User Interface

• Most Topular Stories

• Taking Mobile Global:Tips for Aligning Mobile and Global Web Strategies

  UX Magazine

  John Yunker

  15 May 2012 | 5:56 am

  With more than 55 million iPads in use around the world and more than 400 million smartphones sold in 2011, companies are increasingly thinking “mobile first” when developing their web and mobile app strategies. Hotels.com, for example, offers not only a mobile-optimized website but mobile apps specific to both the iPad and iPhone. Unfortunately, as companies rush to go mobile, they often overlook the importance of maintaining their global reach. That is, their mobile...read more By John Yunker

• iOS orientation change and automatic text resizing

  456 Berea Street

  Roger Johansson

  9 May 2012 | 1:49 pm

  Most web developers who have viewed their work in an iOS device know that Safari for iOS likes to zoom in on the page and do weird things to font size when you change the device’s orientation from portrait to landscape. A too common way to prevent that is to completely disable the user’s ability to zoom, which you really do not want to do. Luckily there is A Fix for the iOS Orientationchange Zoom Bug, a very clever one too. I’ve been using this in a few projects and have found it to work well. I have however run into a couple of issues (that in hindsight are pretty obvious) that I want…

• Screenleap Screen Sharing

  Konigi

  jibbajabba

  14 Mar 2012 | 2:27 pm

  Screenleap is a free service that lets you share your screen from any device with a browser, including tablets and smartphones. No software downloads, installs, or sign ups are required. May come in handy for people doing customer support or testing sessions where participant software installation could be an issue.

• Size Matters Not: The Road to Foundation 3.0

  ZURB

  15 May 2012 | 5:30 pm

  If you hadn’t heard, bigger monitors are in, small ones are out … at least for desktops. The 1366x768 has ousted 1024x768 as the supreme screen size. Now we hope you’re not thinking that means we should stop designing for small screens, even if it is for desktops, despite what Jakob Nielsen might be saying. Because when it comes to designing for the web — size shouldn’t matter. Nielsen makes it a point to carefully say that “small screens are finally so rare for desktop computers that we don’t have to design for them.” Then he goes on to cover his bases, saying we still have…

• Make sure your HTML5 document outline is backwards compatible

  456 Berea Street

  Roger Johansson

  2 May 2012 | 1:43 pm

  This is just a short reminder of something I wrote about in On using h1 for all heading levels in HTML5: make sure your HTML5 document outline is backwards compatible. The reason is simple. Browsers and assistive technology haven’t implemented the HTML5 outline algorithm yet (the only exception I’m aware of is JAWS, which gets it wrong, as Jason Kiss explains in JAWS, IE and Headings in HTML5).Read full postPosted in Accessibility, HTML 5.Copyright © Roger Johansson

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  Signal vs. Noise

• We're hiring: Help us significantly improve conversion and retention

  Jason F.

  14 May 2012 | 12:18 pm

  We’re looking for another teammate. This time we’re looking for someone who is completely focused on improving conversion and retention. You love moving the needle, one small step at a time. This job is all about seeing untapped potential. Conversion could be financial (get more people to start a trial or complete it – what we consider a “sale”), or outcome-based (inspire people to create more Basecamp projects by showing them creative ways to use Basecamp they never thought of before). Or something else. Retention could be reducing cancellations, or reducing…

• Taking the Pain Out of MySQL Schema Changes

  John

  14 May 2012 | 8:53 am

  A common obstacle we face when releasing new features is making production schema changes in MySQL. Many new features require additional columns or indexes. Running an “ALTER TABLE” in MySQL to add the needed columns and indexes locks the table, hanging the application. We need a better solution. Option 1: Schema Change in Downtime This is the simplest option. Put the application into downtime and perform the schema change. It requires us to have the application down for the duration of the “ALTER TABLE”. We’ve successfully used this option for smaller tables…

• Basecamp in Antarctica

  Shaun

  10 May 2012 | 9:39 am

  We have customers around the world doing extraordinary things with our software, but Ben Saunders is taking it to a whole new level. Ben and his team are using Basecamp to organize an expedition to the South Pole and back, unsupported and on foot. This is the same journey Captain Robert Scott died trying to achieve 100 years ago, and no one has attempted it since. Ben has been a professional polar explorer for more than 10 years and is one of only three people to complete a solo journey to the North Pole. He will be joined by Alastair Humphreys, who has cycled 46,000 miles around the world,…

• Sortfolio: Going once, going twice...

  Jason F.

  7 May 2012 | 5:19 pm

  A year ago we put Sortfolio up for sale. We entertained a variety of offers, met with a few potential suitors in person, and negotiated numbers. Ultimately nothing came together. Then we shelved the process so we could focus all of our efforts on designing and building the new Basecamp. Sortfolio continued to run itself for another year, generating over $200,000 in profit for us during that time. Our paying customer count continues to hover consistently in the 170s, each paying $99/month to be listed as a premium member. The price We’ve put Sortfolio on the clock: We either sell it by…

• VIDEO: Keynote by David from RailsConf 2012 on progress…

  David

  1 May 2012 | 2:05 pm

  Keynote by David from RailsConf 2012 on progress, curiosity, fear, and the danger of easy-bake ovens.

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  456 Berea Street

• iOS orientation change and automatic text resizing

  Roger Johansson

  9 May 2012 | 1:49 pm

  Most web developers who have viewed their work in an iOS device know that Safari for iOS likes to zoom in on the page and do weird things to font size when you change the device’s orientation from portrait to landscape. A too common way to prevent that is to completely disable the user’s ability to zoom, which you really do not want to do. Luckily there is A Fix for the iOS Orientationchange Zoom Bug, a very clever one too. I’ve been using this in a few projects and have found it to work well. I have however run into a couple of issues (that in hindsight are pretty obvious) that I want…

• Make sure your HTML5 document outline is backwards compatible

  Roger Johansson

  2 May 2012 | 1:43 pm

  This is just a short reminder of something I wrote about in On using h1 for all heading levels in HTML5: make sure your HTML5 document outline is backwards compatible. The reason is simple. Browsers and assistive technology haven’t implemented the HTML5 outline algorithm yet (the only exception I’m aware of is JAWS, which gets it wrong, as Jason Kiss explains in JAWS, IE and Headings in HTML5).Read full postPosted in Accessibility, HTML 5.Copyright © Roger Johansson

• Automatic line breaks in narrow columns with CSS 3 hyphens and word-wrap

  Roger Johansson

  23 Apr 2012 | 2:54 pm

  A problem that has always existed but has become more common lately as more people – thanks to the popularity of responsive web design – make their layouts adapt to narrow viewports, is the lack of automatic hyphenation in web browsers. As columns of text become narrower, the risk of a single word being longer than the column width increases. When that happens, the text normally extends outside the column (unless the column element’s overflow property has been given a different value than the default visible). The effect can be anything from just a slight visual glitch to unreadable…

• End tags, semi-colons and maintainable code

  Roger Johansson

  17 Apr 2012 | 1:34 pm

  In Of parser-fetishists and semi-colons, Chris Heilmann brings up the importance of code maintainability, something that I feel is overlooked a bit too often. The main issue Chris talks about is omitting semi-colons at the end of JavaScript statements, the subject of a current JavaScript drama. Doing so is valid syntax in many cases, and browsers parse and execute the code fine. However, it does not improve code readability for humans, who are often as important to target as the browsers that run the code.Read full postPosted in Coding, HTML 5, JavaScript.Copyright © Roger Johansson

• The HTML5 placeholder attribute is not a substitute for the label element

  Roger Johansson

  9 Apr 2012 | 1:15 am

  One of the useful things in HTML5 is the placeholder attribute that lets you specify a short hint for text input fields (textarea elements and the text states of the input element). In browsers that implement placeholder according to the specification, the hint text is displayed only when the field is empty and unfocused. This is good since it gives you an opportunity to provide the user with hints regarding what they are expected to enter in the field. What is not good is that the placeholder attribute is often used as a substitute for the label element. I’ve seen this in various demos of…

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  Boxes and Arrows

• Driving Holism in Cross-channel Projects

  19 Apr 2012 | 12:39 am

  Show Time: 29 minutes 29 seconds Download mp3 (audio only) Download m4a (with visuals, requires iTunes, Quicktime, or similar) iTunes Podcast SummaryToday on Boxes and Arrows, Chris Baum talks with Patrick Quattlebaum, Design Director at Adaptive Path. Patrick has some interesting insights and tools that designers can use to develop experiences across channels. Quattlebaum explores the difference between atomism and holism, and how designers often struggle with making parts of an experience that really needs to be thought of as a whole. He also discusses how he navigates relationships in…

• The Past and Future of Boxes and Arrows

  9 Apr 2012 | 6:29 pm

  Show Time: 21 minutes 06 seconds Download mp3 (audio only) Download m4a (with visuals, requires iTunes, Quicktime, or similar) iTunes Podcast SummaryIn this episode, I had the pleasure of sitting down in New Orleans at the 2012 Information Architecture Summit with Christina Wodtke (@cwodtke), the founder of Boxes and Arrows.com. Christina shares a bit of the history and future of the web magazine that has supported both the people and ideas that have played a key role in the continuing growth and evolution of the IA discipline. Her key message is that designers need to get their ideas out…

• Das Design Revolution

  20 Mar 2012 | 12:32 am

  Experience design comrades, I speak to you today because I have a vision. A vision where one day the person who really matters is back at the heart of our design processes. Rightfully claiming pride of place at the centre of all decisions regarding our websites, interfaces and systems. I am talking, of course, of the Designer, or more specifically, the Designer’s Portfolio. For too long have we pandered to the user-centered orthodoxy at the expense of beautiful 1,200px wide images crafted for CSS gallery websites. How can we be expected to turn a small corner into a 400×300px…

• The Story's the Thing

  8 Mar 2012 | 1:06 pm

  _This is an excerpt from “UX Storytellers”:http://uxstorytellers.blogspot.com. If you enjoy it, consider getting the kindle edition of UX Storytellers – Connecting the Dots with all the stories!_ Here’s something I believe in: stories are what make us human. Opposable thumbs? Other animals have those. Ability to use tools? Ditto. Even language is not exclusive to human beings. From my amateur reading of science, the story behind our stories goes something like this: the human brain evolved with an uncanny knack to recognize and create patterns; and through some strange…

• Leonardo's Kitchen Nightmare

  15 Feb 2012 | 2:11 am

  “It’s easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.”Leonardo Da VinciSome of Leonardo’s projects failed because of their execution. The strange tale of Leonardo’s “Kitchen Nightmare” plays out like a Shakespearean “comedy of errors” where a visionary designer’s experiments all work perfectly to extremely disastrous results.In an article for the Big Design blog, I wrote about the Five Sketching Secrets of Leonardo Da Vinci, where it seemed like everything Leonardo did was successful. This, however, is not the case. Once upon a…

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  ZURB

• Size Matters Not: The Road to Foundation 3.0

  15 May 2012 | 5:30 pm

  If you hadn’t heard, bigger monitors are in, small ones are out … at least for desktops. The 1366x768 has ousted 1024x768 as the supreme screen size. Now we hope you’re not thinking that means we should stop designing for small screens, even if it is for desktops, despite what Jakob Nielsen might be saying. Because when it comes to designing for the web — size shouldn’t matter. Nielsen makes it a point to carefully say that “small screens are finally so rare for desktop computers that we don’t have to design for them.” Then he goes on to cover his bases, saying we still have…

• Why Every ZURBian Carries an iPad

  14 May 2012 | 4:05 pm

  Last week, we were excited here at ZURB to distribute new iPads to every member of the ZURB team: design, operations, marketing and engineering — even our interns. There's plenty of companies in Silicon Valley that kit their employees out with nice gear, but this wasn't just about everyone having shiny toys (though it doesn't hurt). Multi-Device is the Future You've probably noticed that it's not just laptops and desktops people are using these days. Other classes of device, like smartphones or tablets or eReaders (etc, etc) are beginning to dominate how people access the Web, or talk…

• Week In Review: ZURB Culture, Customer Service and The Scientific Method

  14 May 2012 | 2:25 pm

  Curious to learn more about the ZURB culture? If you’ve been following our posts from last week, we gave you a nice look into how a new designer adjusts into a new environment as well as our approach to failure. It’s different, and we embrace it! Culture aside, we had two other posts covering entrepreneurship and customer service topics. Grab that cup of coffee and enjoy our Week-In-Review. Breaking In A New Designer One of the most exciting times in a ZURB designer’s career is joining the company, but it doesn’t come without a few bumps in the road. Alina, one of our new designers,…

• In Product Design, Customer Service Is Much More Than A Simple Q&A

  11 May 2012 | 5:30 pm

  Customer service is a core part of ZURB’s day-to-day operations. We spend a lot of hours ensuring that each of our customers can take full advantage of the apps that they invest in. In the most traditional sense, customer service is actually quite basic. A customer has a question, gets in contact with the company and gets their question answered. Perhaps it’s not always this easy, but at its core, it’s a transactional exchange of information for a time. When it comes to ZURB (and product design), however, customer service is a completely different animal. No longer is it just a…

