“The problem with this is there’s too much clutter.” That’s what the legal secretary told me when we were studying her firm’s intranet home page. In fact, the page was pretty sparse in layout. The text was nicely laid out in a readable font, with different weights given to headings and body text. Overall, it [...]

Over at the Boxes and Arrows LinkedIn discussion group, Carrie asked: What is a good success rate for a usability test task? We just conducted user testing on a site map. So we have success rate percentages for each task. They range from 9% – 51% success (in up to 3 tries). Obviously there are [...]

The other day, I listened to a fascinating interview that John Jantsch conducted with Vanessa Fox, author of Marketing In The Age of Google. Listening to her, I got this idea about links like “Products”, which we see on a lot of corporate sites. Vanessa was talking about these words from an SEO perspective, explaining [...]

Your organization spends considerable resources to get people to come to your site. Does your site do what it needs to once they get there? Your users’ experience is a fluid event that frequently starts someplace like Google and, if you’re lucky, ends with them accomplishing their objective at your site. The goal is to [...]

A few weeks back we held a UIE Virtual Seminar with Pete Bell and Daniel Tunkelang of Endeca. These guys are the experts we go to when talking about designing for facets. As always, we had a number of excellent questions from the live audience that we couldn’t attend to during the seminar, so I got together with Pete and Daniel to record this podcast and cover a number of those remaining questions.

One of the most popular speakers in the history of our User Interface Conference is Gerry McGovern. Certainly most of that popularity is thanks to Gerry’s no-nonsense, customer-centric approach to content management strategy. Gerry joins us in this podcast to discuss customer care words and managing top tasks.

Last month we held a UIE Virtual Seminar where I presented my talk,
Search, Scent, and the Happiness of Pursuit. As always, we had a
number of excellent questions from the live audience that we
couldn’t attend to during the seminar, so, with a little help from
Adam Churchill, I recorded this podcast and cover a number of those
remaining questions.

Faceted search brings us to the next level for easily finding some types of information. We can find cameras within a price range from specific manufacturers. We can quickly locate flights that leave in the afternoon on the airlines we’re collecting miles with. We can easily discover jobs within driving distance that are for companies that we are enamored [...]

There’s lots to say about Search and how to best design for it. Folks often reach out to our own Jared Spool for his thoughts and sage advice on Search. Want to know what he has to say? Jared will be presenting at our July 9 UIE Virtual Seminar – Search, Scent, and the Happiness [...]

When you study how designs get made as much as we have, you start to notice something: good design is directly related to effort. Good design takes a lot of work. Bad design, as the bumper sticker says, “it just happens.” You won’t find this to be any more true than in the design of [...]