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.

In this week’s UIEtips, I discusses the concept of context-aware design, where it is today, and the possibilities of its future. Here’s an excerpt from the article Imagine being in a foreign city, trying to get across town to catch a train. Not knowing where you are, relative to the train station. Getting to the [...]

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 [...]

What makes a user want to download an app in the first place? Ideally, it’s the promise of fulfilling a goal or need for the user. With the hundreds of thousands of options available, and the immediacy of the mobile context, you have a small window of opportunity to engage your user. If users can’t easily use your app, they simply won’t.

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 [...]

Dive into advanced design processes, flexible team-based techniques, and innovative multi-device solutions with recordings from our sold out User Interface 17 Conference. UI17 OnDemand brings you the skills you need to keep up with the latest tools, techniques, and processes to deliver the best user experience possible. You’ll hear from these UX experts: Luke Wroblewski [...]

Mobile changes everything about how we conduct usability research. Not only has the way we design and build websites and apps had to adapt, how we study them has to as well. Traditional research methods won’t translate to a mobile environment.

In this week’s UIEtips, Nathan Curtis shares 6 tips on storing and organizing sketches. Here’s an excerpt from the article Sketches enable us to quickly depict and share ideas with each other, but are also considered disposable. Sketches represent an intermittent state leading to something better, more refined. As artifacts, they are fleeting renditions of [...]

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.