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 [...]

Here’s a recap of the resources and information we shared on Twitter last week. UX Design and Coding How To Write Code Comments Well – ^@aarongustafson What Are the Best UI elements (controls, patterns, etc.) in modern web sites & web apps recently? – Quora by @stephenanderson “Being easy and cool” – The Difference Between [...]

If we take the post written by Google UX Researcher Aaron Sedley as Google’s philosophy on why users get upset at design changes, then we can easily understand why users get upset when Google makes changes to their design. From what we know about how users think about the designs they are using, it’s clear [...]

Moving Beyond Conversion Rates: Part 1: Avoid Ratios for Metrics Part 2: Not All Visitors Make Great Customers (this) Part 3: Visitors Are Not All The Same Part 4: Campaigns Are Where Conversion Rates Shine Part 5: Measuring Money Left On The Table A few years back, the executives at the electronics retailer Best Buy [...]

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 curveball at our [...]

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 [...]