There’s nothing that’s as ubiquitous on the web as account sign-in. Do it wrong and the user is frustrated and you may have permanently lost them. Do it right and you can turn a visitor into a long-term customer. Few things can be as important as having user accounts.
Our goal with account registration and sign-in [...]

If you ask designers what the most frustrating parts about designing a project are, one of the top answers would undoubtedly be “communicating and documenting the design process.” And with good reason… it’s not easy.

That’s why I interviewed Dan Brown for this week’s SpoolCast. I don’t know of anyone who knows more about solid design communications than Dan, the co-founder and principal of Eight Shapes, a UX firm in Washington, D.C.

We’re very excited about the 2009 Web App Summit, in Newport Beach, CA for April 19-22, 2009. This will be the must attend event for anyone building web applications!
We’re planning on launching the full site in January, but we wanted you to have a sneak peak at the great program we’ve put together. This year’s [...]

designing for the social web

Our friends at Bookpool are passing along a special discount to the UIE audience.   You will find Josh’s book Designing for the Social Web, at bookpool.com.  For a limited time they’re offering a 38% discount in conjunction with the promotion of Josh’s December 11 online presentation Designing for Sign-up.  If [...]

UIE Virtual Seminar – Designing for Sign-up
with Joshua Porter
Date: Thursday, December 11, 2008
Time: 1:30pm ET
(Please note the special start time)
Is sign-up part of your design? How do you engage users long enough to motivate them to take that precarious step of giving you information? What methods do you use to assure them that [...]

Back in October we had the good fortune to host Dana Chisnell’s popular Virtual Seminar entitled “The Quick, the Cheap, and the Insightful: Conducting Usability Tests in the Wild”, where she told us you don’t have to run usability tests by the book to get great value out of them. Quite a statement considering she (co-)wrote the book!

As usual, we received many more excellent questions that we could deal with during the seminar, so we recorded this podcast.

The User Experience world is filled with many disciplines: information architecture, user researcher, interaction design, copywriting, and visual design — to name just a few. Each of these disciplines have a rich history, a deep knowledge base, and an extensive tool set. Each takes a lifetime to master.
While the successful team needs all of these [...]

UIE Virtual Seminar – Essentials of Effective Visual Design
with Patrick Hofmann of designPH and Google Australia
Date: Thursday, November 20, 2008
Time: 1:30pm ET
(Please note the unique start time)
You have the Visual Design skills to do a good job, but what tools or tricks can you add to your toolbox? Does you team have a complete [...]

One of the many highlights of our recent UI13 conference was Scott Berkun’s Why Designers Fail and What to Do About It presentation. It generated a tremendous amount of buzz on the topic of how we can learn from our failures.
Interestingly, the theme of how to learn from failure was pervasive throughout the conference. Dana [...]

At last week’s UI13 conference, the buzz was about getting started with usability testing. Folks I talked to had a frequent refrain: their group wants to start with some type of user research, but they can’t afford a full-blown scientific study. Neither the schedule nor the budget would let that happen.
That’s why Dana Chisnell’s session [...]