• Rewarding Failure? Actually, We're Fostering Success

  9 May 2012 | 4:15 pm

  Alina highlighted something the other day that caught the attention of a few people — that part of our culture is to encourage our teammates to get crazy and throw out some pretty wild ideas, even if it means failure. She rightfully called it opportunity and outlined three good reasons why we do it: To get bad ideas out of our system To make sure no creative stone is unturned And, occasionally, to gauge the customer’s wild side But there’s also another reason we do it — to learn and to do so quickly so that we can move on. We call it “fail fast.” When you enable people to…

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  UX Magazine

• Taking Mobile Global:Tips for Aligning Mobile and Global Web Strategies

  John Yunker

  15 May 2012 | 5:56 am

  With more than 55 million iPads in use around the world and more than 400 million smartphones sold in 2011, companies are increasingly thinking “mobile first” when developing their web and mobile app strategies. Hotels.com, for example, offers not only a mobile-optimized website but mobile apps specific to both the iPad and iPhone. Unfortunately, as companies rush to go mobile, they often overlook the importance of maintaining their global reach. That is, their mobile...read more By John Yunker

• 6 Key Questions to Guide International UX Research

  Liang Zhang, Pamela Walshe, Elizabeth Shelly

  10 May 2012 | 5:43 am

  Are you worried about how customers in other countries will react to your product or service? Not really sure who your international customers even are, or what they want and need? To find out, it might be time to pop outside the domestic market and conduct an international user research study. Understanding international customers is more critical than ever as emerging market economies continue their rapid expansion. With Internet and mobile usage in particular, the recent adoption rates have been astonishing. China reported 513 million Internet users by the end of 20111—an increase of 30%…

• Combining In-Person and Remote Research

  Sabina Idler

  8 May 2012 | 6:11 am

  In the early 90’s, Jakob Nielsen declared in-person user research as state of the art. “User testing with real users is the most fundamental usability method and is in some sense irreplaceable, since it provides direct information about how people use computers [...]”.1 Sometimes in-person user research can be logistically impractical or cost prohibitive, so remote user research is often employed as an alternative. As well, companies that specialize in user research often combine both in-person and remote user research. In-person user research has been around the longest, and is still…

• New Design Practices for Touch-free Interactions

  Brian Pagán

  7 May 2012 | 5:50 am

  Touch interaction has become practically ubiquitous in developed markets, and that has changed users' expectations and the way UX practitioners think about human–computer interaction (HCI). Now, touch-free gestures and Natural Language Interaction (NLI) are bleeding into the computing mainstream the way touch did years ago. These will again disrupt UX, from the heuristics that guide us, to our design patterns and deliverables. HCI Is Getting "All Shook Up" With touch, people were given a more natural, intuitive way to interact with computing devices. As it moved into the mainstream, it…

• Content as Conversation

  Ginny Redish

  4 May 2012 | 4:42 am

  Every use of your website is a conversation started by a site visitor. Think about it: why do people come to your site or app? IA, Search, Design, and Technology All Support the Content Site visitors and app users come for the content. Of course, the information architecture (IA) and the site search must make that content easy to find. The design must be attractive and usable. The technology must work. But IA, search, design, and technology are all there to support the content that people come for: the words and images that make up the conversations between your visitors and your site or app.

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  information aesthetics

• Venngage: And Yet Another Online Infographics Editor

  15 May 2012 | 4:11 pm

  After 2 very similar posts in a very small timeframe, featuring Easel.ly and infogr.am respectively, I seem not to be able to follow the 'automatic infographics editing' scene fast enough. Automatic resume infographics creator visualize.me has just launched Venngage [venngage.com], which aims to empower people to create beautiful infographics in minutes, so that "creating infographics [becomes] as easy as creating a Powerpoint presentation". As a unique feature, Venngage's visual elements are displayed as pure HTML elements, which should positively influence SEO stats, page ranks and back…

• infogr.am: Another Online Editor of Interactive Infographics

  15 May 2012 | 3:28 pm

  A few days ago, we posted the website Easel.ly, a new web-based service that aims to empower lay users to design infographic-like illustrations within the browser. Unfortunately, Easel.ly seems more apt in combining infographic-like images on a canvas, than to link real numerical data to a graphical form. So here comes Infogr.am [infogr.am], another competitor towards semi-automatic, web-based infographics editing. Developed by a start-up based in Riga (Latvia), though now based in London, the online service offers a collection of infographic themes as well as different interactive chart…

• The Historical Evolution of Europe's Borders

  15 May 2012 | 2:36 pm

  The movie "Epic time-lapse map of Europe" fast forwards a map from the year 1000 AD until 2003 to reveal the dynamic nature of Europe's borders, alliances, unions, territories, and occupied lands. An alternative movie takes a bit longer, but contains useful textual annotations such as the actual year that is shown and the events that occurred. The movie was made with "Centennia Historical Atlas" by Centennia Software. Watch the movies below. Via @tillnm.

• FatFonts: New Font Links Value of a Number to Amount of Pixels Shown

  11 May 2012 | 8:47 am

  FatFonts [fatfonts.org] is a novel numeric typeface for data visualization purposes. The design of FatFonts is based on Arabic numerals, but the amount of ink (i.e. dark pixels) used for each digit is proportional to its quantitative value. This font enables the reading of numerical data while still preserving an overall visual context. The typeface was developed by Miguel Nacenta, Uta Hinrichs and Sheelagh Carpendale at the University of Calgary. In the online gallery several case studies are documented on how this font can be used for good used. More detailed information about these…

• Easel.ly Debutes Online Editor of Infographics

  10 May 2012 | 2:02 pm

  San Diego-based start-up Easel.ly [easel.ly] is offering a beta service that allows lay people to design and implement their own "infographics" via an online editor. The user-based customization of infographics seems to be the next phase after the automatic generation of infographics, and has already been promised by community websites like visual.ly. For now, easel.ly allows users to drag and drop predefined and uploaded vector images on pre-designed canvases and themes for easy creation and customization of infographics. According to the founders Patrick Alcoke and Neil Harris, all themes…

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  UXmatters

• 7 Basic Best Practices for Buttons

  pabini@uxmatters.com

  7 May 2012 | 7:06 am

  By Caroline Jarrett Published: May 7, 2012 “It’s rather easy to find buttons that don’t comply with these basic best practices….” Here are my basic best practices for buttons: Make buttons look like buttons. Put buttons where users can find them. Make the most important button look like it’s the most important one. Put buttons in a sensible order. Label buttons with what they do. If users don’t want to do something, don’t have a button for it. Make it harder to find destructive buttons. Nothing particularly revolutionary there, right? Ever since…

• Positive Design Impact

  pabini@uxmatters.com

  7 May 2012 | 7:02 am

  By Daniel Szuc and Josephine Wong Published: May 7, 2012 “The purpose of our first meeting with the prospective client was to get an initial understanding of the product, determine its value, discuss scenarios for how people might use it, … explore who the target customers might be, and determine what differentiates the product against its competitors.” Recently, a client asked us to help one of their teams that was developing a new product. This is our story about that engagement. The First Meeting The purpose of our first meeting with the prospective client was to get an initial…

• Understanding Information Architecture Differently

  pabini@uxmatters.com

  7 May 2012 | 6:59 am

  By Nathaniel Davis Published: May 7, 2012 “There is information architecture that resembles UX architecture and design, then there’s information architecture that looks like, well, information architecture.” If you’re new to the debate about the practice of information architecture, you’ll discover that there are two polarities of thought. As Peter Boersma proposed in his 2004 blog post “Big IA Is Now UX,” there is information architecture that resembles UX architecture and design, then there’s information architecture that looks like, well, information architecture. The Big…

• Expressing UX Concepts Visually

  pabini@uxmatters.com

  7 May 2012 | 6:56 am

  By Barnabas Nagy Published: May 7, 2012 “Words are not always sufficient to describe things accurately.” It is all too easy to create UX deliverables that are not visually pleasing. But UX expertise encompasses Web design, graphic design, and branding, so why should we be satisfied with mediocre design in our deliverables? When we present our personas, sitemaps, user flows, wireframes, and other design deliverables to our clients and stakeholders, it is our duty and responsibility to create well-designed deliverables. Words and Objects Are Not Enough People visualize words differently. If…

• Interaction12 Conference Review

  pabini@uxmatters.com

  7 May 2012 | 4:23 am

  By Riley Graham Published: May 7, 2012 “I’ll describe the event from my perspective, and hopefully, talk you into attending next year!” From February 1st through February 4th, Dublin, Ireland, hosted about 800 interaction design fanatics from all around the world. Over four days at Interaction12, there were 15 workshops, 6 keynotes, and more than 80 presentations. In addition, many activities and events took place all over the city. During the conference, I met many wonderful people and attended many talks, but unfortunately, I cannot cover all of these presentations in this review.

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  A List Apart

• Responsive Images and Web Standards at the Turning Point

  15 May 2012 | 1:44 pm

  Responsible responsive design demands responsive images—images whose dimensions and file size suit the viewport and bandwidth of the receiving device. As HTML provides no standard element to achieve this purpose, serving responsive images has meant using JavaScript trickery, and accepting that your solution will fail for some users. Then a few months ago, in response to an article here, a W3C Responsive Images Community Group formed—and proposed a simple-to-understand HTML picture element capable of serving responsive images. The group even delivered picture functionality to older…

• Application Cache is a Douchebag

  8 May 2012 | 7:00 am

  We’re better connected than we’ve ever been, but we’re not always connected. ApplicationCache lets users interact with their data even when they're offline, but with great power come great gotchas. For instance, files always come from the ApplicationCache, even when the user is online. Oh, and in certain circumstances, a browser won't know that that the online content has changed — causing the user to keep getting old content. And, oh yes, depending on how you cache your resources, non-cached resources may not load even when the user is online. Lanyrd’s Jake Archibald illuminates…

• Say No to Faux Bold

  8 May 2012 | 6:59 am

  Browsers can do terrible things to type. If text is styled as bold or italic and the typeface family does not include a bold or italic font, browsers will compensate by trying to create bold and italic styles themselves. The results are an awkward mimicry of real type design, and can be especially atrocious with web fonts. Adobe’s Alan Stearns shares quick tips and techniques to ensure that your @font-face rules match the weight and styles of the fonts, and that you have a @font-face rule for every style your content uses. If you’re taking the time to choose a beautiful web font for your…

• Content Modelling: A Master Skill

  24 Apr 2012 | 8:00 am

  The content model is one of the most important content strategy tools at your disposal. It allows you to represent content in a way that translates the intention, stakeholder needs, and functional requirements from the user experience design into something that can be built by developers implementing a CMS. A good content model helps ensure that your content vision will become a reality. Lovinger explains how to craft a strong content model and use it to foster communication and align efforts between the UX design, editorial, and technical team members on your project.

• Tinker, Tailor, Content Strategist

  24 Apr 2012 | 7:59 am

  What does content strategy mastery look like? As in any field, it comes down to having master skills and knowing when to apply them. While there are different styles of content strategy (from an editorial and messaging focus to a technical and structural focus), the master content strategist must work with content from all angles: messaging architecture and messaging platforms; content missions and content management. Above all, she must advocate for multiple constituents, including end users, business users, stakeholders, and the content vision itself. Rachel Lovinger shares the skills that…

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  LukeW | Digital Product Design and Strategy

• Data Monday: Mobile Web Shopping

  13 May 2012 | 7:00 pm

  Though few people dispute the growth of mobile computing, many remain unconvinced about mobile e-commerce. And even more doubt the value of Web-based mobile e-commerce solutions -preferring native mobile applications instead. Looking at recent data, however, shows that both of these assumptions don't seem to be holding up. 79% of US smartphone and tablet owners have used their mobile devices for shopping-related activities. (source) 42% of tablet owners have “used their device to purchase an item,” compared to 29% of smartphone owners. (source) Top activities among mobile shoppers include…

• Data Monday: A Shift in E-reading Devices

  6 May 2012 | 7:00 pm

  Though more people are reading e-books each year, the devices they use to consume digital books may be changing. Recent estimates for Amazon's Kindle line seem to highlight a shift from budget eReaders to higher end tablets. One-fifth of American adults (21%) report that they have read an e-book in the past year. This number increased following a gift-giving season that saw a spike in the ownership of both tablet computers and e-book reading devices. (source) Ownership of e-book readers like the original Kindle and Nook jumped from 10% in December to 19% in January and ownership of tablet…

• Data Monday: As Tablet Size Decreases...

