The Vulcans had something good with that mind-meld thing. Just put your fingertips on someone else’s forehead and your two minds become one. I wonder if Vulcan designers used that technique to ensure everyone knew how to come up with a coherent, integrated design, even though they all worked on different pieces? Without the mind-meld thing, [...]

Designers care about the user experience. Marketers are concerned with SEO and conversion. The reality is that both need to work hand-in-hand to make more relevant and persuasive content that turns into higher search rankings. How do you get everyone on the same page? Google comes to the rescue with their Quality Score. It’s an [...]

I’ve got a real mystery on my hands. I’m hoping you can help me figure it out. Here’s the background: Since 1996, we’ve held an annual event we call the User Interface Conference. Hundreds of folks come every year to learn the latest thinking for creating great user experiences. Over the 15 years, our attendance [...]

When we prepare for our user research sessions, it’s easy to focus on the questions we should ask. But what about the ones we shouldn’t ask? Our goal, of course, is to learn everything we can. We need to leverage the research time, to ensure we’re filling our brains with the information we’ll need to [...]

Event: UIE Book Club: Kristina Halvorson’s Content Strategy for the Web Date: Tuesday, August 17, 2010 (TODAY!) from 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM (ET) Location: http://live.5by5.tv Call to ask your question: +1 407 278-4070 This is all very exciting. The first UIE Book Club is almost upon us. I’m so excited you’ll be part of [...]

Picking the right assumptions to measure against can improve our results, but basing our measures on the wrong assumptions can send us in the wrong direction. Former UIEer Joshua Porter wrote a blog post recently, Why A/B Testing Isn’t Just About Small Changes, that captured the attention of the twitterati. His point, which is a [...]

Recently Johnny Holland published two of my essays on a distinction I call Hands vs. Brains. (You can read part 1 & part 2.) My thinking about Hands and Brains have come from a distinction between, in my mind, contracting and consulting work. We get a ton of calls at UIE to help people with [...]

The disciplines of experience design and marketing overlap, but sometimes the measurements for their success butt heads. You want your users to find exactly what they’re looking for, and for that content to be easily understood. Yet there’s conflict with marketing due to different goals and objectives, such as chasing paid search or other SEO [...]

You’re in the middle of your workout. Working up a good sweat, listening to music, zoning out, when it suddenly hits you (sort of like the V-8 commercials), you could have been listening to a Spoolcast interview with an accomplished UX expert. Why not workout your brain too? Regularly, we produce podcast interviews from UX [...]

On July 13 our new conference series, the Web App Masters Tour 2010 made its final stop. It was an ambitious task to organize a 2 day conference in 4 cities with 14 of the best and brightest in web application design. We had to provide more than just inspiration. We needed to make sure [...]