User Experience Design Blog

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 [...]

Oct 20, 2008 - ReadWriteWeb wrote on Thursday that the news feed is the “dominant information paradigm of our time.” I don’t know that I would go quite that far, but it has spread like wildfire throughout the web despite causing a ruckus when its originator, Facebook, first launched it just two years ago. Today, most respectable social websites [...]

Oct 2, 2008 - Social media includes community-based video, photo, audio, and news websites as well as blogs. Although each of these types of websites has unique content and dynamics, they are also alike in many ways. This article explores various ways to get the most out of any social media site. Social media sites rely on user-generated or user-submitted [...]

Sep 17, 2008 - From mood lighting, to an exhaustive entertainment system, to reasonable fares and good service, there is a lot that Virgin America is doing right. I recently flew the airline, and was taken aback by the attention to detail and the luxury experience that VA has created. I flew on their 1 year anniversary so there [...]

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 [...]

Sep 2, 2008 - Google announced in a nifty way its new, soon-to-be-released open source browser, Chrome. Frankly, I am really looking forward to it based on the description they presented. It is clearly both an evolution of Mozilla’s own product, and a complete innovation. Google, staying true to their revolutionary core, threw away practically every existing model to [...]

Aug 18, 2008 - This survey takes a look at the various example and trends of headers and navigation across major websites. (Scroll down to see examples.) In particular we focus on headers coupled with horizontal navigation as that has become the industry standard. Many top sites, like those shown below, have adopted this paradigm. A few notable exceptions [...]

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, [...]