User Experience Design Blog

Jul 9, 2008 - To some ‘reputation’ and ‘brand’ may be one and the same. I consider reputation to be an integral part of a company’s brand. Beyond reputation, brand can include things like popularity (market penetration), identity, uniqueness, etc.¬† Yet reputation probably pays the biggest role in building a valuable brand. Indeed, this past week Forbes released [...]

Jun 26, 2008 - CNET has posted that it will be rolling out a new user experience design over the coming weeks. The new website will not only look different, but will contain modern interaction elements to simplify its pages while exposing more content. The main goals for the user experience redesign are to “make the site easier to [...]

Jun 23, 2008 - TechCrunch has posted a brief look inside Google’s Gmail usability lab along with some interesting pictures of the testing and observation rooms. One thing that I found interesting is the large monitor in the testing room–not a typical features in most testing set-ups. Other than that, it’s a pretty standard usability lab. Another thing worth [...]

Jun 18, 2008 - MySpace finally cleaned up its act by launching a new, more elegant interface design. Mashable broke the story about a possible MySpace redesign on June 13 after images of the new interface design were leaked to Mark Hopkins. In the user experience sphere MySpace has often been cited as a paragon of bad design, and many [...]

Jun 10, 2008 - Input Structures for International Addresses Yesterday, Luke Wroblewski covered the intricacies of international address input structures for forms. After covering common layouts for American addresses and generic international formats, the article goes on to describe the variations within these constructs. One of the great points made by the article include the observation: Through years of experience with [...]

Jun 3, 2008 - Microsoft toots a vastly improved user experience as the cornerstone of Windows Vista. One look at the software maker’s marketing or Vista packaging reveals this constant, droning message; it almost seems that Microsoft tried to stuff all marketing collateral with the maximum number of various ways to say ‘easy’. Indeed, even the packaging was designed [...]

May 30, 2008 - According to the Business Week, Americans don’t visit the same web sites on their mobile devices as they do on their PC’s. Websites such as craigslist and eBay, ranked at number 1 and number 2 respectively, gain six or more spots in the mobile realm than on traditional devices. The article goes on to [...]

May 13, 2008 - Interview with UX Book Publisher Rosenfeld Media Last week, UX Matters interviewed Lou Rosenfeld, founder, and Liz Danico, Sr. Development Editor of Rosenfeld Media. The interview covers how the small publishing house hopes to confront the publishing industry, and reflects on the experience of bringing user experience design to publishing books–including show-and-tell sessions, testing readers with [...]

May 7, 2008 - “Simplicity isn’t a bad design goal; complexity isn’t a good one” Joshua Porter from UIE responds to Don Norman’s article, “Simplicity is Overrated.” Citing the work of Barry Schwartz, who writes on consumer behavior and trade-offs in “The Paradox of Choice,” Porter observes that users tend to choose more complex products not because they prefer complexity, [...]

Apr 22, 2008 - Design + Management: Want Respect? Smash the Table! Dan Saffer quotes a fall 2007 Design Observer article in his blog post about designers and their relationship with management. Although there may be a persistent desire on the part of designers to get a place at the management table “where the big decisions are made,” Saffer reminds [...]