UX folks can’t get enough of workshops. Whenever we get asked what kind of sessions we want at conferences, we always answer “Workshops!” and “Hands-on activities!” Why? Because of the sad fact that a lot of us don’t get to do much beyond wireframes.

Notice what I said in that last paragraph: “…a lot of us don’t get to do much…”. That’s what we tell ourselves, but I don’t believe it’s true. I believe we are the ones holding ourselves back—not our penny-pinching clients who won’t pay for usability testing or our clueless managers who think personas are a waste of time.

It’s easy to blame others and give them unflattering motives; much easier than taking a hard look at our own behavior and asking, “What’s really standing in my way?”

Are you waiting for permission?

A lot of us ask for permission to do UX and then take no for an answer.

“We put a persona development workshop in our proposal, but of course the client asked us to take it out.” Or: “I tried to talk my manager into letting me do usability testing on this project and she said, ‘maybe next time’.”

You’re going to have to go out there and get proof first.

People need proof before they understand the value of something. Which means the time to ask for resources is after you’ve proven that UX works, not before. You’re going to have to go out there and get proof first—whether that means doing work for free or on your own time, or with surrogates instead of real users, or in a quiet corner of the project that no one’s paying attention to. Do whatever it takes to get results first, then turn those results into paying work or more resources from your company.

Think of it this way: If you’re asking for permission to do a card sort but you’ve never done one before, how equipped do you think you are to make a convincing case for why card sorting will solve this particular problem? How confident will you sound when you get a lot of skeptical questions from your boss? Not very, because you don’t really believe in it yourself. It’s just theory until you experience it first-hand. And unfortunately, book learning and conference wisdom are not adequate substitutes for personal experience.

The funny thing is, once you feel confident about your experience, you’ll stop asking altogether. Instead, you’ll find yourself saying, “this is what I’m going to do,” and no one will argue.

Are you hung up on doing “real UX”?

If you attend conferences and read blogs, you’re only seeing the good stuff: the successful projects that had the biggest budgets or the most engaged stakeholders. If that’s your only view into other people’s work, then you’re getting a very skewed impression of the world.

The fact is, almost everyone in this profession is just like you—struggling to get resources and to push UX further up the food chain, and feeling like few people at work understand what you do or why it’s valuable. Most of us are practicing only a small subset of the UX toolbox—and everyone seems convinced that whatever they’re doing isn’t “real” UX, because it’s not as comprehensive or robust as what they imagine others are doing.

Is it real UX if you can only interview the sales team for your personas?

Is it real UX if you only did the card sort with 3 people instead of 10, and one of them was your mother?

Of course that’s real UX! UX isn’t a number or a rigid set of tasks—it’s the process you go through to identify, explore, and solve the problem.

Stop apologizing for your work and feeling like it doesn’t count. Be proud of whatever you’ve been able to accomplish and keep pushing to do more.

Are you uncomfortable when you don’t have the answers?

The beginning of a new project is always awkward. The clients and stakeholders are impatient to see the solution but you’re still at the stage where you don’t understand the problem or perhaps even the subject matter. In meetings, people look at you as if they’re expecting the design solution to spring from your head magically, with no forethought. It’s hard to say “I don’t know yet,” when you feel like your job is to know. Even seasoned UX designers have to force themselves to slow down at this stage and not give in to the urge to design.

What you really want to do is to get all the stakeholders in a room and do a brainstorming and prioritization exercise. But what if nobody comes? Or what if one or two low-level people come, not the CEO and marketing director you really need?

And let’s say you are able to organize the workshop and now you’re standing in front of the room trying to get a bunch of suspicious executives to stand up and write things on post-it notes, and you can’t see yet where it’s going or how this is going to lead to useful insights.

This part of the process is fraught with ambiguity. Always. It’s awkward and scary and you never know what you’re going to get out of it. After all, if you already knew, you’d just design that; you wouldn’t go through all the trouble of work-shopping. It’s not uncommon to feel a lot of anxiety about not knowing and not having answers, particularly if you are used to feeling confident and in control.

All I can tell you is this: trust the process. It has never let me down and it won’t let you down. Acknowledge your fear and anxieties and push through, because the rewards are great.

Here are two proposals that just tickled my funny bone.

Responsive Design: An Undead Introduction

Mobile For Dinosaurs

Many thanks to John Rhea and Warren Craghead for making me laugh. While that’s no guarantee of success with the Program Team, I for one look forward to seeing zombies and dinosaurs battle it out head to head at edUi.

