The ultimate goal for user experience is that users enjoy using your product or service. Many companies use satisfaction as a metric for measuring their success. But satisfaction is really just the lack of frustration. You should be focused on what you can do to delight your users.

In this week’s UIEtips, Nathan Curtis will share how he shifted the design direction of a large project with just 5 index cards. Here’s an excerpt from the article The concept was a dramatic shift from anything prototyped, discussed, or even sketched during the studio. It was safe to say: the client had never seen [...]

Before Cirque de Soleil, if you thought about a circus, you thought about elephants and lions and poodles that jumped through hoops of fire. The animals were there to make the kids happy. Cirque decided to do something different: no animals. Because they chose no animals, their costs dropped tremendously. It turns out that moving, [...]

Thanks to Marco Dini for translating this post to Italian. Co.Design published an article asking why business schools are still teaching the four Ps of marketing when three of them are dead. Great article if you ignore the premise, which I think they got completely wrong. For those of you who haven’t stumbled across the [...]

It’s rare you hear anyone bragging about the food served at a school or government institution’s cafeteria. The food there usually fits the bill of edible, but it’s certainly nothing to write home about. These government-funded venues have to serve a lot of food to anyone who walks in the door. They can’t think about [...]

Yesterday, a couple of hundred of my favorite UX folks tuned in to my UIE Virtual Seminar while I talked about the ways to use the Kano Model as the basis of a winning UX strategy. During the talk, I referenced a bunch of things, so here’s the list: Understanding the Kano Model – A [...]

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 [...]

If your team is transitioning from static documentation to iterative HTML prototypes, then Nathan Curtis’ March 7 seminar, Start Full Screen, is right up your alley. Nathan will talk about how his team at EightShapes brought it’s renowned modular philosophy of modular components and libraries for producing PDFs to prototyping using simple HTML, CSS and [...]

What is Seductive Interaction Design? More and more, we’re seeing web sites use rewards systems, competitions, and fun progress indicators to get people engaged. Interactions such as these trigger different elements of human behavior and encourage your visitors to engage with your web site more. They differentiate the casual glance from a longer involvement with [...]