instead segmentation gives more insights on how the product may be accepted by target markets.

User persona is more of a UX design technique, that helps understand the goals and motivations of users. It focuses on an archetypal character providing robust information about the story, intents and goals behind users’ behavior. So if market segmentation sets the ground for more efficient marketing, personas help you empathize with your user as an individual.

These two techniques are complimentary and can well be used together to understand both the market segments as a whole and a typical user with feelings, goals and expectations. In fact every market segment can be represented by a user persona.

Why do you need to develop user personas?

User experience is all about creating a seamless and useful interaction between the end user and the product from the very first sight up to delivery and support. And obviously UX Design can’t be complete without a well-defined user persona in mind. Why?

Imagine yourself trying to buy a gift for someone you don’t know but whom you want to impress.

So the #1 benefit of using personas in UX design is keeping the focus on the end user. Knowing what a typical user would do in this or that situation, knowing the goals that would bring the user to your product or service makes it much easier to create designs that will appeal first of all to the users of the product and then only to the management. As Steve Mulder states in his interview to UIE,

“The hardest thing for designers to keep in mind is that they are not designing for themselves. They are designing for the needs of the people who will actually be using the product. Personas are one of the most powerful tools for helping designers keep users in mind.”

Another great benefit of personas is they can be used to effectively communicate the characteristics of the target audience to stakeholders, management staff and other people involved in the project. It is easier to understand something when you are given a proper example and user personas tend to be that example.

Copywriters can also benefit from using personas as a reminder of who they are writing for and what language and tone they can use to better connect with the audience. This is actually a vital factor not only in SEO but also in UX Design, because the language used on a website or other digital product can either boost conversions or ruin them.

How to create user personas?

Though imagination is highly welcome in this process, you can’t solely rely on it when developing user personas. Instead you can make use of both qualitative and quantitative research methods to gather robust data for the project. In fact quantitative methods, among which most popular is user survey, help you understand what is happening, while qualitative methods can tell youwhy it is happening. So for a richer insight on user behavior and expectation you could make use of both methods.

The first step in user persona development is the market segmentation. When you have defined the target markets, you will be able to recruit study participants that correspond to the demographical characteristics of that particular segment. E.g. 20-23 aged females living in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

With this information you can then carry out either user survey with a larger sample size (quantitative) or one-on-one interviews with up to 30 potential customers (qualitative) to gather data. In fact it would even be better to combine those two methods for more grounded results. Another great source for research data can be web analytics. If you already have a running website or other digital product than the real user analytics can give additional insights into what a typical user does and wants.

And finally when you have collected all the necessary information, it’s time to analyze the user behavior patterns that will emerge out of the research data and brainstorm with the whole design and development team to come up with a few user personas, usually not more than 5 for a single project. It is better to keep the focus on just 2 or 3 personas rather than try to cover all the users out there.

There are different approaches to when it is best to start user persona development. But I would suggest that the sooner you create user personas for a project the more effective they will be.

There’s only one thing you need to consider. User personas shouldn’t become stereotypes and come in the way of creativity. When you feel there is a significant change in business that contradicts existing user personas, have the courage to do this all over again!

Written by: Armen Ghazarian, web design views
Posted by: Situated Research

The post The What, Why and How of User Personas appeared first on Situated Research.

In comparison, the research found there was “little difference” in levels of aggression when the games themselves depicted violence. Overwhelmingly, the deciding factor was “how the volunteers were able to master the electronic game after 20 minutes of play”. 

The study was conducted by research teams from University of Oxford in the UK and the University of Rochester in the US, with the findings published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The experiment is believed to be the first study of its kind and consisted of six controlled lab tests involving university students. The candidates played a simple puzzle game the researchers were able to manipulate, increasing its difficultly or making the control scheme less intuitive or responsive.

“To date, researchers have tended to explore passive aspects of gaming, such as whether looking at violent material in electronic games desensitises or aggravates players,” says Dr Andrew Przybylski, co-author of the study, from the Oxford Internet Institute. “We focused on the motives of people who play electronic games and found players have a psychological need to come out on top when playing. If players feel thwarted by the controls or the design of the game, they can wind up feeling aggressive. This need to master the game was far more significant than whether the game contained violent material. Players on games without any violent content were still feeling pretty aggressive if they hadn’t been able to master the controls or progress through the levels at the end of the session.”

