“What’s that catchy intro music?”

Today, I thought I’d share.

SpoolCast: Mocean Worker - Right Now

SpoolCast Crew: Cal Tjader - Soul Sauce

Josh and Jared Show: Medeski Martin & Wood - End of the World Party

Usability Tools Podcasts: Medeski Martin & Wood - Mami Gato

All of these titles are also be available through iTunes, as well.

We license this music through ASCAP.

Many of the interviewees have strong opinions about car brands. And it’s rarely the craftsmanship or engineering of the car that gave them the strong opinion. Instead, it’s something the dealer did or didn’t do. In fact, in many cases, the car could have a problem and, if handled well by the dealer, the customer would come away with a positive opinion of the overall brand.

Many of our clients are working on improving their brand, yet they often overlook what can happen when a problem arises. If the experience in handling the problem is positive, that could strengthen that customer’s engagement with the brand. However, if they somehow make the customer feel worse, then the brand suffers.

In this week’s article for our email newsletter, UIEtips, I talk about how teams from FindTape.com, Netflix, and BestBuy.com designed for problems that arise. In each case, their design helped customers end up with an improved experience and a stronger brand.

You can read my article here.

Have you tried to anticipate your user’s problems in your design? What experiences have you had with your designs? Leave your thoughts and comments below.

[On the subject of how designers can strengthen their brands, this is the subject of our next UIE Virtual Seminar. On May 14, I'll be presenting "Strike Up the Brand: How Smart Design Can Strengthen Your Brand."]

In this week’s SpoolCast, I had a chance to speak with Bill Scott. Bill has been one of my heroes for years, having really pushed the envelope as an evangelist for the public Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. He then went on to work on the Yahoo! Teachers project, where he took his knowledge of Ajax and Web 2.0 techniques and applied it to a creative solution for educators. Most recently, Bill has become the Director of UI Engineering at Netflix, where he now is driving how technology can enhance the user experience at one of the companies that understands what it takes.

During our conversation, we talked about some of the innovative techniques he’s using at Netflix, what he learned from the Yahoo! Teachers project, and his most recent work on Anti-patterns — learning from what we shouldn’t be doing.

I think you’ll enjoy this podcast. We look forward to your questions and thoughts. Let us know in the comments!

[Note: We had prepared this podcast to be released earlier this year, but due to schedule conflicts, its release was delayed. As a result, the intro mentions the very successful 2008 Web App Summit as if it's still to come. But don't worry: we'll have another one next year, so stay tuned!]

May 2008

May 5-6, Chicago

Web Design World/Chicago
Web 2.0: The Power Behind the Hype - 5/5 10:15-11:15am
Enhancing Experiences with AJAX, RIAs, and Browser-Side Intelligence - 5/6 2:00-4:15pm
Deconstructing… You! (with Jim Heid and Lance Loveday) - 5/6 - 4:30-5:30pm

I don’t get to Chicago too often, so this is going to be fun. Let me know if you’d like connect up while I’m there.

May 28, Boston

UPA-Boston’s Seventh Annual Mini UPA Conference
Web Apps: The Collision of Design and Business - 5/28 9:15-10:00am

The Boston UPA Chapter does an amazing job putting together a nice program for a great price: $135 ($75 if you’re a student) I’ve found the presentations here to be as good as those I see at conferences that cost four times or more.

June 2008

June 4, Philadephia

STC’s 2008 Technical Communication Summit
What Makes A Design Seem Intuitive? - 6/4 10:30-11:30am

Keynotes at this conference by Howard Rheingold and Richard Saul Wurman make it very attractive.

June 16-20, Baltimore

UPA 2008

I haven’t spoken at this conference since 2001 for reasons that nobody seems to know. However, I’ve been known to show up on occasion. Could happen this year. Stranger things have happened.

June 23-24, Boston

An Event Apart - Boston
Scent of a Web Page - 6/23 5:00-6:00pm

My second time speaking at An Event Apart, the conference put on my Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer. This is a great gathering of the some of the brightest minds in the design world. (And me.)

