In this week’s UIEtips, I explain the dangerous effects of experience rot on user experience. Here’s an excerpt from the article: Here’s a counter-intuitive fact: Chances are all those features you’ve been adding to your design are hurting your user experience. Every feature that’s squeezed in, in the name of giving your design a competitive [...]

Teams faced with only a single opportunity to conduct usability testing often decide to schedule those tests after they’ve made changes to their design. They think the testing will help them work the kinks out of the changes, giving them a final chance to polish it up before the final release. Unfortunately, this rarely works [...]

In this week’s UIEtips, Margot Bloomstein shares examples of how organizations are successfully incorporating content strategy into their information architecture. Here’s an excerpt from the article: What’s in, and what’s out? “In my experience, it is very easy for brilliant information architects (or UX people who do information architecture) to underestimate the importance of editorial [...]

“We tried creating personas and it was hard. It took us months and they never got traction. Eventually we abandoned the project.” I’ve heard this dozens of times from design team managers. They all embarked on these big persona projects, often with energy and excitement, only to find that energy dissipate and the project lose [...]

In this week’s UIEtips, I discuss the five most common pitfalls of prototyping. Here’s an excerpt from the article: Prototypes are a fabulous way to exploring ideas with a team. They shorten the time between “This is what we’re thinking…” and “Oh, I get it.” In our work with design teams, we see a lot [...]

In this week’s UIEtips, we look back at a past article where I discuss several different user research strategies and the profound impact they can have on your products. Here’s an excerpt from the article: “Damn, I wish we’d done this a year ago.” That’s what I hear right after I’ve started a team on [...]

Accessibility is important, but somewhere along the way it got an undeserved reputation for being ugly, costly, and driven only by technical-compliance requirements. Making it an integral part of your design early creates something that is beautiful, inexpensive, and user-experience-driven. When someone with a disability comes across usability issues in your design, they’re likely to be amplified. Something of minor inconvenience for a user could be a significant roadblock to another using assistive technology.

In this week’s UIEtips, Kate Kiefer Lee explains why it’s important to pay attention and understand the difference between voice and tone. Here’s an excerpt from the article Voice and tone. Tone and voice. Though the words “voice” and “tone” are often used interchangeably, they’re not synonyms. Our voice makes us unique, and our tone [...]

In this week’s UIEtips, Adam Spool interviews Steph Hay about the difference between marketing and usable content and methods to help copywriters and designers work together in creating design and copy? Here’s an excerpt from the article I have to think about the user, so I typically start with a text file. I create the [...]

The ultimate goal for user experience is that users enjoy using your product or service. Many companies use satisfaction as a metric for measuring their success. But satisfaction is really just the lack of frustration. You should be focused on what you can do to delight your users.