“We tried creating personas and it was hard. It took us months and they never got traction. Eventually we abandoned the project.” I’ve heard this dozens of times from design team managers. They all embarked on these big persona projects, often with energy and excitement, only to find that energy dissipate and the project lose [...]

In this week’s UIEtips, Kate Kiefer Lee explains why it’s important to pay attention and understand the difference between voice and tone. Here’s an excerpt from the article Voice and tone. Tone and voice. Though the words “voice” and “tone” are often used interchangeably, they’re not synonyms. Our voice makes us unique, and our tone [...]

In the current multi-device, interconnected landscape, a user can interact with your product or service from a variety of touchpoints. At each, you must address the user’s needs at a particular place and time. Those needs will be determined by where they are in the experience.

I love red velvet cake. I’ve got a great recipe to make it. And I stick with that recipe. I don’t decide to leave out the baking soda (even though I don’t really know what the baking soda does). Nor do I decide to cut the sugar in half (even though I think lots of [...]

Here’s a recap of the resources and information we shared on Twitter last week. Usability Some great usability and user research war stories. This article has some good examples and points to help sell usability testing with execs. Mobile New UI17 speaker podcast: @lukew – Designing Multi-Device User Experiences. Need some help creating cross-platform mobile [...]

It’s impossible to design something if you don’t know who you’re designing for. Developing personas through user research is a great way to create a portrait of your users. But once you have your personas, what do you do with them? That’s a question Whitney Quesenbery says she encounters more and more lately.

Storytelling is a natural form of expression. We’ve all been telling stories from a very young age. In the design process, personas become the tool we use to tell our users’ stories. And with good personas in place, usage scenarios can become the micro-stories that drive your design decisions. Kim Goodwin tells us that scenarios [...]

Personas are one of the most controversial tools in the professional UX toolbox. People either swear by them or swear at them. When they work, they are awesome, but when they fail, well, they fail gloriously. For the past few years, we’ve been researching why so many persona projects have such dismal results. We discovered [...]

Even the best of plans can go awry. We role play in our head how a usability test will proceed, understand the objectives at hand, and do a rigorous job of screening the participants. But what do you do when something totally unexpected occurs? Life circumstances among the participants can throw a curveball at our [...]

Personas are a powerful tool in the UX toolbox. When done well, they rally the team around a small, specific set of archetypal users. Each team member becomes closely familiar with each of the personas, then can create designs that closely match those persona’s needs. In our research on personas, we’ve found this works best [...]