We’ve got another great UIE Virtual Seminar coming up:
The Scent of a Web Page: The Five Types of Navigation Pages
Date: July 17th, 2008 — 1pm ET / Noon CT / 11am MT / 10am PT
You work hard providing top-notch content on your site. Will your users find it? If they don’t find it, all [...]

Brian Christiansen and I recorded a special episode comprised entirely of questions from our customers. Last week, we held the UIE Virtual Seminar: The Scent of Information: Getting Users to Their Content. During the seminar, we received far more questions than time would allow answering. As is tradition, we put together this follow-up podcast to answer even more of your excellent questions.

 

 SpoolCast: The Scent of Information Virtual Seminar Questions Show [27:04m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This week, our good friend Peter Merholz joins us for the show. Peter is president of the noted experience strategy and design consultancy Adaptive Path.

In our discussion, I asked Peter about mapping out a product’s evolution. Launching a product is no simple task. Every new product falls on the spectrum somewhere between feature-complete, perfect execution and actually shipping with a pile of features on the cutting room floor. Realistically, most sway towards the latter. But that doesn’t mean your products needs to feel unfinished.

 

 SpoolCast: Product Evolution with Peter Merholz [36:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Today at 1pm EST, we’re holding our next UIE Virtual Seminar, The Scent of Information: Getting Users to Their Content.
In this 90-minute online presentation, I’ll share the results of years of research examining how the best sites navigate users to their content. I’ll introduce you to the concept of the Scent of Information, the biggest [...]

I’ve recently had the opportunity to observe a master chef teach a class of good cooks how to create some great dishes. While the cooks all knew how to make the dishes, the chef’s version was notably better.
It wasn’t that the chef used a different recipe or better ingredients. What made the difference was that [...]

This week, I had the pleasure of speaking with Donna (Maurer) Spencer, a world-renowned information architect and owner of the freelance agency MaadMob, based in Canberra, Australia.

In this episode I asked Donna, “What separates good Information Architects from great Information Architects?”

 

 SpoolCast: What Makes a Great IA with Donna Spencer [33:04m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In this week’s SpoolCast I had a chance to speak about Design Patterns and Anti-Patterns with Bill Scott. Bill is the Director UI Engineering at Netflix, a position he took after working several years for Yahoo as an Ajax Evangelist. At Yahoo! Bill led engineering on the Yahoo! Teachers project and curated the public Yahoo! Design Pattern Library.

 

 SpoolCast: An Interview with Bill Scott [38:48m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

A button is a button right? Move the mouse over it. Click. Not much to it, eh?

Well, when it’s a well-designed button, all the work your brain is doing to click the button is invisible to you. However, when it’s poorly designed, things start to become harder. Maybe you overshoot the target area? Or maybe you have trouble clicking because the button is too small. Often its not difficult to recover, but it costs attention and attention is expensive.

In this week’s podcast, we discuss the implications of Fitts’ Law. In short, the law states, “The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.”

 

 Usability Tools Podcast: Applying Fitts’s Law [14:07m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I just got off the phone (well, Skype, but it’s the same thing, sort of) with Steve Mulder. We were recording an interview, talking about his experiences with developing rich interactive applications at Molecular.
What really struck me about his experience was how much we can now do within a browser. Once folks figured out [...]

In my article, 8 More Design Mistakes with Account Sign-in, Mistake #13 said:
Mistake #13: Not Explaining If It’s The Username or Password They Got Wrong
Returning to an electronics site they hadn’t used since last holiday season, the user entered what they thought was their email address and password, but it didn’t work. The error message [...]