Karen Bachmann

This past month, I’ve been reading many of the prognostications for technology and design that proliferate in the technosphere at the beginning of each new year. As I have read various lists, I thought about how the success of these predictions is likely to involve integrating ideas from both areas. I consider a couple of themes […]

Jared Spool shares good advice for design teams in his recent post “Putting An End To An Opinion War”. He observes that “Opinion wars kill design projects.” He shares two key ways to end an opinion war: using data to take decisions out of the realm of opinion appointing a final arbitrator These valuable tools […]

User experience, at its best, is about empathy with the people who use the products and services we design. However, not all organizations start a user experience practice with empathy as a goal. Of the many options to cultivate empathy in your organization, consider how you talk about the practice of user experience design. This […]

November is National Novel Writing Month, affectionately known as NaNoWriMo. This annual event is “a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing.” Started in 1999 by Chris Baty, the goal of NaNoWriMo is to write 50,000 words, the equivalent of the average-sized novel, in 30 days. Sounds crazy? Baty acknowledges this in the first line of his […]

Last weekend, I virtually attended BlizzCon 2011, a conference hosted by Blizzard Entertainment, the game developer behind Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo. A major focus of this annual conference is to provide insights and generate excitement about upcoming content planned for each franchise, but it is also a celebration of gamers, by gamers, and for gamers. […]

A colleague and I were discussing challenges in explaining what we do as user experience practitioners. He mentioned a shared pet peeve, the slashing together of UI/UX. I see this most often in job postings, but it appears in technology news, blogs, and even how some people describe their work. The concern that my colleague […]

In UI design communication: General approaches and tips for Axure, I discussed the kind of content to include in a UI design specification and showed how to customize the information you annotate in Axure. This post discusses customizing the final specification. While this post describes using Axure to create a specification, the underlying organizational principles […]

I attended Barcamp Tampa Bay 2011 this past Saturday. Among many excellent sessions, two on user experience and design generated great interest. Justin Davis presented “5 User Experience Basics Everyone Should Know” to an overflowing room: People expect online interactions to follow social rules. Successful interactions provide appropriate feedback and engagement with a appropriately conversational tone.  (A […]

In my last post, I discussed the value of design documentation. In this post, I share some practical tips on writing design documentation. The first part outlines general approaches. The second describes customizing annotations in Axure. Approaches to communication In my presentation on communicating design, I talk about four types of design documentation: Walkthrough presentation […]

I have recently read a number of blog posts, articles, and commentary arguing that design documentation is no longer needed as UI prototyping tools become more sophisticated and commonly used. While I agree that eliminating a 250-page design document can be a positive result, it’s not that documentation is inherently bad or unnecessary. The problem is […]

As I flipped through my idea notebook recently, Musicovery’s mood pad jumped out at me as a particularly fun and inspiring UI. Breaking with more conventional controls for web radio, the site creators realized that most people listen to music according to  their mood. They developed the mood pad to allow you to select music […]

It’s almost redundant to talk about aggressive project schedules. The constantly evolving demands of markets, strong competition for market leadership, and increasing expectations for engaging user experiences require rapid delivery of products and services. While delivery may have to meet these schedules one way or another, true innovation rarely follows a Gantt chart so docilely. […]