At times, getting a team to produce good ideas is like pulling teeth. You try to inspire, create, promote, even cajole people to dream up great design ideas. Some times it works. Other times you’re sitting around a conference table feeling clueless. That’s not the case when you bring Adapative Path’s CEO, Brandon Schauer into [...]

By far, The $300 Million Button is the most popular article on UIE.com. Here’s the back story for how we discovered the problem and the role that analytics played: We had been working on a client project, helping their team redesign their checkout process with some new user research and design techniques. As we were [...]

When shooting the movie, the director doesn’t necessarily film the scenes in the order they’ll appear once edited. Instead, the filmmakers shoot the pieces according to other constraints, such as the availability of actors or locations, or accommodating variability in the weather. It’s not unusual for the movie’s final climax to be among the first [...]

To improve the designs we’re creating today, we know that teams do best when they have all of the essential information about their users to make informed decisions. In our experience, one of the most powerful ways to gather important insights about users is the field study. By making direct observations, design teams can identify [...]

Storytelling is a natural form of expression. We’ve all been telling stories from a very young age. Scenarios are the stories that drive design decisions. They put the design into the context of how and why the user will interact with it. Earlier this year, Kim presented a UIE Virtual Seminar, Designing with Scenarios: Putting [...]

It’s time for feedback on your design. Good or bad, productive or not, you’re given some insight into that design. In many cases, that critique comes from stakeholders or paying customers. Sure, critique should be constructive and impartial, yet it’s inevitable that you’ll occasionally disagree with the feedback you receive. Critique is a crunch moment [...]

Personas are one of the most controversial tools in the professional UX toolbox. People either swear by them or swear at them. When they work, they are awesome, but when they fail, well, they fail gloriously. For the past few years, we’ve been researching why so many persona projects have such dismal results. We discovered [...]

Through the years we interviewed some awesome UX professionals and designers. Many have shared tips and techniques that shed light on new approaches and thinking in the world of design. Today’s article is based on one of those podcasts. Kate Brigham and her group at PatientsLikeMe are doing amazing work when it comes to online [...]

It was crazy. The team put a lot of effort into the design changes. Great care was taken with the navigation. The content was tight. The images were relevant. But they still missed the mark. Now the team learned from usability studies that the site wasn’t resonating with the users. They couldn’t understand why. The [...]

The migration to agile and lean development methods has thrown a wrench into the world of user experience professionals. Now in unfamiliar ground, these professionals want to know what new techniques and tricks help integrate UX into the development process. As we’ve been studying what works and what doesn’t work, we’ve realized that the successful [...]