Mark Hurst interviewed Brian King, VP & Global Brand Manager for Courtyard by Marriott about the new design of their hotels. It’s a great read, talking about how you revitalize a cash-cow business by creating a great experience. One of Brian’s comments jumped out at me: We took our knowledge and created, in a warehouse [...]

Join us January 12 for our next webinar: Leveraging Search & Discovery Patterns For Great Online Experiences, with Peter Morville and Mark Burrell.

We published a lot of great articles during 2009. We featured guest writers, published interviews, and wrote numerous articles on the research we’ve done. At year’s end, it’s common to reflect and revisit what you’ve done. We thought about the articles that had the biggest impact and really got people thinking. Even if some readers [...]

How is a search result like a thoughtful gift? The outcome exceeds the expectation. Ok, that’s kind of a lame riddle, but it’s accurate nonetheless. When we get a wrapped present, we hope the unwrapping will produce something that delights us. The same is true clicking on a search result. We anticipate it will serve [...]

Producing a brand new event is exciting. Lots to think about: the speakers, the topics, and the locations. Yet what immediately separates one conference from another is its name. We’ve launched a ton of events in the 21 years we’ve been around. But this time, we were a little stuck for the name. So we [...]

Your organization spends considerable resources to get people to come to your site. Does your site do what it needs to once they get there? Your users’ experience is a fluid event that frequently starts someplace like Google and, if you’re lucky, ends with them accomplishing their objective at your site. The goal is to [...]

User experience research lives or dies by the appropriateness of the participants in the study. If the participants match the real users, you’re set. We held a Virtual Seminar with Dana Chisnell to discuss recruiting for usability testing, and this is the followup podcast to that seminar. In the podcast, Dana answers remaining questions from the seminar.

“On a web site, the design is represented by two separate yet equally important components. The content users and the links they use. These are their stories.” Doink-Doink. Ok, really it’s just the story of the links. (We’ll talk about the content later, I promise.) About 10 years ago, we started looking at how users [...]

The plans for the our Web App Thingy event are moving along quickly. We’ve already lined up some kick-ass speakers on topics like Web App Navigation, Design Patterns, and building in Seductive Interfaces. We’re scoping out the venues to decide which of the four cities we’re gonna bring the tour to. And we’re getting really [...]

We got ourselves into big trouble back in 1996. In our seminal report, Web Site Usability: A Designer’s Guide, we wrote a little sentence that attracted a lot of angry emails from designers everywhere: “Graphic design neither hurts nor helps.” We’d looked at sites that had made a huge investment in adding graphics to their [...]