Brian Christiansen and I recorded a special episode comprised entirely of questions from our customers. On July 17, we held the UIE Virtual Seminar: The Scent of a Web Page—The Five Types of Navigation Pages. During the seminar, we received far more questions than time would allow answering. As is tradition, we put together this follow-up podcast to answer even more of your excellent questions.

 

 SpoolCast: Followup Q&A from the Scent of a Web Page [24:30m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

It’s easy for design teams to get trapped in the day-to-day grind of improving the designs they are working on. You tweak this image, clean up that text, relabel the button to make more sense — all important things to make incremental improvements.
Yet, it would be impossible to see radical, major innovations come from that [...]

In this episode of Usability Tools, Brian Christiansen and I continue on how to moderate a usability test.

 

 Usability Tools Podcast: Moderating Usability Tests, Part 2 [34:10m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

August may mean the Dog Days of Summer, but we have another great UIE Virtual Seminar for you that we think you’ll find very cool:
Galleries: The Hardest Working Pages on Your Site
Date: August 14th, 2008 — 1pm ET / Noon CT / 11am MT / 10am PT
As we continue our series on Designing for [...]

Tomorrow is a bittersweet day for me. July 18th is my last official day working at User Interface Engineering. For eight years, I’ve been excited and happy to come to the office every day, continually challenged by my work.
While my job role has evolved significantly over the years, I’ve enjoyed every moment: conducting usability [...]

As I mentioned last week, producing a great search results page takes a ton of hard design work. There’s really no way without studying the users’ goals and needs, and watching how they interact with the results the engine generates. In almost every instance, Search is not the user’s end goal, but one tool they [...]

On his Biznology blog, search expert Mike Moran (author of the great book Do It Wrong Quickly), commented on my recent article about how people search, Producing Great Search Results: Harder than It Looks - Part 1.
In his post, Mike makes some excellent points, including pointing to the seminal work by Andrei Broder, A [...]

When you study how designs get made as much as we have, you start to notice something: good design is directly related to effort. Good design takes a lot of work. Bad design, as the bumper sticker says, “it just happens.”
You won’t find this to be any more true than in the design of effective [...]

In this episode of Usability Tools, Brian Christiansen and I talk about how to moderate a usability test. Turns out, the episode got so long that we decided to break it into two parts. This week’s show focuses upon the different roles a single moderator needs to take on during the session.

 

 Usability Tools Podcast: Moderating Usability Tests, Part One [33:22m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Yesterday, I talked about how we come up with each row in our Weighted Differences Matrix. For each of these differences, we need to then assess how important it will be to the user’s experience, which we represent with a weight. The weight is a number from zero to ten, where a zero means the [...]