Breaking up with the User in User Experience Strategy?
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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…
I Love UX Design
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Honing your Research Skills through ad-hoc Contextual Inquiry
It’s common in our field to hear that we don’t get enough time to regularly practice all the types of research available to us, and that’s often true, given tight…