Planning documents for web app projects are often overlooked, despite their importance in the success of the product. James Box and Richard Rutter of Clearleft share their successful process of creating rough interactive prototypes for clients when creating web applications.

UIE is excited to announce our new UIE Roadshow: Secrets Behind Designing Great User Experiences, a full-day workshop, based on 10 years of UIE’s extensive research, that will deliver new insights and inspire your team to create the best user experiences.  This winter, we’re taking this workshop on the road to: Portland, OR on Tuesday, February 17, 2009  [...]

In today’s UIEtips, I tell a story about a client who found a way to dramatically increase their e-commerce site’s revenues with a couple of simple changes. While the story is interesting, the story-behind-the-story is just as interesting. The client had hired us because they were concerned about checkout-process abandonment. Their analytics were showing a [...]

Many of our clients are in the business of designing tools for their users to build great things for a wider audience. These range from mapping tools to pattern libraries. Naturally, our clients’ teams start by focusing on their direct audience. They look to make the best experience for these folks, to make creations come [...]

One of the many highlights of our recent UI13 conference was Scott Berkun’s Why Designers Fail and What to Do About It presentation. It generated a tremendous amount of buzz on the topic of how we can learn from our failures. Interestingly, the theme of how to learn from failure was pervasive throughout the conference. [...]

In the corporate boardroom, Innovation has moved beyond the fad stage and has now become an enterprise mandate. Problem is, ordering your institution to innovate is akin to a gym teacher ordering the class to meditate. (“OK CLASS, TODAY WE’RE GOING TO MEDITATE. BEGIN. ONE. TWO. MEDITATE. THREE. FOUR. MEDITATE. SPOOL! YOU’RE NOT MEDITATING!” Is [...]

Every year, I ask each of my graduate students to interview four of their friends, finding what brands they love and what brands they really despise and the reasons for their feelings. These students, being engineers, all go into the experiment thinking that people will either love or hate the products made by the brands. [...]

Like many of us, Cameron Moll works in a large, complex organization. This means managing design decisions and wrestling (often inflexible) enterprise technology. He talked to me about how he has integrated his real-world experiences into his UI12 tutorial and how he is working on bringing elegance and great function to his complex work projects.

Our friend Cameron Moll has an outline and video preview of his upcoming UI12 Full-day tutorial up on his blog. Cameron works for the LDS Church and has assembled a lot of real-world examples of web design in a large organization. Cameron oversees the creation of highly flexible interfaces that can be repurposed as needed [...]

Jared Interviews Patrick Hofmann at UPA 2007 Austin and gets his insight on internationalization, visual communication, and getting writers and engineers to express themselves visually.