Day: September 5, 2014

Think Your App Is Beautiful? Not Without User Experience Design

By Rob Cowie 5 September 2014Behaviour, Design

Aspiring to beauty in our designs is admirable. But it doesn’t guarantee usability, nor is it a product or marketing strategy. Like “simple” and “easy” before it, “beautiful” says very…

The Right Way to Do Lean Research

By Rob Cowie 5 September 2014Testing

Too many people just “do research” or “talk to customers” without having a plan for what they want to learn. What they end up with is a mass of information…

Breaking up with the User in User Experience Strategy?

By Rob Cowie 5 September 2014Strategy, Theory

Last April, the UX leadership at my company, Slalom Consulting, gathered at an off-site meeting to get aligned on how best to brand and market our UX capabilities to our…

Eye Tracking: What Is It For And When To Use It

By Rob Cowie 5 September 2014Design, Testing

Imagine a usability test in which John, the test participant, attempts to buy a bicycle. On the homepage John quickly finds the “bicycles” link, but on the next page he…

The Xbox One and Usability

By Rob Cowie 5 September 2014Design, Testing

Microsoft’s Xbox One has been out and available to the public for about 10 months at this point and is really just starting to hit its stride. It has certainly…

What To Do When You Can’t Run A Usability Test

By Rob Cowie 5 September 2014Testing, Theory

In an ideal world, users would be involved in every stage of product development, including requirements gathering, iterative prototype testing and post release testing. However, there are a lot of…

The Ethics of UX Research

By Rob Cowie 5 September 2014Design, Testing, Theory

As a UX researcher for a social media operation, Ute considers different interface designs that might allow users to make more social contacts. Ute gets a radical idea to test…

The role of content in self-service design

By Rob Cowie 5 September 2014Design, Theory

Quality content plays a critical role in self-service design. Often a small change in a link, heading or sentence, can lead to dramatically higher task completion. First, a few definitions.…

Print is view, Web is do

By Rob Cowie 5 September 2014Design, Linkedin, Theory

How much of your organization’s online world is made up of dead zones and how much is do zones? A dead zone is any space where there’s nothing to do.…

How Margins and Line Lengths Affect User Reading

By Rob Cowie 5 September 2014Design, Theory

Have you ever spent a long time reading a web page? It might have seem long to you because of the large amount of text. But research shows that margins…