From reports to policy documents to forms to user guides, PDFs are ubiquitous on higher-ed websites. A quick Google search on VCU’s website for PDF documents returns tens of thousands of results.

When designing websites, we spend time on details like colors, typography, navigation, branding and accessibility, but usually ignore these details within PDF documents. There was a time when PDF documents on a website served one purpose: they were meant to be downloaded and printed. Usability, accessibility and appearance were not a concern. With the advent of mobile devices and tablets, as well as the popularity of go-green campaigns, more users are virtually viewing these documents. We need to give them the same high quality user experience they get on a web page.

Why use PDFs in the first place?

The first question you may ask is “Why PDF? Why not HTML?” Even though HTML is the most open, most widely used format for creating online documents, the PDF has its advantages. PDF documents are portable; images, vectors, styles, fonts, even audio and video are all contained in a single file. A PDF can be downloaded, saved in a flash drive, attached to an email, or uploaded to a website as a standalone document. PDF format can easily handle large documents like Apple’s 476 page Final Cut Pro user guide or Smashing Magazine’s 409 page ebook.

PDF has been an open standard since 2008. PDF documents can be displayed on almost all desktop and mobile operating systems. When tagged properly, they are accessible to screen readers.

PDF is not a substitute for HTML, but rather a supplement to overcome some of its limitations.

Why do PDFs lag behind?

In general, creating decent PDF documents can be difficult. Unlike HTML, there are no standardized templates (e.g. .DWT templates in Dreamweaver) or WordPress themes that you can use consistently across all documents. Occasionally, these documents are created by someone else and sent to you to publish. In this tutorial, I have tried to solve some of these issues.

PDF creation tools

Today, hundreds of free and paid tools are available to create and edit PDF documents. For lack of a formal classification, I have grouped them into three categories:

• Office suites like Microsoft Office, Apple iWork and OpenOffice are the easiest to use and fairly flexible.
• Adobe products like InDesign and Illustrator give the best results with graphic heavy documents but have a steep learning curve.
• Server applications like ColdFusion and iTextSharp are most suitable for large scale PDF generation.

For this article, we will use Microsoft Word. Word is easier to use than any Adobe product, has unique features that automate some of the tasks we will perform today, and — if you work in higher education like me — is already used by your colleagues (administrators, faculty) to create content.

The Basic Idea: Design it like a web page

You already know how to design a web page, so use the concepts you already know. Think of the components of a web page: header and footer, navigation, content, and a stylesheet. We will replicate the same structural elements in our document.

1. Content

This is the easiest part. Just like a web page, write the content with semantically correct tags: headings, bullet and numbered lists, block quotes etc. Using semantic markup not only helps with accessibility, but also facilitates creation of document structure and bookmarks. Starting with Office 2007, Microsoft has placed these styles front and center of the new “Ribbon” interface.

2. Stylesheet / Quick Style Set

Word includes a few pre-designed stylesheets (they call them Quick Style Set), but we will create our own. After all, our goal is to make these documents to match the appearance of our website.

To quickly change a style, right click on it and select Modify.

You can change font face, font size, color, spacing, line height etc of any block level element.

Since you have already created a stylesheet for your website, look up the style information there and use it into your document.

Just like custom CSS classes in your stylesheet, you can create your own custom styles in Word.

Once you are finished editing, you can save the style set you just created by selecting Change Styles > Style Set > Save as Quick Style Set. The style set is saved as a .dotx (Word template).

This style set can be used to create new documents or apply formatting to existing documents. You can share this style set with colleagues and even distribute it to the non-designers in your unit.

3. Header, footer, branding

A typical website header contains a logo and a title; the footer typically contains contact information, links to important pages, copyright information etc. There are numerous way to re-create this information in a PDF document, but in my opinion, a cover page works best.

Cover sheet for a white paper. Source: VCU Center for Teaching Excellence

Similar to the style sets, Word includes some pre-designed cover pages, but it is just as easy to create your own.

• To create a cover page from scratch, start with a new Word document.
• Add your own logo and other graphics. For best results, copy-paste vector graphics from Illustrator straight into Word.
• Add placeholders for title, subtitle, author and date. Using placeholders allows you to reuse the same cover page for each document you create in the future. To add placeholder for title, go to the “Insert” tab and select Quick Parts > Document Property > Title. You can repeat the process for other placeholders.
• Once you are done adding the necessary content, press Ctrl+A or command-A to select all content
• Go to the “Insert” tab and select Cover Page > Save Selection to Cover Page Gallery

Back on your original document, simply click on the Cover Page menu to browse the gallery and select the design you just created.

