So, the user had just booked their ticket and was choosing their seat assignments when, out of no where, comes this error message: What should the user do with this little tidbit of information? An “Invalid State Error” sounds like someone entered the wrong US state abbreviation, but the system a minute ago confirmed the [...]

Folks, it’s just about that time… if it’s fall in New England, it must be the User Interface Conference. We are now in our thirteenth year of bringing together all walks of user experience and usability folks together from around the world. This year, we thought we give our attendees a special UI13 advice podcast. [...]

Here at User Interface Engineering, we’ve come up with three questions to help us determine if a team will produce designs that deliver great experiences. Teams that answer the questions positively, in our research, are more likely to succeed with great experiences. What I think makes these questions magical is their diagnostic quality. From their [...]

Have you looked at your site with Javascript disabled? Robert Nyman does just that with the Nokia and SonyEricsson UK sites and finds some surprising results. It’s quite a good write up. Very much worth a read followed by the obvious next step: checking your own site out the same way. [Hat tip to NortyPig]

Like many of today’s news sites, the Wall Street Journal features a box on its article pages that shows other popular articles: Because titles often don’t communicate what’s in the article, the implementation gives users a chance to see more by providing a summary as a tooltip-style pop-up. However, it seems someone has been slacking [...]

A client wrote in and asked a question that I didn’t know the answer to, so I posted it to the twitter: Where would you send a client looking for an article on designing for different browsers and conducting browser-compatibility testing? One of the downsides of being a researcher and never actually doing the hard [...]

You may have seen the red caps on coke bottles. If you looked closely, the caps instruct you to log into MyCokeRewards.com and enter the number printed on the inside of the cap. Doing so will accrue points that you can exchange for wonderful goodies. Going to the site yields this screen: Unless you’re on [...]

Over at the IxDA Discussion List, Benjamin Ho asked about activities he could use at the end of a presentation he was giving at his company’s annual user conference. I got thinking about different exercises we use when we’re training and thought this was a good time to share some of them. Activity Option #1: [...]

UIE Virtual Seminar – The Quick, the Cheap, and the Insightful: Conducting Usability Tests in the Wild With Dana Chisnell of Usabilityworks Date: Wednesday, October 22, 2008 Time: 1pm ET It’s not clear when “quick and dirty” became a dirty phrase in the usability world. There are those that believe that testing must be scientific, [...]

Good design, when it’s done well, becomes invisible. It’s only when it’s done poorly that we notice it. Think of it like a room’s air conditioning. We only notice it when it’s too hot, too cold, making too much noise, or the unit is dripping on us. Yet, if the air conditioning is perfect, nobody [...]