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 [...]

Following the brilliance of Day 1 of the UIE Web App Masters Tour, we had a another awesome day of great presentations. Pam Rodriguez and Luke Wroblewski did a nice job of posting their notes. Thanks guys! Steve Portigal on Design Fieldwork: Uncovering Innovation from the Outside In – Pam’s notes, Luke’s notes. Kate Brigham [...]

Well, we’ve just wrapped up the first day of the UIE Web App Masters Tour stop in Seattle. What a day! Blogger Pam Rodriguez has done a tremendous job summarizing the first day’s sessions. You can read them here: My talk: Mobilism & UX: Inside the Eye of the Perfect Storm Bill Scott’s talk: Designing [...]

Great design principles guide your team to creating designs that delight your users. Having a set of great principles will allow your team to turn ordinary design into extraordinary design. But not everyone has great design principles. What even constitutes a great design principle? Jared dives into our latest research on what teams are doing it right and which are missing the mark.

Web-based applications are different from content-based web sites because the users are involved in a transaction. In our work researching the usability of content-based sites, we focus on how users will find and react to the information. However, with web-based applications, there are many other considerations we need to account for. In this week’s UIEtips, [...]