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

Web-based applications are different from content-based web sites because the users are involved in a transaction. In our work researching the usability of a content-based site, we focus on how users will find and react to the information. However, with web-based applications, there are many other considerations we account for.
In this week’s article for our [...]

In this week’s podcast, Brian Christiansen and I continue exploring usability techniques for web-based applications.
This week, we explore the usability technique toolbox, focusing on those methods that help us with web-based applications.

 

 Usability Tools Podcast: Useful Web App Usability Techniques, Part 2 [21:57m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Web App Summit 2008 is less than two months away. World-class speakers from organizations like The New York Times, Yahoo!, Netflix, 37signals, and Cooper will be attending and presenting on today’s most critical issues surrounding web applications.
Would you like to help us out? Web App Summit 2008 is being held from March 26 [...]

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 [...]

How do you communicate complex and interactive design ideas to the development team? To answer this question, I had a chance to speak with with D. Keith Robinson, the Creative Director of Blue Flavor.
We had a great discussion regarding the “backstage” portion of web app design.

 

 SpoolCast: Web App Deliverables with D. Keith Robinson [34:35m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

While design teams add account registration and sign-in features to enhance the user’s experience, in doing so, they can create all manner of user experience problems. One of the most difficult things to get right is a good sign-in and registration process.
In a recent UIEtips article, I described eight common account sign-in mistakes that we [...]

Today’s podcast features a fascinating conversation I had with New York Times graphic journalists, Andrew DeVigal and Steve Duenes. Andrew and Steve are part of the team responsible for taking data and raw information from the day’s news and turning it into highly interactive and informative online experiences.

 

 SpoolCast: Making Data Engaging: A Talk with the New York Times Interactive Design Team [23:51m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Greetings,
Today, in our UIEtips email newsletter, we published my latest article talking about engaging experiences found in an unlikely place: a newspaper web site. Yet, this isn’t just any newspaper web site, it’s the New York Times. The engaging experiences are interactive calculators, maps, and data visualization tools.
I’ll admit it right up front: This article [...]

If you had a chance to build your user experience design team from scratch, what would you do? Where would you focus your resources? What would you do first?
That’s exactly the situation that our friend and second-time Web App Summit presenter, Sean Kane, now finds himself in. Sean recently left Netflix to be the founder [...]