People today are rethinking their designs to accommodate mobile devices, smartphones, and tablets—let alone new laptops and desktop computers. Each has different screen sizes, input methods, resolutions, and modes of use.But how can a company create one design to work on any device used to access the web?
Why do some apps become addictions, while others are ignored or uninstalled without a second thought? And how can companies gain a foothold in customers’ mobile devices without relying solely on expensive marketing or “viral” word-of-mouth tactics?
You’ll find out from Kelly Goto when she describes the underlying emotional indicators that reveal customers’ surprising attachments to brands, products, services, and devices.
One of the biggest challenges organizations face today is the silo effect. It’s a verticalization of roles and responsibilities that can inhibit teams from developing a shared vision.
Fortunately, an experience map can help bridge the divide. It’s an easy-to-digest tool that tells a visual story about the pain points and delights that users feel while experiencing your product or service.
Personas are easy to do, but hard to do well. Many researchers fall short of capturing the right details, analyzing the data in a timely manner, or establishing the persona as a guiding archetype for a project.
But fear not! You can still create solid personas—even if analyzing data from open-ended interviews with large samples of people seems intimidating.
A zombie apocalypse of new mobile devices, platforms, and screen sizes is upon us. And there aren’t enough designers, developers, and content experts to conquer every UI. But what we can do is match the onslaught with flexibility and stamina—by chunking our content so it can adapt to different contexts and constraints.
Of course, we’ll have to change our production workflow, enhance our CMS tools to be future-friendly, and stop assuming users want a "lite" version of our website.
TVs are the last screens in our lives that haven’t been taken over by computers, but that’s about to change. During the past year, SmartTVs exploded (many with surprisingly capable browsers), Microsoft added IE to Xbox 360, and Nintendo built a WebKit-based browser into the Wii U. Plus, if the rumors are true that Apple will release a TV, web developers will jump into tackling this new-yet-familiar UI.
While we were all managing negotiations between Marketing and the CEO for real estate on the ever embiggening desktop screens, tiny screens were winning the hearts and minds of consumers. We are still catching up, but we have a problem: our way of thinking about usability is too old school. We’re thinking about the UI when we should be thinking about flow.
Have you ever heard yourself saying, “We’ll need more content” or “This is where the content will go”?
We bandy about the term ‘content’ as if it’s what users seek. Yet when users are frustrated we rarely hear them use that word. iOS 6 Maps users didn’t say “the content is broken” when the maps thought their home address was in a nearby river.
Our users experience content in a very different way than we do as designers, content strategists, and developers. For them, it’s all about the details of the experience. That means we need to know how to put the delight in the experience of the content.
