One of the major design projects I worked on a few months back involved redesigning a financial management web application. As part of that initial work we created a concept that used a calendar as the system’s primary navigation. Users…
In the standard software development lifecycle, one of the first things discussed are the requirements. How does it work? What is its purpose? What functions does the program need to provide? The casual conversation eventually leads to a more formal…
I recently completed some ethnographic research around a certain demographic group (intellectual property constraints prevents me from naming said group, however it rhymes with “Men, hi!”). One of the more interesting things I discovered was that for most of the…
So, anything interesting happen this Tuesday? OK, lame joke, and I understand a lot of people are very upset and shocked by the outcome of the presidential election. I was too… But not nearly as much as many people are.…
I had a meeting with two government groups last week, they were keenly interested in how they could apply user centered design into their processes. As I prepared my presentation I started looking at all the various terms and “sub-disciplines”…
“The site’s down.” How many times have you said or heard these words? If you are in the tech industry like me, you’ve probably lost count. If you are the typical consumer, odds are you have heard this a time…
REPOSTING an old post, one of my most popular: One of my new favorite sites is Usability for Evil, which shows examples of web sites that benefits the companies behind the sites far more than the users of said sites.…
That users actually think about what they are doing. As designers, we are focused on creating the best experiences for users, so we focus on the steps and interactions that users access to get things done. That attention to detail often…
If you are a member of a user experience design team, you are probably very busy right now. UX design is in high demand many companies have finally realized that a focus on design and the user experience is the…
UX people LOVE to talk about what they do. Which is understandable – we love our job, and we think that by understanding the user’s perspective and tailoring designs around how they think, work and do we can produce solutions…
In my job I have had the opportunity to work on many different products, though most are in the same “product family” – the basic functionality and processes are similar, though sold for different customers/audiences. After executing many different designs…
Had an interesting observation in a recent series of usability tests. We were testing a design concept that had a lot of information – one section detailed data in a pie chart, another section next to it showed a different…
I love movies. Obviously, that’s not a distinguishing characteristic – lots of people love movies, and many are far more rabid and knowledgeable about cinema than I am. But it’s part of my personal DNA – I sometimes randomly quote…
“Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” I think that phrase sums up how many marketing and brand managers feel about social media. If you are a company of any size, you HAVE to have a presence in social…
The key is to understand the difference between data and information. Data is just that: data, which can tell you absolutely nothing without applying some sort of focus or filter. Once that focus or filter is applied, then you MAY…
This is a guest post I did for UserZoom.com, and I am reposting it here. Several years ago I attended a presentation on Agile and UX at the Agile Australia conference, and about ten minutes into the talk I started…