In addition to the lab tests, researchers conducted a survey of over 300 players, focussing the three games they had played most in the last month. Players were asked which they had enjoyed the most, and why. Again, the research demonstrated that some players experienced aggression when they didn’t feel good at the game. Furthermore, these feelings of aggression had even spoiled their level of enjoyment.

“The study is not saying that violent content doesn’t affect gamers,” says co-author Richard M Ryan, from the University of Rochester. “But our research suggests that people are not drawn to playing violent games in order to feel aggressive. Rather, the aggression stems from feeling not in control or incompetent while playing. If the structure of a game or the design of the controls thwarts enjoyment, it is this, not the violent content, that seems to drive feelings of aggression.”

Written by: Daniel Krupa, IGN UK
Posted by: Situated Research

The post Study Reveals Real Reason Behind Gaming Aggression appeared first on Situated Research.

In the future, horror games will know when you’re scared. And then they’ll get scarier.

Proof: the currently-in-development horror-adventure game Nevermind, which just launched a Kickstarter campaign last week. The game pairs classic first-person exploration with biofeedback data from a heart rate monitor in order to tell when you’re scared and turn up the horror.

“In Nevermind, you get scared, you get stressed, and the world will punish you for giving in to those feelings,” says creative director Erin Reynolds, “But it rewards you for calming down by becoming easier.”

While biofeedback seems like a perfect fit for the horror genre, Reynolds believes that the technology is key to moving the video game medium forward as a whole, allowing for an entirely new level of immersion.

“I think it really speaks to the potential of games being able to know more about you than you know about yourself, and having this intimate response to your internal reactions,” Reynolds says.

That internal response surprised her during playtesting, as it illuminated “just how personal one’s sense of horror is. It made for some design challenges, because it means you need to have something for everything so that everyone’s buttons get pushed.”

But those challenges also served as the ultimate affirmation for Reynolds: She was scaring people.

That’s a good indication that Nevermind may be a successful game and not just a neat tech demo. Reynolds has ambitious goals for the game and hopes that it will move the medium forward as a proof of concept in both biofeedback integration and as an example of a positive game that reinforces stress management skills that have real-world applications.

Because achieving those goals with a video game is all for naught if the game is not fun, states game developer Lat Ware in a feature on Gamasutra:

“The best practice in making biofeedback games is also the best practice for game development in general: Make it fun,” he adds. “Fun is the only thing that matters in a game. Fun is what makes people love your game. Fun is what makes people come back to play again. Fun is what makes people buy your next game without asking questions.”

“That’s why I’m really excited about Nevermind,” says Reynolds. “It creates this experience that is fun but can also empower the player.”

Written by: By Joshua Rivera, Fast Company’s Co.LABS (via Presence)
Posted by: Situated Research

The post This Video Game Knows When You’re Scared–And Gets Scarier appeared first on Situated Research.

Perhaps oddly in this day and age, the Leap Motion is a cheap, potentially revolutionary computer and video game peripheral that wasn’t funded on Kickstarter. Essentially, it’s an inexpensive, easy-to-setup Kinect for the PC. It’s a small — 0.5 inches tall, 1.2 inches wide, 3 inches deep, and weighs 0.1 pounds (1.27×3.04×7.62 centimeters) — unobtrusive device that’s similar in shape and size to one of the rectangular iPod Nanos. With a sleek black-and-silver aesthetic, it looks like a first-party Apple peripheral for the MacBook Pro — it won’t interrupt the vibe of your sweet battle station. It plugs into your computer through a standard USB 3.0 connection, and its placement is only limited to the length of the USB cable. Setup is simple: Plug in the Leap, press “Next” a few times on the installer, make an account for the Airspace Store (the Leap’s app store), then either download or load some apps. Easy peasy. What is not easy peasy, unfortunately, is using the Leap.

