Last week we re-published part 1 of Producing Great Search Results. As I mentioned last week, producing a great search results page takes a ton of hard design work. It’s critical to study the users’ goals and needs, and watch how the user interacts with the results the engine produces. In almost every instance, Search is not the user’s end [...]

Joe wrote us: I was just in a pattern review meeting, and the age-old discussion of whether to use icons and labels vs. just icons or just labels came up. Years ago, I recall Jared Spool and UIE posting an article in which their tests showed that icons and labels together were generally better. I [...]

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 [...]

Once I understood how the Market Maturity model worked, life became much easier. The theory, which describes how organizations prioritize user experience over time, makes it easy to know what to suggest to team managers. Using the model is easy. First, you ask a few questions to determine where the organization’s products are relative to their market maturity. The [...]

A special episode recorded live from Voices That Matter 2009 conference, with two audience questions!

You may have noticed that the last two UIEtips articles concentrated on UX teams. The first article was on Building and Managing a Successful UX Team. The second article was Five Techniques for Getting Buy-In for Usability Testing. Following the rule of three principal, I’m focusing this next article, once again, on the UX team. Today’s article goes back to [...]

UIEtips 4/24/07: Five Techniques for Getting Buy-In for Usability Testing UIE’s Christine Perfetti discusses the 5 best techniques for convincing management and key stakeholders of the benefits of incorporating usability testing into the formal design process.

This week, Will Evans asks Jared and Robert: when do you know your project is “useable-enough”?

UIEtips 7/11/06: Building and Managing a Successful User Experience Team

UIE’s Christine Perfetti recently interviewed Sarah Bloomer and Susan Wolfe, two premier User Experience experts, to discuss how organizations can make their UX practices a success.

Carrying the User Experience flag through your organization can be a daunting task. Whether you’re a UX-Team-of-One or manage a 20-person Experience Design team, our research shows that organizations are varied in their readiness to accept and act upon this idea of User Experience Design. To pull off successful design, regardless of where your organization [...]