The world of web application design is expanding at a rapid rate. We’re now expected to design great experiences across a huge variety of platforms, from small screens to large displays. The flood of iPad applications and successful online businesses are showing our executives that design matters.

In today’s UIEtips, I talk about analytic tools and the insights of what they can capture. Here’s an excerpt from the article Tools like Google Analytics or Webtrends are very powerful for content sites, where the only things a user does is visit a page, click on another page, or leave the site. These tools [...]

A dashboard is often the first screen that a user sees in your UI. The importance of visual design and data visualizations is high. But good looks aside, the dashboard has to meet the users’ needs. Beautiful dashboards are futile if the presented information isn’t useful to the user to accomplish their tasks.

It’s not uncommon for people to multi-task between 2-3 devices during their day. A person may have their laptop out accessing the company intranet, while using their tablet for research, and finally checking their smart phone for their email. And it’s rare for a person to use one device for just one activity. Most of [...]

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 [...]

Pull-to-Refresh is all the rage in mobile apps. Take something like the Twitter client. In the timeline, if you want to see if any new messages have been posted, you pull down on the list with your thumb, then release. The gesture signals the app to check with Twitter’s servers to see if anything new [...]

It’s easy for applications to get overcomplicated and bogged down with data – especially in an enterprise setting. It’s hard to keep track of so many different things. When dashboards and widgets are employed, the goal is to make your life easier, but often that’s not the result. The solution – simplifying these applications for specific use cases and giving the right people the right information they need for their given task. Hagan Rivers spends her time meeting with teams to show them exactly what they need to do to streamline these complex applications.

[Thanks to Yaniv Sarig, who translated this post into Hebrew.] Back in the early days of PC computing, we were interested in how people used all those options, controls, and settings that software designers put into their applications. How much do users customize their applications? We embarked on a little experiment. We asked a ton [...]

[We've built this year's User Interface 16 Conference around eight important challenges facing today's UX Professionals. This is the first in a series of posts where I discuss my thoughts on those challenges and how I came to pick the expert who will be your guide at UI16. Enjoy! – Jared] What happens over time [...]

We’ve received rave reviews from the Philadelphia and Seattle Tour stops. You have one last chance to catch us, and after this performance, we’re breaking up the band. The last stop of the UIE Web App Masters Tour is in Minneapolis, June 27-28. Hundreds of web application designers, from all over have found inspiration from [...]