Building a prototype is a great way to test your design early on with users. Whether you choose to go for a high-fidelity representation, or go lo-fi with paper, you can learn a lot about the usability of your site. Often, teams are concerned with which technique or tool to use because of the litany that are available.

What makes a user want to download an app in the first place? Ideally, it’s the promise of fulfilling a goal or need for the user. With the hundreds of thousands of options available, and the immediacy of the mobile context, you have a small window of opportunity to engage your user. If users can’t easily use your app, they simply won’t.

Mobile changes everything about how we conduct usability research. Not only has the way we design and build websites and apps had to adapt, how we study them has to as well. Traditional research methods won’t translate to a mobile environment.

The ultimate goal for user experience is that users enjoy using your product or service. Many companies use satisfaction as a metric for measuring their success. But satisfaction is really just the lack of frustration. You should be focused on what you can do to delight your users.

Responsive web design allows the notion of “one web” to be a reality. Designers are increasingly able to sell to their organization the idea of delivering content to multiple platforms. Putting it into practice is another story.

With so many teams and divisions within organizations, falling into a pattern of designing within your own silo is incredibly easy. Mobile teams are focused on the mobile products. Desktop teams are concerned with the desktop experience. But customers interact with your product or service from an increasing variety of touchpoints. They expect a seamless experience across channels and devices, but this is often not the case.

We’ve all sat through terrible meetings before. Part of what makes those meetings so bad is poor communication. Being present in a meeting doesn’t guarantee that your attendees will retain the important information from the meeting, or feel like they played any role in it. Improving the way that things are heard, seen, and discussed will go a long way to improving your meetings overall.

Websites are full of links. How useful these links are in helping users complete tasks is another story. Links have to guide users as they follow the scent of information. A vague or confusing link often leads users down a wrong path and in turn increases their rate of failure.

Most interactions have an underlying rhythm. For example, an application may ask you to scan a list of items, then click one, leading to another list to scan and click. Scan, click, scan, click. You can get into a groove. Systems increasingly have rhythm too: animated transitions, hover responses, and digital physics. Static is so last year.

E pluribus unum? Better yet, out of one, create many—many channels within a multifaceted but unified experience. That’s the challenge of experience design among constrained budgets, tight timelines, and unlimited interaction expectations. Content strategy’s communication foundation, the message architecture, can help you answer that challenge.