User experience professionals know that prototyping should be a key part of the design process. You generate design concepts. You test them. You discover what works and what needs improving. You find opportunities for new ideas.
But when it comes to prototyping tools and methods to use, many of us are unsure what to do.
There’s lots [...]

When folksonomies showed up almost 10 years ago, they promised to make information on our sites easier to use. After all, if users apply their own tags to every piece of content, everything will be easier to find, right? Maybe yes, maybe no.
Our favorite taxonomy and category expert, Stephanie Lemieux, has spent the last few [...]

Robert Hoekman, Jr and I are teaming forces once again, to do our best to answer your UX questions.
If you’re not familiar with it, Robert and I do a little podcast show we call Userability. You ask us a question. We give you an answer. Occasionally, we give you a good answer. Sometimes, we (and [...]

Treat your team to a conference-quality seminar right from your own office. Join us for the next UIE Virtual Seminar, The Power of Ad Hoc Personas: Truly Practical Methods to Get Your Organization On the Same Page, with Tamara Adlin, Thursday, February 18.
When you kick off a project right, everything is much easier. When that [...]

One of our most popular UIE Virtual Seminar presenters is back, sharing his thoughts with you on visual design.  On December 3, Patrick Hofmann drills down into one of his favorite topics, Effective Use of Icons & Images.
Icons and images are being used more today than ever before to aid people in finding information. How [...]

“It’s expensive.” “We don’t have time.” “This was the only solution we could think of.”
Often, when we talk to teams about whether they think they explored enough design alternatives, they tell us they didn’t because of time, resources, or their own lack of imagination.
However, good design doesn’t have to be an expensive [...]

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.

Creating great design is now more important than ever. In difficult times, we all have to do more with less. We have to be innovative in both the designs we create and the way we create them.
This year’s User Interface 14 Conference in Boston, MA, from November 1-3, is just the ticket. The UI14 sneak [...]

Carrying the User Experience flag through your organization can be a daunting task. Whether you’re a UX-Team-of-One or manage a 20-person Experience Design team, our research shows that organizations are varied in their readiness to accept and act upon this idea of User Experience Design. To pull off successful design, regardless of where your organization [...]

An interaction design framework is a collection of patterns that make up an entire subsystem of your design. In your project, you’ll need to ensure you’ve got all the essential features along with those new, super-cool, hip capabilities that will dazzle your users. By using these interaction design frameworks, you’ll have a ready kit of [...]