Most interactions have an underlying rhythm. For example, an application may ask you to scan a list of items, then click one, leading to another list to scan and click. Scan, click, scan, click. You can get into a groove. Systems increasingly have rhythm too: animated transitions, hover responses, and digital physics. Static is so last year.

When smartphones and tablets first emerged, designers focused on channel differences like screen size in order to understand the basics in this new area. It’s time to set aside channel-centric planning and think of a user’s context first.

Science fiction films often take liberties with the technology that they display. After all, it is fiction. Though they can make up essentially whatever they want, technologies still need to be somewhat realistic to the audience. This influences the way that sci-fi technology is presented in film, but in turn, it’s how sci-fi influences technological advances in the real world.

In the current multi-device, interconnected landscape, a user can interact with your product or service from a variety of touchpoints. At each, you must address the user’s needs at a particular place and time. Those needs will be determined by where they are in the experience.

Speed and performance are a critical aspect of mobile design. Using media queries to design your site responsively is a great way to ensure proper display on mobile devices. But just shrinking a desktop site to work on a mobile device can affect performance.

The Kano Model focuses on users’ basic expectations first; it predicts the investment a team needs to make to elicit delight from users. On October 25 our own Jared Spool will talk about how your competitors, existing design debt, and the evolution of ideas from innovation to market maturity all affect how you need to [...]

Thanks to Marco Dini for translating this post to Italian. “What are some good KPIs I should use to measure our UX?” This is a question that comes in quite frequently and, at its heart, it shows that they are confused about what a KPI is. A KPI is a Key Performance Indicator. It’s a [...]

If you’ve been under a rock for the last week, you might’ve missed that when Apple released iOS6, they changed their Maps application away from using Google’s maps to using something Apple has created. It’s possible you also missed that the shift to their own map data has not made iOS6 users happy. This isn’t [...]

Scenarios are a powerful tool in the design process. They focus on the user experience in its entirety, giving the reason a user is engaging with your product or service. Scenarios allow you to think about the gaps between the experiences. They are great for crossing organizational silos.

You don’t have to hang around me for very long to hear me utter my mantra, “Good Design is Invisible.” Good design, when done well, is invisible to users because it lets them focus on why they are using the product instead of how they are using it. Thanks to the ongoing Apple / Samsung [...]