On the Quora, Alexia Tsotsis asked an interesting question: What are the key differences between “Normals” (normal mainstream users) and tech early adopters? Here’s the answer I posted: I’ve been thinking about this question for a while now. Something was bothering me and I think I’ve figure it out. Instead of thinking about ‘early adopters’ [...]

Personas are a powerful tool in the UX toolbox. When done well, they rally the team around a small, specific set of archetypal users. Each team member becomes closely familiar with each of the personas, then can create designs that closely match those persona’s needs. In our research on personas, we’ve found this works best [...]

Getting your head around a complex design is, dare I say, a complex process. It’s difficult to understand why your users are struggling with all the features and concepts they want and need in your design. One cause is that we tend to think of complexity as a holistic effect. We try to decide if [...]

By far, The $300 Million Button is the most popular article on UIE.com. Here’s the back story for how we discovered the problem and the role that analytics played: We had been working on a client project, helping their team redesign their checkout process with some new user research and design techniques. As we were [...]

I took four years of Latin in high school, which has not been useful in my job, except to generate my own Lorem Ipsum copy. However, part of the curriculum involved looking at lots of pictures of ancient Rome and modern Italy. I remember always being impressed with the pictures and talking about the Colosseum [...]

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. Then we’ll need [...]

[In essence, the User Interface 16 Conference is all about the full-day in-depth workshops. This is my third entry in our series to introduce you to the amazing workshop faculty we've assembled.] More and more, we’re finding ourselves in situations where the design just “has to be right.” No longer, can we just have incremental [...]

Even the best of plans can go awry. We role play in our head how a usability test will proceed, understand the objectives at hand, and do a rigorous job of screening the participants. But what do you do when something totally unexpected occurs? Life circumstances among the participants can throw a curve ball at [...]

Today’s UIEtips article will upset a lot of folks. They won’t like what our research has turned up. They’ll claim we’ve got it all wrong. And they might be right. Yet we have data — lots of it. And that data is very clear. If you choose to believe the data, there’s something big that [...]

Nothing reminds me more about the power of what we can do with our data than this TED video of PatientsLikeMe‘s Jamie Haywood, talking about how they change people’s lives with incredible data visualization tools: Here he tells the story of his brother and how it inspired him to look into the data of 45,000 [...]