It’s like one of those adventure movies where the hero, surrounded by their motley crew of misfit recruits, is looking across the valley at the approaching army, thinking, “What did we get ourselves into?” That’s the sense I get after talking with UX professionals about the challenges their organization faces as they move to Agile [...]

New can be very scary. It’s easy to get comfortable with what we know, only to have everything turned topsy-turvy when we encounter major changes. The world of mobile design is new, and therefore, scary for many. The comforts of designing for the desktop disappear when we have to deal with these portable, tiny devices. [...]

Sometimes, it’s easy to brand what we do as the “science of the obvious.” Here we are, doing all this research, and come up with something that is painfully obvious. The latest of the obviously obvious findings we’ve come up with? That teams who don’t have a shared understanding of their design rarely succeed at [...]

During 2011, we published 33 articles and 174 blog posts and podcasts. We featured guest writers, published interviews, and wrote numerous articles about research we’ve done. There’s value in listening and reading everything we produced in 2011. But we know time is a factor. So in the last UIEtips for 2011, we decided to share [...]

I remember my first usability test like it was yesterday, even though it was actually more than 30 years ago. I sat in the newly built lab (first of its kind) and watched the participant through the silvered glass as they struggled with the design we were working on. What I didn’t know then was [...]

How is a search result like a thoughtful gift? The outcome exceeds the expectation. Ok, that’s kind of a lame riddle, but it’s accurate nonetheless. When we get a wrapped present, we hope the unwrapping will produce something that delights us. The same is true when clicking on a search result. We anticipate it will [...]

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. [...]

“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 [...]

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 [...]

Because my son is a professional magician, I’ve picked up a bit of magician’s lore over the years. Amongst the pros, they have a saying: “If you want to learn a new trick, read an old book.” Turns out, there’s a lot of excellent illusions which have been lost for years that, when you bring [...]