February 2012
1 post
UX and the Kano Model →
One of the most important aspects with the Kano model is how time affects the attributes. Customer satisfaction with a given feature will deteriorate over time as companies start compete on the feature and customers get accustomed to it.
January 2012
2 posts
Positive UX: Optimal user experience is more than... →
The idea that good UX isn’t simply the absence of usability issues. I intend to draw parallels between the fields of well-being and UX in order to illustrate the factors that define and foster Positive UX and the implications this may have on measuring good experience with the web.
Desire Is A Universal Language →
No matter how motivated we are or how much effort we invest in our work, it doesn’t change the fact that we devote a sizable chunk of our careers to working on brands no one truly cares about….
December 2011
10 posts
Anyone Can Design, Only a Few Can Be Good →
Design has never been more accessible than at this moment, and design is getting more and more accessible. Not only are design tools more user friendly, design thinking is a skill-set that is used…
Five lessons from the best interaction designs of... →
Frog’s Robert Fabricant breaks down the themes from the 2011 Interaction Design Awards.
“Technologies like cheap sensors and cloud computing are increasingly being used to augment our daily…
Why People Adopt Or Wait For New Technology →
On the Quora, Alexia Tsotsis asked an interesting question: What are the key differences between “Normals” (normal mainstream users) and tech early adopters? Here’s the answer I posted:
I’ve…
Increasing Performance and Conversions Through... →
Savvy marketers understand these days it’s not how much traffic you drive to your site, but how many of those visitors are being turned into customers—turning to multivariate testing (MVT) is key in…
Encouraging Participation and Fun During... →
By Janet M. Six
Published: December 19, 2011
Send your questions to Ask UXmatters and get answers from some of the top professionals in UX. In this edition of Ask UXmatters, our experts discuss how…
How To Achieve Simplicity In Design →
Simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication
—Leonardo da Vinci
In his now classic book Art and Visual Perception, Rudolph Arnheim noted that people will perceive and interpret…
5 Sketching Secrets of Leonardo Da Vinci →
You can improve your sketching and paper prototyping abilities by adopting some of the methods used by Leonardo da Vinci in his sketchbooks. Leonardo was a prolific sketcher, filling his…
Warm Gun: Designing for Emotion →
In his Designing for Emotion: Sex, Love, & Violence presentation at the Warm Gun Design Conference in San Francisco, CA Dave McClure walked through several ways to create emotion in people that…
Another Case for Using Top Aligned Form Labels →
By now, most designers should know that top aligned labels allow users to fill out forms faster than left aligned labels. This makes sense when you read and understand why and the research that…
The Anatomy of an Experience Map →
Experience maps have become more prominent over the past few years, largely because companies are realizing the interconnectedness of the cross-channel experience. It’s becoming increasingly useful…
November 2011
10 posts
Severe Change and the Sudden Loss of Competence →
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Four Stages of Competence. These four stages are unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and unconscious competence. As someone…
Complexity and User Experience →
The best products don’t focus on features, they focus on clarity. Problems should be fixed through simple solutions, something you don’t have to configure, maintain, control. The perfect…
Designerly ways of working in UX →
“To address the frictions in introducing designerly thinking to HCI-tradition UX practice, I have tried quite a few strategies. Five of them in particular seem to yield good results in various professional UX settings. I have placed them in the grid to indicate which specific friction they address, and next I will discuss each of them in turn.”
Innovative Navigation Techniques to Save You... →
The header is an important part of a website. It usually has the logo, navigation, login, sign up and search. Making room for all these elements in your header is no easy task. The last thing you…
UI16: Creating Intuitive Designs →
At the User Interface 16 Conference in Boston, Jared Spool walked through what makes a product design intuitive and how teams can use this information to create better designs. Here are my notes…
The Web OS is Already Here… →
The Web OS is already here… it’s just not what you thought it would be. Web technologies are currently powering content and interactions across multiple devices effectively turning the most popular…
What Is Motion Design? →
From the dawn of cinema to Saul Bass to Digital Hollywood in 600 seconds.
From Motion Plus Design, a nonprofit project setting out to create the first exhibition center dedicated to motion…
UIEtips: Riding the Magic Escalator of Acquired... →
Getting your head around a complex design is, dare I say, a complex process. It’s difficult to understand why your users are struggling with all the features and concepts they want and need in your…
Quick Overview of User Experience for Web... →
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How many times have you been in the following situation? You just spent two weeks working on a design that you’re showing to a client. He likes it, but he…
5 Ways to Be Persuasive in Your UX Work →
By Michael Hawley
Published: November 1, 2011
“To be successful as a UX professional, you need to know how to be persuasive.” In your work as a UX professional, do you ever find that you need to…
October 2011
14 posts
Are You Solving Design Problems Or Forcing... →
If you are an artist, you can do anything you want. It’s perfectly all right. Design serves a different purpose. If in the process of solving a problem you create a problem, obviously, you didn’t…
When credibility and trust matter more than... →
Build it and they might come. Build trust and they might stay. Make it usable and credible and they may tell their friends. The first step in building a successful website is to provide…
Storyboarding & UX – part 3: storyboarding as... →
The previous article in this series described a step-by-step technique for drawing storyboards to help us as designers understand the issues we try to solve, and to communicate existing…
14 Guidelines For Web Site Tabs Usability →
Tabs have long been used to show alternative views of the same group of information tabs in software. Known as “module tabs”, these are still used today in web sites. For instance, airline…
Storyboarding & UX: An introduction →
One wonders why it takes so long finding valuable stuff from other fields. And btw, a customer journey depiction is not a storyboard!
