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 [...]

We’ve all sat through terrible meetings before. Part of what makes those meetings so bad is poor communication. Being present in a meeting doesn’t guarantee that your attendees will retain the important information from the meeting, or feel like they played any role in it. Improving the way that things are heard, seen, and discussed will go a long way to improving your meetings overall.

Websites are full of links. How useful these links are in helping users complete tasks is another story. Links have to guide users as they follow the scent of information. A vague or confusing link often leads users down a wrong path and in turn increases their rate of failure.

In today’s UIEtips, I explain how child magicians and Pixar Media have mastered critique and how you can incorporate this into your design process. Here’s an excerpt from the article. Giving the presenter a chance to show their work without being interrupted by a string of questions turns out to be pretty important. After seeing [...]

“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.

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.