If this is the first test on the project, it will probably reveal deeper issues. Much deeper than an easy to fix button miss-alignment or a typo.We’ve conducted quite a few preflight usability studies and many times we discovered a core problem. On one occasion, the registration steps hadn’t been ordered in a sequence that had been logical to the user. On another, the touch-screen equivalent to drag ‘n’ drop with a mouse was missing.

Fixing a broken experience that’s discovered only a day or two before launch is usually postponed until the next release. Many more times still, there’s no clear roadmap after the project delivery, so the issue is never repaired. The solution? Test your designs early.

With both picture and srcset HTML syntaxes seeming like too much effort in the wrong places, we looked for a simpler solution. We wanted to be able to add a single image path and let the CSS, JavaScript and PHP deal with serving the correct image — instead of the HTML, which should simply have the correct information in place.

At the time of developing the website, no obvious solution matched our requirements. Most centered on emulating picture or srcset, which we had already determined weren’t right for our needs.

The Etch website is very image-heavy, which would make manually resizing each image a lengthy process and prone to human error. Even running an automated Photoshop script was deemed to require too much maintenance.
Our solution was to find the display width of the image with JavaScript at page-loading time, and then pass the src and width to a PHP script, which would resize and cache the images on the fly before inserting them back into the DOM.

We’ll look at an abstracted example of the code, written in HTML, JavaScript, PHP and LESS. You can find a working demo on my website. If you’d like to grab the files for the demo, they can be found on GitHub.

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I regularly conduct studies for executives who are responsible for business strategy, product planning, operations, sales and marketing, and professional education. At the conclusion of each study, my challenge is to create a final deliverable tailored to a specialized audience.

In the past, my user-research deliverables have consisted of short videos, concept feedback, games, workshops, competitor audits, strategy documents, customer journey maps and very detailed personas. It was only recently that I thought a comic book would make a fine user-research deliverable. Sure, it might seem strange to create a comic book in a staid corporate environment, where they are thought of primarily as light entertainment. But it’s not strange at all.

In 2006, Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón wrote The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation to illustrate, “word for word the original report… even including the Commission’s final report card.” In October 2011, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published “Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse” to explain how to act in the face of a major “plague.” And in 2012, Kevin Cheng applied methods of sequential art to illustrate the process of planning for new technology products in See What I Mean.

In this article, I will discuss why I created a comic book to help a group of executives explore a business scenario that has multifaceted problems and is set in an imaginary future. I will also talk about how the comic book helped the executives experience the strategic and emotional impact of the problems and how it helped them noodle over possible solutions. Finally, I’ll provide some guidelines for UX designers who would like to use comics or sequential art to illustrate open-ended business scenarios.

Let’s start with a thorny concept most of us have heard of: cybercrime. It’s a mature industry with an extensive professionally run underground economy. As you might know, the cybercrime economy is based on the development and distribution of sophisticated tools to carry out large-scale fraud attacks, consumer-data breaches and politically motivated distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. These attacks on financial institutions, retailers and governmental agencies result in the loss of billions of dollars every year.

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