I like to cook. I enjoy perusing cookbooks and discovering interesting ingredients that I haven’t use. Following a recipe is really just following a process, a proven way that has worked in the past. The folks at Cooks Illustrated created a formal process for testing out a recipe. They specialize in the “what if” scenario by testing out a recipe [...]

There’s an on-going debate in the design community: are teams better off with generalists or specialists? Those taking the generalist side argue that a breadth of abilities helps more. On the specialists’ side, they claim it is the depth of specific abilities delivering the benefit. From our research in what makes up the most successful [...]

Announcing our next UIE Virtual Seminar – Faceted Search: Designing Your Content, Navigation, and User Interface with Pete Bell and Daniel Tunkelang. Daniel is offering a free copy of his book Faceted Search with every registration. People come to your site to get the information they need, by exploring, discovering, and making comparisons. You want them to successfully [...]

There’s lots to say about Search and how to best design for it. Folks often reach out to our own Jared Spool for his thoughts and sage advice on Search. Want to know what he has to say? Jared will be presenting at our July 9 UIE Virtual Seminar – Search, Scent, and the Happiness [...]

When you study how designs get made as much as we have, you start to notice something: good design is directly related to effort. Good design takes a lot of work. Bad design, as the bumper sticker says, “it just happens.” You won’t find this to be any more true than in the design of [...]

If you’re like me, (and hopefully you’re not,) you have books and magazines scattered all over your house. For reasons I can’t completely explain, I always want reading material in arms reach, so I’ve haphazardly distributed my library in every possible room. There’s even reading material in the bathroom. (I once bumped into the editor of my favorite magazine [...]

Our May 7 UIE Virtual Seminar is right around the corner.  If you are struggling with how to organize a vast amount of information for your users, then you’re not going to want to miss this UIE Virtual Seminar. UIE Virtual Seminar New Ways to Think about Taxonomy: The Role of Taxonomies in Your Organization [...]

My article, Design Cop-out #2: Breadcrumbs, is one of the most controversial I’ve written in recent years. People either agree completely or think I’ve gone off the deep end. When people disagree, it’s often because they think I’m suggesting that we stop putting breadcrumbs in our designs. I’m not suggesting this at all. I’ve defined [...]

We’ve received some interesting comments about last week’s article on site maps as design cop-outs. Christian & Michael both asked: Why is it a cop-out to provide a site map anyway? Christian explained that they are easy to create and maintain, so what’s the big deal? It’s a good question. While creating a site map [...]

The design process is filled with tradeoffs. We have to decide what functions are in and what functions are left on the cutting room floor. We have to decide how we’re going to present the functions to the user and what we’re going to hide from them. And we have to decide what problems we’re [...]