July 2008

July 15-16, Philadelphia

Higher Education Web Symposium - University of Pennsylvania
Cooking Up Gourmet User Experiences on a Fast-Food Budget - 7/16 9:00-10:15a

I’ll be presenting the keynote after full day workshops from Steve Mulder and Ricardo LaRosa (AJAX & Web 2.0), Eric Meyer & Stephanie Sullivan (CSS Tips & Techniques), Luke Wroblewski (Web Form Design Best Practices), and Usability Testing (Dana Chisnell). $299 gets you a full day workshop and the second day of great sessions. (As of last week, they were almost sold out.)

July 19-20, Boston

Podcamp Boston

I’ve gone to the last two podcamps and had a blast. I expect I’ll do something here again, at least on the 19th. (I have to fly to Seattle on the 20th.)

July 21-23, Seattle

Web Design World/Seattle
Web 2.0: The Power Behind the Hype - 5/5 10:15-11:15am
Enhancing Experiences with AJAX, RIAs, and Browser-Side Intelligence - 5/6 2:00-4:15pm

They are still nailing down the program, but this is what it looks like now. I expect I’ll be doing an evening presentation or get together while I’m here.

I’ve posted the slides above and have synched it up with audio from the conference. (Unfortunately, there was a mic-input problem during the recording and they ended up using the built-in mics instead of the sounds system. So, the recording is noisy and unintelligible in places. Sorry about that.)

Here’s the description of the talk:

Journey to the Center of Design

User-centered design was born in the 1980s, amidst a world filled with frustration with blinking VCR clocks and computer command lines. Up until this time, developers focused on making the devices work, giving little heed to how they’d be used. Terms like “user friendly” and “easy to use,” buzzwords for the UCD movement, soon became as common as “new and improved” on laundry soap.

We guarantee a journey that shouldn’t be missed.

| View | Upload your own

You can download the slides (without audio). On the Slideshare site, you can view this presentation full screen to see the details.

What do you think of this presentation?

We need someone who has the insight and right touch to take this program and make it sing. This person is going to know the design community, what they need, and how to craft a great online educational product for them.

If you know such a person, forward them this ad and have them contact us right away. We’d really appreciate it.

In February we held one of our most popular Virtual Seminars ever, Mental Models: Getting Into Your Customer’s Head, presented by Indi Young. Indi explained her mental model method of organizing the beliefs and philosophies of users, then comparing them to the current and planned functionality, to see if the users’ needs align with the design.

When we were done with the seminar, we had a number of compelling questions left over from the seminar. In this Podcast, we got back in touch with Indi and discussed some of the more interesting ones.

Indi had some interesting opinions on:

• whether you use surveys for data collection,
• how long it will take to do a mental model assessment,
• how you ensure the accuracy of the interpretation of the data you collect,
• and much more…

[Note: Unfortunately, while we were recording, there was a motor running in the background and the mic was picking it up. Brian worked extremely hard to scrub this noise out as much as possible, but there are places where doing so would've made it hard to understand what Indi was saying. We apologize in advance if the recording is a little difficult to listen to in places.]

Later this month, Indi will be presenting her full-day workshop on this subject, Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior at our Web App Summit in Coronado, California. We’ve almost sold out, sign up now for one of the few remaining seats! You won’t want to miss it.

In the podcast and seminar, Indi expounded upon the information in her new book, Mental Models, Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior. If you’re interested in purchasing the book, enjoy a 10% discount with our compliments. Use the code FOUIE010 at checkout. (The code stands for “Friends of UIE.”)

Cities, Dates, and Program Details

April 3 in Boston, May 16 in Chicago: Steve Krug’s workshop, Don’t Make Me Think: Discount Usability Testing

April 4 in Boston, May 15 in Chicago: Lou Rosenfeld’s workshop, Site Search Analytics for a Better User Experience

Special Discount for Our Readers

If you enter discount code UIEPAL, you will receive $100 off each workshop. If you sign up before the early bird deadline using promotion code UIEPAL, you will pay a discounted rate of $695 for one workshop and $1195 for both workshops — a savings of $100 off each day.

Sign up today for these fantastic workshops.

You can read my article here.

At UIE, a big part of our research agenda focuses on how to create web applications that delight users. In the upcoming months, we’ll share our tips and techniques in our weekly Usability Tools podcast.

