“We learned that it was all about getting the basics right,” the product manager told me, having just come back from a tour of observing multiple customers. “We can invest in all the nifty new features we want, but if we don’t get the product’s basic features to work right, our users don’t care.” This [...]

It’s true. People are accessing our designs on more types of devices than ever before. So how do you keep up? How do you ensure your design will work the way you intended on all of those products? Ethan Marcotte coined a term called Responsive Web Design. A technique that will help your design scale [...]

Happy New Year! We know a new year means looking forward and moving on to new adventures, challenges, and opportunities. But we’re glancing back at 2010 and sharing three of our most popular articles from 2010. Even in a few years, I think these articles will stand the test of time and still provide valuable [...]

Deliverables are the bread-and-butter of the UX profession. We produce a ton of them. We’re constantly reading them. We send them to our clients and hope for their comments. Our deliverables need good design. They perform a function, just like the work they’re describing. They either do their job well, or they miss the boat. [...]

User Experience, UX, and Experience Design often feel like terms-du-jour: the new, sexy words we use to sell folks on what we do. The terms’ recent rise in popularity left us wondering if anything is new here. Or are we renaming the old arts and disciplines of design? As we often do, we delved into [...]

For years, we’ve been touring the world talking about designing web sites. At every presentation we’ve given, someone approaches us and asks the tough question: “Does this apply to web-based applications?” It’s a tough question because the answer often is Yes and No. Yes, good design practice is good design practice and it applies no [...]

One thing I love about my neighborhood grocery store is how they have a little demonstration area where they feature different food items each week. Often times they’ll cook the items up in a little, easy-to-make recipe that’s quite tasty. More often than not, I’ll end up buying whatever they’re demoing. The grocer is definitely [...]

Here in the northeast United States, we rely on the French Toast Alert System. This is how local, state, and federal emergency officials communicate the severity of an oncoming snowstorm. The alert system tells us how quickly we should get to the supermarket before all the eggs, milk, and bread run out. The thinking is [...]

Often, when we talk of finding inspiration for our visual design techniques, we turn to the discipline of fine arts. From the rich history of the arts, we can see many parallels between the artist’s work on the canvas and the designer’s work on the screen. Because much training in visual design often comes out [...]

Probably more used than any other tool in the toolbox, the critique is the lost orphan of the user experience world. There are books written about usability testing, endless debates on the validity of heuristic evaluations, and hours of lectures on persona development. But, when it comes to developing the essential skills for a good [...]