User Experience Design Blog

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 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 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 [...]

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 [...]

Feb 7, 2007 - An MIT and Harvard study (via Slashdot) unveils that the SiteKey system employed by Bank of America, ING Direct and Yahoo!, among others are likely ineffective at protecting users against fraudulent sites. The SiteKey system is based on assigning an image to a user’s account and presenting it prior to the user entering a password. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Dec 5, 2006 - On Monday, Techdirt writes about the concerns that BitTorrent creator, Bram Cohen has regarding the integration of Digital Rights Management (DRM) into his widely popular “peer distributed” product. As the company approaches launch of a store which will controlled by Windows DRM, the issue of the DRM usability has been called into question. This is a [...]

Nov 20, 2006 - Recently, the BayCHI mailing list had an interesting discussion regarding a very common input mechanism with which many of us have grown accustomed: selecting from a group of available items and adding to a congruent set of chosen items. The polemical issue that arises with this selection tool is in its implementation, specifically “should we [...]