Experience Design (XD)

Personas are incredibly helpful at informing project teams because they are powerful mnemonics for large amounts of data. They combine our ability to perceive and recognize other human faces and our ability to remember stories in a light, accessible document. Personas are based on deep research of the users through interviews, observations, and other reliable […]

Valentine’s Day is about celebrating people we care about. It seems like a good holiday to focus on increasing our empathy and compassion for our customers and our users. Here are a few perspectives on why empathy is good for innovation and success as well as thoughts on cultivating compassion.

In “The top mistakes UX designers make: the writeup,” Scott Berkun shares common errors about culture and attitude that designers and user researchers make. Sadly, most of the mistakes seemed to result when we fail to have empathy for our colleagues. The following summarizes just a few of Berkun’s points that I found particularly interesting […]

This past month, I’ve been reading many of the prognostications for technology and design that proliferate in the technosphere at the beginning of each new year. As I have read various lists, I thought about how the success of these predictions is likely to involve integrating ideas from both areas. I consider a couple of themes […]

Unless you’ve been living under a rock or have possibly gone full blackout mode in support of the occupy SOPA / PIPA festivities, undoubtedly you’ve heard of Responsive Web Design — RWD for all the hipsters who like their acronyms.  In this 4 part series, I will explain the following: 1. What Responsive Web Design […]

Jared Spool shares good advice for design teams in his recent post “Putting An End To An Opinion War”. He observes that “Opinion wars kill design projects.” He shares two key ways to end an opinion war: using data to take decisions out of the realm of opinion appointing a final arbitrator These valuable tools […]

Someone at Google Android must be reading my blog.  Seriously though, Google just announced a website focused on aiding developers in the creation of smartphone applications for Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich).  The website will focus on features, design suggestions and approaches to different issues in Android  application development. This website will augment the current […]

I recently had the chance to get my feet wet with responsive web design for one of our clients. Yes, it’s the flavor of the week in terms of design and development trends, but we didn’t choose it just to be trendy. We chose responsive web design as the solution because it was a good […]

The number of devices, platforms, and browsers that support web content are growing daily. This presents challenges for both engineers and designers when trying to create a usable website. One approach for accommodating these challenges is responsive web design: that is, a fluid design that adapts to any device, regardless of screen size. The main […]

User experience, at its best, is about empathy with the people who use the products and services we design. However, not all organizations start a user experience practice with empathy as a goal. Of the many options to cultivate empathy in your organization, consider how you talk about the practice of user experience design. This […]

Baseline Magazine has an article about the purchase experience catching up to technology capabilities.  Personally, I think anything that improves checkout time is well worth the effort. his may soon change. Apple—which has already eliminated POS terminals in its stores and provides e-receipts—rolled out its EasyPay service on November 8. It allows customers to scan […]

I’ve been working with Axure’s 6.0 update for a few weeks, and so far I think my favorite feature is the addition of page guides.  Page guides make aligning elements so much easier, and since they are standard for most design tools, they were overdue in Axure. The guides are easy to use — just […]