When folksonomies showed up almost 10 years ago, they promised to make information on our sites easier to use. After all, if users apply their own tags to every piece of content, everything will be easier to find, right? Maybe yes, maybe no. Our favorite taxonomy and category expert, Stephanie Lemieux, has spent the last [...]

Bill Scott chats with Jared Spool about rich interactions, his new book about them, and his deep history with them at Sabre, Yahoo! and now Netflix. Bill is one of the stellar presenters scheduled for all four cities on the UIE Web App Masters Tour.

When our applications grow large and complex, how do we help users find the right commands and functions? If we were talking about large data sets, we’d build in a search capability. Would search also work for finding commands? Our good friend, Hagan Rivers, explores that question in this issue of UIEtips. Inspired by our [...]

Robert Hoekman, Jr and I are teaming forces once again, to do our best to answer your UX questions. If you’re not familiar with it, Robert and I do a little podcast show we call Userability. You ask us a question. We give you an answer. Occasionally, we give you a good answer. Sometimes, we [...]

Personas have been part of the UX toolbox for a while. Yet we’ve always wondered why teams don’t use them more often. A few years back, we set off to answer that question. We discovered a variety of ways to create personas — each valuable in their own right. With our clients, we’ve been using [...]

The world’s foremost authority on web forms is Luke Wroblewski, author of the heralded book, Web Form Design. It’s no coincidence that we lean on Luke often to join us at events like our upcoming Web App Masters Tour. Jared Spool sat down with Luke to discuss what’s been happening with web forms since his book came out. It winds up there have been some interesting developments recently.

Treat your team to a conference-quality seminar right from your own office. Join us for the next UIE Virtual Seminar, The Power of Ad Hoc Personas: Truly Practical Methods to Get Your Organization On the Same Page, with Tamara Adlin, Thursday, February 18. When you kick off a project right, everything is much easier. When [...]

In this podcast, Jared Spool sits down with Peter Morville to answer many excellent questions from the recent Leveraging Search and Discovery Patterns virtual seminar. Even if you did not attend, there’s a lot of great information in this podcast.

It’s hard to have a conversation about great design without mentioning Apple. Usually, we’re talking about the design of the iPod, iPhone, or last week’s newly announced iPad. However, those aren’t the only interesting challenges Apple’s talented designers have tackled. They’ve done an amazing job with something that wouldn’t get a lot of attention otherwise: [...]

We turn to Hagan Rivers for insight on designing challenging web applications year-after-year because she just keeps coming up with better and better ideas. Recently, Jared sat down to talk with Hagan to discuss her somewhat radical notion, designing web app navigation as its own, separate application.