  29 Apr 2012 | 7:00 pm

  Though Apple's 9.7 inch iPad commands over 60% of all tablet sales worldwide, tablets of all sizes are emerging around globe. But as tablets get smaller people's use of the Web drops. Why? 10 inch tablets (like Samsung's Galaxy Tab) average 125 page views in the browser per tablet. (source) 9 inch tablets (like Apple's iPad) average 116 page views in the browser per tablet. (source) 7 inch tablets (like Amazon's Kindle Fire) average 90 page views in the browser per tablet. (source) 5 inch tablets (like Samsung's Galaxy Note) average 79 page views in the browser per tablet. (source) What could…

• UX Immersion: The Mobile Frontier

  23 Apr 2012 | 7:00 pm

  In her The Mobile Frontier presentation at UX Immersion, Rachel Hinman explored future trends in mobile and their implications for designers. Here's my notes from her talk: Mobile has arrived. As more people experience mobile technology, it’s no longer a niche topic for a subset of designers. It’s everywhere.Mobile currently feels like the Wild West: lots of unexplored terrain and people working through a lot of new challenges.But lots of people are trying to replicate physical objects, desktop applications, and office suites on mobile. This is an example of the “rear view mirror…

• UX Immersion: Enterprise Mobility Revolution

  23 Apr 2012 | 7:00 pm

  In his Enterprise Mobility Revolution presentation at UX Immersion, James Robertson discussed the intersection of intranet design and mobile. Here's my notes from his talk: People working on consumer software can share, discuss, and analyze examples of public sites. Intranets are hidden from everyone other than the company that uses them. This has lead to a lot of re-inventing the wheel and poor experiences.Mobiles are going to completely change the nature of work and organizations. The pieces are finally here to make mobility work for the enterprise.We have very slowly been making things…

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  Andy Budd::Blogography Articles

• User Research ain't no Magic Bullet

  andybudd

  7 May 2012 | 1:54 pm

  User research is an extremely powerful tool (or set of tools) for understanding customer needs and behaviours. As digital projects grow in size and complexity, the risk of building the wrong thing becomes an increasing danger. So it makes sense to spend a portion of your budget to ensure that you’ve done the due diligence and are investing wisely. Marketing teams have known this for years, so few company’s would dream of launching a product or service without first understanding the market and ensuring product-market fit. However for some reason this hasn’t filtered into the world of…

• Designing in the Browser is Not the Answer

  andybudd

  14 Mar 2012 | 1:38 pm

  The argument for “designing in the browser” seems very seductive at first glance. The web is an interactive medium that defies the fixed canvas of traditional layout tools, so why not use the browser as your primary design environment? The reason is simple. The browser was intended as a delivery mechanism with HTML and CSS a means of describing content rather than defining it (a subtile distinction I know, but an important one). As such the browser lacks even the most rudimentary tools like the ability to draw lines or irregular objects through direct manipulation. Instead this…

• Most Web Design Agencies Suck

  andybudd

  5 Mar 2012 | 12:02 pm

  Over the years I’ve heard plenty of designers moan about their clients. I’ve also witnessed a recent outburst of complaints against authors and speakers on Twitter. However the group that rarely comes under fire in public, but probably should, are the mass of terrible agencies out there. Through my travels I get to speak to lots of designers and developers, and am constantly amazed by how smart, knowledgeable and engaged these folks are. These people care passionately about doing the right thing, but are thwarted time and time again. It’s not clients getting in the way and it’s…

• Web Design Disciplines Explained Through the Medium of Dungeons & Dragons

  andybudd

  27 Jan 2012 | 10:23 am

  First off let me apologise for the laboured metaphor I’m about to inflict on you, but I thought it could be entertaining to try and describe the web design industry using a medium I’m sure you’re all familiar with—Dungeons & Dragons. However I should point out that I’m no D&D expert, having played it last when I was 13. So please don’t leave comments to the line of “you got that all wrong as those character classes were changed in AD&D 2nd Edition, Unearthed Arcana.” or I’ll pull out my +2 broadsword and go Berserker on your ass.

• UX Developer is a misleading and potentially damaging job title

  andybudd

  27 Jan 2012 | 4:58 am

  I was really disappointed to see a recent post from somebody I admire and respect defend the validity of the new UX Developer job title that has been cropping up of late. As well as being misleading, the title, UX Developer has implications that are damaging to the field of User Experience and will hasten the current devaluation of the term. Despite what many newcomers to the industry may think, User Experience Design is a well-defined specialism as distinct from visual or interface design. The practice of user experience design is a specific field of study with its own books, conferences,…

• 

  InfoDesign: Understanding by Design

• 5 Valuable Skills For UX Professionals

  PJB

  10 May 2012 | 9:02 am

  I can think of another 25 valuable skills. It takes at least 10.000 hours of work to become a real pro. "The background, education and skills of professionals in User Experience are diverse. Regardless of whether you're more on the research side or more on the design side of the User Experience, here are five skills that will make you more valuable and effective in your job." (Jeff Sauro a.k.a. @MsrUsability ~ Measuring Usability)

• How to transform vision into value

  PJB

  9 May 2012 | 7:08 am

  Service design connects here to customer experience. Presentation - "This presentation shines the light on what's missing in turning A customer experience vision into tangible business value. How do you use all that is good and useful from typical customer experience approaches? How do you add commercial rigour and the hard core analytics in a way that one competency doesn't dominate the other? What is the secret in bringing together the skills and perspectives that result in a great customer experience and an equally great commercial outcome?" (Damian Kernahan a.k.a. @protopartners…

• Principles of User Interface Design

  PJB

  9 May 2012 | 4:39 am

  Scope is clear: the design of user interfaces. "It contains a list of 20 or so design principles that I refer to all the time. This was a good way to get them down into one spot.. so I can point people there in the future." (Joshua Porter a.k.a. @bokardo)

• Enhancing user involvement with digital cultural heritage: The usage of social tagging and storytelling

  PJB

  8 May 2012 | 4:23 am

  Dutch museums enter the universe of metadata. "This paper focuses on the use of online social tagging and storytelling to enrich digital collections of cultural heritage. Together with several Dutch museums, we examined the question of whether and how social tagging could benefit these museums in disclosing specific digital collections. This led to the development of a social tagging tool as a means of researching behaviour when tagging cultural objects. The results show that tagging and storytelling can help museums enrich their collections and involve their audiences." (Harry van…

• Expressing UX Concepts Visually

  PJB

  7 May 2012 | 7:32 am

  One image, a thousand words. One word, a piece of the jigsaw puzzle. "It is all too easy to create UX deliverables that are not visually pleasing. But UX expertise encompasses Web design, graphic design, and branding, so why should we be satisfied with mediocre design in our deliverables? When we present our personas, sitemaps, user flows, wireframes, and other design deliverables to our clients and stakeholders, it is our duty and responsibility to create well-designed deliverables." (Barnabas Nagy ~ UXmatters)

• 

  Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report

• Responsive Images and Web Standards at the Turning Point – Mat Marquis in ALA

  Jeffrey Zeldman

  15 May 2012 | 2:36 pm

  IN A SPECIAL ISSUE of A List Apart for people who make websites: Responsible responsive design demands responsive images — images whose dimensions and file size suit the viewport and bandwidth of the receiving device. As HTML provides no standard element to achieve this purpose, serving responsive images has meant using JavaScript trickery, and accepting that your solution will fail for some users. Then a few months ago, in response to an article at A List Apart, a W3C Responsive Images Community Group formed — and proposed a simple-to-understand HTML picture element capable of…

• My Glamorous Life: The Power Compels You

  Jeffrey Zeldman

  10 May 2012 | 5:52 am

  I DREAMED that my friend Jason Santa Maria took a job at a popular new startup that had exploded onto the world scene seemingly overnight. A fascinating visual interface was largely responsible for the popularity of the company’s new social software product. It was like a Hypercard stack that came toward you. A post full of exciting social significance just for you would appear in a self-contained deck with rounded corners. The next post would pop up on top of the first. The next, on top of that one. And so on. In my dream, people found this back-to-front pop-up effect thrilling for some…

• Keep your site’s type right; let users work offline

  Jeffrey Zeldman

  8 May 2012 | 8:08 am

  IN ISSUE No. 350 of A List Apart for people who make websites: keep your web type looking right across browsers, platforms, and devices; let users do stuff on your site even when they’re offline. Say No to Faux Bold by ALAN STEARNS Browsers can do terrible things to type. If text is styled as bold or italic and the typeface family does not include a bold or italic font, browsers will compensate by trying to create bold and italic styles themselves. The results are an awkward mimicry of real type design, and can be especially atrocious with web fonts. Adobe’s Alan Stearns shares quick…

• A plane crash in slow-mo

  Jeffrey Zeldman

  7 May 2012 | 11:27 am

  I WAS SOBER SIX MONTHS when my Uncle George took me to lunch and told me he believed his sister, my mother, had Alzheimers. She was 60. Via frequent short visits to Pittsburgh and more phone calls than we’d shared in decades, I helped my dad accept that he needed to take her to the doctor for tests. Then I helped him accept the results. She declined over ten years. It was like a plane crash in slow motion. At my Aunt Ruth’s funeral, my mother cried and cried, with no clue who she was crying for. When I joined my parents at the grave site, my mother turned excitedly to my father…

• Big Web Show 69: Chris Cashdollar on fonts.com

  Jeffrey Zeldman

  3 May 2012 | 9:13 pm

  HAPPY COG Creative Director Christopher Cashdollar is my guest in Episode No. 69 of The Big Web Show, the weekly podcast on “everything web that matters.” In 35 lively minutes, Chris and I discuss the joys and challenges of redesigning typography mega-site Fonts.com; nimble versus waterfall; process versus inspiration; running a creative department that is interactive in every sense of the word; the two sides of a design education (learning and teaching); fostering collaboration; and the transition from doodling eight-year-old to graphic design student to interactive creative…

• 

  Keith Instone

• Cleveland lunch, Wednesday, Noon, GLBC

  UXer

  24 Apr 2012 | 8:08 am

  The next stop on my tour around the area to re-connect with my user experience colleagues and talk about options for my next career will be: Wednesday, April 25th, Noon: Lunch at Great Lakes Brewing Company, 2516 Market Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio 44113 If you are in the Cleveland area and would like to join me for lunch, then please leave a comment here, send me a tweet, leave me a message on Facebook or contact me on LinkedIn. Or just show up at GLBC at noon and ask for the Instone reservation. I would love to hear what you are working on. I would be happy to share some stories of what I have…

• Save $100 on Midwest UX conference registration

  Toledoan

  3 Apr 2012 | 11:09 am

  I am going to the 2012 Midwest UX conference (May 31 - June 2) in Columbus and I'd like others from the Toledo region to join me. Last year was the first year for Midwest UX, and it was a great conference, with content rivaling events that are much farther away. If you are interested in user experience and in the Toledo region, I highly recommend you go to Midwest UX (and/or Internet User Experience, in Ann Arbor, slated for July 16-18 - follow @internetUX for info). To encourage people from the region to attend, I am running a little contest. The winner gets $100 off their Midwest UX…

• Leaving IBM

  IBMer

  20 Mar 2012 | 8:41 pm

  Starting in April, I will not be an employee of IBM. Why? They laid me off. I am not upset about it. It was a great 10 years. I got to work with great people on really challenging and interesting business problems. I contributed to several important, transformative efforts within the company. I made a difference for users across a variety of IBM digital touchpoints. What's next for me? I do not know yet. If you are going to the IA Summit this week, then I want to talk with you about opportunities to collaborate. I am excited that I will get to do something new and different, and can build…

• Site back

  admin

  23 Dec 2011 | 2:53 pm

  I shut down the site for a while so I could fix some things on the back end. You would not have noticed, except that I have not been posting anything for longer than usual. Everything seems working on the new version of Drupal, new hosting service, etc. So a lot fewer excuses to skip write something here!

• Frontiers in Service, Columbus, Ohio, June 30 - July 3

  IBMer

  30 May 2011 | 6:07 am

  I learned about the Frontiers in Service conference back in 2007 and I have been keeping an eye on it ever since. It is where a lot of IBMers present their Service science, management and engineering research. Sylvia Long-Tolbert also had great things to say about it back when she was a professor in the business college at the University of Toledo. After touring the world, the conference is making its midwest USA stop next month, so I am trying to figure out a way to get there. Not my core areas of interest, but I am sure I would learn something. About Frontiers in Service in general Hosted…

• 

  Putting people first

• Short report on EPIC Europe, a conference on ethnography research in industry

  Experientia

  15 May 2012 | 2:54 am

  Short report on the first European EPIC meeting by Anna Wojnarowska, UX researcher at Experientia: Last Friday, 11th of May, around 100 members of the ethnographic research community in Europe gathered in Barcelona for the 1st European EPIC (Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference) meeting, to discuss the conditions of ethnographic practice in Europe. The meeting concentrated on the specifics of European cultures and traditions from the point of view of the research industry. It was developed as a younger sister of the annual EPIC conference, which this year will be held in Savannah, USA,…

• Is the 1,9,90 rule outdated?

  Experientia

  14 May 2012 | 8:42 am

  The BBC have just released some interesting research around participation online, writes Neil Perkin on FutureLab. The findings (the result of a “large-scale, long-term investigation into how the UK online population participates using digital media today”) have raised a little controversy since they seem to indicate that the long-term model or view of participation online, the 1,9,90 rule, is outmoded. “The BBC claim that their research (I’ve embedded a presentation of the research findings below) shows that the number of people actively participating online is…

• New design practices for touch-free interactions

  Experientia

  12 May 2012 | 10:06 am

  Brian Pagán of User Intelligence in Amsterdam argues that touch-free gestures and Natural Language Interaction (NLI) may open up further paths toward a true Natural User Interface (NUI). “User interfaces for computers have come a long way from vacuum tubes and punch cards, and each advancement brings new possibilities and challenges. Touch-free gestures and natural language interaction are making people’s relationship with computers richer and more human. If UX practitioners want to take full advantage of this changing relationship, our theories and practices must become richer and…

• Do you really want your bank following you around all day?

