User Experience Design Blog

Feb 5, 2008 - The Usual Suspects: Alertbox, Boxes and Arrows, and UIE User Skills Improving From the Alertbox, Nielsen reports that users are getting better at moving their mouses, clicking on things, and the basics of search. Though users might be fluent on sites they know, they still trip over new sites, new information architectures, and information overload. To help, [...]

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 [...]

Jan 22, 2008 - Neglect Advanced Search, Never More A new article on Boxes and Arrows calls advanced search “an under-utilized tool hampered by its own design.” “Normal” people don’t use it. The “old framing” of search versus advanced search, of “geeks versus normal people”, is prohibitive and doesn’t allow users to tackle the problem of too many results. The [...]

Jan 15, 2008 - Engagement in Web Metrics Print advertisers buy space. Broadcast advertisers buy time. We used to measure the success of online ads by page views. The Washington Post this week suggests that given multi-tasking users and the rise of development techniques like Ajax, a better measure of success would be to develop new metrics, like “engagement”–a way [...]

Jan 8, 2008 - In the tradition of the New Year, best-of lists and some things to look forward to… Ten Best Intranets 2008 From the Alertbox, Mr. Nielsen reports the Ten Best Intranets of 2008. Half the winners are from the U.S., among them Bank of America, Barnes and Noble, Campbell Soup and Coldwell Banker. The financial industry is strongly [...]

Dec 11, 2007 - On November 7th, 2007, RollingStone published an interview with William Gibson, author of Neuromancer and the man who coined the term ‘cyberspace’. In the interview, Gibson suggests that one of the “challenges” we will face is the prospect of ubiquitous computing. He prophesizes: One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that [...]

Dec 4, 2007 - Like Pointillism, Web Metrics? This past week, The Economist ran an article on web metrics and banner advertisement. The piece explores the difficulty involved in interpreting metrics and the meaning and evolution of measurements like page hits, page views, and user sessions. But perhaps the most important point in the article is its last sentence: “Advertisers [...]

Nov 30, 2007 - Below is a listing of events in December 2007 related to user experience design in the San Francisco Bay Area, North America, and throughout the world. If you would like to add an event, feel free to leave a comment below with its details. User Experience Events in the San Francisco Bay Area The Future of Search December [...]

Nov 27, 2007 - Amazon releases the Kindle With a 6″ display, 600×800 pixel resolution, 4.9″ x 7.5″ x 0.7″ dimensions, free EV-DO, and the “visual flair of an Apple IIc“, the Kindle sold out within 5.5 hours of its release on November 19th. Though many books are available for $9.99, including 101 of the 112 current New York Times [...]