What are some of the challenges you’ve had to address when building web-based applications?

That’s the subject of a presentation I’m giving twice over the next week. The first time is tonight, at Yahoo!’s Sunnyvale offices, and open the public. The second time is at South by Southwest Interactive on Sunday.

I get really nervous when presenting this talk, since the magical illusions I’ve embedded into it take more concentration and focus than a normal presentation, where all I need to do is focus on the lecture portion. So, if you come, please be gentle.

Here’s the official talk description:

Magic and Mental Models: Using Illusion to Simplify Designs

As children, we’re told the world is a magical place. Babies are delivered by storks. The tooth fairy harvests retired teeth in exchange for currency. Bunnies deliver candies in brightly covered baskets on a spring holiday. The world’s adults use magic to explain away the complexity of life.

In our work, confusing complexity is the natural result of an unchecked design and development process. Teams work hard, responding to customer requests through incremental improvement and feature enhancements, yet they often end up with a dismaying array of features that make users unhappy.

In this entertaining presentation, Jared will share some of his recent research into the craft of professional magic. He’ll demonstrate the parallels between the world of magical illusions and the world of digital design, comparing the similarities between professional illusions and some of today’s top design techniques.

In this presentation, you’ll learn how:

• Illusions performed by professional magicians follow the same design principles as your computer’s file system
• Designers can create specific mental models to eliminate perceived complexity
• Simple design tricks can make designs seem to be faster than they really are
• Whimsicality, attention, and functionality are essential elements to creating delightful experiences

You’ll see examples of illusions built into a variety of designs, including those from Microsoft, Flickr, Netflix, iTunes, and Facebook. Jared will also, possibly at his own peril, reveal the secrets from several magical illusions to show you just how the tricks were created and the effects are realized, giving you the ammunition necessary to build illusions into your own designs.

In this week’s article for our email newsletter, UIEtips, I share some of the challenges we’ve seen users encounter in our usability tests of web applications. These are challenges you’ll want to look out for when users interact with your applications. I hope you enjoy it.

You can read my article here.

At UIE, a big part of our research agenda focuses on how to create web applications that delight users. In the upcoming months, we’ll share our tips and techniques in our weekly Usability Tools podcast.

What are some of the challenges you’ve had to address when building web-based applications?

Each week in our Usability Tools Podcast, we will be sitting down to discuss tips and tools for improving your site’s user experience. The goal of our weekly podcast is to share some of the most important findings from UIE’s research on web design and usability.

A button is a button right? Move the mouse over it. Click. Not much to it, eh?

Well, when it’s a well-designed button, all the work your brain is doing to click the button is invisible to you. However, when it’s poorly designed, things start to become harder. Maybe you overshoot the target area? Or maybe you have trouble clicking because the button is too small. Often its not difficult to recover, but it costs attention and attention is expensive.

In this week’s podcast, we discuss the implications of Fitts’ Law. In short, the law states, “The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.”

While this seems obvious, it’s surprising how often it’s forgotten and the trouble that causes. And there’s magic that can happen when a designer takes special care to use Fitts’ law to its full advantage. Listen to the podcast to hear about how that can work.

As always, we’re very interested in hearing from you. Do you have questions or comments about this episode? We love to create shows based on your questions. Please leave a comment below or email us directly at mailbag@uie.com

UIE’s Latest Research: If you’re interested in the topics we discuss in the podcasts, I highly suggest you sign up for our free newsletter, UIEtips, to read our latest usability and design research as soon as we publish it. We’ll also notify you in UIEtips when we publish new podcasts.

Duration: 22min | File size: 12.5 MB
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[ Text Transcript ]

Each week in our Usability Tools Podcast, we will be sitting down to discuss tips and tools for improving your site’s user experience. The goal of our weekly podcast is to share some of the most important findings from UIE’s research on web design and usability.

In this week’s podcast, Brian Christiansen and I continue exploring usability techniques for web-based applications. Web-based applications are different from content-based web sites because the users are involved in a transaction. When we’re researching the usability of a content-based site, we’re focused on how users will find and react to the information. However, with web-based applications, there are many other considerations that we need to account for.

