It’s difficult to predict how users will access your designs and your content. More and more, people are connecting to the internet through some sort of mobile device. Using the latest advances in HTML and CSS can leave aspects of your site incompatible with some browsers. How do you ensure that you’re providing a good experience to your users over a broad spectrum of scenarios?

It’s impossible to design something if you don’t know who you’re designing for. Developing personas through user research is a great way to create a portrait of your users. But once you have your personas, what do you do with them? That’s a question Whitney Quesenbery says she encounters more and more lately.

If we take the post written by Google UX Researcher Aaron Sedley as Google’s philosophy on why users get upset at design changes, then we can easily understand why users get upset when Google makes changes to their design. From what we know about how users think about the designs they are using, it’s clear [...]

Critique is an integral part of the design process. Contrasting from feedback, critique is more focused and specific. Often, rather than a gut reaction, it is framed within the context of a dialogue. It is centered around arriving at an understanding.

“We’re designing something that nobody’s ever built before. What’s the best way to ensure we create a great design solution?” We often get this question. Usually it’s from someone who understands a process for making solid incremental UX improvements, but is worried those techniques won’t work when they try to design something that’s revolutionary in [...]

I always thought this request was a myth: “Can we make that logo bigger?” Yet there I was at the table and the stakeholder, with no sense of irony, said those very words. Out loud. I was stunned. “We paid a lot of money for that logo,” he continued, “and we need it to establish [...]

Reputation is everything. On sites where users can rate and review products or services, the result is, well, reputation. But a problem can arise when ratings aren’t accompanied by a qualifying review. A user could have had a negative experience with service or shipping but the product itself could be stellar.

Ratings and reviews can generate quite a lot of money. Who hasn’t asked a friend, peer, or family member their opinion on products or services, especially on something you’re about to purchase? A simple, “it did the job” or “it’s worth the money” is enough to convince most people to complete their purchase. How these [...]

Last week, I attended a conference presentation where a team presented findings from their A/B Testing efforts. It was a cute presentation where they posted the control and test variants, then asked the audience to pick which one “won” the A/B test. They compared the audience answer to the variant that demonstrated the best increase [...]

A data visualization, when done well, can be an incredibly powerful way to communicate information. It ultimately boils down to the choices you make in how to design and present the data. If you make the wrong choice you can run the risk of not accurately displaying the data or struggling to effectively tell its story.