Summary: UX leadership templates | Designing for old users | Use AI to ideate bilingual content | Benefits of wireframes for early UI design | UX Tarot cards | Free generative AI course from NVIDIA
UX Roundup for September 9, 2024. (Ideogram)
UX Leadership Templates
Jason Culbertson (VP Design at Linktree) has published a set of templates for leading and growing UX teams. The templates include a 30/60/90 plan for a UX leader’s first three months on the job and definitions of design team staff levels and competencies.
All very useful. Even if you don’t want to use Culbertson’s exact documents, you can edit them, which is much easier than starting from scratch. He’s done a great service to the community. Thank you, Jason!
Jason Culbertson has released a bundle of essential documents to use as a starting point for your own work. Will save you boatloads of time and — maybe more important — save you from many mistakes and omissions. Use them wisely. (Midjourney)
Designing for Old Users
Nufar Zisman wrote a great article on Senior-friendly design: Do’s and Don’ts for designing for older adults (65+), with 3 parts:
Why care about old folks?
Guidelines for UX design for old users.
4 case studies of websites that cater to seniors.
In the United States, 17% of the population is 65 or older. In Japan, 29% are this old. That’s a lot of customers. (Midjourney)
The “why” is very simple: a huge population of rich old folks is ready to spend money if you cater to them. Furthermore, all advanced countries have very fast-growing populations of seniors. And if business reasons aren’t enough, remember that you have a selfish reason to care about seniors: it’s the one disability group everybody will join one day (at least you should hope to become a senior because the alternative is worse).
Why support old customers? There are a lot of them; they’re rich and will spend money with you if you design products and websites for their needs. (Leonardo)
You can’t just expect a product made by young designers to work for seniors if all your user testing is limited to young participants. Seniors have declining abilities in all major areas: vision loss, hearing loss, reduced memory and cognitive abilities, and motor skills limitations. Furthermore, seniors are often not familiar with the latest and greatest technology. (In contrast, teenagers are socialized into any new tech immediately, and adults in the workforce often benefit from training courses or help from colleagues when a new technology is launched.)
People decline in many ways as they age: less keen eyesight (can’t read small fonts), reduced motor skills (can’t click small buttons or maneuver finicky sliders), and slower cognition plus poor memory (can’t understand fast changes or remember items from past screens). (Ideogram)
Zisman provides more detailed design guidance, but the key points boil down to two elements:
Do not require fine details or precision in reading or interacting with tiny text or screen graphics.
Reduce cognitive load and eliminate anything that requires speedy interaction. Slow and steady win the day.
The old fable of the tortoise and the hare also applies to UI design: if you design for slower interaction, you’ll support older users and win the race for Internet revenue. (Leonardo)
This is a great article, and everybody should follow Zisman’s advice. Hundreds of millions of seniors will thank you, and you’ll make boatloads of money.
I’ll just add one point: Use AI to help old users compensate for declining fluid intelligence. Old people typically have very strong crystallized intelligence, allowing them to make solid decisions based on existing information that they already know (using deductive reasoning). But the fluid intelligence needed to handle new information drops rapidly with age (weakening inductive reasoning). Traditionally, this decline in fluid intelligence has led to declining creativity with age, causing professional performance in intellectual jobs to peak around the age of 40. With AI, we don’t have to accept this creativity decline. I have called for human-AI symbiosis many times, but the strongest case for this symbiosis is the ability to benefit from old people’s hard-won experience without the declining performance caused by fluid intelligence loss. Let AI boost ideation, and seniors will flourish.
Creative synergy between AI and humans is good for everybody but particularly helpful for seniors, where AI boosts ideation while the older human provides judgment honed by experience. (Midjourney)
Use AI to Ideate Bilingual Content
All the major AI language models are trained on all the world’s big and midsized languages. You can use AI’s multilingual ability to ideate content where you want to use multiple languages in a playful way.
A user with the handle Mr De La Bruyère posted the illustrations he had made for a bilingual French-English children’s book with illustrations of the alphabet. For each letter A-Z, he chose to illustrate something that starts with that letter in both languages. For example, A is “Avion - Airplane.”
Even if you speak both languages, it can be hard to come up with ideas for every letter for something that starts with that letter in both French and English. However, AI is perfect for such ideation. For each letter, just ask for 10 objects that start with that letter in both languages.
My example of a bilingual object, inspired by Mr De La Bruyère. F is for fleur, and F is for flower. His drawings are cuter than mine. (Ideogram)
In Praise of Wireframes
Christopher Nguyen posted a useful wireframing cheatsheet. These days, it’s easy to create high-fidelity prototypes, possibly through the AI-driven Generative UI features in products like Uizard and Figma. Why use anything less?
Because eschewing colors, detailed content, and most branding allows you to focus on the workflow and features you’re designing. When presenting the wireframes to stakeholders or when conducting early user testing, you’ll get feedback about those important points and avoid distracting people with shinies.
Also, by clearly showing an unfinished state of the design, a wireframe invites more open-ended comments and ideas that are less limited to incremental tweaks.
Nick Fine adds that his entire portfolio consists of wireframes, to emphasize UX design, not visual design. (Obviously, if you’re a great visual designer, don’t do this. Even then, show some wireframes if you claim to do more than make things pretty.)
A simple wireframe eliminates many of the distractions found in an almost-perfect UI design, and allows everybody (designers, stakeholders, test users) to focus on workflow and other larger issues. (Leonardo)
UX Tarot Cards
I thought it would be a fun project to create a series of Tarot cards for UX, showing various concepts from this field. However, generative AI is not yet up to this task without much more manual work than I am willing to put into this type of project. Here are the Tarot cards I made before giving up:
“The Empathy Map.” Left to right: Ideogram, Flux, Leonardo.
“The Iteration.” Left to right: Ideogram, Flux, Leonardo.
The only card that looks somewhat like a real Tarot card is Flux’s version of “The Empathy Map,” but even that it not nearly rich enough.
Free Course on Generative AI
NVIDIA has released a series of free online courses on various AI topics. They are mostly geeky, but they have a promising Generative AI Explained course targeting a broader audience.
In general, I don’t like AI courses offered by AI vendors, because they emphasize their own product instead of teaching fundamental principles that generalize across vendors. NVIDIA is an exception to this rule. Yes, it’s one of the companies in the world that makes the most money from AI, but NVIDIA makes its money from selling GPU chips to cloud data centers and AI companies. It’s like the old stereotype of selling shovels to the gold miners. NVIDIA sells infrastructure items that are then used to build the actual AI products.
NVIDIA doesn’t care which AI tool you use, so they are, in effect, neutral.
NVIDIA makes its money selling the proverbial shovels to the gold miners — in other words, they make and sell the tools needed to build AI products, but the company is not an AI service itself. (Midjourney)