We don’t live for press clippings, like some folk do. We just do our best to provide good, quality content to you, our audience, figuring that those people who need to know about us will find us. So, it’s a nice fifteen minutes of fame when we get picked up by the popular press, in [...]

Our newest creation: The Userability Podcast. Our listeners call into to ask Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr. their most vexing design questions. This week: Rob Fay asks about exploring design alternatives.

Most online design requires the designer to focus on two separate but equal elements. The content of the design and the chrome that supports it. (Do you think I’ve watched too much Law and Order over the years?) Take a multi-step dialog sequence, such as, say, signing up for a new account. Each step will [...]

We’re looking for a little bit of help from you.  Scott Berkun, our top speaker at UI13, has agreed to present our April 14 UIE Virtual Seminar, and wants you to help select the topic. The guidelines are simple. As he says on his blog, the topic should be “design / usability related in some [...]

Web-based application development is a field in flux. With new advances in interaction technologies, social media, and fast-paced design, it can be hard to keep up. That’s why we’ve put together a series of podcasts with some of the experts in the field: Dan Brown, Molly Holzshlag, Steve Mulder, Riccardo LaRosa, and Nathan Curtis. In [...]

Dealing with real-life web app production isn’t as glamorous as some aspects of design in the digital realm, but it is full of challenges and can honestly make or break a project. There are ways of truly optimizing certain aspects of the production so that you can create a product with consistent quality at a faster pace. To find out how, I turned to Nathan Curtis.

You may know of Jason Fried and the folks at 37Signals, makers of the Basecamp project-management application, the Highrise contact-management application, and other successful web-based products. Jason spoke at last year’s Web App Summit, his basic philosophy is to focus primarily on designs he wants to use. When he builds something he wants to use, [...]

UIE is excited to announce our new UIE Roadshow: Secrets Behind Designing Great User Experiences, a full-day workshop, based on 10 years of UIE’s extensive research, that will deliver new insights and inspire your team to create the best user experiences.  This winter, we’re taking this workshop on the road to: Portland, OR on Tuesday, February 17, 2009  [...]

In today’s UIEtips, I tell a story about a client who found a way to dramatically increase their e-commerce site’s revenues with a couple of simple changes. While the story is interesting, the story-behind-the-story is just as interesting. The client had hired us because they were concerned about checkout-process abandonment. Their analytics were showing a [...]

Back in 2006, I wrote an article called The Elements of a Design Pattern which has proven to be very popular. The interesting thing about popular articles is they regularly get good comments, long after they were written. Fast forward three years and today we get a comment from Tessie asking: I am currently designing [...]