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 [...]

I just got off the phone (well, Skype, but it’s the same thing, sort of) with Steve Mulder. We were recording an interview, talking about his experiences with developing rich interactive applications at Molecular.
What really struck me about his experience was how much we can now do within a browser. Once folks figured out [...]

In my article, 8 More Design Mistakes with Account Sign-in, Mistake #13 said:
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 [...]

For today’s application designers, one of the biggest challenges is getting the vision implemented the way we imagined it. In our mind, we can clearly see the design in all of its interactive goodness. Yet, when it emerges from the development process, it doesn’t work the way we thought it would.
Unless you’re doing your own [...]

Greetings,
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 [...]

Jared Spool describes eight common account sign-in mistakes we see all the time in usability tests.

If you had a chance to build your user experience design team from scratch, what would you do? Where would you focus your resources? What would you do first?
That’s exactly the situation that our friend and second-time Web App Summit presenter, Sean Kane, now finds himself in. Sean recently left Netflix to be the founder [...]

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 [...]

Over the past few years, we’ve been studying the emergence of web-based applications and the usability and design challenges that accompany bringing them to light. We’ve also been concerned with the best practices for overcoming these issues to create web apps that actually delight users. During this time, we’ve been asking ourselves, “Are these best [...]