Flickr, the online photosharing web site, changed everything for web applications. Flickr was one of the first instances where developers combined elements of Flash and AJAX in a seamless form, along with the HTML page.
What many people don’t know is that Flickr wasn’t originally a site for sharing photos. It was originally conceived as an [...]

If you had a chance to build your user experience design team from scratch, what would you do? Where would you focus your resources? What would you do first?
That’s exactly the situation that our friend and second-time Web App Summit presenter, Sean Kane, now finds himself in. Sean recently left Netflix to be the founder [...]

I bet you can tell I’m cleaning out my inbox.
Jen wrote:
I enjoyed your December 10th article, on assessing UX skills, so I sent it around to my colleagues. It was favorably received, but the folks on the alias found that one core skill was missing: the creation of UI mockups, particularly interactive mockups.
The places [...]

Over the last 7 years, we’ve been looking carefully at how to put a user experience team together. We’ve studied dozens of teams, some that are very good at producing great designs, while others regularly struggle to produce anything that makes users happy. As we’ve looked at the differences between the teams, we’ve started to [...]

There’s been a lot of discussion lately on the Interwebs about how personas are a useless tool. 37Signals’ Jason Fried recently wrote:
We don’t use personas. We use ourselves. I believe personas lead to a false sense of understanding at the deepest, most critical levels.
Every product we build is a product we build for ourselves to [...]

A while back, I wrote about a question our friend Cheryl had about the KJ technique.
Recently, Cheryl got back to me about her company’s reaction:
A few months back you kindly responded to my inquiry about facilitating a KJ Analysis session. The team did a great job and I was relieved as a couple of [...]

We’re big fans of the KJ Technique, a method that helps teams rank the important issues for a focus question, such as “What are the most important usability problems we need to fix in this version of the design?” or “Which user populations are most important to our business?”
In the method, teams brainstorm on potential [...]

In this week’s article, UIE’s Christine Perfetti sat down with Scott to talk about his new book and his research in the area of innovation.

One problem we often see is when the user researchers get overzealous in their improvement suggestions. They start to make recommendations in cases where there may not be any clear evidence the change will eliminate frustration or improve the design in a measurable way.

His initial solution was to hire a consultant to run some usability tests, gather the essential information, write a report, and present it back to the team. I had a different idea: I suggested we train the development team to do their own testing. In my 28 years of experience of doing this work, I’ve found there is no single experience more educational than conducting usability tests.