  Experientia

  12 May 2012 | 9:55 am

  A conversation with senior Wells Fargo execs reveals a bank trying to use the Internet, social media and mobile technology to worm its way deeper and deeper into their customers’ lives. “Brian Pearce, senior VP in charge of Wells Fargo’s retail mobile channel, said the bank sees mobile as “a way to be with our customers all day long.” Wells Fargo’s aim to go wherever its customers go involves more than getting them to use mobile apps, mobile websites and text banking. Pearce wants to move beyond purely mobile interactions into so-called “simultaneous uses.”…

• People-powered health co-production catalogue

  Experientia

  11 May 2012 | 9:22 am

  The people at Nesta, the UK innovation charity, think that co-production is potentially transformative and its power comes from re-framing the problem and re-establishing relationships to enable more holistic and people-centred approaches. Co-production can also tackle the lack of trust between some users and professionals, a dependency culture where people look to the state to solve their problems and a culture of expertise where professionals are trained to be the sole source of solutions. At its best, co-production can build people’s capacity to live the life they want, in the community…

• 

  Reaction!

• FanCulture: The Evolution of Influence

  16 May 2012 | 3:17 am

  In this short film, Amplify explores "the changes in fan culture in the digital age - the shift in power - and the growing importance of fans":

• THE EAGLEMAN STAG

  16 May 2012 | 3:12 am

  The 2011 BAFTA award winning short film from Mikey Please:

• Story of Send

  16 May 2012 | 2:52 am

  Google (Green) shows what happens when you send an email using Gmail (and how the company minimises the impact on the environment along the way):

• 60,000 Dominos

  15 May 2012 | 2:49 am

  They took FlippyCat 65 hours over eight days to set up...and just 12 seconds to fall...

• The World's First Invisible Ad

  15 May 2012 | 2:30 am

  We seriously doubt it's the world's first invisible ad, but hey....LYNX (or AXE, as the brand's known in the US of States) has installed the world's first invisible ad in a terrace house in Sydney. As you can see in the clip below, it's beamed onto some special LCD screens that can only been seen with polarised glasses.

• 

  Small Surfaces

• Designing a remote control for bionic ear implants

  Gabriel White

  11 May 2012 | 1:39 am

  Shane Morris and Matt Morphett talk about designing a remote control for recipients of Cochlear hearing implants and their carers. “Designing a physical hand-held device presents a number of unique challenges. Designing that device predominantly for use by folks with impaired physical abilities introduces another layer of complexity. Ensuring that the experience is appropriate for an audience ranging from five year-old kids to ninety five year-old retirees while they control one of their primary senses is just downright difficult.” Link: Matt Morphett & Shane Morris:…

• Tactile touch, the next big problem for device user experience

  Gabriel White

  9 May 2012 | 8:44 am

  As physical buttons have rapidly disappeared over the last few years, to be replaced by smooth planes of glass, this photo is a nice reminder of one of the next big mass-market device user experience and technology challenges: haptics. Link: If a key button on a remote isn’t easy to find… (imgur.com, via)Related: Four emerging mobile user experience trends Designing the Mobile User Experience Interview with BenQ about user experience Small Surfaces designs amazing mobile and device UI. Learn more

• Optimising mobile UX for real reading behaviours

  Gabriel White

  3 May 2012 | 6:30 am

  Harry Brignull writes about the failures and then successes of bringing a print magazine to the iPad. “The ad team wanted to sell fixed position ads. So like in print, the HSBC ad would appear by the finance section, and so on. Now, we were determined not to have the app ruined by invasive ads. We didn’t want ads appearing on article pages. We didn’t even want them appearing between the pages of an article. So we pitched this idea that we’d have only full screen ads that would appear in between the section pages…[But] They were coming into the issue, tapping…

• Search, sort, filter: patterns for mobile UX

  Gabriel White

  25 Apr 2012 | 11:34 am

  Theresa Neil takes a look at patterns for manipulating information on mobile devices: explicit search, auto-complete, dynamic search, scoped search, saved & recent, search form, search results. Link: UI Patterns For Mobile Apps: Search, Sort And Filter (smashingmagazine.com, via)Related: Mobile design patterns for guidance and inspiration Mobile search habits in USA Mobile design patterns Wiki Small Surfaces designs amazing mobile and device UI. Learn more

• Wearable computing, past and future

  Gabriel White

  17 Apr 2012 | 10:04 am

  A recent addition to the Interaction Design Encyclopaedia goes in deep in the topic of wearable computing. The article was written by Steve Mann, who’s been working in this field for decades. “An important distinction between wearable computers and portable computers (handheld and laptop computers for example) is that the goal of wearable computing is to position or contextualize the computer in such a way that the human and computer are inextricably intertwined, so as to achieve Humanistic Intelligence – i.e. intelligence that arises by having the human being in the…

• 

  Subtraction.com

• Recursive Drawing

  desk@subtraction.com

  14 May 2012 | 3:07 pm

  This made the rounds last week but it’s worth playing with — or at least watching the video. It’s a novel and quite startling concept in object-oriented drawing that’s fascinating to see in action. Via Chunk Anderson. To follow me on Twitter click here.

• When Letraset Was King

  desk@subtraction.com

  9 May 2012 | 2:50 pm

  A look at two 1970s-era catalogs from Letraset Ltd. To follow me on Twitter click here.

• Stijn Debrouwere on Journalism

  desk@subtraction.com

  9 May 2012 | 9:44 am

  A sobering diagnosis of how extensive the crisis is for journalism as something people need in their lives. Stijn is a technologist working in journalism and has an apparently keen understanding of the situation that he expresses clearly and urgently. Full blog post here. Via Mike Davidson. To follow me on Twitter click here.

• Why Publishers Don’t Like Apps

  desk@subtraction.com

  8 May 2012 | 9:08 pm

  From MIT Technology Review, a summary of the publishing industry’s ill-fated dalliance with iPad apps, including first hand experiences. “And Technology Review? We sold 353 subscriptions through the iPad. We never discovered how to avoid the necessity of designing both landscape and portrait versions of the magazine for the app. We wasted US$124,000 on outsourced software development. We fought amongst ourselves, and people left the company. There was untold expense of spirit. I hated every moment of our experiment with apps, because it tried to impose something closed, old,…

• Tracking Airfare Prices

  desk@subtraction.com

  4 May 2012 | 10:48 am

  Air fares to Europe are up significantly this year, as I recently discovered when my girlfriend and I started planning a trip to France to see relatives. To try to get a sense of whether there were any deals to be had, I started manually checking prices every day and tracking them in a Google Docs spreadsheet. I did this for about two weeks. It was laborious, but it was fascinating in that it let me decrypt just a little bit of the arcane logic that goes into the fluctuation of ticket prices. There’s not a tremendous amount of pattern recognition that you can glean from a sample size as…

• 

  Veerle's blog

• Ikea PS Collection 2012

  Veerle Pieters

  15 May 2012 | 11:37 am

  Not so long ago I received an invite to go to the launch of the Ikea PS collection for 2012 at Ikea Ghent. Unfortunately I was too busy to go but I kept my eye on it to see if it was something worthwhile to mention here. Now that I had some time to read up on it & explore the furniture I believe it is. 46 products by 19 designers For this new PS 2012 collection Ikea asked its designers to search for inspiration in more than 60 years of Ikea design history. However, instead of just simply looking back the designers were challenged to bring the designs forward by updating and innovating forms,…

• Design Goes Washing Jetty

  Veerle Pieters

  11 May 2012 | 4:19 am

  Wonderful combination of colors & characters.via Tuomas Ikonen

• Pure

  Veerle Pieters

  11 May 2012 | 4:01 am

  Dystopian cheese flavouring crisps finger man has been busy dabbing the rocks. He is walking over to finish the rocks on the right mountain.via Matthew Lyons

• Space Jam

  Veerle Pieters

  11 May 2012 | 3:44 am

  Lovely space illustrations by Italian illustrator Andrea Manzati.via Andrea Manzati

• Tycho at the Troubadour

  Veerle Pieters

  11 May 2012 | 3:29 am

  It has been awhile since I added some new work from Scott Hansen.via ISO50

• 

  Usability Counts

• Fast Company: Advertising People Are Not Normal

  Patrick Neeman

  15 May 2012 | 9:25 am

  From Fast Company. We knew it. ShareStuff to check out UX Drinking Game | UX Resume and Career Guide

• Onward Search: Research Yourself Into a New UX Job

  Patrick Neeman

  14 May 2012 | 3:10 pm

  One of the most important things about any job search is knowing the companies that you are applying to. Jessica Greco has crafted a great post about researching your way into a new UX Job. Some very good points: Research comparable jobs. If you’re the type to take on more responsibilities as they become necessary, you may be working at a higher level than your title indicates. Apply those research skills to publicly available job descriptions and salary surveys. How does your experience compare? You may be surprised to find out you’re being underpaid. Check out the data…

• The Last UX Resume Template and Career Guide You’ll Ever Need

  Patrick Neeman

  12 May 2012 | 8:29 pm

  The Usability Counts UX Resume and Career Guide Download Now Need that resume and career advice to get the UX job you love? I’m offering the Usability Counts UX Resume Template in Microsoft Word format. It includes comments and annotations to give you tips on how to write your resume. You also get a list of 30 other recommended articles for developing your User Experience career. It might not get you a job right away, but it should give you ideas on how to better structure your career history and accomplishments. You just have to fill out a 30-second form. I’ll be involved an…

• Dakotalapse: Amazing Timelapse Photography

  Patrick Neeman

  12 May 2012 | 1:02 pm

  Please upgrade your browser Nothing needs to be said. Click here to view all the videos. ShareStuff to check out UX Drinking Game | UX Resume and Career Guide

• What Are Your Organizational Challenges? Answer The Survey.

  Patrick Neeman

  8 May 2012 | 2:23 am

  I’ve got quite a few responses, but I want more. Click here to answer the survey. Here are some quotes from the survey: Very timely survey. Organizational challenges seem to loom over everything we do. I find myself designing things that never get built, or things that get built but never implemented, or being left out of the process entirely and seeing things implemented that have never been designed. … Our relatively new UX team is struggling to settle into a comfortable rhythm of working. And it’s been a challenge to not only sell UX to other departments, but also to…

• 

  21 lives

• The traps you set for yourself

  Etienne Garbugli

  9 May 2012 | 8:07 am

  When you’re in control of

• The path to greater truthfulness

  Etienne Garbugli

  4 Apr 2012 | 8:00 am

  When you get to the

• Words you should never* use in relationships

  Etienne Garbugli

  28 Mar 2012 | 8:00 am

  Some words can really hurt

• What would they expect to pay for?

  Etienne Garbugli

  21 Mar 2012 | 8:00 am

  We expect to pay for…

• How valuable is your network?

  Etienne Garbugli

  14 Mar 2012 | 10:30 pm

  It’s really easy to grow

• 

  UIE Brain Sparks

• Do A/B Tests Focus Us On The Wrong Problems?

