Most interactions have an underlying rhythm. For example, an application may ask you to scan a list of items, then click one, leading to another list to scan and click. Scan, click, scan, click. You can get into a groove. Systems increasingly have rhythm too: animated transitions, hover responses, and digital physics. Static is so last year.

E pluribus unum? Better yet, out of one, create many—many channels within a multifaceted but unified experience. That’s the challenge of experience design among constrained budgets, tight timelines, and unlimited interaction expectations. Content strategy’s communication foundation, the message architecture, can help you answer that challenge.

If we focus too much on content, we ignore what we know about how our associative brain comes to makes sense new information. Think about how many people respond before reading past the first sentence of an email, or how a magazine article doesn’t get the same reaction when displayed in HTML. Or consider how knowing the author of a publication influences your judgement of that content.

Here’s a simple trick that will produce dramatic improvements in your product or service: bring the developers to your usability tests. Have them spend time watching users actually use the things they’ve built. I’ve been doing this for 30 years and every time it’s exactly the same. As soon as they see someone working with [...]

It’s rare you hear anyone bragging about the food served at a school or government institution’s cafeteria. The food there usually fits the bill of edible, but it’s certainly nothing to write home about. These government-funded venues have to serve a lot of food to anyone who walks in the door. They can’t think about [...]

“Was your experience satisfactory?” the survey asked the user. If the answer is no, well, then we can work on making it better. But if it is yes, what do we do? Should we walk away happy with what just happened? Satisfaction is a miserable place to stop our goal of constant improvement. Food that [...]

In today’s UIEtips, I discusses the difference between failed and missed expectations, and how to avoid them. Here’s an excerpt from the article. When many folks reach into their user research toolbox, the first tools to emerge are surveys and usability testing. However, these are not that helpful with discovering potential missed expectations. Surveys are [...]

Science fiction films often take liberties with the technology that they display. After all, it is fiction. Though they can make up essentially whatever they want, technologies still need to be somewhat realistic to the audience. This influences the way that sci-fi technology is presented in film, but in turn, it’s how sci-fi influences technological advances in the real world.

In the current multi-device, interconnected landscape, a user can interact with your product or service from a variety of touchpoints. At each, you must address the user’s needs at a particular place and time. Those needs will be determined by where they are in the experience.

In today’s UIEtips, I look back on an article from January 2011 – Understanding the Kano Model – A Tool for Sophisticated Designers. In this article, I explain how the Kano Model predicts the reaction of users from initial delight and why the delight fades over time. Here’s an excerpt from the article. When blogging [...]