We’ve got a unique and exciting UIE Virtual Seminar coming up in September:
Testing Your Critiquing Skills: Site Navigation
Date: Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
Time: 1pm ET / Noon CT / 11am MT / 10am PT
When looking over someone else’s design, how do you ensure you’re delivering valuable insights that bring new perspectives to the table?
The best critique [...]

This week, our good friend Peter Merholz joins us for the show. Peter is president of the noted experience strategy and design consultancy Adaptive Path.

In our discussion, I asked Peter about mapping out a product’s evolution. Launching a product is no simple task. Every new product falls on the spectrum somewhere between feature-complete, perfect execution and actually shipping with a pile of features on the cutting room floor. Realistically, most sway towards the latter. But that doesn’t mean your products needs to feel unfinished.

 

 SpoolCast: Product Evolution with Peter Merholz [36:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

When designing online experiences, it’s very tempting to ask the users what they would expect. Where would they expect the search box to be? Where would they expect a login element to appear? Where would they expect to find contact information?
Asking for their expectations makes sense: if we know what they are already preconditioned to [...]

A few years back, Blockbuster, the video rental business, launched an amazing new service. Customers could select movies from the company’s web site, which Blockbuster would mail to their home. The customers could take as long as they wanted to watch the videos, returning the DVDs any time without late fees, all for a recurring [...]

On April 12, I gave the keynote at the IA Summit. It was my second time keynoting this event and a real honor for me. The audience was great and it lead to some very interesting discussion, both at the conference and on blogs and discussion lists everywhere.
I’ve posted the slides above and have synched [...]

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.

 

 SpoolCast Crew Episode 7 - The Book of Face [01:18:16m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Over the last 7 years, we’ve been looking carefully at how to put a user experience team together. We’ve studied dozens of teams, some that are very good at producing great designs, while others regularly struggle to produce anything that makes users happy. As we’ve looked at the differences between the teams, we’ve started to [...]

Slideshare.net’s Slidecast technology is pretty slick.
With very little effort, I easily added the soundtrack to the slides I’d uploaded earlier:

| View | Upload your own

Kudos to Rashmi, Jon, and the folks at Slideshare.
Thanks to Andy Budd at d.Construct 2007 for letting me use the audio.
[Note: the slides don't completely match the audio, as I [...]

Unbeknown to me, David Armano recorded and posted a small portion of my UI12 Keynote: Magic and Mental Models.
In this segment, I’m talking about how functionality of a customer experience creates delight, sharing examples from Proflowers, Orbitz, and Farecast.

It was a fun presentation and the audience was very responsive. I’ll be giving this presentation again, [...]

With much prompting from Rashmi and others, I’ve learned to post things on SlideShare.

My first experiment is the slides from my presentation, The Dawning of the Age of Experience.