UIE’s Virtual Seminar on January 15 will be full of key takeaways your team can use immediately.  Jared M. Spool will share state-of-the-art techniques to get from observation data to informed decisions. He’ll show you the best practices for teams to organize chaotic data, develop consensus, bring objectivity out of subjective observations, and produce clear [...]

The User Experience world is filled with many disciplines: information architecture, user researcher, interaction design, copywriting, and visual design — to name just a few. Each of these disciplines have a rich history, a deep knowledge base, and an extensive tool set. Each takes a lifetime to master. While the successful team needs all of [...]

From a user experience professional perspective, the current economy has a weird convergence happening: Because of the economic downturn (due to the rising fuel costs and mortgage market crisis), some companies are laying off and some are disappearing outright. Because executives understand the competitive value of creating great experiences, user experience professionals are in great [...]

We’ve got a unique and exciting UIE Virtual Seminar coming up in September: Testing Your Critiquing Skills: Site Navigation Date: Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 Time: 1pm ET / Noon CT / 11am MT / 10am PT When looking over someone else’s design, how do you ensure you’re delivering valuable insights that bring new perspectives to [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]