User Experience Design Blog

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 [...]

Aug 17, 2009 - When people consider buying anything, whether it be clothes, a gadget, or home, they often spend a lot of time comparison shopping and trying to gather information to inform their choice. In fact, a major effort is generally exerted to try to experience the item: When shopping for shoes, we will put on one shoe and [...]

Aug 12, 2009 - Jonathan Hassell of BBC online shared a presentation on the challenges and methodologies of the company’s Usability & Accessibility team. The short presentation describes the challenges, such as a wide range of platforms and audience types, as well as the wide-range of research tools that are used to understand and address them, from card sorting [...]

Aug 12, 2009 - John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly recently published a fascinating white paper on the evolution of the Web (PDF). The report, titled Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On gives an excellent analysis of the last five years of Web 2.0, current trends, and where the Web is heading in the future. Battelle and O’Riley write [...]

Aug 11, 2009 - Earlier this month Nokia Conversations posted a poll for the most important feature in a web browsing device and the results are in from 461 respondents. No surprise, the ‘all of the above’ choice was the top-rated feature, but following that were ‘big screen,’ and ‘high speed connectivity.’