This is my nomination for the Most Amusing Error Messages of the Day award:

A normal day at the SmartMoney.com Map of the Market interactive market mapping tool: But yesterday was anything but a normal day: (The green box represents Barrick Gold, which saw a 4.5% increase in its value yesterday. The next biggest winner I could find was Campbell’s Soup at 0.32%. Gold? Soup lines? Hmmm.) Update: A [...]

On one of the member-only lists I hang out on, there’s been a discussion about asking participants in studies to role play in a usability test’s scenario. Instead of saying, “Find information about the costs for summer camps in Vermont” the list member asked if there was a problem with using a scenario like this [...]

From a user experience professional perspective, the current economy has a weird convergence happening: Because of the economic downturn (due to the rising fuel costs and mortgage market crisis), some companies are laying off and some are disappearing outright. Because executives understand the competitive value of creating great experiences, user experience professionals are in great [...]

It’s been years since we’ve written about the Scent of Information and how to use trigger words in links to make them more usable. So, it shouldn’t be news or a surprise to anyone in the world of web site usability that having clear links that describe what the user will find after clicking is [...]

Interaction design is hard enough to do when the business model is clear. When the designer knows exactly how making a better design will increase the value of the company, (thereby increasing the chances they’ll get a raise if they do a good job,) it’s still hard to know what to do. All one has [...]

Steve Heller from the New York Times asked me to give a short review of the Barack Obama and John McCain campaign sites. I haven’t had a chance to watch voters use either site, so I chose four scenarios that I thought would be common tasks for a voter visiting each site. I rated each [...]

Probably more used than any other tool in the toolbox, the critique is the lost orphan of the user experience world. There are books written about usability testing, endless debates on the validity of heuristic evaluations, and hours of lectures on persona development. But, when it comes to developing the essential skills for a good [...]

In next week’s UIE Virtual Seminar, Testing Your Critiquing Skills, you’ll get to compare your critiques of our selected sites against my critiques. We’ll see if you found the same things I found and we’ll look at your style and technique for critiquing. To help you prepare, I’ve created this little preview. [If you haven't [...]

A special podcast previewing the upcoming User Interface 13 Conference.