Over the last 7 years, we’ve been looking carefully at how to put a user experience team together. We’ve studied dozens of teams, some that are very good at producing great designs, while others regularly struggle to produce anything that makes users happy. As we’ve looked at the differences between the teams, we’ve started to [...]

Over the past few years, we’ve been studying the emergence of web-based applications and the usability and design challenges that accompany bringing them to light. We’ve also been concerned with the best practices for overcoming these issues to create web apps that actually delight users. During this time, we’ve been asking ourselves, “Are these best [...]

I’m pleased to announce the return of our Web App Summit sell-out program.

We’re holding the Summit in Coronado, CA on March 26 - 28, 2008. We’ve got a great line-up of presenters, including Andrew DeVigal, Steve Duenes, Derek Featherstone, Kim Goodwin, Sean Kane, Jeremy Keith, Steve Mulder, Leisa Reichelt, D. Keith Robinson, Bill Scott, Luke Wroblewski, and Indi Young. Jared Spool will also be presenting UIE’s latest research on web app design.

Register by December 11th and get your own limited-edition Web App Summit 2008 iPod nano.

In this audio recording from January’s UIE Web App Summit, eBay’s Christian Rohrer provides a peek behind the curtain at eBay’s User Experience (UX) process.

Pabini Gabriel-Petit, Publisher & Editor-in-Chief at UXmatters, just released a fantastic 3-part review of our recent UIE Web App Summit in Monterey, CA. She provides an in-depth look at how we organized the event, from the speakers we invited and the content they covered, to the proceedings we gave away and the venue we chose. [...]

UIEtips 1/12/07: Taking Time to Tour The practice of designing web applications is so new to us that a formalized method for studying these works is nonexistent. In order to educate ourselves, we must take tours of various web apps to find out what does and does not work. Jared Spool explores why we should take the time to tour web applications, what web applications we should tour, what we should be looking for, and what we can do with the information we gather.

“George Oates [a Flickr employee] and I would spend 24 hours, seven days a week, greeting every single person who came to the site. We introduced them to people, we chatted with them. This is a social product. People are putting things they love–photographs of their whole lives–into it. All of these people are your potential evangelists. You need to show those people love.”

Matt Linderman at Signal vs. Noise wrote about how Netflix “nails the customer experience” in everything they do.

BSAL #7: UI11 Presentation: What is Rich? Why Do Rich? by David Malouf

In this presentation, David Malouf moves beyond the usual story of patterns, code, and tips and tricks, and talk more about aesthetics, experience design, brand, and total environmental context of use. He layers those elements over a discussion around trying to define “richness” in the context of general application design and then try to apply it to a continuum of various types of computer and network based solutions.

Luke Wroblewski, who is speaking at our Web App Summit this January in Monterey, makes an interesting connection between packaging of physical products and product tours of web applications.
Writing on Digital Web, Luke points out that the two have a lot in common:
“In a self-service retail world (present in most physical stores and just about [...]