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 [...]

[We're butt-deep in preparations for the User Interface 16 Conference. For my part, I get to work closely with the amazing speakers we've assembled, helping them construct their full-day workshops. Here's the second part of my series introducing each of the UI16 experts.] So much of a project’s success is determined at its start. If [...]

Over the years, I’ve received a lot of great advice. One piece of advice I keep coming back to is about managing expectations. It came from an old friend, just a few days after I’d started my consulting practice. He was a seasoned consultant himself and I had asked him what I should know, just [...]

You’re going to want your entire team to see our next UIE Virtual Seminar on Thursday, July 21, UX Design when Time, Money, and Support is Limited with Cennydd Bowles. In this 90-minute online seminar, Cennydd will show you: Ways to tailor your UX design process to the culture of your organization How to conduct [...]

“Innovation isn’t about saying YES to 100 ideas. It’s about saying NO to 1000 ideas.” – Steve Jobs As we study how teams can best use design principles, we’ve discovered that project specific principles are far more useful than generic overarching principles, which many teams develop. Take Facebook’s published principles, which include generic phrases like [...]

Lately, I haven’t been making friends with people who work at design agencies. I think it’s something I said. It’s definitely something I said. In fact, I can tell you exactly what I said. However, to do that, we need to revisit some research we’ve conducted over the last few years. We’ve been looking at [...]

[This topic has set off a firestorm of debate. That's good. You can see my original post here. There have been thoughtful responses from Jennifer Tidwell, Hillel at Jackson Fish Market, Matt Nish-Lapidus, and Michael Angeles. This is my last post on the topic for a little while.] Not every job will require that a [...]

Following the brilliance of Day 1 of the UIE Web App Masters Tour, we had a another awesome day of great presentations. Pam Rodriguez and Luke Wroblewski did a nice job of posting their notes. Thanks guys! Steve Portigal on Design Fieldwork: Uncovering Innovation from the Outside In – Pam’s notes, Luke’s notes. Kate Brigham [...]

[Continuing on the theme of designers who can code.] If you’re a designer, imagine you had a chance to work with two development teams. Team 1: One team has top-notch developers who know virtually nothing about design. They can code miracles, but the designs of their applications are horrible and frustrating to use. And they [...]