Almost 23 years ago, UIE started with the goal of conducting usability tests for clients. For many years, we made quite a good business of this. Now, it feels like we do our best to convince people they should be conducting tests on their own, even those folks who want to pay us. Don’t get [...]

Our good friend, Dana Chisnell, wrote a fabulous answer on Quora, sharing her tips on recruiting participants for user research: Do the recruiting yourself. This gives you bonus research data about your people, and you may learn things you hadn’t anticipated that will influence how you conduct the study. It also starts a relationship with [...]

When we prepare for our user research sessions, it’s easy to focus on the questions we should ask. But what about the ones we shouldn’t ask? Our goal, of course, is to learn everything we can. We need to leverage the research time, to ensure we’re filling our brains with the information we’ll need to [...]

30 years ago, I conducted my first usability study. The lab we had— the first ever built for this purpose— was the size of a janitor’s closet (because it was a converted janitor’s closet) and was packed with more than $20,000 of video equipment (because that’s what a simple camera and editing system cost then). [...]

Usability testing is a powerful tool. It guides the design of products. It informs us on the behaviors and expectations of users. And it gives teams a way to measure how close they are to achieving their goals. Our clients recognize that usability testing is still the most effective way to ensure their designs meet [...]

Our guest Jon Wold from Oslo brings up a really great point about test results: It’s hard to report on problems without providing suggestions for correcting the problems you observe in testing. Tune in to get Jared and Robert’s suggestions on the topic.

The world of user experience design is made up of many disciplines. On the list, there is information architecture, usability testing, visual design, interactive design, copywriting, and prototyping (and this is just a sample of the list). At a minimum you need an understanding of the principles of these disciplines and often you need to [...]

Jason Fried brings a unique viewpoint to any design discussion, one informed by years of success with his company, 37signals. Recently, Jared Spool was able to chat with Jason about 37signals’ current work. If you’re joining us at the UIE Web App Masters Tour in Minneapolis or Philadelphia, Jason will go into even more detail

Our March 31 webinar, A Practitioners Guide to Prototyping, is full of great stuff for you: a critical topic, a rock star presenter, loads of actionable takeaways, a free PDF copy of an acclaimed book, a bonus seminar. What more could you want for your team? Prototyping is an iterative process. You discover what works, [...]

Julie Zhuo is the principal designer behind the Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect experiences, and has contributed to the last two major site redesigns. She sat down to chat with our Jared Spool.