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 [...]

A while back, a client handed me some persona descriptions they’d written for their project. Immediately, I saw several red flags. See, these personas descriptions had something that always put me on alert: they described the character’s car and pet. Now, if we’re building enterprise accounting software, why do we need to know whether Mary [...]

Get all of the recordings and slide decks from last year’s User Interface 15 Conference for free. We’re celebrating this year’s User Interface 16 Conference’s fantastic program by giving everyone access to last year’s great show. The recordings and slide decks contain these great topics: Engaging team members in the design process Developing a content [...]

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 [...]

Storytelling is a natural form of expression. We’ve all been telling stories from a very young age. Scenarios are the stories that drive design decisions. They put the design into the context of how and why the user will interact with it. Earlier this year, Kim presented a UIE Virtual Seminar, Designing with Scenarios: Putting [...]

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 [...]

Storytelling is a natural form of expression. We’ve all been telling stories from a very young age. Scenarios are the stories that drive design decisions. They put the design into the context of how and why the user will interact with it. Kim Goodwin uses her immense experience to outline the relationship between personas and scenarios and how to bring them into your design process.

It was crazy. The team put a lot of effort into the design changes. Great care was taken with the navigation. The content was tight. The images were relevant. But they still missed the mark. Now the team learned from usability studies that the site wasn’t resonating with the users. They couldn’t understand why. The [...]

Effective communication is the basis for keeping your team organized. But how can you be certain that everyone in your organization is on the same page when it comes to business goals, objectives and the user experience perspective? Using personas can set in you that direction and Tamara Adlin specializes in just that.

SEO and User Experience shouldn’t be at odds with one another. That’s what Vanessa Fox and Tamara Adlin tell us in this week’s SpoolCast with Jared Spool.