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Molly Malsam

Blogs from this Author

Designing for the Future

In his post Time to Give Up on Controlling Our Designs, Jonathan Smiley says that what we need to know about designing for the future is: “You will never know what device someone will use to view your website, or read your content.” He goes on to say that there will be so many permutations of […]

Learning about experience design from my children

As a practitioner in the user experience design field, I have a foundational understanding that the way I do or think of things is not necessarily the same as others. It never ceases to amaze and inspire me when I get user feedback on an existing or proposed design and they bring things to the […]

Marking required fields on forms: should you or shouldn’t you?

When I first started working in user experience design, the thought of designing a form filled me with dread. It’s something that seems like it would be so easy, but creating a really good form requires a lot of thought (which is why poorly designed forms still abound). Many Web conventions exist around form creation, […]

Should Designers Code?

Should designers know how to code? It seems lately I can’t get away from this question. I’ve read countless blog posts and online discussions answering the question in varying levels of detail and with differing opinions. Though not a reliable sampling, anecdotally I’ve noticed that job descriptions for User Experience or Visual Designers lately have almost […]

Integrating the real world with mobile: Yelp art

The explosion of smartphone ownership over the past few years has brought with it all manner of software designed to tie mobile devices with a person’s experiences in the real world. I’ve got friends developing some pretty exciting location-based game apps and I’m sure these will get richer and more immersive as more people move […]

Progressive Enhancement and Effective Browser Support

I always enjoy Paul Boag’s posts on Boagworld when I get a chance to read them. His most recent post, Where are My Rounded Corners?, includes a great downloadable factsheet that helps explain how static design comps play out in various browsers. Here’s an excerpt: “One of the biggest areas of confusion among our clients […]

iPhone Built-In Application Design Issues

As a regular iPhone user, I do certain things over and over again. Mostly, Apple gets the design of their common applications pretty spot-on, but a couple of issues trip me up regularly that could be easily addressed with small interface design changes. Placement of the Send button in Messages   I have a couple […]

Creating High-Fidelity Portal Prototypes in Axure

I recently posted about high-fidelity Axure prototypes on our new Spark blog. While the post focuses more on the visual design aspects of Axure, the prototype I created was for a financial services portal and also included a fair amount of interactivity for the purpose of demonstrating the product to potential customers. Axure has sophisticated […]

High-Fidelity Visual Design in Axure

I’ve recently spent some quality time in Axure Pro 5.6 creating a public facing high-fidelity demo site, with a goal of representing a new visual style as accurately as possible within the constraints of Axure’s capabilities. I don’t expect Axure to support a feature set that creates perfect front-end production code because that’s really not […]

Shopping at IKEA: Behavioral Design

I live in the Denver area, where most of us in a 100-mile radius have seen the towering IKEA sign over construction indicating the imminent arrival of a new place for us to experience discount shopping nirvana. I, however, have always hated shopping there because of the store layout, which I knew was purposefully designed […]

E-commerce Checkout Design

It should be pretty difficult these days to design a poor e-commerce checkout experience with all the free, user-tested guidelines out there. Yet I experience issues on a regular basis. If you sell something on your web site, make sure to incorporate these basic guidelines guaranteed to increase your conversion rates. These guidelines were published […]

Amazon’s wish list extension

Browser extensions and add-ons are typically reserved for those working on the creation side of technology or for those avid feature explorers who like to “trick out their ride” while surfing the net. I just recently discovered an extension for the Amazon wish list that was advertised in just the right way for the type […]

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