If you missed the first part of the show, you can listen to it here:
Usability Tools Podcast: Useful Web App Usability Techniques, Part 1

This week, we explore the usability technique toolbox, focusing on those methods that help us with web-based applications.

In this episode we start with the basic usability test, move onto variants, then talk about field studies. In each case, we explore the web-app specific advantages and talk about how we get the information we need to make informed design decisions.

We talked about several books in this episode:

• The Handbook of Usability Testing—by Jeff Rubin
• A Practical Guide to Usability Testing—by Ginny Reddish and Joe Dumas
• Paper Prototyping—by Carolyn Snyder

As always, we’re very interested in hearing from you. Do you have questions or comments about this episode? We love to create shows based on your questions. Please leave a comment below or email us directly at mailbag@uie.com

UIE’s Latest Research: If you’re interested in the topics we discuss in the podcasts, I highly suggest you sign up for our free newsletter, UIEtips, to read our latest usability and design research as soon as we publish it. We’ll also notify you in UIEtips when we publish new podcasts.

What really struck me about his experience was how much we can now do within a browser. Once folks figured out ways to eliminate page refreshes, a world opened up to allow for truly immersive experiences.

In this week’s article for our email newsletter, UIEtips, I explore some of these experiences and what they can bring to a business environment. A few weeks ago, I looked at what the New York Times did for delivering news in an interactive format. In this article, we’ll explore what other companies can do for their customers.

You can read my article here.

Are you using highly interactive designs to create an immersive experience for your users? If so, what challenges have you run into?

Steve Mulder, Jeremy Keith, Andrew DeVigal, and Steve Duenes will be presenting their experiences with developing highly interactive experiences as part of our UIE Web App Summit. I highly suggest you check out the program and consider joining us. (I just got back from visiting Coronado, where the event will take place. What an amazing resort! It’s going to be great fun.)

Each week in our Usability Tools Podcast, we will be sitting down to discuss tips and tools for improving your site’s user experience. The goal of our weekly podcast is to share some of the most important findings from UIE’s research on web design and usability.

In this week’s podcast, Brian Christiansen and I explore usability techniques for web-based applications. Web-based applications are different from content-based web sites because the users are involved in a transaction. When we’re researching the usability of a content-based site, we’re focused on how users will find and react to the information. However, with web-based applications, there are many other considerations that we need to account for.

Because this is a big topic, we’ve divided it into two podcasts. In Part 1, Brian and I lay down the framework for what our usability research needs to tell us about our web-based application. In Part 2, will look at the techniques for finding that information.

In this episode we cover,

• The differences between hub-and-spoke and interview-based web applications
• When in the design and development process we look to user research
• 5 major classes of usability concerns to consider when testing web apps

Here are some UIE resources on web apps that relate to this episode,

• Five Usability Challenges of Web-Based Applications—Research Article
• The Designer’s Guide to Web Applications: Web Apps Tour 2007 - Learning from Successful Designs—PDF Report
• The Designer’s Guide to Web Applications, Part I: Structure and Flows—PDF Report
• The WebApp Summit, March 2008—in beautiful Coronado, California

As always, we’re very interested in hearing from you. Do you have questions or comments about this episode? We love to create shows based on your questions. Please leave a comment below or email us directly at mailbag@uie.com

UIE’s Latest Research: If you’re interested in the topics we discuss in the podcasts, I highly suggest you sign up for our free newsletter, UIEtips, to read our latest usability and design research as soon as we publish it. We’ll also notify you in UIEtips when we publish new podcasts.

Would you like to help us out? Web App Summit 2008 is being held from March 26 - March 28, 2008 in Coronado, California at the Coronado Island Marriott Resort. We are currently looking for volunteers who are available to assist us throughout the full three days of the Summit and with initial set-up. Volunteers will be asked to arrive by 3pm on Tuesday, March 25th and stay until the end of the Summit.

Throughout the main three days of the Summit, volunteers will be assigned to a full-day workshop and short talks to assist Summit speakers with their needs. We’ll make every effort to accommodate your preference for which sessions you’d like to attend. Volunteers are responsible for paying for all travel and hotel accommodations but we will provide breakfast and lunch Wednesday through Friday of the Summit. The registration fee is waived for volunteers.

