I was battling, the other day,  with a particularly curly personal finance issue which had me fluctuating between -snore- and utter panic . The problem just was just not resolving in satisfactory manner and then it struck me; I needed to white board it.

Drawing up the issue in a variety of ways helped me to better understand the problem and to better communicate it to my partner. At this point I realised that this is how I’ve been solving problems in my day job for years now and that  I KNOW I need to draw to best communicate. Why is it that our useful and proven problem solving methods from the UX work place seldom venture out in to the rest of our lives? Even with in the work place we focus our UX eyes on the ‘hard problems’ (e.g. client has problem X) rather than the ‘soft problems’ (e.g.  If I could on get X from Marketing on board this project would run so much smoother)

UX methods can help us in a few ways

1. Solve our UX projects work problems (you know, strategy,analysis & design on projects)
2. Solve our own personal work problems (strategy, analysis and design of ourselves and our problems as employees, colleagues, )
3. Solve our own personal problem (strategy, analysis and design of ourselves and our problems at home)

UX at work (projects)

There is enough information to cover the entire planet if it were printed on how to solve UX project conundrums. Fact.

UX at work (interpersonal)

Solving personal work problems  is a topic that has much less visibility in the UX arena but it exists and is of good quality. The UX leadership journal is a great place to see the beginnings of work interpersonal related UX thinking.

UX at home

Take that white board, grab those stickies and work out how you are going to save for that trip to Peru. OR take your side of an arguement and your adversary’s and put them on post-it notes, shuffle them around, see what happens when you understand the full picture (sound familiar? user vs business anyone?).

In the end we have great tools and they can be used for most everything

Our tools can be used in a huge range of situations. We already use our UX tools in work projects to get the clients project right. I’m going to be using the UX tools I love to get my working situation right and to get my home life right. Wish me luck!

Lack of visual design doesn’t lead to a necessarily usable result.  Someone wise once said “There is no ‘no design’ there is only good design and bad design”, they couldn’t have put it more succinctly.

User experience design and Visual design must work together to guide the user through a website. The line height of text must be high enough, so that it is easy to read. White space (you remember it, that place where ads oft creep) provides focus to your websites calls to action. All these things are important because they allow website users to easily focus on each different element on the page. They can do this without having to struggle to differentiate between one thing and another. White space is clarity and clarity allows users to quickly and easily make the choices that they want to, the choices that you provided them with.

Peter Morvilles honeycomb diagram shows us how good websites are comprised of many different charactoristics. Visual design has a huge impact on the credibility  and the desirability of a website. The challenge for designers is to marry up the components seamlessly e.g. visual designers and user experience designers must collaborate over matters of credibility and usability to achieve the optimal result in designs.

My experience of this kind of collaboration is built on design team members who have a great deal of respect for each other, working together informally throughout the design process. This works well for me.

How do you ensure the best visual and experience design compatibility?