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 [...]

Here’s a simple trick that will produce dramatic improvements in your product or service: bring the developers to your usability tests. Have them spend time watching users actually use the things they’ve built. I’ve been doing this for 30 years and every time it’s exactly the same. As soon as they see someone working with [...]

In today’s UIEtips, guest writer Kevin M. Hoffman shares four simple, easy-to-remember guidelines about how to convey information.Here’s an excerpt from the article. A college lecture and a business meeting are similar in that they are both mechanisms for conveying structured information. It’s also common that in both situations, not everyone in the room is [...]

Recently, we’ve interviewed dozens of design managers about what separates out their best designers from the rest. One of the consistent answers we’ve gotten is “The best designers are passionate about design, yet dispassionate about their own designs.” The managers tell us they look for folks who get very excited and curious about creating great [...]

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 [...]

Small is good. We love small products. Why not small processes? Mobile phones used to be big and bulky. Then we found ways to make them smaller and pack more stuff into them. Now we walk around with multi-purpose computers in our pockets. And guess what? We use them more than ever for things we [...]

Recently, I’ve been talking about having your portfolio tell the story of your best work. One part of any story is the main character, who, in this case, would be you. After all, a project is like an adventure. You start out heading in one direction, then things happen, and you end up growing your [...]

After listening to my interview with UX Immersion speaker, Jeff Gothelf, Ziv posed this this question: I was wondering about the viability of integrating this methodology into a design agency that basically ends it’s work with a recommendations document with no real access to the development teams. It sounds like major shifts in people’s understanding [...]

A great portfolio is a collection of the stories that describe your best work. As the demand for UX professionals increases, there’s been a renewed discussion on the importance of having a portfolio. There are even some, like Whitney Hess in a recent SxSW panel, who assert that because UX isn’t really about the deliverables, [...]

In this seminar you’ll get a reality check on critiques from Adam Connor. He’ll describe how to give, receive, and act upon feedback while confidently guiding your projects through beneficial feedback loops. With the right approach to critique and collaboration, your designs will be stronger than ever. In Adam’s seminar you’ll learn to: Structure projects [...]