UX: What is it and why should I care?
User Experience – dubbed UX for short – is a hot topic. In the broadest sense, it can be defined as the overall experience you have when you are using…
Usability testing for mobile is easy
Many people think that it takes special skill and fancy equipment to run a user-testing session on mobile. Not true. If you’ve ever run user-testing sessions with regular computers, setting…
UX is the future
For decades, the most successful businesses thrived on product innovation as the natural strategy to increase revenues, market share, and loyalty. Fast forward to 2014: today’s product innovations, and the…
We Don’t Research. We Build.
The following is a composite of experiences I’ve had in the last year when talking with startups. Some dialog is paraphrased, some is verbatim, but I’ve tried to keep it…
Things that go wrong in usability tests
A lot of planning goes into a usability test. Part of good planning means being prepared for the many things that can go wrong. Here are the ten most common…
Notification design strategies
If your inbox is anything like mine, it’s littered with unwanted notifications from companies begging for attention. Gmail has done a great job of making it easy to separate important…
Enduring misconceptions of UX Design
A couple weeks ago I suddenly saw a resurgence of interest in an article I wrote for Mashable in January 2009 titled 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design.…
Shades of Discoverability
If your working week is anything like mine, I’d wager the term “discoverability” comes up often. Typically we use it when asking if a feature explains its presence and function.…
Iterative user interface design
Redesigning user interfaces on the basis of user testing can substantially improve usability. In four case studies, the median improvement in overall usability was 165% from the first to the…
UX Dark Patterns
A Dark Pattern is a user interface that uses manipulative techniques to get users to do things they would not otherwise have done. The thing about Dark Patterns is that…