Slideshare presentation: On its surface, Amazon.com just seems like a large e-commerce site, albeit a successful one. Its design isn’t flashy, nor is it much to write home about. But deep within its pages are hidden secrets — secrets that every designer should know about.

This week I wanted to share my interview with Brian Kalma, Director of User Experience and Web Strategy for darling of Internet retail, Zappos.com. In case you’ve somehow missed out on their meteoric rise to top of online retail, now conducting over a billion dollars in sales a year, you’re in for a treat.

A few weeks back, I wrote about how changing a button increased a major e-commerce site’s revenue by $300 million dollars. The article quickly became one of the most popular articles we’ve ever published. People love the fact that a small design change could be linked to a huge increase in revenues. It’s the ultimate [...]

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. [...]