If you’re interested in volunteering, or if you have any questions, please send your replies directly to Ashley McKee at amckee@uie.com. Priority will be given to full-time students and those of you available to help out for the full event from Wednesday, March 26th through Friday, March 28th, plus initial set-up.

This week, we have the latest installment of the SpoolCast crew (which we recorded back in December, and then got busy — sorry!).

Almost every company has to struggle with the balance between customer needs and internal business objectives. In this episode the crew examines the recent situation at Facebook. While trying to please both users and build a business model, the fast moving organization has stepped on many toes.

Our panel took a look at this delicate balance and how the future UX team at Facebook might help to resolve this. Facebook makes a fascinating business case from which to extract lessons, and we think you’ll enjoy it, too.

Returning to the crew this week was our foreign UX correspondent based in Hong Kong, Mr. Danial Szuc. Dan is the Principal Usability consultant with Apogee Usability Asia Ltd.

Joining the crew for the first time in this episode were special guests David Armano, VP of Experience Design for Critical Mass and Robert Hoekman, Jr., CEO of Miskeeto. You can learn more about David at DavidArmano.com and you can learn more about Robert at rhjr.net. I think you’ll find their contributions to the panel insightful!

Mistake #13: Not Explaining If It’s The Username or Password They Got Wrong

Returning to an electronics site they hadn’t used since last holiday season, the user entered what they thought was their email address and password, but it didn’t work. The error message was a simple, “Invalid Login. Please Try Again.” Was the password wrong or did they register with a different email address? (After all, they have had several over the years.)

The user tried several different combinations of email addresses and passwords, but none worked. Eventually, they left the shopping cart with a $500 purchase. They went from a very excited customer to a very frustrated one in a matter of moments.

Several folks wrote to tell me I’d gotten this wrong — that, in fact, this is intentional to throw off hackers.

It’s true that if you give an error message helping users know which they’ve gotten wrong, you are also giving prospective hackers information that makes it easier to violate the security of the site.

However, I’m wondering if all sites need the same security rigor. A site where a hacker could get at personal information and steal your identity requires great security.

But, does every site have the same restrictions? For example, an online forum where I can talk about my interest in magic tricks doesn’t need the same rigorous security restrictions as my mortgage account at my bank.

There are those in the security world who suggest that any breach in security is a bad thing and therefore every possible breach should be rigorously protected. Yet, maybe there’s another approach where we can decide, based on the information and functions we’re protecting, to err on the side of an easier experience some of the time.

Unless you’re doing your own implementation — practically impossible for a serious production application — you need to find a way to succinctly communicate what’s important and how it should all work. Today, in our UIEtips email newsletter, we published my latest article, where I discuss how the best design teams go about successfully communicating their ideas to the development team. I think you’ll really enjoy it.

You can read my article here.

I also recently had the pleasure of chatting with D. Keith Robinson, Creative Director of Blue Flavor, who has tackled the problem of communicating design ideas to his development team. In our chat, Keith shares some of his experiences developing methods that get the entire development team on the same page. I highly encourage you to listen to our conversation.

How do you communicate great interaction design ideas to your implementation team?

How do you communicate complex and interactive design ideas to the development team? To answer this question, I had a chance to speak with with D. Keith Robinson, the Creative Director of Blue Flavor, a premier design and development shop based in Seattle, Washington. In addition to being one of the design experts we turn to for guidance, Keith was formerly the Editor-in-Chief of Digital Web Magazine.

We had a great discussion regarding the “backstage” portion of web app design. I think Keith has some innovate ideas which will inspire your own projects. In our chat, we discussed:

• “Projects from hell”
• Where can communications break down when designing web apps?
• How do effective deliverables affect the success of a project?
• What’s involved in creating enhanced deliverables to improve communication and the interaction design process?

We’re excited to have Keith speaking at our UIE Web App Summit this coming March. Keith will be discussing his successful communications methods for highly interactive designs, especially those where the design elements can’t be captured with static images.

