A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Four Stages of Competence. These four stages are unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and unconscious competence. As someone learns and adapts to your design, they are working their way through the stages. The ultimate is the user who is unconsciously competent — they can seemingly move [...]

One of the joys of putting together a conference, like the annual User Interface Conference, is the great conversations I have with all the smart people who show up. This year was no exception, and one conversation that stood out was a quick discussion I had with Kim Goodwin, author of Designing in the Digital [...]

“The problem with this is there’s too much clutter.” That’s what the legal secretary told me when we were studying her firm’s intranet home page. In fact, the page was pretty sparse in layout. The text was nicely laid out in a readable font, with different weights given to headings and body text. Overall, it [...]

A while back, a client handed me some persona descriptions they’d written for their project. Immediately, I saw several red flags. See, these personas descriptions had something that always put me on alert: they described the character’s car and pet. Now, if we’re building enterprise accounting software, why do we need to know whether Mary [...]

By far, The $300 Million Button is the most popular article on UIE.com. Here’s the back story for how we discovered the problem and the role that analytics played: We had been working on a client project, helping their team redesign their checkout process with some new user research and design techniques. As we were [...]

Pull-to-Refresh is all the rage in mobile apps. Take something like the Twitter client. In the timeline, if you want to see if any new messages have been posted, you pull down on the list with your thumb, then release. The gesture signals the app to check with Twitter’s servers to see if anything new [...]

[Update: MSNBC picked up on this story and reminded me that I wrote an article deconstructing the Knowledge Navigator a while back.] Back in 1987, Apple (under the direction of John Sculley, not Steve Jobs), released a video of what Apple products could be like in the future. Called the Knowledge Navigator, it showed a [...]

JQuery facilitates the vital steps of designing and testing complex interactions of today’s modern websites and web applications. In the next UIE Virtual Seminar, Rich Rutter gets you started with JQuery—assuming no prior knowledge—and shows you lots of examples, hints, and tricks. Just 5 minutes into this seminar, you’ll see JQuery in action and have something you can use in your own wireframes.

As we use a multitude of devices to access the same content, we expect a similar experience across platforms. If you have a great user experience on the desktop, it would be easy to rationalize that your mobile experience, for example, shouldn’t be painful. User experience professionals now need to consider how and where their applications and content are being accessed more than ever before. Developing rich interactions across all of these platforms can be a daunting task. Bill Scott discusses how employing design patterns can help ensure that your users have a great experience wherever they use your product.

Everybody strives to arrive at the end of a project with a great design. But often times the “brilliant idea” isn’t easy to communicate and takes a long time to develop. Brandon Schauer believes that you can develop techniques to help this communication, arriving at good design in shorter amounts of time. By putting your ideas on paper and post-its, and getting everyone participating, you create a collaborative environment that allows these ideas to grow and develop.