My article, Design Cop-out #2: Breadcrumbs, is one of the most controversial I’ve written in recent years. People either agree completely or think I’ve gone off the deep end.
When people disagree, it’s often because they think I’m suggesting that we stop putting breadcrumbs in our designs. I’m not suggesting this at all.
I’ve defined a [...]
To wrap up this year, we’re revisting some of our best articles and podcast from 2008.
Out of the 29 articles that we published this year, we’ve decided on five that we think had the most impact and really got people thinking. Even if some readers didn’t agree with our conclusions, it started a discussion [...]
Many of our clients are in the business of designing tools for their users to build great things for a wider audience. These range from mapping tools to pattern libraries.
Naturally, our clients’ teams start by focusing on their direct audience. They look to make the best experience for these folks, to make creations come [...]
At the beginning of this month, we had Joshua Porter in the office to present his Design for Sign-up talk. Designing for sign-up should be simple, yet it’s often the most challenging area of your design. Josh had some great ideas on how to increase the ease of sign-up and how to motivate your users to want to.
We got back together with Josh to follow-up on the seminar so we could answer a number of viewer’s questions that we didn’t have time for in the seminar.
This time, we spot an embiggen over at macenstien.com (Click to Embiggen):
The security challenge question on Bank of America’s site seems innocuous:
In what year (YYYY) did you graduate from high school?
But, what if the user didn’t graduate high school? (Little known fact: I didn’t graduate high school, so I’m a little sensitive to this question.)
Should the user enter the date they would’ve graduated high school? [...]
Randall Monroe’s XKCD is probably my favorite comic strip. Here’s one of the latest ones:
(Of course, the flow charting portion of Dan Brown’s Communicating Design: Essential Deliverables for Highly Effective Design Teams session at the UIE Web App Summit will have a lot more depth to it.)
If we want to see how brand engagement works, we don’t have to look any further than the Cuisinart Popcorn Maker.
Williams-Sonoma is featuring this intriguingly designed popper on their site. It’s received 3.6 stars from the 25 reviewers. Only 9 (36%) of those reviewers gave it one, two, or three stars.
Amazon is selling the [...]
I think the 2009 UIE Web App Summit (April 19-22, Newport Beach, CA) has one of the best line ups of speakers we’ve ever had. We’ve spent the past six months hand-crafting this excellent program that’s all about planning, designing, and building web-based applications. We’re very excited about it and you should be too
We recently had our friend Patrick Hofmann a designer with Google Australia in for a Virtual Seminar covering the Essentials of Effective Visual Design. His wealth of knowledge from his years of design and usability research into visual design provided an incredibly interesting and popular seminar.
As usual, we received many more excellent questions that we could deal with during the seminar, so we recorded this podcast.
You are currently browsing the UIE Brain Sparks weblog archives for the year 2008.
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