Lou Adler’s Hire With Your Head is a hidden treasure. The best $19.77 you’ll ever spend. It will help you ensure you get the absolute best UX team, even though ‘user experience’ is not mentioned once in the entire book. Lou shares several head-slappingly simple techniques for hiring the best folks, which is something you [...]

Yesterday, a couple of hundred of my favorite UX folks tuned in to my UIE Virtual Seminar while I talked about the ways to use the Kano Model as the basis of a winning UX strategy. During the talk, I referenced a bunch of things, so here’s the list: Understanding the Kano Model – A [...]

In today’s UIEtips, I discusses the difference between failed and missed expectations, and how to avoid them. Here’s an excerpt from the article. When many folks reach into their user research toolbox, the first tools to emerge are surveys and usability testing. However, these are not that helpful with discovering potential missed expectations. Surveys are [...]

Mark Schaefer loves Home Depot. He wrote this blog post about how much. However, in that same post, he talked about a breakdown in the experience of being a Home Depot shopper. I’ve been going to Home Depot for 20 years and have spent untold thousands of dollars on home improvement and landscaping materials. I [...]

You don’t have to hang around me for very long to hear me utter my mantra, “Good Design is Invisible.” Good design, when done well, is invisible to users because it lets them focus on why they are using the product instead of how they are using it. Thanks to the ongoing Apple / Samsung [...]

A well-built design pattern library is an extremely valuable tool for highly productive design teams. It ensures the designs they create feel like they were built by the same folks. It helps everyone on the team understand how things get put together. When combined with a component library, it can shorten development time by using [...]

If we take the post written by Google UX Researcher Aaron Sedley as Google’s philosophy on why users get upset at design changes, then we can easily understand why users get upset when Google makes changes to their design. From what we know about how users think about the designs they are using, it’s clear [...]

I’ve been fascinated by critique lately. It’s a fabulous tool to help the entire team – designers and non-designers alike – learn more about what makes great design great. I’ve learned that you can tell that a team is taking advantage of well-done critiques by the new, personalized language they are now sporting. They have [...]

Want to achieve a dramatic innovation in your design’s user experience? That’s easy. Just increase the hours of exposure to real users that your design team has. In our research, we found successful design teams have each team member spend a minimum of two hours every six weeks watch real users interacting with either their [...]

Get all of the recordings and slide decks from last year’s User Interface 15 Conference for free. We’re celebrating this year’s User Interface 16 Conference’s fantastic program by giving everyone access to last year’s great show. The recordings and slide decks contain these great topics: Engaging team members in the design process Developing a content [...]