The goal of the Leap, of course, is to allow you to just sit back in your chair, relax, and effortlessly wave a hand or poke a finger in the air to interact with your computer. It has not yet achieved that goal, mainly because of that “effortlessly” qualifier. Using the Leap is a chore.

The Leap creates a three-dimensional motion and gesture recognition zone around itself that measures in at eight cubic feet. Eight cubic feet sounds like a pretty large area in which to wave your hands, and considering both you and the Leap are sitting comfortably in each other’s vicinity, you would think that eight cubic feet would allow you to sit back, relax, and control your computer with the ease of a technopath. Unfortunately, the Leap seems to have a sweet spot of recognition much smaller than that eight cubic feet, and even more unfortunately, the sweet spot doesn’t ever seem to be in the same spot from app to app. To make that matter even more frustrating, you aren’t ever in the same spot. When you use your computer, you likely shift around in your chair, maybe lean your head in one hand while you use the mouse with another, sit up straight, slouch, and so on. Sneezing even puts your body in a slightly different place. While using the Leap, you constantly lose that sweet spot of being recognized, even if you’re completely aware that you have to remain still.

If you have only been paying attention to the Leap in an ancillary news capacity, you might think that it just plugs into your computer, and after installation, you can control your everyday computer tasks with the wave of a hand. This isn’t the case — the device requires Leap-specific apps, downloaded from the Airspace Store. You’ll find apps with which you’re familiar, such as a Cut the Rope, while other apps such as Google Earth have Leap Motion support. However, the Leap isn’t designed to take over your computer’s input methods. There’s an app for the Leap, Touchless, that attempts to achieve this goal — it essentially turns your monitor into a virtual touchscreen — but it’s disappointingly frustrating to use. This seems to be more due to the Leap’s finicky recognition than it is due to a poor implementation of the app.

There are quite a bit of mobile-style games, meaning nothing too in-depth, but some fun experiences to kill a few minutes with. Again, though, the Leap’s finicky recognition makes the majority of experiences to be had less than ideal. However, the recognition seems to vary from app to app. One game, Boom Ball — a 3D iteration of Breakout — works well for the most part. In a 3D space, the paddle is closest to you on the screen, while the blocks are in the distance. You simply wave your hand around to control the paddle and bounce the ball back toward the blocks. For some reason, Boom Ball also has acceptable recognition within menus — you can easily hover over an option and choose it without any hassle — whereas navigating menus in just about every other app I tried is a frustrating experience.

While Boom Ball worked well enough to show what the Leap is going for, Double Fine’s music visualizer game, Dropchord, on the other hand, is a good example of what the Leap currently seems to be. The game itself is simple, but fun. Little circles appear on screen within a larger circle, which is the field of play. Using a finger on each of your hands, you point at the screen on either side of the field of play, and it creates a line between your two finger points. You touch the little circles with the line by moving your fingers around the field to maneuver the line, the little circles clear, and you get points. Sadly, the Leap just can’t seem to notice your fingers on a consistent basis, mainly because you’re moving them around and the Leap loses them. Furthermore, at the two different desk-and-computer setups I tried the game at, neither of which allowed me to rest my elbows on the chairs’ armrests. Regardless of how in shape your shoulders and forearms are, holding them up without rest and moving them around quickly becomes tiring, giving you gorilla arm.

Sadly, the finicky recognition isn’t just inconsistent the one way, as it also tends to notice appendages that it shouldn’t be noticing. A majority of the apps require you to point with one finger, but the Leap often times notices your knuckles on the hand you’re pointing with, and classifies them as other fingers. You can’t exactly remove your knuckles, so you end up moving your finger around a bunch in order to find a sweet spot of the Leap noticing your pointing finger, but not its companion knuckles. In the same vein, if you rest your head in the hand that isn’t in use, the Leap might recognize that hand’s fingers, as well as what appears to be your nose. Again, though, these issues seem to be more or less apparent from app to app.