You can catch his talk, Making the Translation: Critical Web App Design Deliverables on day 3 of the UIE Web App Summit!

Joshua Porter (formerly of UIE, but now doing great work on his own at Bokardo Design) recently described much of the latest online debate about the need to develop personas when designing. Josh got a lot of things right, but he got one thing very, very wrong. And, unfortunately, he bases a lot of his argument on that one thing.

Josh said this:

Definition, please?

But while all of this arguing is going on, nobody is really defining what personas are. This, of course, is a big part of the problem. What most definitions don’t say is that personas are a document. They might be a poster, a word file, or a PDF. But they are a document that represents an archetypical person that is passed around design teams. Ok, just wanted to make that clear.

Personas are not a document. Persona descriptions can be a document (or a movie or any other practical rendering). But, those are just renderings of what happened during the persona creation process.

Here’s the way to think of it:

Personas are to Persona Descriptions as Vacations are to Souvenir Picture Albums.

While people who didn’t go on the vacation can look through the album and think, “Boy, that must’ve been fun,” they’ll never get the full experience of what the actual vacation experience was. The album is just a remnant.

In the UX community, many folks are now saying, “I’ve looked at these documents and they just don’t do anything for me. I don’t think personas are valuable.” Unfortunately, they are judging the value of creating and using robust personas based on the quality of the paper deliverable. If the vacation pictures aren’t compelling, did the vacation itself suck?

To be fair, I think there could be a lot of improvement in the ways people document their personas. Todd Zaki Warfel, over at MessageFirst has some interesting diagrams, though he admits they take a bit of explanation.

Todd Zaki Warfel’s persona description with his Persona DNA chart

Stuart Karten is also doing interesting stuff with his ModeMapping work.

Stuart Karten’s ModeMapping deliverables

However, these are just the final souvenirs, after the team has gained the real value. That value comes when the team visits and observes their target audience, absorbs and discusses their observations, and reduces the chaos into patterns, which then become the personas.

What’s in the team’s head, as they are designing, is what will make a difference in the final design. The persona descriptions are just there to remind everyone what happened.

If you’re amongst those who insist on judging the value of personas on their descriptions, I suggest you cancel your next vacation and just order one of these gift boxes. I’m sure you’ll find it just as valuable as the vacation itself.

In a recent UIEtips article, I described eight common account sign-in mistakes that we see all the time in our usability tests. Today, in our UIEtips email newsletter, we published my latest article that continues the list with 8 more design mistakes you’ll want to avoid. If you’re designing an account system, or already have one, this serves as a good start to assess how much you may be frustrating your users.

You can read my article here.

Account Sign-in is just one of the topics we’ll discuss at the Web App Summit, March 26-28, 2008, in San Diego, CA. You’ll want to reserve your seat today. Tuesday, January 15th is the last day for the $1,799 pricing.

Today’s podcast features a fascinating conversation I had with New York Times graphic journalists, Andrew DeVigal and Steve Duenes.

Andrew and Steve are part of the team responsible for taking data and raw information from the day’s news and turning it into highly interactive and informative online experiences.

For example, the team built the NYTimes Debate Analyzer, a tool to explore the presidential debates. Readers can see how frequently a specific term, such as “health care” or “iraq”, is mentioned by each candidate. They can scroll to a specific answer in the transcript and the video automatically plays that section, bringing an entire new way to experience the debates.

In this discussion, we also examined some of the NYTimes.com’s other amazing interactive graphics and multimedia applications, including:

• Paths to the Top of the Home Run Charts - An interactive chart showing how quickly record holders beat the MLB home run record
• Trailer Living, Then and Now - Explore how vacation trailers have changed over the years
• Exonerated, Freed, and What Happened Then - An multimedia exploration of 200 prisoners exonerated by DNA evidence

I think you’ll enjoy my conversation with Steve and Andrew. You’ll learn a great deal about the their journalistic techniques for building for successful interactive online experiences.

I’m also greatly anticipating their presentation this March at our Web App Summit in San Diego, California. They will present the talk, Engaging an Audience: Using Out-of-the-Box Thinking to Create Great Designs.

