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.

As more web capable devices hit the market, designers need to consider where and how their designs will be seen. Unfortunately, the same consideration isn’t always made when it comes to content. With design changing so much in a multichannel environment, content must be structured independent of how it will eventually look.

Des Traynor is an expert on crafting microcopy. In his virtual seminar, Microcopy That Strengthens your Design’s Experience, Des identifies the key questions to ask when creating microcopy so that it doesn’t get lost or created by accident. The audience asked a bunch of great questions during the live seminar and Des joins Adam Churchill to answer some questions in this podcast.

Building a prototype is a great way to test your design early on with users. Whether you choose to go for a high-fidelity representation, or go lo-fi with paper, you can learn a lot about the usability of your site. Often, teams are concerned with which technique or tool to use because of the litany that are available.

What makes a user want to download an app in the first place? Ideally, it’s the promise of fulfilling a goal or need for the user. With the hundreds of thousands of options available, and the immediacy of the mobile context, you have a small window of opportunity to engage your user. If users can’t easily use your app, they simply won’t.

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.

During the first half of 2013, you’ll hear the latest thinking from the best speakers in the user experience design community. Get your team into all the live seminars from January-June, plus their recordings at the lowest price. You’ll save over 25% off the regular pricing. Sign-up Once. Pay Once. All live seminars January through [...]

Responsive web design allows the notion of “one web” to be a reality. Designers are increasingly able to sell to their organization the idea of delivering content to multiple platforms. Putting it into practice is another story.

In this week’s UIEtips, I share the 3 big UX lessons learned from the top tech headlines of 2012. Here’s an excerpt from the article On the surface, this story was about a company using the inventions of another company without permission. Apple claimed — and the jury agreed — that Samsung violated some critical [...]

With so many teams and divisions within organizations, falling into a pattern of designing within your own silo is incredibly easy. Mobile teams are focused on the mobile products. Desktop teams are concerned with the desktop experience. But customers interact with your product or service from an increasing variety of touchpoints. They expect a seamless experience across channels and devices, but this is often not the case.