5 User Experience Lessons From Tom Hanks

November 19, 2012 by Steve Tengler for UX Magazine

You may work for a company that just hasn’t figured it out. It may still be pondering, “Why should we care about user experience?” Maybe it doesn’t care at all. Maybe it has lucked into a strange vortex where customers are accepting of unpleasant interactions and misguided designs.

If you’re that lucky, stop reading this article and go buy a lottery ticket. If, on the other hand, you work at any company with a product, website or application within which a customer might fail or succeed, you should pause to understand how the strategic failings of some companies (e.g. Research In Motion, Yahoo or Sony) caused them to be leapfrogged by the vision of others (e.g. Apple, Google).

But delineating the underpinnings of user experience clearly for everyone is not an easy task. There are algorithms, axioms and antonyms abound. Our frequent reference-point is pop culture — something to which folks can relate. We’ve already touched on UX lessons from Tom Cruise and Johnny Depp. But a thirsty person crawling through the desert of knowledge needs more than two swigs. So today’s user experience lessons are five taken from the cannon of Tom Hanks.

Read Steve's full article here.

Self Evaluate User Experience of Apps

I found this posted on InfoQ:

Posted by Anand Narayanaswamy on Nov 24, 2012

Lora Heiny, Senior Program Manager, Windows Partner Ecosystem and Will Tschumy, Principal User Experience Advisor at Microsoft delivered a session at the recently held Build 2012, where they disclosed tips which should be followed to evaluate the UX of an application.

According to Lora, you should first identify concept and define scope. Then a prototype should be created and you need to study and evaluate it against the relevant guidelines in place. 

Lora suggests you to monitor user ratings, comments and feedback. Finally, you should check animations and interaction which are plugged into the design. Moreover, you should list what the users will be able to do with your application. 

Lora advocates the need for using wide tile layouts with live, personalized content and the content should flow from edge to edge. You should make use of square titles only when there are no updates. 

According to Lora, you should make use of horizontal panning for grid layout and should employ hierarchical system for apps with large collection. The team also suggest you to make use of semantic zoom to move quickly through big lists. The session advises you to use top bar of the user interface for navigation purposes and bottom bar for various commands such as pinning. 

The session concludes by stating the fact that developers should continuously review their apps after submission to create stability and confidence including a list of resources from where you can gather more information regarding the UX techniques.