Today, in our UIEtips email newsletter, we published my latest article talking about engaging experiences found in an unlikely place: a newspaper web site. Yet, this isn’t just any newspaper web site, it’s the New York Times. The engaging experiences are interactive calculators, maps, and data visualization tools.

I’ll admit it right up front: This article is probably the most difficult one I’ve had to write in a long time. Not because the subject matter was hard to come up with. Nor was it because I was at a loss for words.

No, the reason it was so difficult to write was because of the examples. They were just so much fun to play with. I’d bring one up to quickly note a detail and then I’d realize I’ve spent 30 minutes just playing with it.

In this week’s article, I explore some key principles that are the common thread in the NYTimes interactive graphics. Of course, I provide links to the examples, which you’ll really want to play with. You were warned!

You can read my article here.

I am extremely excited that we have two key members from the New York Times, Andrew DeVigal and Steve Duenes, joining us for the UIE Web App Summit in San Diego, CA on March 26-28. They are going to share their process and inspiration for their engaging interactive designs. You don’t want to miss this session.

Have you come up with some interesting methods of making your data engaging?

Now, I’ve asked Christine to work on a new project for UIE because it really needs her talents. I can’t say any more about it, except that it is going to be cool.

That means we need an amazing, top-quality event manager to continue the great work Christine started. This new person needs to be extremely organized, have great people skills, and like to travel, as we’re expanding our programs to Europe and Canada in 2008. (Asia and Australia are also in our sights.)

Oh, yeah, that favor: I’m hoping you know someone who would make a great addition to our staff. As you know, we shoot for hiring only top-caliber folks, which is why I thought of asking you. I’m betting there may be someone in your circle who would be great addition to the team.

We’ve written up a job ad. If you know someone who you think we should talk to, please let me know right away.

The ironic thing is, while we add account registration and sign-in features to enhance the user’s experience, in doing so, we create all manner of user experience problems. Despite its prevalence, one of the most difficult things to get right is a good sign-in and registration process.

The challenge is one of creating selective usability. We want the process to be completely usable for our customers and users. We also want it to be unusable for the bad people who want to steal our identities and disrupt our environment. Creating a design that is usable to a subset of users seems to be much harder than creating one that is usable for everyone.

Today, in our UIEtips email newsletter, we published my latest article that describes eight common account sign-in mistakes we see all the time in our usability tests. If you’re designing an account system, or already have one, this should serve as a good start to assess how much you may be frustrating your users.

You can read my article here.

Account Sign-in is just one topic we’ll discuss at the UIE Web App Summit, March 26-28, 2008, in San Diego, CA. You’ll want to reserve your seat today, as we’re filling up quickly.

Has your design suffered from these mistakes? What have you done to improve it?

Each week in our Usability Tools Podcast, we will be sitting down to discuss tips and tools for improving your site’s user experience. We’ll share some of the most important findings from UIE’s research on web design and usability.

It’s tempting to spend a ton of time creating slick flyout, dropdown, or pop-up navigation on our site, but is it worth the effort?

This week, Brian Christiansen and I discuss interactive mouseover techniques for navigation. Are they a good idea when it comes to actually using your site? Based on our testing, we don’t think so.

Some of the issues we address are:

• Why would designers want to use mouseover navigation?
• How do mouseovers become an obstacle to navigation?
• What effect does mouseover navigation have on users finding their trigger words?
• What sites are good examples of navigation without mouseovers?

Here’s our list of referenced links for the episode:

• The UIE research article that started it all: User’s Decide First, Move Second
• Our research in link-rich home pages: an article, Lifestyles of Link-Rich Home Pages; a podcast, Home Page Design; and a 90-minute Virtual Seminar, Initial Scent: The Latest Thinking on Home Page Design.
• Our research on gallery pages: an article, Galleries: The Hardest Working Pages On Your Site; a podcast, Gallery Pages; and a 90-minute Virtual Seminar, Gallery Pages: The Hardest Working Pages on Your Site.
• Two sites we believe are good examples of link-rich designs: Staples.com and Analog.com.

As always, we’re very interested in hearing from you. Do you have questions or comments about this episode? We love to create shows based on your questions. Please leave a comment below or email us directly at mailbag@uie.com.

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