User Experience Design Blog

Jan 20, 2010 - Nokia has started circulating specifications and previews of its new Symbian^4 OS interface and interaction design (via Symbian.org). Some notable improvements include: New interface layout and interaction structure (see diagrams below) Consistent look and feel across all applications Contextual menus providing quicker access to common actions Customizable home screen New Interaction Models in Symbian^4 Below are some diagrams from the Symbian^4 [...]

Jan 18, 2010 -

Jan 7, 2010 - I had the opportunity to speak with Netvibes’ CEO, Freddy Mini, as a follow-up to our original article on the company’s RSS reader. In our interview, we mainly discussed the strategy and vision for the product—who are the customer segments, how Netvibes meets their needs, where the product has been and where it is going. [...]

Oct 21, 2009 - In part 1 and part 2 of this series, I explored synergies that exist between product development and user experience design as well as how the two fields fail to leverage those synergies in the product development process. In this part, I explain what product development and user experience teams can do to collaborate effectively. What [...]

Oct 19, 2009 - Jim Ross posted an excellent article on UX Matters describing the good and bad of eye tracking studies, entitled Eyetracking: Is It Worth It. Ross clearly itemizes the positives and negatives, expelling myths about eyetracking’s ability to answer all issues and expose full meaning of the user’s actions Ross states that eyetracking helps to solve issues, [...]

Oct 14, 2009 - In part 1 of this series, I explored synergies between product development and user experience design. In this part, I write about how product development and user experience design teams fail to collaborate effectively. How Product Development and User Experience Design Fail to Work Well Together As described above, there are many intersections in the product development [...]

Oct 7, 2009 - Product development and user experience design are two fields that should, but rarely, collaborate effectively to design and define products that consumers will find delightful to use. There exist many natural synergies between the two disciplines, and each field’s strengths complement the other’s weaknesses. Despite this, product development and user experience teams often work in [...]

Sep 29, 2009 - It has been five years since John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly launched their Web 2.0 Conference. The Web has changed immensely in that short period. Since 2004, web-enabled mobile devices have gained wide-spread adoption, all kinds of devices have started interfacing with the internet, events on the Web have started occurring in real-time, and we [...]

Sep 18, 2009 - Many online and mobile applications rely on ratings and reviews from their communities to provide wisdom for their remaining users. Services such as Yelp, Amazon, Digg, and even the Apple App Store use input from their users to evaluate some intrinsic value of a set of items—be they books or iPhone applications.  However, new research [...]

Sep 10, 2009 - The United States Postal Service recently launched an augmented reality application that simulates a virtual box for your shipment. The application projects a “hologram” of a shipping box over an item that the user holds up to the computer’s webcam. It remains to be seen how useful and accurate the application is, but it definitely [...]