User Experience Design Blog

Dec 4, 2008 - This article strives to explain, in non-technical terms, what is user experience design, why it is critical in the modern business landscape, and how businesses can take advantage of what the field has to offer. What Is User Experience Design? User experience design is a specialized field that combines product strategy and usability engineering. It aims to [...]

Nov 13, 2008 - Mark Chu-Carroll, an engineer at Google who’s been beta testing the Google Android Phone for six weeks before it officially launched, wrote an excellent review of it on his blog, Good Math, Bad Math. He drew many comparisons and contrast to Apple’s iPhone, which serves as his primary mobile device. In a nutshell, he concluded that [...]

Nov 4, 2008 - Today is the big day, and no matter for whom or what you are voting on November 4th, you not only want your vote counted, but you also want it counted correctly. In the spirit of fair elections with a twist of usability geekiness, we at Montparnas compiled a few resources where you can learn [...]

Sep 16, 2008 - It is a good thing that Facebook is slowly rolling out their new design; they might have had another huge revolt on their hands if they just threw it on their users. However, despite easing users into the new version, there is still a significant number of users that dislike the new experience and refuse [...]

Sep 4, 2008 - A while ago, I wrote about the dangers of radical experience redesigns and how to implement them so the fewest number of users will abandon the product during the transition from old to new. The main points articulated in the article were: Make only changes that really will benefit users Let users know what improvements will be [...]

Aug 6, 2008 - As a designer and consumer advocate, I often judge the experiences that I have with various products and services. So I was keen to read David Pogue’s recent article with his own experience observations, aptly titled It’s the Software, Not You. Of the Delta Airlines touchscreen kiosks, Pogue writes: “Whenever I encounter badly designed software like this, [...]

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 3, 2008 - Based on this week’s talk of the rising importance of universal design, one may ponder whether this trend is actually real and to what extent it has manifested itself in daily life. Are products really easier and more accessible for everyone? Although I think the global trend is moving in the right direction for the most [...]

Jul 1, 2008 - Beth Tauke of uiGarden.net recently posted a pretty complete article on universal design’s rising momentum in the global marketplace. Admittedly, universal design has been around for over twenty years, but as the writer points out: “Recently, universal design has been cropping up in places in which it would have been unwelcome twenty years ago. The term [...]

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 [...]