One of my first jobs in user experience was designing an interactive voice response system for my company’s customer support line. it was more challenging that you might think… we had to understand the mental model of users who would…
Personalization is when the system you are using tailors itself to you and your behavior. A good example of this is Amazon "noticing" what you are buying and changing their front page to feature similar items. Customization is when the…
I was able to attend and speak at Usability Professionals Association 2012 last week in Las Vegas, and it was quite a learning experience. I got a lot out of it, and was also grateful for the opportunity to share…
Based on the presentation given at UPA 2012 this June. I have spent a lot of time over the past month looking at alternate methods of interaction, different ways people can engage with technology other than the traditional mouse/keyboard paradigm.…
As a UX professional who travels a lot, I love this question. It's like playing a video game in God Mode: you are in complete control, for better or worse. Let's try for the better, shall we? A key principle…
One of the first things I would do is get a better understanding of is usage. What is the information that is being entered going to be used for? A good sense of what is important and what is not…
Here's three tips on usability from my interview on the subject with TechJournal: http://www.techjournal.org: First, create the simplest version of user interface required to accomplish the task you are designing. Take out everything that isn’t necessary to accomplish the task.…
I travel quite a bit for work, and as I recently sat in a hotel room I started thinking about all the steps that brought me to that room. I booked the flight and the room online, I flew from…
There are several benefits to user experience design, and I'll list some of them. Before I begin, a quick note: user experience design to me encompasses EVERYTHING, from UI design to customer support processes to retail store design and packaging.…
The best response I have to this question is "it depends." Depends on the organizational culture, the amount of design rationale you have to back up your design decisions, the personalities at play in both sides of the conversation, and…
I recently went to a conference where several sessions focused on analytics, and what analytics could provide to businesses of any size. Having some background in analytics myself, I definitely agreed with several sentiments these speakers expressed.. but I also…
I’ve worked on several design projects that resulted in “dead ends,” situations where what we created didn’t really work. I always try and learn something from these experiences, and a key lesson I’ve learned again and again was that benefits…
These are high-level, but I think still specific enough to be actionable. These are principles to apply to a design project, and good UX design is reflected in these principles. Know your users. Have a firm and clear "target" in mind…
I used to code. And when I say “code,” I mean write HTML, JavaScript and active server pages – not full desktop applications. This was close to a decade ago, and while I have taken some software development classes since,…
LinkedIn, like Google and Facebook, benefits from the more it "knows" about you. As I and others have frequently mentioned, you are not the user of such services… You are the product that the service "sells." In LinkedIn's case, the…
Timing is everything. When Minority Report came out, it was in the early days of the User Experience design field, a time when decision-makers at companies started paying attention to design. As it was the first movie that featured a…