Probably every developer in the .net community has seen the sound clips to Steve Balmer chanting "Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers". I even saw a few videos of songs created on the whole event. In the world of your application and User-Centered-Design, every person on your project should be chanting "Users, Users, Users, Users" with the same passion and vigor as Steve Balmer.

It comes to no surprise that my first tip for bringing better user experiences in your applications would be to look at the one person that matters, your users. Creative Directors do this by creating what is known as Personas. According to Wikipedia, the real dictionary of the world, "Persona's are fictitious characters that are created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic that might use a site or product".

If you really want to improve your applications you really need to take the time to create a few persona's and i am going to help you in that task by providing a small, simple activity to follow.

1. Create 3-4 Persona's based on your users.

• 2 Persona's that represent 80% of your user base.
• 1 Persona that represents the "influence" role... aka managers/decision makers
• and finally create 1 persona that is administrator/upkeep role

Example of a Persona from http://www.steptwo.com/

Now, of course this could be very basic exercises, some applications that are corporate enterprise based may be more complex, but I encourage you to stay focused. The more persona's you create the more muddy your application becomes. The more complicated, the more I would encourage you to bring in an interaction designer.

2. Now go through your application in the mind set of each of these persona's. Try to think in their frame of mind, and jot down changes each persona would really benefit from to make their jobs easier and facilitate the requirements better. Its very important to do each persona separate from the other. Stick with 1 persona each day or half day. Don't cross pollinate, you want to avoid personal confliction and persona confliction at this stage.

3. Finally after its all said and done, take each notes and review the notes and weight the positives and negatives of each change/request to a positive or negative number to each persona. Would a particular change benefit this persona some, none, or not effect it. I go with a simple calculation of +1, -1, or 0 for not effected by change.

Thats it, thats the basics to persona capturing. Of course there can be more to it, but I guarantee that if your looking for ways to improve your UX of your existing applications, this exercise can really make a difference. Its important to really think outside your developer "frame of mind". But overall this is a very simple, very basic, and very effective way to overall improving the UX of your application. If anything, its a start in the right direction.

Our fourth meeting of CD2UG is upon us (Wednesday, October 1, 2008), for those who don't know, CD2 is a user group called Chicago Designers and Developers and it's focused around designer and developer collaboration, rich application development, user experience, and anything else in and out of that area of exptertise.

I was not able to be there for the last meeting with Chad Udel from the IONA group but I heard it was a great topic. Hopefully we can get a D2 site up soon and begin sharing those clips with the world.

This month we shall be hearing from a couple of presenters on the topic of techniques for designers and developers to improve user experiences in their applications. Following will be a panel/open discussion with those speakers, so please bring some questions to the table. The presentations are as follows:

The Helicopter View of User Experience Design David Charney Illumen Group, Creative Director

Creative Direction in a User Experience World Jessica Boggs AlphaZeta Inc, Creative Director

If you're in the Chicago area and interested in the topics mentioned above, come check us out, we meet the first Wednesday of the month in Chicago, learn more and sign up at http://www.cd2ug.org/.

All to often I hear people using the term UX very loosely. In most cases, I hear people refer to User Experience while referencing the concept of Usability. And Yes, Usability is definately part of the umbrella to User Experience but they are not synonomous with each other. User Experience references the entire interaction, its percieved, learned, use of a product/software/application. I like to think that user experience is about interaction, visual design, delivery, usability, utility, and communication.

Usability is only a portion of what makes good user experience. A great example of great usability and bad user experience can be found at the very forefront of usability promoters. I mean no disrespect, but Jacob Nielsen is considered in the realm of usability as being one of the forefathers to its implementation. His name is synonomous with the subject of Usability. But as Anthony Handley pointed out to me once in a disucssion of the topic, "I find Jacob Neilsen as interesting as dry toast." And why is that? Has anyone ever been to Jacob Nielsen's website, or seen the cover of his last famous book? It has no curb appeal, it provides very little in alot of the other avenues of User Experience. His site is very usable, it communicates well, but it lacks in visual interest. Don't underestimate that, people do care what things look like. 

That also can go the other way, lots of great designers fail at creating usable design and in the same sense also fail at good user experience. Just today, what actually sparked this topic of which i am writing, I ran into a design for a company that had the concepts of great design: clean, nice style, trendy, but all of these things didn't make up for the pure fact the design complicated usability. It did not seperate the elements out on the page to make it easy to navigate and use the application. Design groups need to start paying attention to User Experience, the bar is being raised by the design community to become User Aware... Think User Experience!

Microsoft has been making many changes in their tune towards User Experience. It has been obvious in their latest application releases such as Office and Vista, but that change has been more apparent in its development tools such as WPF and Silverlight. The original model Microsoft had used in their previous applications and development tools was very clear. They stuck to consistency as their primary focus in User Experience. And rightly so, the audience at the time did not grow up with PC's at hand, everything had to be consistent to help bring a sense of comfort to these particular users. And let’s face it, we all benefited from this particular type of focus. With these latest applications, what was originally deemed consistent and comfortable is evolving into something more and that is the beginning of change.

While consistency has an importance in user experience, this change is warranted as the audience evolves. Some will find the change to be awkward but the overall evolution of the audience demands change. This new audience has a much closer feel to computers and the interaction with them. There are some that have quite literally grown up with computers in their homes, in their schools, and even in their pockets. They have a new demand; they want personal, creative, innovative experiences with their applications. While I cannot justify all the complaints with Vista, I will claim that Vista has definitely put a wow factor into the user experience. When office released their latest 2007 I griped a bit about the new ribbon interface, but in just a few weeks it went from this "Oh, my god where is it?" to something I can’t imagine not having. And I have seen clients eat this up, and want these kinds of changes into their applications.

These changes however, don't come without a price. As this evolution takes place it is imperative that development groups and shops also begin to evolve and embrace this new paradigm. Without a sense of consistency or direction in interface design; it will be imperative that these groups add User Experience professionals into their teams. And yes, I mean User Experience professionals and not just creative artists, that’s another topic I will save for another time.