  Jared Spool

  14 May 2012 | 11:56 am

  Last week, I attended a conference presentation where a team presented findings from their A/B Testing efforts. It was a cute presentation where they posted the control and test variants, then asked the audience to pick which one “won” the A/B test. They compared the audience answer to the variant that demonstrated the best increase in the conversion rate (sometimes as little as 0.9%, which the presenters declared as a “huge increase”). For dramatic effect, the variant that won often broke many commonly accepted design principles, supporting their case that A/B testing trumps our…

• Brian Suda – Designing with Data

  Sean Carmichael

  14 May 2012 | 10:00 am

  [ Transcript Coming Soon! ] A data visualization, when done well, can be an incredibly powerful way to communicate information. It ultimately boils down to the choices you make in how to design and present the data. If you make the wrong choice you can run the risk of not accurately displaying the data or struggling to effectively tell its story. Brian Suda, author of A Practical Guide to Designing with Data, believes experimentation is a big part of arriving at the right choices. As ideas end up on the cutting room floor, not only do you arrive at a great visualization, but you’re building…

• UIEtips: Five Factors for Successful Persona Projects

  Jared Spool

  8 May 2012 | 2:24 pm

  Personas are one of the most controversial tools in the professional UX toolbox. People either swear by them or swear at them. When they work, they are awesome, but when they fail, well, they fail gloriously. For the past few years, we’ve been researching why so many persona projects have such dismal results. We discovered there are basic factors that are critical for a project’s success, yet most teams ignored them. In today’s UIEtips, I look back at an article that discusses five of these factors. We look at the role of research, who should be involved in the personas, and…

• Self Design And The Out-Of-Box Experience

  Jared Spool

  5 May 2012 | 2:34 pm

  For many projects, self design works great. By designing for our own use, we can optimize the user’s experience to be smooth and seamless. A while back, I wrote about the advantages of self design and the alternatives to self design. Of course, to be successful at self design, you have to use your design practically every day and you have to have a base of people just like you that’s big enough to support whatever business model pays for your work. That way, when something in annoying in the design, you’ll discover it quickly. And when you fix it for yourself, you’re also fixing it…

• UIEtips: The Magical Short-Form Creative Brief

  Jared Spool

  3 May 2012 | 4:05 pm

  Small is good. We love small products. Why not small processes? Mobile phones used to be big and bulky. Then we found ways to make them smaller and pack more stuff into them. Now we walk around with multi-purpose computers in our pockets. And guess what? We use them more than ever for things we never imagined we could do. What if we did that same thing for our UX processes? What if we could “smallify” important artifacts to make them easier to carry around? Would we use them more for things we can’t imagine? In this week’s UIEtips, I talk about the Short-Form Creative…

• 

  Cone Trees

• Runne(a)r phones- if you run, you need one (earphone mounted rotary knob volume control)

  ConeTrees

  13 May 2012 | 11:09 am

  Summary This is a product idea I have submitted on Quirky targeted at runners. Changing the music volume (because of traffic, changing environmental noise) while running is always a hassle. Well, not any more, Runne(a)rphone’s here. Vote here: http://www.quirky.com/ideations/224692 (if you like it, and tell your friends about it too) The Problem This product is a solution to a very specific problem- changing the volume of your music device while running. When running, we often have to change the volume over the course of the run, especially if we’re running in the city. We come across…

• Karen McGrane on Adapting Ourselves to Adaptive Content

  ConeTrees

  3 Apr 2012 | 10:57 am

  This is a fantastic presentation on NPR’s COPE concept- create once, publish everywhere. Karen asks the right questions- why are we still letting content authors plan for where their content will live on a web page? Why do we waste time and money creating and recreating content instead of planning for content reuse? As our design and development processes evolve, our content workflow has to keep up. And she does a good job of providing the right answers on how we can we adapt to creating more flexible content.

• The best of Cone Trees for 2011

  ConeTrees

  9 Feb 2012 | 7:22 am

  2011 has ended and has been a rather good year for me. I know I have not been writing this year, but work has kept me very occupied, and happy. I left Delhi and moved to Singapore early in the year to join PebbleRoad and have since then had a great time working on a whole lot of digital strategy, user research, information architecture, mobile and social interaction design, usability testing and competitive evaluations for websites and intranets for both the government and corporations such as IE Singapore, Tourism Australia, Visa, SMU, Guiness, Singtel, DHL and more. And the projects went…

• Videos from UX Week 2011

  ConeTrees

  13 Nov 2011 | 9:17 am

  You can watch most of the videos from UX 2011 which took place in San Francisco from August 23 to 26, 2011. UX Week 2011 was organised by Adaptive Path. Chris van der Walt & P.J. Onori of HunchWorks on Applying Human-centric Design to Complex Global Problems Mark Trammell & Jesse James Garrett on Creating Engagement on Twitter Kristian Simsarian on Educating the Next Generation of Interaction Designers Teresa Brazen and Kate Rutter on Intentional Environments: Designing a Culture of Co-creation Jon Wiley on “Whoa, Google Has Designers!” Steven Pemberton on The Computer…

• Rajat Paharia on Influencing User Behaviour through Game Dynamics

  ConeTrees

  5 Oct 2011 | 10:02 am

  Rajat talks about how designers can address fundamental human needs and desires (like status, achievement, reward, competition, self-expression) to make experiences both compelling and satisfying. He talks about how game designers have known for years on how to incentivise and motivate players by addressing these needs through the use of mechanics like points, levels, leaderboards, virtual goods, challenges, and real-time feedback. He covers the migration of these mechanics out of the gaming world and into the world at large, including destination sites, devices, productivity applications,…

• 

  erova notebook

• UPA Boston 2012: Under(standing) the Influence

  Chris

  9 May 2012 | 10:08 pm

  Earlier this week I was fortunate enough to speak at the UPA Boston one-day conference and share ideas on social influence. The presentation, also viewable on SlideShare, bibliography, and interesting additional resources are available below. Under(standing) the Influence: UPA Boston 2012 View more documents from Chris Avore Bibliography: Aral, Sinan, Identifying Social Influence: A Comment on Opinion Leadership and Social Contagion in New Product Diffusion. June 7, 2010. Marketing Science, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1621780 Adams, Paul. 2012. Grouped: How Small…

• Now hiring

  Chris

  3 Jan 2012 | 9:48 am

  It’s been almost 6 months since I left the independent life and accepted a position at NASDAQ as what is essentially a product design role, overseeing and responsible for the visual design, information architecture and content strategy of many products and services. Though I’ve been able to do my share of juggling, it’s finally time to bring on someone to help me out. We’re looking for someone who has enough skills and experience to understand how static web sites work, with an emphasis on how screens appear in the browser and other devices, not necessarily how data or…

• Asbury Agile Recap

  Chris

  9 Nov 2011 | 8:53 pm

  On a rain soaked Wednesday a few weeks ago, I traded my desk in Manhattan for a sleek couch by the beach and attended Asbury Agile, a one day single-track conference for “makers and doers in the web industry” in nearby Asbury Park. After not attending a conference or workshop in some time, it was good to get out of the office and here the perspectives, ideas, and insights from other web professionals in the area–many of whom I had yet to meet or had much familiarity with at all (and after spending almost three years in the UX echo chamber, that says something). Overall the…

• Wrapping up Social Media: Social Uprising at NYU

  Chris

  12 May 2011 | 7:54 am

  Continuing my exploration into events outside of the immediate domain of user experience design, I recently attended a panel discussion at New York University that examined the role of social tools in the Middle East and North African uprisings underway in Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, and elsewhere. The discussion, Social Media: Social Uprising, was moderated by Helga Tawii-Souri, an assistant professor of media, culture, and communication at NYU, and the panelists consisted of author Clay Shirky, Arab and Muslim issues expert Mona Eltahawy, and WNYC/NPR’s “On the Media” producer Sarah…

• Field Trip: Social Capital and Computer Mediated Communication

  Chris

  7 Apr 2011 | 9:44 pm

  Only a few days from returning from the IA Summit in Denver, I continue attempting to distance myself from focusing exclusively on design lectures back home in the New York and New Jersey area. Whereas last month I ventured uptown to attend a lecture on Erving Goffman and technologically mediated social identities, this time I headed a few miles south to the Rutgers School of Communication and Information to attend another discussion tangentially relevant to my daily work responsibilities as a social interaction design strategist. The School hosted Dr. Gustavo Mesch, a senior lecturer and…

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  Everyone's Blog Posts - HFI Connect

• Steve Gillette, Usability Analyst Chevron, CUA of the Month, May 2012

  Guy Harvey

  2 May 2012 | 6:30 pm

  Steve Gilltette, Usability Analyst Chevron. Keeping it simple by Sheldon Kreger Many large companies have been using internet tools for many years. These systems support both the internal dynamics of an organization and also serve as an interface for their clients. As the importance of the internet continues to grow, there are many changes in the technology which can serve to improve these digital systems. As these developments unfold, Chevron Corporation has prioritized user experience within their intranets and web sites. Steve Gillette - our CUA of the Month - has played an important role…

• Do Personas Always Have to be ‘Good’?

  Apala Lahiri Chavan

  25 Apr 2012 | 4:30 pm

  If you have been in the field of User Experience Design, then it is very likely you are familiar with the use of personas in the design process. Introduced by Alan Cooper in 1998, the use of personas has proven to be immensely popular with professionals who follow a User Centered Design approach. What you may not be so familiar with is the parallel that Alan Cooper drew with theater when describing the use of the persona technique. Our scenario process has been described as very like method acting, in which the actor must inhabit the character, knowing what he knows and feeling his feelings.

• Answers to Select Questions on User-Centered Design

  Eric Schaffer

  24 Apr 2012 | 1:30 pm

  April 23, 2012 – submitted by Hardik Khanna Question: I am an Internet evangelist. I came across your website through a friend's recommendation and really like it. I have a query regarding web designing, which goes like this: on websites, why are filters provided on the right-hand side of the page? From my personal observation/usage I have seen that generally the cursor is always on the right side of the screen, which is probably because I am a right-handed person. Whenever I try to change filters, I have to again rub my finger against the mouse pad, which is not a very good experience.

• New Smart Watches Promise a Wearable Device Revolution

  Guy Harvey

  17 Apr 2012 | 4:01 pm

  Tech circles have been exploding this week with news that both Sony and Allerta announced new smart watches- wrist accessories that are smart, connected and will replace the dummy timepiece popular with most non-millennial groups. Both the Sony SmartWatch and Allerta’s Pebble show signs of what’s next- wireless wearable computers that can go anywhere while tethering data from iDevices and Androids- allowing for a form factor small enough to wear in our everyday lives. Pebble, a new KickStarter crowd fund project that made its goal funding after only a few short hours, and has already…

• Seven Common User Experience Mistakes To Avoid In Financial Services - How to avoid blunders when aiming for the best possible customer experience

  April McGee

  17 Apr 2012 | 1:30 pm

  I don't think there's a single financial institution still standing that doesn't recognize the obvious — ensuring a top-notch user experience for customers pays off in spades. But some have learned the hard way that there's a right way – and a wrong way – to approach the topic of making products and services usable. Sometimes in the rush to do "something-anything," companies end up hurting more than helping. Case in point — consider the company that invests major dollars and resources to produce an intuitive, easy-to-use interface only to discover that they've built something that…

• 

  New UI design patterns in the Patternry library

• Navigation List

  18 Apr 2012 | 1:27 pm

  Written by Janne Lammi Navigation list provides a simple and easy way to build groups of navigation links with optional headers. They're best used in the sidebars of a Website/Web app.

• Multicon-page pagination

  18 Apr 2012 | 1:07 pm

  Written by Janne Lammi When there are too many search results to comfortably fit on a single page, split the results into separate pages. Let the user to navigate between pages using a pagination control. The ultra simplistic and minimally styled pagination example here is inspired by Rdio. The large block is hard to miss, easily scalable, and provides large click areas.

• Badges

  17 Apr 2012 | 3:19 pm

  Written by Janne Lammi Badges are small, simple components for displaying an indicator or count of some sort. They're commonly found in email clients like Mail.app or on mobile apps for push notifications.

• Progress Bar

  25 Mar 2012 | 2:27 pm

  Written by Janne Lammi Progress bar tells the user the application is busy doing something and she needs wait. It should be used especially when the action in progress takes more than few seconds to complete to keep the conversation going with the user and make the interface feel faster and more responsive. Keep the progress bar simple, show it close to where the action is, and make the bar indicate the progress of the task.

• Feedback Messages

  25 Mar 2012 | 2:11 pm

  Written by Janne Lammi Messages are a way to provide feedback to users. *Success messages* tell people they have successfully completed a task, for example submitted a form. *Error messages* let people know that something has gone wrong and it needs to be resolved to complete the task. Errors and success messages are the most important message types, but sometimes you might need also other types of messages. *Info messages* can be used to inform the user about something relevant or to share tips or suggestions. *Warnings* should be displayed for example when there is something wrong with the…

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  90 Percent of Everything - by Harry Brignull

• The 5 stages of coping… with user research

  Harry Brignull

  30 Apr 2012 | 12:07 pm

  It may sound old fashioned, but there are still plenty of companies out there that have never done usability testing. They aren’t all dinosaurs, either – there are plenty of new start-ups popping-up who know they need to “do UX” but don’t know where to start.If you land one of these as a client, you might find it useful to refer to the “five stages of coping”. Although it was originally created as a model for the grieving process, it actually maps pretty well onto any jarring-change-in-perspective the world demands from you, usability testing included.

• From Print to iPad: Designing a Reading Experience

  Harry Brignull

  20 Apr 2012 | 7:31 am

  A paraphrased transcript of my talk at UX London 2012.Do you want to know what interests me about our industry? It’s the fact that we always talk about the importance of making mistakes, and iterating, and learning from our failures, but we never actually share real stories about our mistakes and failures. It’s this weird taboo. We’re obsessed with it – yet we never share the details. All too often we brag and we tell impressive stories, as if we’re in the locker room at school. It’s not a great situation for the young and inexperienced. It tells them that…

• Real-life user experience design

  Harry Brignull

  19 Apr 2012 | 6:18 am

  My talk at UX London this year was about the iPad app that Paul Lloyd and I designed for The Week magazine. It’s been doing rather well in the App Store (The majority of ratings are 4-5 star and it’s held the number 1 spot in the UK newsstand category a good few times), but my talk was about the mistakes we made behind closed doors in the early stage design process – the stuff that people would normally skip over when giving a conference presentation.One of the things that bothers me about the UX scene is the fact that there’s so much showmanship and self-promotion…

• Apple’s Newsstand unsubscription process is a joke

  Harry Brignull

  14 Mar 2012 | 7:57 am

  Purchasing an auto-renewing subscription to a Newsstand publication on an iPad is incredibly easy. You basically just tap “buy subscription”, tap confirm and you’re done. So how hard is it to unsubscribe?Well, it involves a 12 step process so obscure that Apple feels the need to lay it out in a knowledge-base article:From your device’s Home screen, tap App Store.Tap Featured at the bottom of the screen.Scroll to the bottom of the page.Tap the Apple ID button in the lower-left corner. (If you are not signed in, tap the Sign In button, and sign in with your Apple ID.