You can calibrate the Leap in an attempt to rectify these issues, but even the calibration tool is finicky. A window appears on screen, at which you have to point the top part of the Leap. A score meter sits at the bottom of the window. You have to wave the top part of the Leap around the window, which moves a circular cursor and paints the window green. The more of the screen you paint, the more the score meter is moved. You have to reach a score of 80 for the Leap to be calibrated. At one computer, I was able to reach 80, but the Leap’s recognition didn’t improve when I loaded up some apps for a second time. At my more powerful gaming rig, after about five minutes of trying as patiently as possible, I could not crack the 65 mark and gave up.

Another odd issue is that you’re sitting right in front of your monitor, but have to wave your hands around in front of it. This partially obstructs your view. Your hands have to be situated above the Leap, and you can move the Leap anywhere the USB cable can reach. However, if you move it off to the side so you have a clear view of your monitor, you now have to awkwardly stretch your hands off to the side, and the gestures don’t exactly give you a precise feeling. When the Leap is off to the side, and you have to poke the screen to select an icon, for example, you’re now poking the Febreze bottle you keep next to your desk rather than that icon on the screen.

The majority of my time with the Leap was spent being frustrated. Either the Leap wouldn’t recognize my motions or appendages on a consistent basis, or it consistently recognized everything it shouldn’t, causing interference. I am honestly not entirely sure where the problems lie. Some apps, like Boom Ball, worked great — seemingly with the same exact motions and gestures with which other apps had trouble. The majority of the apps, though, were frustrating to use, and due to Boom Ball‘s success, it’s difficult to tell whether or not the problem is with the Leap, or with the apps’ understanding of the Leap. Either way, though the Leap is only $80, it would seem like that money is better off buying you a week or two of groceries until the Leap can get itself sorted out. Until then, keep your fancy gaming mouse plugged in.

Written by: James Plafke, ExtremeTech
Posted by: Situated Research

The post Leap Motion Review: Is It Time to Replace the Mouse? appeared first on Situated Research.

Experience Media Studios’ 3DPOV^® system enables the capture of a three-dimensional visual and auditory experience from the first-person perspective. 3DPOV^® media delivers a higher level of sensory engagement than virtual reality that replicates a true-to-life binocular and peripheral visual field and a stereophonic auditory experience. The system also captures GPS coordinates and altitude information to further augment reality.

“Modern audiences demand more of their media experiences,” said Michael-Ryan Fletchall, CEO of Experience Media Studios. “With more control over how and when they consume media, audiences want new and individualized experiences offering deeper levels of engagement. 3DPOV delivers an experience that goes far beyond just watching.”

Immersive media quickly absorbs the viewer into the experience, providing implications for critical skills training, simulations, and experiential learning environments. Experience Media Studios formally launched 3DPOV^® in conjunction with the Military and Government Summit at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show. Today’s announcement underscores the value of 3DPOV^® in these key segments where small details not available in virtual reality are integrated to assess and teach armed forces critical life-saving, decision-under-pressure skills through rapid processing and reaction according to policies and protocols.

“In developing this media for military and government blended learning simulations, we immediately recognized the opportunity to apply the technology to our wheelhouse of entertainment and advertising,” said Fletchall.

Experience Media Studios is currently in pre-production with Possessed Soul, its upcoming feature length horror “experience” shot entirely using 3DPOV^®technology. The project is partially financed through pre-sales to the horror-genre fan community using the Indiegogo crowdfunding platform. In 2012, Experience Media Studios released the Josh Hutcherson drama, The Forger.

The 3DPOV^® system also features a cloud-based digital delivery platform, connecting affiliated media production companies with 3DPOV^® technology to build a high quality digital asset inventory for worldwide distribution to private and public end users via 2D and 3D televisions, personal computers, and mobile devices.

“Our goal was to build a complete front-to-backend solution for creating and directly distributing unique 3DPOV^® content,” said Fletchall. “We have an exclusive content platform for creating, cataloging, managing and distributing experience-driven 3DPOV^® assets through an industry-leading pipeline with a user-friendly interface.”

Experience Media Studios will roll out the consumer subscription service component of 3DPOV.com with limited content later in 2013.

Written by: PR Newswire (via Presence); more images available at the Experience Media Studies website
Posted by: Situated Research

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