American Express is rolling out a new travel service for its business customers. As is customary for today’s web services, there’s are terms and conditions that the new user needs to agree to when they sign up. Now, these are often implemented with a checkbox that says something like “I have read and agree to [...]

UX professionals have made a lot of progress in large organizations. Companies realize the importance of connecting with their users more and more. User research is becoming firmly rooted in many organizations as companies try to produce better products and services for their users. But user research itself can be narrow in focus and full of biases. Lou Rosenfeld of Rosenfeld Media, suggests that by breaking down the silos that exist between other research practices, we can create a complementary research experience. This will produce even better analysis and therefore, better products as a whole.

A while back, a client handed me some persona descriptions they’d written for their project. Immediately, I saw several red flags. See, these personas descriptions had something that always put me on alert: they described the character’s car and pet. Now, if we’re building enterprise accounting software, why do we need to know whether Mary [...]

We’re really good at criticizing things. We can spot the flaws instantly. But that’s different than a critical exploration of what we’re trying to do. Where we learn what it takes to make a great design. Where we explore both the problem space and the possible design solutions. I ask teams whether they do critiques. [...]

The field of user experience has grown incredibly over the past decade. It is really quite refreshing to see the number of companies who are starting to view user experience as an essential part of their business strategy. Design skills are in high demand. It is a great time to be a UX professional. But [...]

At times, getting a team to produce good ideas is like pulling teeth. You try to inspire, create, promote, even cajole people to dream up great design ideas. Some times it works. Other times you’re sitting around a conference table feeling clueless. That’s not the case when you bring Adapative Path’s CEO, Brandon Schauer into [...]

By far, The $300 Million Button is the most popular article on UIE.com. Here’s the back story for how we discovered the problem and the role that analytics played: We had been working on a client project, helping their team redesign their checkout process with some new user research and design techniques. As we were [...]

Gamestorming can allow collaboration to happen. It quickly gets a lot of people working together, sharing ideas, and getting creative. Words may be tricky because you’re not certain if someone has interpreted what you’ve said the way you meant it. The beauty of Gamestorming is it gets people to think visually and physically express their thoughts and ideas on paper.

Right now, it’s a great time to be a designer, particularly a talented one. Everyday, more companies are recognizing the value of design. They are realizing they need to have strong design to compete in the marketplace. They see their competitors, even the small ones that don’t offer as full a feature set, are eating [...]

I took four years of Latin in high school, which has not been useful in my job, except to generate my own Lorem Ipsum copy. However, part of the curriculum involved looking at lots of pictures of ancient Rome and modern Italy. I remember always being impressed with the pictures and talking about the Colosseum [...]