4. Navigation

Depending on the amount of content, you may need to add some sort of navigation to help users find their way through the document. This is where the semantic markup we created in step 1 comes in handy.

You can create navigation as a table of contents at the beginning of the document, or as a hierarchy of bookmarks, or preferably both. Irrespective of the amount of content, both can be created in just a few clicks.

a) Table of contents

Go to the “References” tab, select Table of Contents and select one of the available styles. The templates included in Word are good enough for our use, but you can create your own.

b) Bookmarks

Bookmarks can be generated automatically when you save the document as PDF and select “Create bookmarks” option.

bookmarks and table of contents

5. Exporting to PDF

Exporting to PDF is as easy selecting File > Save As > PDF but you need to change a few options.

1. Check “Create bookmarks using” option. Choose “Headings” radio button
2. Check “Document structure tags for accessibility” option
3. Uncheck “ISO 19005-1 compliant (PDF/A)” option. Creating a PDF/A compliant PDF will disable all the hyperlinks in your document

Save as PDF options

Conclusion

We have explored one workflow to create appealing, user friendly and accessible PDFs. Experiment with other tools, or discover those hidden features in Word and create a process that works best for you.

PDF as a format is not going away any time soon. It fulfills a specific need that HTML cannot satisfy yet. If you do use PDF documents, make sure they provide the best user experience possible.

Further reading

• Style basics in Word
• Apply table styles
• How to create custom cover pages in Word 2010
• How to create a table of contents in Microsoft Word
• Creating Accessible Adobe PDF Files

When people think about brand they usually envision a logo or slogan. In reality, brand is a person’s gut feeling about a service, product or organization. Brand experiences are interactions that influence perceptions about an organization’s brand. Almost any interaction has the power to shape someone’s perception of a brand.

When I walk into a beautiful hotel lobby, it influences my impressions of the hotel brand. All of us make assumptions about quality, price, history and service just by walking into a physical space:

Receiving terrible customer service during check-in impacts my view of the hotel brand as well—this time in a very negative way.

Experiences are very powerful in shaping people’s perceptions of brand. A good logo won’t make up for bad customer service. That’s why a Forbes.com article on higher education recently exclaimed, “the entire institution needs to live the brand.”

The entire institution. This extends beyond physical space and into the digital world. A user interface can shape one’s feelings about brand every bit as much as customer service interactions or a picturesque lobby.

Institutions improved their websites over the last ten years, but how many of us still have at least one web application that’s painful and cumbersome to use? A website we cringe when we think about? Most of us still have one or two (or more) of these applications, and many of them are important enterprise systems.

Forcing an audience to use a clunky website diminishes their positive feelings about the organization. The negative experience associated with a confusing and poorly designed web application isn’t just bad for the user—it’s bad for the brand.

User experience and brand experience are two sides of the same coin. Bad user experiences are also bad brand experiences. Organizations that understand this connection will flourish as more of our interactions move to the web. Institutions that believe they can fill the lobby with fancy furniture without investing in digital infrastructure will learn a hard lesson.

You are what makes edUi the amazing event that it has been in past years, and we need you to help edUi keep up the great pace.

Share your stories of success (or failure, which can come with its own kind of success). Share your expertise about user experience design, web design and development. Commiserate about the challenges you’ve faced and celebrate your triumphs with your peers from higher education, libraries and museums.

Preference is given to presentations that offer practical methods and ready-to-use techniques and tools.

You can look at our programs from previous years for inspiration (2009, 2010, 2011, 2012) or come up with something so totally fresh and mind-blowing and new that we can’t possibly imagine this year’s conference without it.

Deadline for Proposals: May 3, 2013
Conference dates: Nov. 4-6, 2013

Submit Your Proposal Now!

Why Speak @ edUi?

• Because you’ve got a wealth of knowledge and experience to share with your peers. (Don’t argue with us. We know it’s true.)
• It looks great on your resume.
• Everyone who submits a proposal gets 10% off registration.
• Speakers attend for free!*

*Speakers are responsible for travel and lodging.

What is edUi?

edUi is a conference for web professionals serving colleges, universities, libraries, and museums.

Focusing on the universal methods and tools of user interface and interaction design, as well as the unique challenges of producing websites and applications for large institutions, edUi is a perfect opportunity for web professionals at institutions of learning—including higher education, K-12 schools, libraries, museums, government, and local and regional businesses—to develop skills and share ideas.

edUi 2013 will take place November 4-6 in Richmond, VA.

