Jane Reinberg - User Experience Architect, Genex
By Allan Maurer
A while back I tested a Motorolla Droid Pro, my first experience with the Android smartphone operating system. Since I’ve been relying on a trusty but feature-lacking cell phone for the last few years, and using other devices for mobile computing, it took me a few hours to get the hang of it.
But when I handed it to a 21-year-old friend who uses her smartphone as if it is part of her hand, she figured everything out in minutes (and trashed my Angry Birds score to boot).
Jane Reinberg, user experience architect at the full-service interactive agency Genex, says she had a similar expeience. “I got a new Android phone and experienced some anxiety over it for about two hours, but then I got it.”
So is the Android system intuitive – something you learn at a glance? “The question is intuitive for whom?” says Reinberg. “For which generation? We do a lot of research to figure out who we’re designing for,” she says.
As an industry veteran, Reinberg has extensive experience creating immersive digital experiences across web, mobile and touch platform, combining elements of interaction design, information architecture and usability principles to build award-winning solutions.Prior to Genex, she worked at Morgan Stanley in New York City, as well as Sotheby’s, where she was the Director of Information Architecture.
She joined Genex in 2006. Reinberg is one of the dozens of Internet gurus, top executives, entrepreneurs and experts participating in the upcoming Digital Summit at the Cobb Galleria in Atlanta May 16-17.
What does a user experience architect do?
“You literally figure out on an interface level how a design for Web sites, mobile apps, or social media will look and how people will interact with it.”
It’s not a hard and fast science, she notes. “It’s always evolving,” she says. “It’s hard to tell what the best practices are sometimes, because there is something new happening every day.”
People often experience anxiety over technology changes, especially when the changes alter something we’re used to seeing done a particular way. “There is resistance to change,” Reinberg says. That can be an initial problem to overcome in innovating new practices in design.
When clients come to Genex, she says, they generally ask the same set of initial questions: What are the client’s goals? What do they want to achieve? Who is the message for? How will they measure success?
“Then we have to figure out what message delivered by what tools we need to make that happen.
The process includes looking at the role search plays in the campaign, how people find the client, what may be wrong with a current site, and timeline and budget constraints.
For the mobile or tablet markets the questions are the same, but the process differs, she says. “You have to limit your scope in mobile. You need to ask, how best can I use this channel? What is it appropriate for?”
Once upon a time, if your goals were to increase eyeballs, brand awareness and/or revenue, you only basically had to consider broadcast and print. Now, Reinberg points out, you have the Web, mobile, email marketing and the social dimension. “The conversation is getting pretty complicated,” she notes.
One of the problems with usability design is “That it’s sometimes hard to quantify usability,” she says. “Is it about the number of people you’re talking to or the quality of what you’re talking about?”
Listen up, Mr. Zukerberg
Designing for innovation, a topic Reinberg plans to address at the Digital Summit in Atlanta, also leads to some questions from clients.
“A lot of times, if you come up with something innovative, the client asks if that’s a best practice. How do you come up with good new ideas when people keep trying to put you in a box. You can only test your way out of it. But selling that to clients is difficult.”
A different idea may be as simple as putting a company logo somewhere other than the top left of a website. A client may ask, “Shouldn’t the logo be on the top left?”
“That may not be best for you,” Reinberg says.
So, how do companies such as Google, Facebook, and Microsoft do innovative design?
“They develop their own design principals and figure out what’s important to their organization,” says Reinberg. They ask, “Are our features aligned to what we’re trying to do as an organization?”
It’s amazing, how fast things can get stale, she adds. “I’m pretty bored with Facebook. Now and then they take off or add a button here and there, but I have to interact with it a lot and I’m ready for a change.”
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