some notes on UXby Rui Lopes

demystification. inspiration. guidance.

demystification

UX is not

a boogeyman

UX is not

a panacea

UX is not

just for coolness

UX is not

abstract

UX is not

sacred

UX is not

(just) usability

UX is

listening

UX is

knowing

UX is

reflecting and understanding

UX is

pleasure

UX is

trust

UX is

a long term relationship

UX is

a process

inspiration

source: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_instapaper_was_created.php

I would find things during the workday that I wanted to read, but I was at work - so I really couldn't. I would skim articles [or] I would open a tab and never go back to it, until my browser crashed and then I forgot about it.

And then similarly, I had to commute on the train everyday for about an hour or two. When I was on the train, I had my iPhone and I could browse the internet - but only before it went underground. There were a load of things I had to read.

– Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper

source: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2486-bootstrapped-profitable-proud-github

It started more out of necessity than anything else: we both loved git but there was no acceptable way to share code with others. Tom thought I’d be interested in helping fix the problem, and I was.

Shipping early and often lets you see how people are actually using your site and allows you to react accordingly.

– Chris Wanstrath, co-founder of github

source: http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/08/dropbox

I love Dropbox. The appeal is its utter simplicity – it's essentially invisible, doing the task that isn't hard but none of us care to remember to do, namely, backing up our files.

I had a hard-drive meltdown this summer, and even though I broke into a cold sweat, I really hadn't lost anything because I had been working on those files within Dropbox. The hard drive and my whole computer, for that matter, was just a piece of metal and plastic that I replaced. Disaster averted.

– Susan Orlean, staff at New Yorker

My daughter came home from college on thursday night and showed me all of her friend's Tumblrs. All the cool kids have them at her school now.

A Tumblr is self expression. Jessica's looks different than Emily's, mine and the Gotham Gal's. That's powerful. And that is what I think is driving Tumblr's popularity. Self expression matters.

– Fred Wilson, aka A VC

source: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/11/self-expression-matters.html

source: http://farukat.es/journal/2010/10/482-addictive-allure-of-instagram

Through its mix of efficiency, charm and community, Instagram quickly creates an emotional connection amongst its users, while at the same time offering a great amount of functionality.

Instagram [...] brought me back to the place wherein I enjoy sharing my photos [...]. I’m followed by far more strangers on Instagram than I am on Flickr already, but everything about it feels intimate and personal.

– Fred Wilson, aka A VC

versus

Between the worse data aggregation method and the much higher amount of work Wesabe made you do, it was far easier to have a good experience on Mint, and that good experience came far more quickly.

– Marc Hedlund, founder of wesabe

source: http://blog.precipice.org/why-wesabe-lost-to-mint

source: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/07/code-its-trivial.html

If you then tell a developer to replicate StackOverflow, what goes into his head are the above two SQL tables and enough HTML to display them without formatting, and that really is completely doable in a weekend.

If you really want your code to be successful, you'll stop coding long enough to do all that other, even more trivial stuff around the code that's necessary to make it successful.

– Jeff Atwood, co-founder of Stack Overflow

But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked.

– Urs Hölzle, Senior VP Google

We're dedicated to giving you better access to the information you currently have in Google's Wave servers. We aim to provide multiple ways to let you export and migrate that information [...]

– Pat Coleman, Google Wave Team

source: http://googlewave.blogspot.com/2010/11/exporting-your-waves.html

Twitter is over capacity.

– Fail Whale, HTTP 404 on Twitter.com

source: http://damnyouautocorrect.com/1479/todays-plans/

guidance

idea listen prototype

ideas

your own pain points

ideas

ideas

sleep, shower, get distracted

listen

learn to listen!

listen

talk to people

listen

facilitate

listen

pain points will be expressed

listen

free text

listen

user support

listen

A/B testing

listen

analytics

prototype

paper & pen!

prototype

powerpoint et al.

prototype

HTML

one more thing

copy

thank you.