I was happy to make it back to the Code4Lib conference this year. For those unfamiliar, Code4Lib is a group of self-organized library tech-types that’s not affiliated with a professional organization. Each year a different set of Code4Lib members from a different city volunteers to host the conference. This year’s conference was in Chicago, hosted by an intrepid group of library coders from UIC and Loyola.

As usual, the conference was a blast (not unlike edUi): great people, informative/inspiring sessions, cool city. I really enjoyed meeting new people and catching up with familiar folks. And the conference itself ranged from the theoretical to the super-detailed, and I ended up taking copious notes on helpful items from code snippets to inspirational quotes. The big takeaways, though, are still revealing themselves me two weeks later.

Community = relationships, not product

Code4Lib opened and closed with talks from big thinkers Leslie Johnson and Bess Sadler, respectively. Both speakers focused their talks on the idea of community, including the Code4Lib community and other open-source and/or technology communities.

The connecting idea: the core of a tech community isn’t code; it’s relationships. Healthy relationships build healthy communities, and healthy communities are open, communicative, and inclusive. We’re all solving some of the same problems, here; we need to talk to each other, self-reflect often, be open to criticism, and be open to change and growth.

And–no surprise here–those relationships are the reason that conferences are special for more than just the awesome presentations. Catching up in the hallways, meeting new people, and making those interpersonal connections is what makes conferences so special.

Keep growing: foster a hacker epistemology in yourself and others

Bess Sadler’s talk at the end of the conference got at the core of our community, a trait that unites us all: learning by questioning and tinkering.

What is a hacker epistemology? From the text of Bess’s talk:

Epistemology, if you’re not familiar with the term, refers to the question of how we decide what’s true, how we construct knowledge. … Here in code4lib, many of us have more of what I think of as a hacker epistemology, this magic combination of collaborative knowledge building, combined with a disregard for the mental traps of conventional thinking. We like to take things apart and see how they work. Sometimes we listen to what authority figures tell us, but we easily discard received knowledge if we gather evidence that contradicts it. … The truth is what works.

Finding ways to support our own and others’ curiosity, exploration and experimentation is crucial to growing our communities and making better stuff. And being open to acknowledging bugs, not just in our code but in our lives, to actively try to fix things, makes the world better for everybody.

The biggest failure is not talking about failure

Lately there’s been a lot of talk about failure, inside and outside of the tech community. I was happy to participate in a pre-conference breakout session called Fail4Lib, wherein a small group of us discussed projects that had failed at our institutions. Everybody’s candor was so refreshing, and  it was also a relief to hear of other organizations grappling with similar problems.

From this preconference, here are my unofficial top-three reasons why projects fail:

1. There’s a breakdown in communication somewhere, from senior management to project team to external stakeholders to internal stakeholders…there’s no such thing as overcommunicating about your project.
2. We don’t know it when we see it. Failure isn’t always something that blows up in your face.  Sometimes we don’t assess projects after they launch (or a year down the road, or 5 years down the road) and they fail slowly, a little bit, over a long period of time. And sometimes we just don’t know when to quit a failing project. The list goes on.
3. We’re building projects without a clear audience or purpose.  Are you building something just because you can or just because you’d like it yourself? That’s not enough of a reason. Know your audience. If you don’t know the why’s or the who’s about your project, kill it.

Don’t forget why you’re here

Mark Matienzo’s lightning talk on emotion in archives was a highlight of Code4Lib for me. In a few short minutes he brought us all back to the reason library and archives folks do what we do: we’re preserving emotions and making them available to the world for remembrance, education, creativity, inspiration.

For people in the nonprofit sector–whether we’re archivists preserving the cultural record, or web-folk working on making it easier for high school students to apply for college–it’s good to be reminded that our mission is grounded in helping people and connecting them with information.

Other read-worthy wrapups of Code4Lib 2013

• Cynthia Ng: Code4Lib 2013 Reflections and thoughts (Cynthia also liveblogged the whole damn conference, which was super-helpful for all of us)
• Hillel Arnold: How I learn
• Margaret Heller: Reflections on Code4Lib 2013

Kathryn Zickuhr is a research analyst at the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, where she studies the changing role of libraries in Americans’ lives and communities in the era of digital content.

Kathryn is the lead author of reports on libraries and e-books, younger Americans’ reading and library habits, and disparities in technology access and use. She has also published reports on topics ranging from location-based mobile services to broadband adoption. She has been interviewed by The New York Times, NPR, The Washington Post, and other major news outlets regarding the Pew Research Center’s work.

