User Experience Design Blog

Jan 10, 2007 - Imagine that you are in a supermarket buying groceries for dinner. Imagine also that this supermarket does not label what kinds of items can be found in each aisle making it impossible for you to know where to go for the next item on your list. To make things worse, the aisles in the store [...]

Nov 14, 2006 - In the first installment of this series, we examined how we can enhance search tools by allowing users to set the context of searches. In this article we will examine another key feature that aids users in completing a task within a site: the help link. Particularly, we will examine providing contextual help globally on [...]

Nov 6, 2006 - At Montparnas, we often think of ‘users’ as ‘patrons’ to stress the fact that users of most web sites are either active or prospective customers or contribute to the web site’s financial state in some way. It is critical to acknowledge this fact, because unlike users of desktop applications or physical products, web site users [...]

Oct 31, 2006 - Two weeks ago, I attended a talk given by Mark Wehner of Yahoo! Inc. at a BayCHI event in Mountain View. At first glance many may balk at the idea of conducting research through mere drawings, but having heard and seen the impact this tool can make, I am now a huge enthusiast for this [...]

Oct 6, 2006 - Some time ago iVillage commissioned Dynamic Logic to study the effect of page clutter on the effectiveness of advertising on the iVillage web site. The study strove to discern what effect, if any, ‘online clutter’ (defined as the number of text, image, and advertising elements on a page) had on the brand value score (aggregate [...]

Sep 21, 2006 - One of the most pervasive design shortcomings of web sites is neglecting entire market segments–a mistake that can have very costly consequences. This article provides the basis for an effective method to correct this and improve overall conversions. Principal Market Segmentation for Web Sites There are many different ways to divide a company’s market into segments; the [...]

Sep 11, 2006 - Last Thursday, September 7th, a federal judge ruled that a class action lawsuit brought on by the National Federation of the Blind against Target Corporation could commence. (Additional coverage available here and here.) The lawsuit alleges that Target’s web site is inaccessible to people with impaired vision. Although the lawyers for Target tried to get [...]

Sep 6, 2006 - Much has been written about the correct placement and style for effectively integrating search on a site, yet a fundamental issue with such search remains: the results are too broad and are difficult to sift through. Alleviating this problem is a simple case of letting the user put their search query into context. That is, [...]

Aug 29, 2006 - When starting a web development project, there are many advantages to hiring a user experience architect first. The most important of these are: to ensure a usable product that matches the goals of your company to obtain a definitions guide which can protect against scope creep, synchronize [...]

Aug 25, 2006 - Information architectures and accompanying sitemaps often illustrate page relations with single channels linking them. These architectures are sub-optimal because they do not take advantage of the principle of multiple varied access points to key destinations which can increase the traffic flow to said goals. Providing multiple and varied pathways to key destinations is a fundamental tenant [...]