• Mr Tappy: a filming rig for mobile and tablet usability testing

  Harry Brignull

  27 Feb 2012 | 3:57 pm

  My good friend Nick Bowmast has created Mr Tappy, a rather well engineered kit for mounting cameras onto mobile devices and tablets, for the purpose of filming the screens for usability testing.The rig costs $289.00, which isn’t expensive when you consider it’s made from aircraft grade aluminium with stainless steel nuts. This thing is a labour of love. No more faffing around with blu-tack, sticky-tape or Meccano. It’s available for order now, though I expect the first batch will sell out pretty quickly.

• 

  Konigi

• Your app is a collection of tiny details

  jibbajabba

  8 May 2012 | 2:52 pm

  "Getting the details right is the difference between something that delights, and something customers tolerate." —Jeff Atwood I didn't read Jeff Atwood's article about cat feeders right away, because it really is 90% about a cat product. It's also a terrific demonstration of what he's saying above. The first version of the product, a cat feeder, served a core need well enough for him to satisfice with its shortcomings because the net return in time savings and improved quality of life, for him anyway, was absolutely worth it. The punchline is this. Be sure you're first getting the…

• Buxton Collection

  jibbajabba

  25 Apr 2012 | 12:23 pm

  Bill Buxton has been collecting input and interactive devices whose design struck him as interesting, useful, or important. In the process, he has assembled a great collection spanning over 30 years of the history of pen computing, pointing devices, touch technologies, as well as an illustration of the nature of how new technologies emerge. The collection can be browsed in HTML or via the PivotViewer Silverlight interface. PivotViewer provides a richer experience with faceted filtering, search, and hypertext links for metadata. Each device includes Buxton's photos, notes, details about the…

• New sketch gear at JetPens: Maruman sketchbooks

  jibbajabba

  27 Mar 2012 | 12:23 pm

  People still occasionally ask me if I make the small bound Wireframe Sketchbooks, but I stopped selling them after a few years, and instead just posted instructions for how to make your own. I know that few people have the time or interest to do that, so I've been looking at alternatives for them. A month ago, Brad from JetPens contacted me to tell me that he started supplying a sketchbook from Maruman that I might like. What I really liked is how closely it resembles the one I made. Some of my Instagram friends have been seeing pics of me using the Maruman Mnemosyne Inspiration Notebook, and…

• Bruce Springsteen on Creativity

  jibbajabba

  22 Mar 2012 | 9:16 am

  I'd like to talk about the one thing that's been consistent over the years—the genesis and power of creativity. ... It’s all about how you’re putting what you do together. The elements you’re using don’t matter. Purity of human expression and experience is not confined to guitars, to tubes, to turntables, to microchips. There’s no right way, no pure way of doing it—there’s just doing it. From Bruce Springsteen's inspiring 2012 SXSW Keynote Speech.

• Screenleap Screen Sharing

  jibbajabba

  14 Mar 2012 | 2:27 pm

  Screenleap is a free service that lets you share your screen from any device with a browser, including tablets and smartphones. No software downloads, installs, or sign ups are required. May come in handy for people doing customer support or testing sessions where participant software installation could be an issue.

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  KA+A : Blog

• Startup Remix

  Janneane Blevins

  2 May 2012 | 11:51 am

  We all know music sampling. Like the song “Take Care”, which began with Gil Scott-Heron, then passed through Jamie XX and ultimately on to Drake, who sampled it and pulled in Rhianna for vocals. Listening to all of its permutations the other day, inspiration struck — sampling occurs in startups, too! Like Fancy, which I blogged about the other day; it feels a little bit like Pinterest, Svpply and Fab all rolled into one. And Pinterest – isn’t that a little bit Tumblr and Polyvore? Obviously/ironically/interestingly enough, I’m not the first one to have this…

• The Fancy : Pinterest for Men

  Janneane Blevins

  18 Apr 2012 | 3:23 pm

  If you’re one of those guys thinking Pinterest is just for girls, and can’t bring yourself to adopt it despite its stunning growth, you might check out The Fancy – part store, part magazine, part bookmarking – a tool to curate the things that define you. It’s a bit like Pinterest, but sleeker, cooler, more minimal, and more provocative. It’s luxury. And women, don’t be shy; you can Fancy as well (the break down is about 60:40, male:female). Backed by the likes of Kanye, Jack Dorsey, Andreessen Horowitz, and PPR, Fancy is certainly not lacking street…

• Facebook & Instagram : Buying Cool

  Janneane Blevins

  13 Apr 2012 | 3:06 pm

  It’s been days now since Facebook erupted the tech world with their $1B purchase of Instagram. Since then, bloggers and reporters alike have been trying to determine the causes and ramifications of the deal. Popular theories include: Defense/Offense: Facebook bought a potential competitor and prevented other competitors from doing the same. As David Carr said in the New York Times, “Good for Facebook for buying a bandwagon before they got ran over by it.” Mobile UX: Facebook’s mobile app is perhaps its weakest link and has been “publicly labeled as a risk to its…

• SXSW 2012 : Empathy Building Tools for Better Collaboration

  Janneane Blevins

  21 Mar 2012 | 3:27 pm

  I enjoyed the better part of an hour, attending the bite-sized Future 15 panels at SXSW 2012. At just 15 minutes a pop, these talks were focused, direct, and spanned a variety of topics that kept my interest. One that I enjoyed in particular, was by Kyra Edeker of Project202: Empathy Building Tools for Better Collaboration. Kyra prescribed three tools, to help teams work better: Deep Listening Non-attachment Generosity Deep ListeningDeep listening is all about being present and communicating it through body language. So put away those phones during meetings! Also, practice simply listening to…

• SXSW 2012 : Storytelling : How To Build Entrepreneurship Communities

  Janneane Blevins

  16 Mar 2012 | 12:51 pm

  SXSW has long been advising on how to build startup communities, as you can see from Kristian’s post back in 2009. This year’s “How to Build Entrepreneurship Communities” panel was no different. Successful startup communities still need capital, mentors and support systems to thrive. Perhaps new to this year’s conversation, though, was the need for storytelling. The startup epicenters on the coasts have media bulwarks in their neighborhoods – Fast Company, Mashable, TechCrunch, The New York Times – lapping up their frenzy and pushing it out into the…

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  The UX Booth

• Designs Well with Others: Collaboration for Designers (Part 1)

  Raluca Ene

  15 May 2012 | 8:30 am

  “And there came a day, a day unlike any other, when Earth’s mightiest heroes and heroines found themselves united against…” – poor design, typographic crimes and the threat of confusing interfaces! Sounds great, doesn’t it? Successful teams can feed off each other’s creative drive to push innovative ideas forward resulting in amazing work. Poor team dynamics, however, can lead to Frankenstein creations. Overcoming these challenges enables a distributed team to author its own success story. Just like the X-men who only succeed by uniting their forces, the “UX-men” (and…

• Effective Presentation of a Website’s Navigation

  Andy Montgomery

  8 May 2012 | 8:30 am

  Users obtain information on the web in one of two ways: searching or browsing. Browsing – moving through a multi-faceted content structure – is made easier when information architects present users with an intuitive navigation hierarchy. This article discusses two techniques to that end. There’s a great line in the Postal Service song, This Place is a Prison, that states, “It’s not a party if it happens every night.” Although the singer specifically refers to a life of too much partying, it’s a good reminder that anything that happens too regularly loses its significance. This…

• How to Win the UX War Within Your Organization

  Girish Gangadharan

  1 May 2012 | 8:30 am

  When companies don’t care about user experience, it is clearly reflected in the products they create. Although everyone can agree that software should be intuitive, user-friendly, and aesthetically pleasing, many managers aren’t willing to invest the time and resources it takes to build something compelling. A large part of our job as UX advocates, then, is explaining design’s impact on the company as a whole. Determining which battles to win and which battles to lose – even intentionally – can help you win the UX war. The war within your organization is probably…

• Breaking Out of the UX Status Quo

  Barnabas Nagy

  24 Apr 2012 | 8:30 am

  As a UX Designer you’ve committed your career to helping people. You challenge the status quo everyday…but are you challenging it enough? How about with your deliverables? Your customers are people, too! Are your common deliverables – personas, sitemaps, user-flows and wireframes – really usable or are they just getting in the way? It’s no secret to us: user experience designers speak their own language. From personas to user journeys, card sorts to wireframes, there’s a certain vernacular to our profession. It’s something that we learn over the…

• Enhancing Your eCommerce Site’s Credibility: Part 2

  Rajlakshmi Borthakur

  19 Apr 2012 | 8:30 am

  In the previous part of this series I addressed the role that credibility plays in online retail sites. Because an increasing number of users are leaving these sites, it behooves us to ensure that the ones that we design are perceived favorably. I then explored a few ways to do this–to increase a retail site’s perceived credibility– including both security and ethical considerations. Picking up where my last article left off, I’ll now discuss how certain communication and user assistance strategies can be used to further improve your perceived credibility. Let’s jump right in!

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  Mantia

• Tesseract

  Louie Mantia

  15 May 2012 | 11:01 am

• SHIELD

  Louie Mantia

  8 May 2012 | 2:23 am

• The DMV

  Louie Mantia

  30 Apr 2012 | 4:40 pm

  Update: I sent a message to the DMV on Twitter, and then they gave me a call and answered all the questions I have. I need to get a California driver’s license. I go to the California DMV website. With a good effort of searching around, I don’t see how I can apply for one if I have another state license. That leaves me two options: call and find out or go to the DMV in person. I opt for going in person, because I assume the phone solution isn’t going to work well, and in reality, I’m going to have to go in anyway. So I look at the nearest DMV location to me. Great, 20…

• Ive Drives 2

  Louie Mantia

  15 Apr 2012 | 5:31 pm

• Hardware Updates and Lukewarm Reactions

  Louie Mantia

  26 Mar 2012 | 11:00 am

  With every new product Apple announces, there are more people with lukewarm reactions. “I’ll wait until next year.” I’ve wondered why people seem to think that Apple is trying to create a new device every year for every person. Apple does not expect you to purchase a new iPhone, iPad, or AppleTV every year. They’ll certainly love you buying one year-after-year, but if you hold off, no one’s hearts are broken. Eventually, they’re getting more money from you. Think about it, since you bought an iPhone or iPad, how many of you have switched to another…

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  User Vision

• Inspiration from the International eGoverment Forum

  Chris Rourke

  24 Apr 2012 | 7:55 am

  Last week I spoke about how user experience, user-centred design and participative design methods can be applied as part of successful eGovernment programme at the International eGovernment Forum which took place in Manama, Bahrain.  My talk focused

• Design your app to score big with sports fans

  Mark Westwater

  28 Feb 2012 | 9:53 am

  Scenario: A golf fanatic without Sky Sports wants to check the second round results from the WGC Accenture World Matchplay event. Conveying sports scores, in particular golf, seems to have become something of a lottery recently. Last week was the

• RNIB takes legal action on accessibility

  Ross Philip

  15 Feb 2012 | 5:46 am

  We have all been great advocates for accessible web design for a number of reasons - from the ethical, moral and inclusive, to the commercial and legal.  However the latter has always been seen as more of a grey area. Whilst it is a legal require

• The multi-channel customer experience saves the day

  Mark Westwater

  14 Feb 2012 | 9:54 am

  It is fair to say that RBS have garnered a great deal of negative press over the last few years including the recent executive bonus payments issue. This is not a topic for this forum but I would like to present a situation where the RBS multi-platfo

• User Vision MENA at GITEX

  Simon Duke

  30 Oct 2011 | 7:38 am

  Earlier this month User Vision MENA attended GITEX, one of the largest and most important ICT global events. The 5 day show aims to deliver a leading platform for industry innovation and has an impressive track record of attracting the biggest nam

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  Cre8pc Usability Testing and Web Design Support

• Links for 2012-05-14 [Digg]

  15 May 2012 | 2:00 am

  Cre8asiteforums.com - Forums, blog, jobs site for Sale on Flippa: Cre8asiteforums and Forums Blog 13 yrs old, web design/marketing community Flippa: Website cre8asiteforums.com is up for auction. Price negotiable for the right home.