Some of Kathryn’s Writing:

• Innovative Library Services “In the Wild”
• Should Libraries Shush?
• The Smell of Books

Inspired by Don Norman’s fantastic book The Design of Everyday Things, I set out to identify usability issues in the things I encounter every day.

1 – The lock on my car door
2 – My Samsung Galaxy Tablet
3 – The toilet down the hall from my office

1 – The lock on my car door

I’m old enough to remember a time when all car doors had to be locked manually. Growing up, we had many cars with the little post sticking up just inside the window. You pushed it down to lock it and you pulled it up to unlock it. It was simple and clear even if it didn’t have the convenience of being able to unlock the car with a remote from halfway across the parking lot.

My Subaru Impreza (which I love despite its door locks) manages to thoroughly confuse this concept. There’s a door lock rocker switch on the arm rest that you rock back and forth to unlock or lock the door.

Forward is locked, backwards is unlocked. Easy enough, but the lock on the door itself rocks the opposite way. Forward is unlocked, backwards is locked.

Consequently, every time I’m trying to unlock the doors from the inside to let a passenger in, I have to click the button at least three times before I manage to successfully unlock the doors.

2 - My Samsung Galaxy Tablet

This issue is a lot like the one with my car door locks. For the record, I love my Galaxy Tablet. It’s a fabulous device that’s elegantly designed in every way but one.

Remember the first time you held a tablet (probably an iPad) and rotated the device from portrait to landscape? It’s a magical feeling when everything on the screen shifts, flips, and reorganizes itself to remain perfectly usable. You can even rotate the screen upside down and everything just flips with you. Well, everything except for one thing.

It’s surprisingly hard to photograph a bright LCD screen but I hope you can see the volume slider on the screen. In this position volume up is to the right on the screen, but the buttons on the edge of the device work the opposite way. The buttons are oriented perfectly if you’re holding the device in portrait mode with the volume buttons to the top-right. Flip it any other way and the rest of the device will bend over backwards to make sure everything looks and functions properly, except for the volume controls.

This creates a little cognitive dissonance in me every time I use the device. I’m distracted by the technology as I have to think about which way to push the button to raise or lower the volume.

3 - The toilet down the hall from my office

This is one of those great ideas that’s just not quite right. Someone installed a water saving mechanism in the toilet in my office building. It’s a much better approach than the “if it’s yellow let it mellow, if it’s brown flush it down” method of reducing flushes.

Here’s how it works: You pull the toilet lever up for half a flush (if it’s yellow). You push it down for a full flush.

Here’s the problem: Before encountering this toilet I don’t think I’d ever pulled up on a toilet flush lever in my life.  Apparently neither has anyone else because as you can see, there are two separate instruction labels on the toilet. There’s also a sign on the wall behind the toilet (in color) just to make sure you get the message. Yep, that’s three signs instructing grown adults how to operate a toilet. That’s three too many in my mind. If you have to go to these lengths to explain to people how to do something they’ve been doing since childhood, you probably need to rethink your design.

In this case the perfect solution would be a lever that goes half way down with a gentle push for half a flush and then continues with a little additional pressure. You might still need a label on the lever, but the action will be a lot more natural and therefore require less instruction.

What About You?

These examples, like the many in Don Norman’s book, are reminders that usability is a field of study that predates the web. We encounter usability and user interface challenges all the time in everyday life. But I find it’s actually a lot easier to screw this kind of thing up when designing a web interface or a mobile app because there are very few natural laws at work to stop you from doing something very, very wrong.

Paying attention to the usability issues you encounter online and in the “real world” can help you avoid making these mistakes in your own designs.

What sort of usability issues do you run into every day?

Want to hone your user interface and usability skills? Then consider joining us for edUi this November in Richmond, VA.

I keep a copy of Zeldman’s “Designing With Web Standards” book on my book shelf and I hope you do too.

I’m proud to say that one of the headline speakers at the very first edUi in 2009 was Molly Holzschlag, delivering the talk New Insights in Web Standards. And just last year we had the King of Web Standards (the guy this whole blue beanie thing is built around), Jeffrey Zeldman as our keynote speaker.

Here are some web standards related resources from the edUi archive for you.

Jeffrey Zeldman – Content First

Slides: Content First (pdf)

Christopher Schmitt – HTML5 Does All That?

Joseph Gilbert – Core Concepts for HTML & CSS

Slides: Core Concepts for HTML and CSS (pdf)

Denise Jacobs – CSS3 Moving Forward While Looking Back

Sildes: CSS3 Moving Forward While Looking Back (pdf)