Experience Design (XD)

I was going to take the leap today and cancel my landline (insert your “old-fashioned” joke here). But when I went to [insert communication provider’s] website, I was led down a rabbit hole of bad user interface decisions, one after another—it was the web equivalent to the annoying “press 1 for option A” recorded customer […]

One of the primary principles in designing forms for the web is to keep them as simple and easy as possible. You can generally expect about a 15% drop off for every step in the process – literally every field in the form – as each discrete step is  an opportunity for the user to […]

“If you build it, he will come.” This mantra may have worked for “Field of Dreams,” but it doesn’t cut if for new or redesigned enterprise-level applications. User adoption, like all change really, is never easy. It requires breaking habits and changing mindsets and doing so on a large, enterprise-level scale. But at the end […]

Prototyping is by far my favorite activity to perform as a UX Designer, followed up naturally with user research. Prototyping is a natural problem solving technique that allows you to quickly create a vision of the solution, or multiple solutions, for a design problem and share that vision with others. In most cases, it’s cheap […]

The emerging use of infinite scrolling in 2012 is something you’re probably familiar with, but may not realize it yet. Think of searching for an image on Google images. Or how about search results on Pinterest, Lookbook, Polyvore or Udemy. You’ll find it more common in “search results” type applications, but there doesn’t seem to […]

I grew up in what you might call “a Disney family”. What this means is as a child growing up we always looked forward to our annual road trip from chilly Wisconsin to sunny Florida. We enjoyed the palm trees, cheesy shell shops, orange juice stands and “Meeting the Mouse”.  Watching Disney movies and relating […]

A recent frustration I’ve been feeling can be summed up very nicely by a quote from UX designer Leisa Reichelt—“Don’t design for everyone. It’s impossible. All you end up doing is designing something that makes everyone unhappy.” It’s been a recurring request on the last few projects I’ve been involved with. Somewhere along the way […]

Form Follows Function has put out a growing set of interactive examples using HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. What you’ll find there is some really interesting interaction and occasionally seizure-inducing animation. Are all of the examples practical? No, but that’s not the point. What is being shown off here is that with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript, you […]

To be frank, your developers aren’t following your brand standards and style guides for the same reason I eat healthier when the apples are pre-sliced in the fridge… Busy days, tight deadlines… a quick look at what needs to get done and off we go ticking away at our tasks with the little time we […]

According to IDEO, “Design Thinking is a about believing we can make a difference, and having an intentional process in order to get to new relevant solutions that create positive impact.” It is also described as being human-centered, collaborative, optimistic and experimental. IDEO follows an open-source process to implement Design Thinking by dividing it into the […]

For years, Starbucks has served only dark roast coffee drinks, implying that the dark roast was a better roast and appealed to everybody. I’ve previously written about a very interesting TED talk where Malcolm Gladwell discusses the trend toward understanding customer preferences instead of relying on one absolute “best” product.  Gladwell actually mentions coffee at about the […]

A couple of years ago I was working on a small project where the client wanted to visualize data from their field operations on a map. Nothing overly complex – just locations, custom icons, radius of operation for that location, etc. Easy, I thought. We’ll use a system like Google Maps. Except the client wanted […]