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Articles by Donna Lichaw
Make Your Job, Prototype Your Life — Donna Lichaw
I recently read an article in the New York Times with the please-click-me (that’s a step above click-bait for me, polite click-bait) title, “A Deceptively Simple Way to Find More Happiness at Work.” So, of course, I had to click through to read the entire article. I don’t think that “happiness” is necessarily the right way to think about work (my clients think of it more in terms of satisfaction, empowerment, mission, momentum, impact…and so do I).
The Only Performance Review You’ll Ever Need – Donna Lichaw – Medium
It’s a new year! New quarter! It’s time to start setting goals for yourself so that you can get clear on where you’re going over the next quarter, year, even several years at work. Yay! But, wait. While setting goals is an important way to ensure that you will actually accomplish the things you want to do, the best goals that you can set for yourself are based on what you’ve successfully accomplished before.
The User’s Journey: Storymapping Products That People Love
While visualizing stories is the first step toward making sure that you’ve got a solid, good story, writing that story out helps you uncover additional strengths, weaknesses, gaps, and opportunities that you might otherwise miss. Writing stories out with words is also the first step toward doing something else: communicating your stories, both internally with a team or stakeholders and externally with the world and your users.
Book Excerpt: "The User's Journey"
Humans are sense-making creatures, and story is our most critical sense-making tool. As humans, we’ve evolved and innovated story over millennia as a way to understand our world. For example, there is evidence that ancient cave dwellers learned how to trap an animal and not go hunting alone through the use of stories. Given how long we’ve lived with story, it’s not surprising that Aristotle uncovered a working model for it long ago.
Meaningful CSS: Style Like You Mean It
These days, we have a world of meaningful markup at our fingertips. HTML5 introduced a lavish new set of semantically meaningful elements and attributes, ARIA defined an entire additional platform to describe a rich internet, and microformats stepped in to provide still more standardized, nuanced concepts. It’s a golden age for rich, meaningful markup. Yet our markup too often remains a tangle of s, and our CSS is a morass of classes that bear little relationship to those s.
Prototypal Object-Oriented Programming using JavaScript
Douglas Crockford accurately described JavaScript as the world’s most misunderstood language. A lot of programmers tend to think of it as not a “proper” language because it lacks the common object-oriented programming concepts. I myself developed the same opinion after my first JavaScript project ended up a hodgepodge, as I couldn’t find a way to organize code into classes.
Looking for “Trouble”
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I know a colleague who keeps a “wall of shame” for emails he gets from clients—moments of confusion on their end that (for better or worse) are also funny. The thing is, we know how to answer these questions because we’ve heard them all before: Why does this look different when I print it? How do people know to scroll? To a certain extent, making light of the usual “hard questions” is a way of blowing off steam—but it’s an attitude poisonous for an agency.
By Donna Lichaw, Sara Wachter-Boettcher, Eric Meyer, Mica McPheeters, Rachel Nabors, Brendan Murray Verified, Orr Shtuhl
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A List Apart
Verified
The User’s Journey
Both analytics funnels and stories describe a series of steps that users take over the course of a set period of time. In fact, as many data scientists and product people will tell you, data tells a story, and it’s our job to look at data within a narrative structure to piece together, extrapolate, troubleshoot, and optimize that story.
The User's Journey - Rosenfeld Media
Testimonials Lichaw delivers a creative, common-sense design method that simply works, no experience necessary. This book belongs on every experience designer’s desk. Kristina Halvorson, Author, Content Strategy You’ve heard the term storymapping before. In this detailed, tactical, and delightfully illustrated book, Donna Lichaw takes a different spin on how to bring the story of your product to life.
The User’s Journey: Storymapping Products That People Love
This is a sample chapter from Donna Lichaw’s new book The User’s Journey: Storymapping Products That People Love. 2016 Rosenfeld Media.
Object-Oriented UX
In June 2012, while working at CNN.com, I was tasked with designing the user experience of election night. The next five months of my life would be dedicated to that single night—but success to me had nothing to do with who won. I was concerned with findability, data visualization, a shape-shifting canvas, and how the hell mouse-over flyouts were going to work on an iPhone. For the first time in history, CNN.com was releasing a responsive experience.
On Our Radar: Faux-Naive
Google—it’s not just for (and by) engineers anymore. Slowly but surely, the search+ giant has come to the realization that design matters. This week, in the wake of a massive structural shift, the company unveiled a new logo (designed in-house).
Multimodal Perception: When Multitasking Works
Word on the street is that multitasking is impossible. The negative press may have started with HCI pioneer Clifford Nass, who published studies showing that people who identify as multitaskers are worse at context switching, worse at filtering out extraneous information, worse at remembering things over the short term, and have worse emotional development than unitaskers.
Meta-Moments: Thoughtfulness by Design
Ever had a moment on the internet when you’ve been forced to stop and think about what you’re doing? Maybe you’ve been surprised. Maybe you’ve stumbled across something new. Maybe you’ve come to see things in a different light. I call such experiences meta-moments: tiny moments of reflection that prompt us to think consciously about what we’re experiencing. Take Google. In the early days, its clean white page helped distinguish it from the pack.
Approaching Content Strategy for Personalized Websites
There’s a curious concept in astrophysics known as the Drake Equation. Developed to quantify the potential for intelligent life in our galaxy, it raises a number of odd questions, among them: does having intelligence, in the long run, actually benefit or harm a species? In other words, will amoebas ultimately outlive humans in the face of eternity? If you’re like me, these are the types of things you think about while listening to hold music before conference calls.
Content-First Design
A few years ago, I started getting into video games like Katamari, Animal Crossing, and Borderlands 2. Their designs are astounding; each feels like I’m having a natural conversation with the game, and each introduces content in the moment I needed it. As a result, the game experience feels so dang smart, and I feel like a hero whenever I play. Here’s an example from the very first minute of Animal Crossing. All you’ve done is started a new game.
What Really Matters: Focusing on Top Tasks
Digital is a space of endless replication. It has never been easier to create—and create, and create. People love to publish, but they hate to remove, which leads to overloaded websites and constant, inevitable redesigns. The top layers get a shiny new coat of graphics and meaningless “we really care” content—but underneath, a teeming mass of out-of-date, badly organized information still swirls about. The solution is to make hard choices using Top Tasks Management.
Let Links Be Links
The concept of the web as an application platform has never been more popular, but the tools used to create these so-called “web apps” are still fraught with pitfalls that are often ignored or misunderstood. Single-page web app frameworks have gained traction because they can easily be used to create fast, complex applications that feel much more solid and interactive than traditional websites.
Readable Wearables
A few weeks ago we added our first wearable to the Bearded device lab, and it was an eye-opening experience. The same day that Apple showcased the soon-to-arrive Apple Watch, a Samsung Gear S showed up at our door. This device is a large smartwatch with pixel dimensions slightly greater than the iPhone 3GS. It has Opera Mini and its own cellular and wifi connections, so it functions as a standalone web interface. So will people use their watch-like devices for browsing the web?
80/20 Practitioners Make Better Communicators
I spent the better part of 2014 working on two redesigns: one for a major pizza chain, the other for a major bike retailer. The five of us working on the redesigns were excited beyond words—two large-scale sites about two things we loved: pizza and bikes! We all wanted to be heavily involved in every phase of these projects to ensure their success. Along the way, we learned important lessons about how to fine-tune that involvement to arrive at a better outcome.
Training the CMS
Nothing brings content modeling to life like launching a shiny new site: teasers fit neatly without any awkward ellipses, images are cropped perfectly for different screen sizes, related content is wonderfully relevant. The content strategy comes to life, and all is right with the world.
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