Back in November 2009 we asked for you to dig deep into your creative powers and help us name our spring conference. Out of that brainstorm activity, the Web App Masters Tour was born. Well we’re doing it again. During the spring of 2012, (hint: probably late April) we’re producing a new conference. We’re still [...]

Over at the User Interface Conference LinkedIn Group (which you should join, as we’re having lots of interesting conversations over there), a discussion popped up about Lean UX. In the discussion, one group member, Lorena, posted what she’d been doing, which sounded a lot like what I’ve heard folks are doing in Lean UX. She [...]

How did all those horrific designs in Myspace come about? Two words: Unconscious Incompetence. Unconscious incompetence is the first of the Four Stages of Competence. In this stage, someone doesn’t realize just how much they don’t know. It’s a blissful state and, frankly a place that is wonderful. Imagine not knowing what you don’t know. [...]

Back in January 2009, we published an article that received quite a bit of attention, The $300 Million Button. This article quickly became our most popular article and was often found on other web sites. The interest was around how a major retailer dramatically increased their e-commerce site’s revenues with a couple of simple changes. [...]

The term Lean UX is bandied about quite a bit these days. Along with it, there seems to be some confusion as to whether this is just a buzzword, a new way of working, or simply a new description for what people in the UX realm already do. Jeff Gothelf of The Ladders is a champion of Lean UX, so Jared Spool sat down with him to find out what Lean UX was all about.

“As we practice Lean UX, it becomes a mindset. It becomes a way of thinking about our development and design process.” That’s what Jeff Gothelf said to me when I asked him to explain all this fuss about Lean UX. As our clients are moving to more rapid development processes, like Agile’s Scrum, their design [...]

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Four Stages of Competence. These four stages are unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and unconscious competence. As someone learns and adapts to your design, they are working their way through the stages. The ultimate is the user who is unconsciously competent — they can seemingly move [...]

The migration to agile and lean development methods has thrown a wrench into the world of user experience professionals. Now on unfamiliar ground, these professionals want to know what new techniques and tricks help integrate UX into the development process. As we study what makes teams successful, we realize that the successful teams aren’t doing [...]

In full-day workshops, it’s not uncommon for the workshop instructor to put together exercises. When the workshop is about design, those exercises are often design projects, where the attendees work through the techniques while building something. Now, what they are building is usually some made-up project, constructed to practice the techniques. The actual results of [...]

One of the joys of putting together a conference, like the annual User Interface Conference, is the great conversations I have with all the smart people who show up. This year was no exception, and one conversation that stood out was a quick discussion I had with Kim Goodwin, author of Designing in the Digital [...]