“Made to Stick” authors Chip and Dan Heath touch upon a common mistake we see in our work: When design teams focus on satisfying the needs of everyone, they often fail to entice the people who actually matter, the target audience.

Over at Creating Passionate Users, Kathy Sierra recently wrote about how a little bit of innovation can go a long way when growing a user community to enhance your brand and the content on your site. Every time I give a talk, someone always asks, “That’s all good and nice that helping users learn is [...]

… If the online portion was the only thing involved, our customer would’ve been delighted with the results and likely shopped again. Because of the total user experience, she’ll likely resist shopping with the brand again.

In this organization’s case, the usability of the site involves only those people who directly influence the design of the site. However, to create a pleasurable user experience, we now have to involve people from all over the organization, including those people dictating how the store operations are designed and implemented. …

I first discovered In-N-Out Burger during a trip to Las Vegas last March. How I went so many years without knowing the joys of that place is beyond me. My friend brought me to the In-N-Out on Dean Martin Drive, and we waited a good 20 minutes in line just to get up to the [...]

There’s a saying that “Every kiss is a promise”. Every time you kiss someone, you’re setting some expectation for the future. You’re together…and you’re dating/going out/seeing each other (or whatever they’re calling it nowadays). It’s kind of like a girl wearing a boy’s varsity jacket: everyone knows that those two are an “item”, as my mother would say…

Josh gets an interesting message while visiting the Yahoo homepage, where they ask him to search from his browser instead. What, if any, are the results of this? Won’t people be exposed to fewer Yahoo services?