In this week’s UIEtips, Jared discusses the cost effectiveness of responsive design vs. creating a separate mobile version of a web site. Here’s an excerpt from the article Which is more expensive: a responsive design web site or creating a separate mobile version? This is a constant debate among many organizations. We can answer it [...]

Join us on March 28, when Kevin Cheng presents Storyboarding: Communicating Your Ideas with Comics & Drawings. Storyboards capture an experience in a visual way. They communicate complex ideas in succinct, understandable ways—whether for planning a feature film or the user experience of an application. Kevin Cheng uses comics to make storyboards more understandable. In [...]

With the emergence of techniques like responsive web design, many of the traditional prototyping methods become difficult to employ. Sketches and wireframes have in some cases given way to HTML and CSS prototyping so that users and clients can experience a richer, more complete interaction.

In this week’s UIEtips, I speak with Cyd Harrell on conducting user research on mobile devices. Here’s an excerpt from the article Jared: Does mobile usability testing require a lot of hardware? Cyd: It can. I think there’s a bit of a perception that it requires more than it actually does. If we’re going with [...]

Accessibility is important, but somewhere along the way it got an undeserved reputation for being ugly, costly, and driven only by technical-compliance requirements. Making it an integral part of your design early creates something that is beautiful, inexpensive, and user-experience-driven. When someone with a disability comes across usability issues in your design, they’re likely to be amplified. Something of minor inconvenience for a user could be a significant roadblock to another using assistive technology.

As more web capable devices hit the market, designers need to consider where and how their designs will be seen. Unfortunately, the same consideration isn’t always made when it comes to content. With design changing so much in a multichannel environment, content must be structured independent of how it will eventually look.

Des Traynor is an expert on crafting microcopy. In his virtual seminar, Microcopy That Strengthens your Design’s Experience, Des identifies the key questions to ask when creating microcopy so that it doesn’t get lost or created by accident. The audience asked a bunch of great questions during the live seminar and Des joins Adam Churchill to answer some questions in this podcast.

Building a prototype is a great way to test your design early on with users. Whether you choose to go for a high-fidelity representation, or go lo-fi with paper, you can learn a lot about the usability of your site. Often, teams are concerned with which technique or tool to use because of the litany that are available.

In this week’s UIEtips, Adam Spool interviews Steph Hay about the difference between marketing and usable content and methods to help copywriters and designers work together in creating design and copy? Here’s an excerpt from the article I have to think about the user, so I typically start with a text file. I create the [...]

In this week’s UIEtips, I discuss some practices to help prepare your design to be adaptive for multiple device sizes. Here’s an excerpt from the article This year, it will be hard to find an organization that doesn’t prioritize making their web site responsive. Yet, as we talk to organizations moving in this direction, we’re [...]