Art Zippel

When it comes to music, most of us have an idea about low and high fidelity. Low fidelity is the radio in your grandfather’s station wagon. You get the idea of the sound, and in the ‘70s, that’s about all you had to work with. High fidelity is the car next to you at the […]

Recruiting real end users can be costly and time consuming for usability testing. For anyone but a user experience (UX) purist, the temptation to use employees for usability testing can be quite a temptation. Employees are accessible and already paid for, so why not use them? After all, they are users outside of work. So, […]

Are usability testing and user acceptance testing (UAT) the same? Some people in the past have told me “yes,” because they are both about the user. My guess is that people who aren’t familiar with UAT see the word “user” and assume it means the “real-life” user. I don’t know who came up with the […]

UX Research is not 9-to-5. It controls you and never leaves you alone. No matter what I am doing or where I am, I analyze stuff. From learning a new app on my phone to walking into a store, I am aware of my experience as a user. The user experience (UX) mantra, “We are […]

Before I’m labeled as a “visual design hater,” you should know that I was a visual designer for five years and a creative director for 10 years. I left the creative side of the house for two reasons. I felt a lot of people were better designers than I was and I became obsessed with […]

I’m not sure who came up with the “Fail Early” concept associated with rapid prototyping. It seems like a negative sale or a glass-half-empty approach. I can’t help but think it would be easier to sell stakeholders on a program that is geared to “succeed sooner,” rather than “fail early.” It might just be semantics, […]

Your strategy has a lot to do with your results. I grew up with the phrase, “It’s easier to catch a bear with honey than with vinegar.” While I never had the goal to literally catch a bear, the strategy of finding out what appeals to bears is likely to be a successful strategy for catching […]

Two questions. Do you invite friends over to your place when it is a mess, or do you clean it up first? Are people encouraged to walk on a sidewalk before the cement is dry? Search engine marketing (SEM) before user experience (UX) might not be the best decision for your bottom line. SEM is […]

Unless your name is James Bond, you might not want your name applied to everything you do. Ethical guidelines for UX research The importance of ethics in user experience (UX) research cannot be understated. UX research ethics are in place to protect your participants, but they also serve another very important purpose. You want to […]

Think about how you organize the utensils in your kitchen. It’s easy for you to find a spoon because you know where you put them. You put them in a place that makes sense to you. When you have relatives over, and they want a spoon, they would know to look in the kitchen, but […]

The options you have when developing the various aspects of your website can be endless. Sometimes everyone in a team meeting wants to voice an opinion. Sometimes all the opinions are different. In the spirit of efficiency and effectiveness, how can we move forward with decisions and not get bogged down? Your user experience (UX) […]

“Hey honey, do you know where my old college sweatshirt is? You didn’t throw it away did you?” Much of what gets the most press in user experience (UX) is finding out what is wrong with a product. What we should change. What isn’t working. But, if we are talking about a UX redesign, it’s […]