Yes, I was out at 4 AM on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, in order to get some of the “door-buster” sale items retailers were offering to shoppers who hit the stores early. Yes, sometimes I am not terribly…
Tag: UX
UX Articles
Lessons in UX: Are addicting experiences good or bad for users?
Farmville. Desktop Tower Defense. World of Warcraft. Twitter. All of the above have one thing in common: for many many users they are incredibly addictive experiences, sucking hours and hours of time away from them day after day. Updates from…
UX 101, UX Articles
Lessons in Mobile UX: “First, do no harm”
Having just completed an extensive ethnographic research project in the mobile space, my head is still chock-full of observations, findings and notes around how people use their mobile devices every day of their lives. But one thought bubbles to the…
UX Articles
Lessons in UX: Should you facilitate usability tests of your own designs?
This is a topic of discussion that comes up in conversations with my peers about every six months or so. Should you test your own designs? Many, perhaps even the majority, say no – designers need to not facilitate usability…
UX Articles
Lessons in UX (from the iPhone): Take care when providing a “feast of riches” to your users
The iPhone has a problem. There’s too much you can do with it. This is a problem, you may be asking? Yes, it is, because there are so many things you can do with the device (thanks to hundreds of…
UX Articles
Lessons in UX: “A failure of empathy”
The great This Week in Google podcast just had a very enlightening conversation about the new Google Sidewiki. This feature, just rolled out last week, allows anyone who has the Google Toolbar to open a sidebar on any site to…
UX Articles
Lessons in UX Design: The future is not what it used to be
Time is broken. Well, it may not be broken, but, from where I stand, it isn’t moving at the same pace it used to. Maybe it’s because I’m about to cross a particularly notable threshold (I leave my 30s in…
UX 101, UX Articles
The immediacy of now: Designing for the reactionary user experience
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…
UX Articles
Lessons in UX: “Experience rules” are just as important as business rules
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…
UX Articles
UX designers, be aware of “experience sensitivity”
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…
Featured Articles, UX Articles
#UX by any other name
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”…
Featured Articles, UX Articles
“Experience Downtime”: How trust is as important as usability
“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…
Featured Articles, UX Articles
Usability for Evil: Six Flags Online Meal Deals
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.…
UX Articles
Creating a User Experience “SWAT Team”
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 Articles
“Sell me this pen”: Explaining the value of #UX
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…
UX Articles
On creating a User Experience Knowledge Base
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…