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When your user gets value from your design, they’ll likely make using it into a habit. They’ll keep coming back, forming more habits as they continue to get results. When we add new features, we often force them to break the habits they’ve carefully formed. That’s what makes our users upset when we change the design unexpectedly. Their old habits no longer deliver the value they once did, and now they have to form new ones. In this episode, Jared learns from Amy Jo Kim how game designers approach the problem of introducing new levels, weapons, and other features. Amy Jo shows how the way game designers think can be easily applied to your designs.

There’s a saying that you can’t know where you are going unless you know where you come from. Designing navigation for enterprise applications is a journey unto itself. One that UX Immersion speaker, Hagan Rivers is quite familiar with. In this podcast, listen as Jared Spool discusses the importance of clear navigation systems in enterprise applications with special guest Hagan Rivers. They explore techniques for tackling complex navigation, how screen codes are perfect for those with in-depth experience, and how a balance with ease-of-learning is critical. When you’re sitting face to face with the wilderness that is an enterprise application, a map and compass would serve you well. Unless you’re a tracker, know which side moss grows on a tree, or can follow the stars, you’re likely not going to be able to navigate through on your own, much less find shortcuts and become proficient.

Enterprise applications are massive, often unwieldy pieces of software. You get a sense they were never truly improved or updated, they just had a continuous string of features tacked on until it got to the point where they are almost impossible to use. And they’re old. This focus on features let design fall to the wayside, making it less important than the application’s perceived capabilities. Now, you’re forced to stare at a screen straight out of 1995. You’ve become a time traveler, whether you were aware of it or not. We’ve come across other time travelers in our journey. You aren’t alone. One such person is Hagan Rivers, who has worked tirelessly to bring these enterprise applications into modern time, if not the future. In this podcast, listen to Jared Spool weave a tale of time travel with special guests Hagan Rivers and Dana Chisnell.

Traditionally, user research has taken on more of a scientific identity. You would do usability testing and research, take a ton of notes, and then compile all of your findings into a report. The effectiveness of that research depended on whether anyone read the report, and then if they could do anything actionable with that data.

The expansion of the web past a desktop-based world into more of a multi-device ecosystem has caused organizations to re-evaluate almost everything they do. Style guides have had to grow to accommodate this new reality of multiple screens sizes and resolutions. When you start incorporating the multitude of products across devices and all the people working on them, organizations are forced to think more “systematically.”

The notion of being a “designer who can code” has been a prevalent topic in recent years. Delivering static PDFs and working in photoshop is seen as inefficient in some circles. Being able to create a clickable or even responsive mockup to present to developers and stakeholders can be a better way to show your intent. It’s also much easier to iterate by changing a few lines of code.

Understanding is what user experience as a field hinges upon. After all if you don’t understand how users are interacting with your product or service, you don’t know what to design for. But how, as a team, do you come to that understanding? Telling the story of a user’s journey highlights areas where you’re right on point and where you’re missing the mark.

Service design seems to go by an increasing array of names: Customer Experience, Cross-Channel UX, or even just “design thinking.” In most cases, these terms describe a holistic approach to your users’ and customers’ needs, no matter where or when they’re interacting with your product or service. In traditionally siloed organizations, it can be no small task to ensure that you are providing the best possible service.

Usability in products and websites is what most organizations strive for. The more usable the product, the more likely that people will use it. Through research and testing, you can root out many issues with clunky interactions that hinder the experience. What isn’t as immediately clear is if some perceived usability issues are actually understandability problems. Your content could be the culprit.

When some people hear the term Lean UX, they dismiss it as simply a nouveau buzzword. There can be some confusion as to its relationship to Agile, both the methodology and the adjective. Some of the biggest resistance came from the idea that Lean UX was shortcutting and lazily undoing much of the groundwork to get organizations to buy into the value of UX. But as waterfall development increasingly becomes “the old way” of doing things, teams are operating in more agile, or Lean, ways.