• Does the Social Web Impact Human Behavior?

  cre8pc

  3 May 2012 | 12:00 pm

  CNN’s online news site recently posted a poll that asked, “Are you tired of social networking?” When I had checked their results, it showed that 74% chose “YES.” Yet according to Inside Twitter by Alex Cheng, Mark Evans and Harshdeep Singh, after analyzing information disclosed on 11.5 million Twitters accounts, 72.5% of all users joined during the first five months of 2009. 85.3% of all Twitter users post less than one update per day. Twitter is not the sole means of social networking of course, but this is one small example of conflicting reports regarding the Internet and human…

• Quick Second Credibility Usability Test

  cre8pc

  1 May 2012 | 3:14 pm

  In a Lance Loveday’s article called Designing For The Subconscious Mind, he described his experiences when showing two different web site pages to an audience a half second apart. He then asked the participants which web site they’d prefer to do business with. The “professional” and “credible” page won over the “small time” and “cheap.” As Lance pointed out, nobody said, “I don’t have enough information to make that judgment.” I’m willing to bet in that particular setting, those who wanted more information felt too intimidated to ask, but his quick test is still…

• Ignore Usability Testing at Your Own Risk

  cre8pc

  30 Mar 2012 | 12:10 pm

  While more web site development companies understand why human factors web design contributes to long term business and brand success, there are still those not investing and taking risks. In my latest column for Search Engine Land, I describe the risks of not performing site testing during the developmental stages of web site design. The testing I recommend is not just on functional or server performance. I would like to see every department, from search engine marketing, to software application development to user interface engineering planning and testing together. This means adding more…

• To Underline or Not Underline Links

  cre8pc

  9 Mar 2012 | 10:00 am

  As visually entertaining the latest trends in web design may be, there are a few usability walls we run into while reading. One is the appearance of a hyperlink. Should you underline a text link? These days it’s not the only way to signal a place to click. Other clues may be a different text color, font size or hover color. Your best choice is to pick one style and be consistent through out your web pages. Does underlining words that don’t link anywhere matter? On the Web, yes. The first reason is convention. Or, another way to say it – conditioned behavior. We know that…

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  UX Movement

• Arrow and Ellipsis Affordances on Buttons and Menus

  anthony

  2 May 2012 | 1:18 am

  There’s more to menus and buttons than just labels. Before users click a button or menu option, they’ll usually read the label first. But labels alone don’t always give users a clear picture of what will happen after they click it. Sometimes users are left wondering which buttons or menu options open a new page, window or dropdown. By using proper affordances on your buttons and menus you can make this clear to users so that they can choose the action they want with full comfort. Interface affordances are certain qualities of a button or menu that cognitively help users…

• Interface Styles 3: Pixel Perfect Elements in One Click

  anthony

  26 Apr 2012 | 12:06 pm

  10 Reasons You’ll Love Interface Styles You get 10 style palettes for one price. You get free updates to future versions of Interface Styles. You get the option to work in Photoshop or Fireworks. You’ll craft beautiful mockups that’ll impress your colleagues and clients. You’ll give your interface crisp, pixel-perfect graphics for users to marvel at. You’ll make your interface more emotionally appealing to use. Your designs will look more professional with industry standard visual effects. You’ll never have to spend time to create visual effects from scratch.

• Win a Free Prototyping License from Pidoco

  Pidoco

  19 Apr 2012 | 4:42 pm

  Note: These giveaways are our way of giving back to our readership. Thank you for being a loyal reader of UX Movement. Pidoco is offering three six-month Expert licenses (each worth $356) to the readers of UX Movement! Pidoco is a web-based prototyping software for creating clickable wireframes and interactive prototypes for web and mobile applications. Pidoco is easy to use and offers smart collaboration features, a convenient usability testing module and much more! Build Web and Mobile Prototypes In development projects, teams of professionals from different areas have to work together and…

• 8 Reasons Users Don’t Fill Out Sign Up Forms

  anthony

  5 Apr 2012 | 10:14 am

  Signing up for a website is a big commitment for most people. Users that sign up for your website are giving their personal information and trust to you. If you misuse their personal information or violate their trust, you can upset your users. Most users today are more wary than ever about who handles their personal information. In a cyber world full of hackers and spammers, who can blame them? If you aren’t seeing many sign ups, your form is raising a red flag for users. Here are eight reasons users don’t fill out sign up forms. 1. Fear of getting spammed Most users are afraid that if…

• PowerMockup Winners

  anthony

  27 Mar 2012 | 11:00 am

  PowerMockup offered 5 free licenses to give away to readers. Out of the 60 people who entered the giveaway, only 5 will win a free license for PowerMockup. The winners were chosen at random from the comments. Winners will receive an email from Andreas Wulf on how to get their license. Congratulations to the 5 winners. And if you want to learn more about upcoming giveaways, follow uxmovement on twitter. Noémie Lemaitre Thomas Krahne Lawrence Tom van der Valk Michelle Knight

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  Cone Trees

• Runne(a)r phones- if you run, you need one (earphone mounted rotary knob volume control)

  ConeTrees

  13 May 2012 | 11:09 am

  Summary This is a product idea I have submitted on Quirky targeted at runners. Changing the music volume (because of traffic, changing environmental noise) while running is always a hassle. Well, not any more, Runne(a)rphone’s here. Vote here: http://www.quirky.com/ideations/224692 (if you like it, and tell your friends about it too) The Problem This product is a solution to a very specific problem- changing the volume of your music device while running. When running, we often have to change the volume over the course of the run, especially if we’re running in the city. We come across…

• Karen McGrane on Adapting Ourselves to Adaptive Content

  ConeTrees

  3 Apr 2012 | 10:57 am

  This is a fantastic presentation on NPR’s COPE concept- create once, publish everywhere. Karen asks the right questions- why are we still letting content authors plan for where their content will live on a web page? Why do we waste time and money creating and recreating content instead of planning for content reuse? As our design and development processes evolve, our content workflow has to keep up. And she does a good job of providing the right answers on how we can we adapt to creating more flexible content.

• The best of Cone Trees for 2011

  ConeTrees

  9 Feb 2012 | 7:22 am

  2011 has ended and has been a rather good year for me. I know I have not been writing this year, but work has kept me very occupied, and happy. I left Delhi and moved to Singapore early in the year to join PebbleRoad and have since then had a great time working on a whole lot of digital strategy, user research, information architecture, mobile and social interaction design, usability testing and competitive evaluations for websites and intranets for both the government and corporations such as IE Singapore, Tourism Australia, Visa, SMU, Guiness, Singtel, DHL and more. And the projects went…

• Videos from UX Week 2011

  ConeTrees

  13 Nov 2011 | 9:17 am

  You can watch most of the videos from UX 2011 which took place in San Francisco from August 23 to 26, 2011. UX Week 2011 was organised by Adaptive Path. Chris van der Walt & P.J. Onori of HunchWorks on Applying Human-centric Design to Complex Global Problems Mark Trammell & Jesse James Garrett on Creating Engagement on Twitter Kristian Simsarian on Educating the Next Generation of Interaction Designers Teresa Brazen and Kate Rutter on Intentional Environments: Designing a Culture of Co-creation Jon Wiley on “Whoa, Google Has Designers!” Steven Pemberton on The Computer…

• Rajat Paharia on Influencing User Behaviour through Game Dynamics

  ConeTrees

  5 Oct 2011 | 10:02 am

  Rajat talks about how designers can address fundamental human needs and desires (like status, achievement, reward, competition, self-expression) to make experiences both compelling and satisfying. He talks about how game designers have known for years on how to incentivise and motivate players by addressing these needs through the use of mechanics like points, levels, leaderboards, virtual goods, challenges, and real-time feedback. He covers the migration of these mechanics out of the gaming world and into the world at large, including destination sites, devices, productivity applications,…

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  Nomad Chique: Visual Experience Design

• Why do we share?

  karen@nomadchique.com (Nomad Chique)

  20 Apr 2012 | 12:08 am

  Three reasons 1. To brag 2. To complain 3. To reach out Angel Anderson, a technicolor dreamer and benevolent dictator (wonderfully described in her about.me page) explains the motivations for why we share and designing social tools for these purposes. At the UX Speakeasy Conference she discusses six social considerations when designing. 1. Landscape The landscape is crowded so design in such a way that users don’t have to leave their existing platform allowing them to cross post like Facebook’s integration with Twitter. 2. Relationship Framework The way people share through dominance (ie…

• Sharing at UX Speakeasy Conference

  karen@nomadchique.com (Nomad Chique)

  15 Apr 2012 | 6:31 pm

  A few weeks ago I went to a great user experience conference held at the San Diego Zoo (perfect spot BTW) called UX Speakeasy. I got to watch a variety of user experience experts discuss everything from user experience design to user testing. The ultimate goal of this conference, aside from the obvious – getting us out of our PJ’s on a Saturday to shake hands and put a face to a @name and meet others we normally wouldn’t get to meet in our daily routine, was to help us collaboratively improve the user experience through the sharing of knowledge and concern for a better…

• Shoulder Season User Experience Review of Southwest Airlines – Part II

  karen@nomadchique.com (Nomad Chique)

  18 Nov 2011 | 1:14 am

  Last week I wrote a review about the user experience of Southwest Airline’s website specifically discussing the navigation and presentation. This week I end the discussion with a review of the content and interaction design of the website. Content Overall, from what I did see, the organization of the content and copy writing seemed to be well done and speaks in the voice of the brand that I am accustomed to hearing – friendly, approachable, contemporary, easy-going. I honed in on The Southwest Experience section and was pleased to see how it neatly and cleanly grouped the key…

• Shoulder Season User Experience Review of Southwest Airlines

  karen@nomadchique.com (Nomad Chique)

  10 Nov 2011 | 2:31 am

  It’s shoulder season! What’s that you ask? It’s one of those times of the year when you can travel for less cost and avoid the crowds because the peak summer season has ended… and the airlines and hotels really need to get butts in seats and fill those rooms, respectively. So in honor of shoulder season I thought it would be fun to do a quick user experience review of Southwest Airlines, which is one of my favorites for domestic travel. I decided to review their website and its mobile version, as well as its mobile app. Here are some of what I loved (and didn’t love) about their…

• How to Stay Productive As a Web Developer

  karen@nomadchique.com (Nomad Chique)

  4 Nov 2011 | 2:18 am

  Where do you find the time? It’s a question I’m asked weekly. Three nights a week I attend a web professionals meeting, social media chat, or local networking event. I watch at least two webinars every week (my friends call me a “webinar-holic.”). As a volunteer leader for two professional groups, I help plan and market monthly events. Oh, and yes, my days are spent designing and developing websites for small businesses and non-profits through my web consulting business. I’m not a productivity expert. Working from home is a challenge. Staying focused takes a lot of work. And…

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  Symantec Connect - Inside Symantec - Blog Entries

• Meet The New Norton Secured Seal

  Reshma Kumar

  30 Apr 2012 | 2:49 pm

  The seal of trust and security we're all familiar with which appears on websites across the internet has a new identity. Now known as the Norton Secured Seal - previously, the VeriSign Trust... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

• Guidelines for Presenting Visual Designs

  Jackie Moore

  17 Apr 2012 | 12:50 pm

  Visual designs can be presented in different ways, so it always a good idea to know who you will be speaking to. They can be shown with or without annotations depending on the audience. A business... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

• New Symantec.com Now Live

  Reshma Kumar

  5 Apr 2012 | 10:00 am

  Phase one of our brand new website which we recently told you about has been launched, providing a new and improved Corporate and Enterprise user experience on Symantec.com worldwide. The first... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

• Redesign of Symantec.com Coming Soon

  Reshma Kumar

  26 Mar 2012 | 11:25 am

  We are very excited to announce that Symantec.com is currently undergoing a redesign which will launch shortly. What To Expect The redesigned site will take the best of our current site and evolve... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

• Balancing Consistency with the Needs of the User

  Steve Riley

  9 Mar 2012 | 11:11 am

  One of the challenges of user experience design is coming up with a meaningful and universal definition of the word "consistency." And I think, therein, lies a self-defining problem.... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

• 

  Baymard Institute

• Designing With Metaphors & Skeuomorphs

  Christian Holst

  8 May 2012 | 1:52 am

  Metaphors are often used in interface designs as a shortcut to tell a story, mimic something tangible and in general make otherwise puzzling digital products more relatable. Digital metaphors date back to when Xerox PARC first invented the GUI (that Apple and then Microsoft subsequently commercialized). Here we got metaphors for “desktop”, “documents”, “trash bin” and “folders”, that all visually looked and conceptually functioned much like their real-world siblings. These concepts have since evolved beyond the simple visual metaphor to a point…

• UI: Proper Indicators for Hidden Elements

  Christian Holst

  25 Apr 2012 | 1:44 am

  Tabs, collapsed menus, accordion forms, and the ever popular hover items such as mega menu drop-downs – progressive disclosure is a great way to cut down visual clutter while still offering the user lots of content and features. However, there’s an inherent danger to these hidden elements: the user may fail to notice that the hidden content exists! Proper indicators for the hidden content are therefore paramount. After all, if (in the mind of the user) the content is “not there” the user may consequently assume your site doesn’t have this content and instead go to a…

• Idea: Error-Fields Only

  Jamie Appleseed

  9 Apr 2012 | 9:53 pm

  Validation error pages are dreadful. You just filled out 20 form fields yet you still get the same bloated page thrown back in your face because a single field failed the validation. When getting the exact same page (but now with an error message) the user will feel that little or no progress has been made – despite actually having typed 90% of the form fields correctly. Image credit: BlueNile. I clearly recall the sighs of despair during our last usability study each time a test subject encountered a validation error. This frustration was in part caused by the fact that they were returned…

