On April 12, I gave the keynote at the IA Summit. It was my second time keynoting this event and a real honor for me. The audience was great and it lead to some very interesting discussion, both at the conference and on blogs and discussion lists everywhere. I’ve posted the slides above and have [...]

Web-based applications are different from content-based web sites because the users are involved in a transaction. In our work researching the usability of a content-based site, we focus on how users will find and react to the information. However, with web-based applications, there are many other considerations we account for. In this week’s article for [...]

In this week’s podcast, Brian Christiansen and I continue exploring usability techniques for web-based applications.
This week, we explore the usability technique toolbox, focusing on those methods that help us with web-based applications.

Josh has it wrong: Personas are not a document. They are a collective perception about who the users are, what they need, and what solutions will work best. Thinking about personas as a document is the best way to fail.

I bet you can tell I’m cleaning out my inbox. Jen wrote: I enjoyed your December 10th article, on assessing UX skills, so I sent it around to my colleagues. It was favorably received, but the folks on the alias found that one core skill was missing: the creation of UI mockups, particularly interactive mockups. [...]

Bruce McCarthy offers this great writeup of our recent Virtual Seminar on Building Robust Personas. A while back I wrote a piece about personas where I talked it about why it’s a bad idea to base your personas on a single real individual. Using a real person as a substitute persona might seem like a [...]

Yesterday, I gave my Virtual Seminar on Building Robust Personas in 30 Days or Less. If you missed it, you can watch it on demand. The session went well, but we ran tight on time and I didn’t get to all the great questions. Brian and I were just talking and we’re planning a followup [...]

The always intriguing Christopher Fahey commented on yesterday’s post about Crappy Personas vs. Robust Personas: Personas provide a fabulous way for people who understand their audience/users to communicate their understanding to people who do not understand that audience in a rapid and meaningful way. They are also a great way for people who have different [...]

There’s been a lot of discussion lately on the Interwebs about how personas are a useless tool. 37Signals’ Jason Fried recently wrote: We don’t use personas. We use ourselves. I believe personas lead to a false sense of understanding at the deepest, most critical levels. Every product we build is a product we build for [...]

A while back, I wrote about a question our friend Cheryl had about the KJ technique. Recently, Cheryl got back to me about her company’s reaction: A few months back you kindly responded to my inquiry about facilitating a KJ Analysis session. The team did a great job and I was relieved as a couple [...]