“The fields of user experience and service design typically use…
Socially-Transmitted Functionality →
Pull-to-Refresh is all the rage in mobile apps. Take something like the Twitter client. In the timeline, if you want to see if any new messages have been posted, you pull down on the list with your…
The Keys to Organic Designs →
In the world of design we all tend to have our processes and approaches that rule how we craft our work. This is essential for most of us in the field to have…
How To Lead Clever People →
Clever people are employees whose skills are not easily replicated and who add disproportionate value to their organizations. Often, these people are smarter than their bosses and most of them don’t really want to be ‘led.’
Paul Rand Will Change Your Life! →
Author’s Note: In all the articles I’ve written. In all the designer profiles I’ve written and will write, this article… this testament to Paul Rand is the most…
Richard Feynman on Beauty, Honors, and Curiosity →
The art of uncertainty, why awards are the wrong pursuit, and how to find wonder in truth.
On the heels of yesterday’s children’s book on sciene by Richard Dawkins and Wednesday’s …
Beyond Task Completion: Flow in Design →
Sometimes embedding visual treats and trying to be considerate of users aren’t enough to create the engaging, immersive experience of being in flow.
UIEtips: Why We Sketch →
In our ongoing research into design excellence, we’ve come across an interesting correlation. The designers who are at the top of their game are mostly people who sketch.
Even though every designer…
The myth of the page fold: evidence from user... →
As web professionals, we all know that the concept of the page fold being an impenetrable barrier for users is a myth. Over the last 6 years we’ve watched over 800 user testing sessions between us…
What Impacts Web Form Conversion? →
There are many things you can do to improve the design of Web forms. But what can you do to really boost conversion? Here’s a few case studies that illustrate how the removal, clarity, and even…
September 2011
17 posts
Hagan Rivers – Simplifying Complex Applications →
[ Transcript Available ]
It’s easy for applications to get overcomplicated and bogged down with data – especially in an enterprise setting. It’s hard to keep track of so many different things….
How Good Designers Think →
Firstly, good designers don’t tend to think about consumers; they think about people and what they want and need. It’s a subtle point, but thinking about people as consumers immediately dehumanizes them and makes it harder to empathize.
Secondly, good designers like observing — really looking at what people do rather than simply relying on what they say they do. As Paul Smith once explained, when...
Form design guidelines crib sheet (free download) →
Forms, forms, forms, often overlooked when it comes to design. We spend a lot of time user testing forms here at cxpartners which led us to putting together a crib sheet for form designers. We’re…
Designing Enjoyable User Interfaces: Lessons... →
I find inspiration in the literature that examines games and play as factors in creating delightful and engaging experiences. I like to think of how this applies to products outside of the…
The Psychologist’s View of UX Design →
Dr. Susan Weinschenk takes research and knowledge about the brain, the visual system, memory, and motivation and extrapolates UX design principles.
Psychological Usability Heuristics →
By Jordi Sánchez
Translating Susan Weinschenk’s UX psychology facts into usability heuristics.
Some time ago, Susan Weinschenk wrote about the psychologist’s view of UX design,…
Demographics Won't Make a Great Milkshake →
Thirty thousand new consumer products are launched each year and 95% of them fail — and this is after the marketers invested heavily to understand what their customers want. The quote above is…
Presentation: The Three Stories Every Designer... →
Setting up for a presentation in the Ziba auditorium This is the final post in a 6-part series from Ziba’s Industrial Design Director, Paul Backett, on rethinking design education. Read the…
The Conscience of Television →
What Lucille Ball has to do with the dot-com bubble, or why 2001 was the beginning of the end for TV comedy.
I may have given away my TV set in 2004 and fully endorse Clay Shirky’s theory of…
How To Use CSS Combinators and Simple Pseudo Class... →
Last week we began looking at some of the selectors we have available for hooking css styles into our html. We briefly touched on some simple selectors and mainly focused on attribute selectors.
This week I want to continue and talk specifically about combinators before starting to cover
Breaking Dev: Buttons are a Hack →
In his Buttons are a Hack presentation at Breaking Development in Nashville TN, Josh clark made the case for moving beyond GUI controls on touch devices. We can do better! Here are my notes from…
How Long Do Users Stay on Web Pages? →
Users often leave Web pages in 10–20 seconds, but pages with a clear value proposition can hold people’s attention for much longer because visit-durations follow a negative Weibull distribution.
Wireframes Must Die →
Some comments about the use of wireframes in the web design process. This could make for interesting debate…