UIEtips 9/27/07: The Power of Comics for Understanding User Needs
As designs and product visions become more complex, there is an increasing need to find ways that effectively convey just how people will use the product and integrate it into their lives. Recently, more and more organizations and design teams have turned to comics to communicate [...]

UIEtips 9/18/07: Time for Content to Become More Scientific
Time and time again in usability testing, I watch users struggle with web sites. I’d like to say that the problems I see in testing are always unique and novel, but they aren’t. We’ve been seeing very similar problems with all of the sites we’ve tested.
What problems [...]

UIEtips 9/11/07: 5-Second Tests: Measuring Your Site’s Content Pages
It’s hard enough creating usable designs when there is ample time and plenty of resources, but what do you do when that’s just not an option for your design team? One of the most common reasons designs fail users is because the design team didn’t have the [...]

Jared M. Spool details the seven essential long-term components to reach a successful redesign project, and avoid costly changes that don’t enhance the site’s user experience or help the business.

UIEtips 8/21/07: Five Survival Techniques for Creating Usable Products
At User Interface Engineering, we’ve spent two decades researching the usability and design techniques employed by both successful and unsuccessful development teams. We’ve focused our research agenda on identifying the key techniques successful teams utilize to consistently produce usable products on time and within budget.
Because we [...]

UIEtips 8/15/07: Goal-Directed Design: An Interview with Kim Goodwin
The most valuable asset of a successful design team is the information they have about users’ goals and behaviors. When teams have the right information, the job of designing a powerful, intuitive, easy-to-use interface becomes tremendously easier. When they don’t, every little design decision becomes a struggle.
One [...]

UIEtips 8/07/07: Web 2.0 — The Power Behind the Hype
Over the past few years, the world of web application development has seen the emergence of a new set of approaches such as APIs, RSS, and Folksonomies that have come to be known collectively as Web 2.0. These new approaches allow developers to easily create [...]

UIEtips 7/31/07: Common Pitfalls of Social Web Applications, Part II
This week, UIE turns 19 years old. Over the years, we’ve seen technology come and go, features grow and shrink, and interaction styles dramatically change.
What used to be just a person interacting with a screen has become something more — people interacting with other people, [...]

In this week’s article, UIE’s Christine Perfetti sat down with Scott to talk about his new book and his research in the area of innovation.

UIEtips 7/16/07: Learning from the Facebook Mini-Feed Disaster
When teams make critical feature changes in their designs, there’s always a risk of backlash from loyal users. That’s what happened to Facebook, the social networking site, a few months ago. Facebook’s designers created the mini feed, an exciting new feature that promised to offer users a vastly [...]