Lean UX can eliminate the contractual obligations inherent with specification documents and other deliverables. Designers and developers find it frustrating to put so much effort into a project then not see it ship at the end. Using the Lean UX process, you’re constantly validating your designs, especially early in the process. This motivates the team to work towards the same end goal.

It’s amazing how learning a new skill or process can make you feel overwhelmed and out of your comfort zone. Sometimes we’re asked to follow a set of tasks or procedures that just doesn’t make sense and seems repetitious. Yet after a period of time we start to see how these tasks connect, make sense, [...]

There’s a belief that user experience insight is lacking in Agile development. Trying to shoehorn UX practices into an Agile process results in a lot of frustration. Often, developers build stuff faster than the designers can design it. The whole process often focuses on the delivery more than the quality of the experience. Anders Ramsay believes that UX and Agile can coexist.

Technologies are often misunderstood at their outset. This misunderstanding leads to a lack of adoption. This lack of adoption leads to the technology not reaching it’s full potential or not being utilized in useful ways. This is essentially what happened to JavaScript. Its detractors said it wasn’t a real programming language, and it’s capabilities were ignored. Dave McFarland notes that Google’s use of JavaScript in Google Maps makes a lot of people take notice.

Mobile is greatly influencing the user experience community. It’s challenging traditional approaches to design, but also bringing with it a host of new opportunities. Being a user experience practitioner in this changing environment is a bit scary. Yet coupling existing skill sets with the constraints of designing in the mobile space makes for an exciting world full of possibility.

Touchscreen devices give you the ability to directly manipulate content. This allows designers to create interfaces where the content itself is the control. This lessens the need for buttons and can reduce the level of complexity within your design. The problem is making the user aware of the availability of gestures in your design. Gestures, especially multi-touch gestures, are powerful control mechanisms but useless if the users aren’t aware of them.

It’s easy for web applications to get overly complicated. Ideally, complex applications help their users solve complex problems, making their lives simpler. Unfortunately this isn’t always the case. Vague commands, useless dashboards, and confusing navigation create headaches for users by otherwise well-meaning applications. Often this can be a product of the structure of the application [...]

The goal of any site is for the right audience to find the right information. But beyond your actual content there are many things that can cause findability issues. These tend to be unanswered questions about your primary audience and whether or not you’re satisfying the need of that audience. Good information architecture can help guide your design decisions so that your users can effectively engage with your content.

A common trap in designing data visualizations is focusing on all the different ways to represent the data, rather than the questions that the data should answer. The presentation of a data set is pointless if it’s not useful, usable, or if people can’t understand it. With so much data to choose from how do you keep the goal of the visualization in mind? How are you sure you’re telling the right story?

There’s definitely an advantage to having your users understand data and messages through a picture versus reading a series of sentences. Information visualization, when done right, can have a greater impact. In many ways, data visualization will take a message and make it more succinct. A good visualization can simplify the most complicated data, and [...]