User Experience Design Blog

Jul 29, 2008 - Jakob Nielson’s article, Weekly User Testing: TiVo Did It, You Can Too provides a great case study supporting testing early and frequently in the design process to produce exceptional design. Having worked with TiVo, I can say that their approach to usability and research is stellar, and their user experience team is very talented, so [...]

Jul 11, 2008 - The search experience is one that continues to evolve. Developers continue to improve the algorithms and interactions aimed at getting users to their desired result(s) faster. Hints such as the exposed URL, have expanded to include elements such as StumbleUpon’s Social Search, Ask’s binoculars site previews, among others. There has even been talk and development [...]

May 29, 2008 - In this past week’s issue of The Economist (May 17-23), the newspaper brilliantly provides an explanation of its homepage redesign. Not only is it fascinating to read the rationalizations behind the changes, but communication is a critical step often missed in major redesigns, and this also serves as a great example of how to effectively [...]

Apr 29, 2008 - We all know the saying “too many cooks spoil the broth,” yet it is common during the design process for too many stakeholders to become design decision-makers. When reviews go beyond discussing issues in the user experience and gathering new information and ideas, stakeholders with varying points can sometimes begin to dictate the direction of [...]

Feb 27, 2008 - In my last article ‘Radical Redesigns May Be Dangerous,’ I wrote about the potential hazards of drastic changes to existing user experiences. In a poorly executed redesign, these pitfalls can turn away hard-won users (customers). In this article, I explore ways that radical redesigns can be successfully implemented, so fewer existing users leave, and more [...]

Jan 29, 2008 - “Small Pond, Smart Fish” The latest from Coroflot’s Creative Seeds blog contends that Design Capitals are “rarely the best locations to start a career.” Rather than eking out a living in some of the most expensive cities in the world, going deeper into debt, at a temporary internship getting “small pieces of pick-up work”–why not [...]

Jan 23, 2008 - Many clients are excited by radical user experience redesigns; few realize that radical redesigns are not always warranted and often pose potentially grievous problems for users. Throughout my career I have been involved in a number of projects that called for a ‘radical redesign’ of an existing product or service. To their credit, those clients realized [...]

Mar 12, 2007 - Well, February was an extremely busy month, and for the shortest month of the year was packed with quite a few gems from the User Experience community. Here is a re-cap of a few articles and concepts that should not go without mention:

Jan 30, 2007 - The latest issue of Usability News from the Software Usability and Research Lab (SURL), has a very interesting study - “Eye Gaze Patterns while Searching vs. Browsing a Website” - on web users’ eye gaze patterns while browsing and searching web sites. Findings from the study show that the ‘F’ pattern as described by Jakob [...]

Jan 24, 2007 - In a previous article, ‘4 Principles of Effective Navigation on the Web‘, one of the stated keys is letting users know where they can go. One of the most effective ways to let users know what paths are available to them is to expose subsequent destination points. In other words, bubbling up subsections and pages [...]