As I mentioned last week, producing a great search results page takes a ton of hard design work. There’s really no way without studying the users’ goals and needs, and watching how they interact with the results the engine generates. In almost every instance, Search is not the user’s end goal, but one tool they [...]

When you study how designs get made as much as we have, you start to notice something: good design is directly related to effort. Good design takes a lot of work. Bad design, as the bumper sticker says, “it just happens.”
You won’t find this to be any more true than in the design of effective [...]

User research is now a critical tool in the toolbox of design teams. However, it only works well if you involve the right participants in the study.
Having the participants that match the design’s audience will give the team feedback on what works well and where the design needs rethinking. By learning from the participants, the [...]

I’ve recently had the opportunity to observe a master chef teach a class of good cooks how to create some great dishes. While the cooks all knew how to make the dishes, the chef’s version was notably better.
It wasn’t that the chef used a different recipe or better ingredients. What made the difference was that [...]

Jeremy Keith shares his strategy for creating applications with Ajax that do the right thing when JavaScript isn’t available.

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 [...]

Flickr, the online photosharing web site, changed everything for web applications. Flickr was one of the first instances where developers combined elements of Flash and AJAX in a seamless form, along with the HTML page.
What many people don’t know is that Flickr wasn’t originally a site for sharing photos. It was originally conceived as an [...]

We want to make designs simple, but we don’t want to make them dumb. There’s a difference. The goal is to simplify the design by keeping only the most valuable bits, eliminating everything else.
This is not easy to do. You really have to know something about the users, what they are trying to do, and [...]

In last week’s UIEtips email newsletter, I shared three challenges we’ve seen users encounter in our usability tests. These are challenges to look out for when users interact with your applications. In this week’s newsletter, I continue my commentary by discussing two more important challenges.
You can read my article here.
At UIE, a big [...]