• 7 Limitations When Designing For Mobile

  Jamie Appleseed

  21 Mar 2012 | 1:38 am

  So you have a website designed for standard desktop computers, but you obviously want to keep up with times and make your site mobile-friendly too. However, it isn’t just a matter of scaling down your design – it’s a new platform with a new set of interaction patterns and limitations. In this article we’ll explore seven UI limitations to be aware of when going from desktop to mobile web. 1) No hover state On smartphones there’s no hover state (not yet anyways). This can be a challenge for pages with a lot of content or features as the interface quickly gets bloated…

• UX: 7 Product Image Categories

  Christian Holst

  6 Mar 2012 | 1:50 am

  Images sell. But besides the traditional white-background product image shot from three different angles, which product image categories can you include in your product gallery? A dress on a hanger will look vastly different from one on a mannequin, that again will look vastly different on a real human model, that again will look vastly different when worn in the street as opposed to a studio. The level of information range from descriptive to telling a vibrant story about owning the product. Online shopping is typically inferior to shopping in the physical world because the online medium by…

• 

  Wireframes Magazine

• Multi-Device Layout Patterns

  Jakub

  30 Apr 2012 | 7:54 am

  Multi-Device Layout Patterns is a short compilation of a few common layout patterns by Luke Wroblowski after he has gone through the Media Queries site. The article contains 5 high level layout considerations that could work for when dealing with responsive wireframes. A great inspirational read for those who like to respect flexible screen widths. Credits: Luke Wroblewski

• Job Postings

  Jakub

  25 Apr 2012 | 10:04 am

  Putting my commercial hat on I’ve just started a Jobs section experiment on this blog. Why not? To start off and populate a few listings, the first five posts will be free. So if you have a job you would wish to advertise, please email me: the company name, job title, link to job description and a location and I’ll post it. Cheers. Jakub

• Justinmind Prototyper FREE 1.0 and PRO 4.5

  Jakub

  24 Apr 2012 | 7:51 am

  The other month, Justinmind Prototyper went ahead and split their pricing plans into two, with a paid pro and a free version. As a refresher, this is an advanced prototyping tool allowing for such things as rich interactions, data simulation, variable based and conditional rules (for both Mac OSX & Windows). They have also shared a few of their prototype examples online. The Free edition is slightly lighter but still should be able to satisfy many designers’ needs. It comes with access to a wide library of iPhone, iPad, Android and web based widgets. Some useful widgets include:…

• 15 Dribbble UI Sketching Designers

  Jakub

  23 Apr 2012 | 1:14 pm

  There are those who design, and then there are those who design in the open – enter dribbble.com. Although sharing a 300 by 400px image perhaps might work if you want to show off a shiny button style, maybe it isn’t always the best constraint for interaction type of work (flows, multiple screens, scenarios and stuff in between the screens). Nevertheless the other day I was looking through dribbble.com out of curiosity for some designers who might be doing a bit of UI sketching type of work. I guess I always find it interesting to look at how others sketch. Here is a bit of a list…

• Interface Origami

  Jakub

  16 Apr 2012 | 9:05 am

  Juan has been recently playing with paper in order to explore some possibly new interactions. This person is trying to pinch, tear, flip, curl, fold, and peel UI’s in new ways just for kicks without the limitations of pixels. In a way this kind of stuff resembles paper prototyping a bit but probably focuses more on discovering new gestures. Either way, it’s an awesome way to think outside the box in my opinion, as tactile play breads creativity. Thanks for sharing! In Juan’s own words: In a previous post, I mentioned a way of thinking about interactions and interface within…

• 

  Users Know

• Sometimes It’s Not the Change They Hate

  Laura Klein

  3 May 2012 | 4:36 pm

  There has been a lot of discussion in the design world recently about "change aversion." Most of the articles about it seem to be targeting the new Google redesign, but I've certainly seen this same discussion happen at many companies when big changes aren't universally embraced by users.Change aversion is a real thing. Often people don't like something different just because they're used to the old way. Once they get used to the new way, they discover all the wonderful new features and are happy with the new change.But sometimes your users' rage isn't change aversion. Sometimes your new…

• I Don't Know What's Wrong with Your Product

  Laura Klein

  4 Apr 2012 | 1:59 pm

  When I’m talking with startups, they frequently ask me all sorts of questions. I imagine that they’re probably really disappointed when I respond with a shrug. You see, frequently they’re asking entirely the wrong question. And, more importantly, they’re asking the wrong person.It is an unfortunate fact that many startups talk to people like me (or their investors or their advisors or “industry experts”) instead of talking to their users. Now, obviously, if they just asked the users the sorts of questions they ask me, the users couldn’t answer them directly either. This is the…

• Fucking Ship It Already: Just Not to Everyone At Once

  Laura Klein

  2 Mar 2012 | 11:36 am

  There is a pretty common fear that people have. They’re concerned that if they ship something that isn’t ready, they’ll get hammered and lose all their customers. Startups who have spent many painstaking months acquiring a small group of loyal customers are hesitant to lose those customers by shipping something bad. I get it. It’s scary. Sorry, cupcake. Do it anyway. First, your early adopters tend to be much more forgiving of a few misfires. They’re used to it. They’re early adopters. Yours is likely not the first product they’ve adopted early. If you’re feeling…

• Fucking Ship It Already: Prototype Testing Can Save You Time

  Laura Klein

  15 Feb 2012 | 8:00 pm

  So, I was talking to a company the other day, and they had just done a major redesign of their product. Unfortunately, as soon as they released it, they started getting customer complaints. They had removed a particular feature from the main part of the product, and paying customers started to scream. They were already allowing people to use the previous design, which was a good thing, since folks started switching back immediately. Of course, they went into recovery mode. They started looking at customer feedback and planning a redesign of the redesign to reintegrate the feature they’d…

• Fucking Ship It Already: Limited Products vs Shitty Products

  Laura Klein

  13 Feb 2012 | 12:15 pm

  In our second installment of Fucking Ship It Already, we deal with a common problem for startups: shitty products. Look, I know that building a product with one or two engineers and no money is tough. As an entrepreneur, you almost certainly have far more ideas than you have resources to create those ideas. And it doesn’t help that you have people like me screaming, “Ship it! Ship it!” before you’re really ready. Who could possibly blame you for shipping a product that is, frankly, kind of shitty?I could. Knock it off. Let’s take a step back and try to understand the difference…

• 

  The UX Bookmark

• Ergonomics for Interaction Designers

  admin

  22 Apr 2012 | 8:17 am

  The topic of discussion is the increasing value of ergonomics knowledge to the interaction designer. Ergonomics is necessary for 3-dimensional, tangible product design where issues of physical fit and comfort are critical. But for interaction designers in the 2-dimensional world of the display screen, ergonomics has largely been…irrelevant. For example in most cases, interfaces are designed for existing, defined hardware that are out of the control of the interaction designer. But things are changing. The continuing convergence of digital interfaces with physical products is putting…

• Mobile Prototyping Essentials

  admin

  22 Mar 2012 | 4:23 am

  As the presenter puts it, designers new to mobile interaction design don’t have the domain specific skills or heuristics to lean on. The best way to develop those skills is to prototype early and often. This presentation makes a great 101.

• Organizing digital information for others

  admin

  2 Mar 2012 | 12:17 am

  This short free to download ebook explores how lists, categories, trees and facets can be better used to organize information for others. You also learn how metadata and taxonomies can connect different collections and increase the findability of information across the website or intranet. Organizing digital information for others Disclosure: I work for the company that released the ebook. None the less, I have included it here because it I think it deserves to be here.

• The UX of Co-Design: Experience Principles for Successful Client Workshops

  admin

  22 Feb 2012 | 8:30 am

  While creating the right methods and activities for planning a client workshop is important, what has been especially fascinating is explicitly crafting the workshop-participant experience and recognizing how the participant experience is connected to the overall project success. Some of the experience principles for co-design workshops with client teams followed at Adaptive Path are: Honor the gathering Establish shared reference Evoke the mission Personalize the purpose Prepare for excellence Plan for productive groups Reveal the forest in the trees Remember the Enterprise Be grateful Bring…

• Inside The Atlantic: How One Magazine Got Profitable by Going ‘Digital First’

  admin

  3 Feb 2012 | 7:30 am

  With consecutive quarterly growth in both print and digital advertising sales, The Atlantic has emerged as a vanguard in an industry harassed by declining ad revenues and falling circulations. And the credit, its executives say, belongs to the ‘digital first’ strategy it embraced four years ago. Inside The Atlantic: How One Magazine Got Profitable by Going ‘Digital First’

• 

  Perspectives on Experience Design

• Multiple Devices. Cloned Experiences?

  13 May 2012 | 10:40 am

  Usability Engineers and Technologists who think they understand the basic principles of User Experience Design often brag that their latest UI is one that can be rendered consistently from device to device. They'll go on to state that a consistent User Experience across devices is "best practice" for UX Design.If their interpretation of that "best practice" is the replication of a user interface across multiple types of devices and form factors, I say they are missing the point of User Centered Design..big time!Multi-platform, brand consistency is, indeed, important, in terms of the…

• What has your UX Manager done for you, lately?

  8 May 2012 | 10:57 am

  You may have entered the UX field indir­ectly, through mento­rship, or by studying peers who you admire. Addit­ionally, as you evolve as a UX pract­itioner, or look for new emplo­yment in the field, it is important that you seek an employer who meets your personal and profe­ssional needs. When you take an inter­view, remember that it isn’t a one-way inter­rogation, but the start of a profe­ssional relat­ionship. For it to work, you must feel that you are getting as much out of the relat­ionship as your future employer is getting from you. Further, if you are currently employed as…

• Digital Tactics for eCommerce Personas

  12 Apr 2012 | 10:05 pm

  Success or failure, for an eCommerce business, is linked to an understanding of the different behaviors of online shoppers. Developing successful tactics to support unique behaviors, tasks, and motivations, means getting familiar with the following eCommerce personas. Get the full infographic here Browse more data visualizations. Jonathan Lupo SVP/Experience Design, Co-Founder Empathy Lab http://twitter.com/userexperience

• Know Your Digital Media Consumer [INFOGRAPHIC]

  22 Mar 2012 | 4:29 pm

  With businesses rushing to extend their digital distribution of media to connected consumer devices, and Cable television threatened by the onslaught of "OTT" (Over the Top) services, it is more important than ever to truly understand the "Digital Media Consumer". Who are they? What are their likely behaviors? What tasks will they need to accomplish, when accessing broadband user experiences across devices? Empathy Lab has collaborated with media companies to answer these questions, in an effort to help them extend their distribution of digital media products and services. The following…

• Applications Are For Humans

  16 Mar 2012 | 1:44 am

  Empathy Lab believes that intuitive and engaging interfaces are designed with an in-depth understanding of your end-users’ needs, behaviors, and motivations. Here is an overview of our behavioral research practice. Apps are for Humans View more PowerPoint from Jonathan Lupo Jonathan Lupo SVP/Experience Design, Co-Founder Empathy Lab http://twitter.com/userexperience

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  IDYeah Usability Blog

• Use Profile Picture As Emoticon in Facebook Chat

  Vishal Mehta

  11 May 2012 | 6:49 am

  Facebook Chat Allows Profile Picture As Emoticon Facebook allows you to insert profile picture of anyone in the chat window. It’s a nice little feature to make the chat more picturesque. The convention is to type as: [[profile-id]] OR [[profile-name]]. Everyone’s profile page URL contains either the id or the name; for example: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1499865610 OR [...]

• GoDaddy Domain Smart Search

  Vishal Mehta

  4 May 2012 | 4:47 am

  Domain Search on GoDaddy When you search for a domain name on Godaddy, it displays instantly a series of smart results, based on the most common extensions people choose. The feature is very functional and easy in that the users do not have to navigate back and forth for search options and re-do it. The [...]

• LinkedIn iPad App Has a Privacy Hole

  Vishal Mehta

  2 May 2012 | 9:56 pm

  Article first published as LinkedIn iPad App Has a Privacy Hole on Technorati. LinkedIn launched an App on iPad recently. How does it fare in experience as compared to browsing LinkedIn online? LinkedIn has sadly managed to create a disconnected quality between both experiences – from a browser vs through the App. It is inconsistent [...]

• Consistency – Product Experience Across Devices

  Vishal Mehta

  1 May 2012 | 10:34 pm

  Consistency can be difficult for a product company to maintain in its branding and user experience through growing platforms. PC to Mobile to Tablet. iOS to Blackberry to Android to Windows Mobile. It is however, mandatory I would opine to achieve the consistency. The following three high-level points will either drive home or drive away [...]

• Smiley

  Vishal Mehta

  23 Apr 2012 | 8:00 am

  Smiley in Communication In this new age, early “warmth” is exchanged between newly formed acquaintances, in hope of building quick relationships. Smileys and other emoticons that we used only with close friends, family and blind dates (!!) now find place even in semi-formal and formal situations. What came off-age during Instant Messenger days, now is [...]