It seems we’ve failed to offend our international audience sufficiently, so this week we’ll try again by chatting with Jay Vidyarthi, a designer hailing form Montréal, Québec, Canada. Jay is working on a project with social design aspects. He’s helping design a site where the goal is to build “an involved and contributing community of users.” He wants to know if there are any user experience techniques to encourage participation.

The skills you need to discover and fix many common visual design problems don’t require an art degree. The term “web design” implies knowledge and understanding of visuals, creative, even artistic ability. But not everyone practicing web design comes from this background, and the process of improving your site’s design can be daunting. Thankfully, Dan [...]

Some days, I sit and wonder what it will be like for our children’s children. After all, our parents’ parents didn’t think that houses came with plumbing. So what will our grandkids think? Computers, it seems, are here to stay for a while. However, they’re getting smaller, ubiquitous, and are far more connected. We’re already [...]

Bill Scott’s Designing for Interesting Moments was one of the highlights of the first stop on UIE’s Web App Masters tour, in San Diego. We wanted everyone to benefit from his research into web interactions, so we’re bringing you this audio and visual sample.

What are the ingredients that drive teams to deliver consistently good experiences? Does the company size, business processes, organizational management, or executive management have anything to do with it? For the past 10 years, Jared Spool and our research team at User Interface Engineering studied the secrets behind successful teams and the factors driving their [...]

The time has come to wrap up the final part of the Web App Masters interview series. Today we feature Ken Kellogg from Marriott and the authors of Designing Social Interfaces, Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone. Ken Kellogg’s podcast talks about navigating the design process within a large corporate world, and how customer research plays [...]

Recently in UIEtips, we featured part 1 of the Interviews with the Masters. Julie Zhuo shared how Facebook handles design changes and public reaction to these changes. If you didn’t get a chance to listen, Julie’s podcast shares some fascinating Facebook processes that you’ll want to hear. Bill Scott’s podcast looked at design patterns and [...]

Over the last couple months, I had the privilege of interviewing some of the leading experts in the world of web app design. These folks are the creme de la creme in their field and shared quite a bit of juicy information with me. In a 4-part series, we’ll feature audio interviews with these Masters. [...]

As humans, we’re a social species, so it’s no surprise our applications are becoming social too. Our users want to connect, share, and collaborate, using the data and tools we’re designing. Building in social components adds new challenges and requirements: protecting privacy, curtailing inappropriate behavior, and encouraging participation. As we planned the topics for the [...]

Forms are crucial for users to complete many online transactions, ranging from sign-up forms introducing new customers to your site, to checkout forms finalizing your users’ purchases. In last week’s UIEtips, we re-published the first part of an excellent article written by Luke Wroblewski, author of Web Form Design. Luke discusses tips for improving web [...]