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. Then we’ll need [...]

It’s easy for applications to get overcomplicated and bogged down with data – especially in an enterprise setting. It’s hard to keep track of so many different things. When dashboards and widgets are employed, the goal is to make your life easier, but often that’s not the result. The solution – simplifying these applications for specific use cases and giving the right people the right information they need for their given task. Hagan Rivers spends her time meeting with teams to show them exactly what they need to do to streamline these complex applications.

I love red velvet cake. I’ve got a great recipe to make it. And I stick with that recipe. I don’t decide to leave out the baking soda (even though I don’t really know what the baking soda does). Nor do I decide to cut the sugar in half (even though I think lots of [...]

JQuery facilitates the vital steps of designing and testing complex interactions of today’s modern websites and web applications. In the next UIE Virtual Seminar, Rich Rutter gets you started with JQuery—assuming no prior knowledge—and shows you lots of examples, hints, and tricks. Just 5 minutes into this seminar, you’ll see JQuery in action and have something you can use in your own wireframes.

As we use a multitude of devices to access the same content, we expect a similar experience across platforms. If you have a great user experience on the desktop, it would be easy to rationalize that your mobile experience, for example, shouldn’t be painful. User experience professionals now need to consider how and where their applications and content are being accessed more than ever before. Developing rich interactions across all of these platforms can be a daunting task. Bill Scott discusses how employing design patterns can help ensure that your users have a great experience wherever they use your product.

With the amount of content coming at you from all sides, it can be difficult to make sense of it all and present it in a logical fashion. Curation allows you to create order out of all the chaos. Borrowed from the world of museums, curating your content allows you to form a narrative, showing your users what they can and should do with your content. Margot showcases lessons she has adopted from museum curators. She shows what content strategists take from these lessons and apply to their practice.

Could the new changes with HTML5 and CSS3 create a utopian society? Doubtful, but what it can do is make a designer’s life a lot easier and bring about more SEO results. A few weeks ago I interviewed Stephanie (Sullivan) Rewis and Greg Rewis to find out what they’ll cover in their UI16 workshop, Everything [...]

[Thanks to Yaniv Sarig, who translated this post into Hebrew.] Back in the early days of PC computing, we were interested in how people used all those options, controls, and settings that software designers put into their applications. How much do users customize their applications? We embarked on a little experiment. We asked a ton [...]

Everybody strives to arrive at the end of a project with a great design. But often times the “brilliant idea” isn’t easy to communicate and takes a long time to develop. Brandon Schauer believes that you can develop techniques to help this communication, arriving at good design in shorter amounts of time. By putting your ideas on paper and post-its, and getting everyone participating, you create a collaborative environment that allows these ideas to grow and develop.

Need another reason to be in Boston, November 7-9 for the User Interface 16 Conference? How about your own personal designer’s toolkit? C’mon, you know you want one. Communicating your design ideas is hard enough. You certainly don’t want to worry about the tools you use to get your message across. So we made a [...]