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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

UIE Virtual Seminar – Designing for Sign-up with Joshua Porter Date: Thursday, December 11, 2008 Time: 1:30pm ET (Please note the special start time) Is sign-up part of your design? How do you engage users long enough to motivate them to take that precarious step of giving you information? What methods do you use to [...]

In next week’s UIE Virtual Seminar, Testing Your Critiquing Skills, you’ll get to compare your critiques of our selected sites against my critiques. We’ll see if you found the same things I found and we’ll look at your style and technique for critiquing. To help you prepare, I’ve created this little preview. [If you haven't [...]

Every week, teams approach us looking to conduct their first usability study. Having spent months (sometimes years) arguing the value of a study with their management, they’ve finally received the necessary approval. Under the guise of making this study as valuable as possible, these teams make the novice mistake of trying to do too much. [...]

As we continue our research into what separates the best design teams from the rest, we see one factor consistently bubbling to the top: an attention to the user’s entire experience. This attention comes in the way the team thinks about their design. Are the elements designed right? Do they account for where the user [...]

Are you an ACM or SIGCHI member? Have you seen me give a presentation? Did you like it? If so, I may need your help. I’ve been nominated to the Association for Computing Machinery’s Distinguished Speakers Program. They’ve contacted me and asked for references. If you think I’d be a good addition to their program, [...]

Guy Kawasaki, owner of the How to Change the World blog, recently conducted an interview with Scott Berkun, one of our expert speakers at this year’s UI12 Conference. Scott is the best selling author of The Art of Project Management, and recently published his new book, The Myths of Innovation. In The Myths of Innovation, [...]