User experience professionals know that prototyping should be a key part of the design process. You generate design concepts. You test them. You discover what works and what needs improving. You find opportunities for new ideas.
But when it comes to prototyping tools and methods to use, many of us are unsure what to do.
There’s lots [...]

Our March 31 webinar, A Practitioners Guide to Prototyping, is full of great stuff for you: a critical topic, a rock star presenter, loads of actionable takeaways, a free PDF copy of an acclaimed book, a bonus seminar. What more could you want for your team?
Prototyping is an iterative process. You discover what works, [...]

Julie Zhuo is the principal designer behind the Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect experiences, and has contributed to the last two major site redesigns. She sat down to chat with our Jared Spool.

It’s hard to have a conversation about great design without mentioning Apple. Usually, we’re talking about the design of the iPod, iPhone, or last week’s newly announced iPad.
However, those aren’t the only interesting challenges Apple’s talented designers have tackled. They’ve done an amazing job with something that wouldn’t get a lot of attention otherwise: the [...]

We turn to Hagan Rivers for insight on designing challenging web applications year-after-year because she just keeps coming up with better and better ideas. Recently, Jared sat down to talk with Hagan to discuss her somewhat radical notion, designing web app navigation as its own, separate application.

How can we design systems that encourage the behaviors we want? In this episode, Jared speaks with Stephen Anderson about using human psychology in web apps to encourage users’ behavior.

A followup conversation with Fred Beecher answering more questions about prototyping tools and techniques, after his popular, recent Virtual Seminar on the topic.

Mark Hurst interviewed Brian King, VP & Global Brand Manager for Courtyard by Marriott about the new design of their hotels. It’s a great read, talking about how you revitalize a cash-cow business by creating a great experience.
One of Brian’s comments jumped out at me:
We took our knowledge and created, in a warehouse in San [...]

An audio selection from Leah Buley’s A UX Team of One
7.5MB – 14min 15sec
If you didn’t attend the User Interface Conference this year, you may have missed the buzz over Leah Buley’s session entitled “How to be a User Experience Team of One”. Attendees loved it. Leah gave them tips and techniques used by top [...]

For years, we’ve known about the importance of completing tasks. Not the items on your to-do list — the users’ tasks.
What we found in our research over the last 10 years is that practically every measure of users’ performance correlates strongly with the users completing their task. Users who achieve their objective believe the web [...]