In the design world, there’s always been an assumption that some users demonstrate “search-dominant” tendencies by going right to the search engine when they first visit a web site looking for content. But back in 2000, UIE made a groundbreaking claim that blew away the web design world. From our research, we concluded that users aren’t Search dominant. How does this effect your design choices?

In usability tests where we incorporate interview-based tasks, the participants interests are discovered, not assigned. Unlike traditional task design methods, the test facilitator and participant negotiate the tasks during the tests, instead of proceeding down a list of predefined tasks. There are many situations where this is the appropriate way to test a product.

UIEtips 9/27/07: The Power of Comics for Understanding User Needs As designs and product visions become more complex, there is an increasing need to find ways that effectively convey just how people will use the product and integrate it into their lives. Recently, more and more organizations and design teams have turned to comics to [...]

In this interview, Kevin Cheng and Jared Spool discuss the use of comics to express user experience ideas early in the brainstorming stage of a project. Comics show the team how a user will experience the design.

Embiggen, a made-up word for a Simpson’s episode, found its way into an options screen at Flickr. We think that’s a perfectly cromulent fairy door.

This week, Christine Perfetti asks Jared Spool about User Interface Engineering’s groundbreaking study on download time. In this study, we found the actual download time of a page didn’t impact a site’s usability.

Multiple levels of security are great. However, designers need to learn ways to explain these more complex models, so users don’t panic when they encounter the security measures. Sophisticated security models are not intuitive for most users, so training is a required part of the interface design.

It’s hard enough to create a successful user experience when you can control every aspect of the customer interaction . Can Apple (or anyone else for that matter) create truly amazing experiences when they need to work through partners? That is yet to be seen.

UIEtips 9/18/07: Time for Content to Become More Scientific Time and time again in usability testing, I watch users struggle with web sites. I’d like to say that the problems I see in testing are always unique and novel, but they aren’t. We’ve been seeing very similar problems with all of the sites we’ve tested. [...]

We’ve had some great comments on my post, Usability Tests with 30 Observers. Here are my responses.