Molly Malsam

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 […]

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 […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]