“Meetings are a waste of time.” “Meetings, ugh—I have real work to do.” Heard these? The perception of meetings worsens when you have an unproductive one. The entire team feels like their time could have been better spent.

In any website, there’s a lot of thought that goes into the visual design. But a great visual design is worthless if the site isn’t useful. If the content is confusing, poorly constructed, or even just missing, your users are going to have a horrible experience. Karen McGrane suggests the solution was once much simpler. You’d determine your content, stick it into your design, and never worry about it again. With the web changing as drastically as it has over the past few years, content can no longer be static.

Scenarios are a powerful tool in the design process. They focus on the user experience in its entirety, giving the reason a user is engaging with your product or service. Scenarios allow you to think about the gaps between the experiences. They are great for crossing organizational silos.

Prototyping is an effective way to communicate design ideas. Static PDFs, PSDs, and wireframes can help get your point across but aren’t dynamic. Usually, any necessary changes are logged away as to-dos. They’re then taken back, fixed, and presented again. Nathan Curtis and the team at EightShapes are prototyping with HTML and CSS more in their design process. They find that employing these techniques leads to greater efficiency.

On September 13, Jason Grigsby presents Mobile-First Responsive Design. And with your registration before August 31, you’ll get free and immediate access to Ethan Marcotte’s recording of The How and Why of Responsive Web Design. Start practicing mobile-first responsive web design by reordering your CSS, assets, and images. And learn how from Jason Grigsby, co-author [...]

On Thursday, August 30, Chris Risdon presents our next virtual seminar, Mapping the User Experience. As services become more interconnected across channels and devices—and more importantly across time and space—it’s becoming increasingly critical to find ways to gain insight about customers’ interactions with your service. Experience maps offer a framework for mapping human experiences across [...]

Context is an important consideration in designing a mobile experience. As new devices enter the market, designers have to contend with new form factors and consider things such as ergonomics. Even things such as Apple’s retina displays affect approaches to design.

Structure aids collaboration and helps achieve consensus. If everyone is participating in a structured environment, you begin with a greater level of understanding. Using a design studio as a process can get everyone on the team communicating and moving in the same direction.

Convincing your boss to spend $1,500-$3,000 to send you to the User Interface 17 Conference is no easy task. Your boss wants to see the total costs and how this conference will benefit the organization. In part 2 of of our 2 part series, you’ll learn how to explain the benefits of attending UI17 to [...]

There are likely two main pieces of information your boss needs to decide whether or not to send you to the User Interface Conference (in Boston, Nov. 5-7). Cost and benefits. In this first post of our 2 part series, we’ll cover cost. There’s no way around it, conferences can be expensive. Your boss wants [...]