Experience Design (XD)

November is National Novel Writing Month, affectionately known as NaNoWriMo. This annual event is “a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing.” Started in 1999 by Chris Baty, the goal of NaNoWriMo is to write 50,000 words, the equivalent of the average-sized novel, in 30 days. Sounds crazy? Baty acknowledges this in the first line of his […]

Last weekend, I virtually attended BlizzCon 2011, a conference hosted by Blizzard Entertainment, the game developer behind Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo. A major focus of this annual conference is to provide insights and generate excitement about upcoming content planned for each franchise, but it is also a celebration of gamers, by gamers, and for gamers. […]

A colleague and I were discussing challenges in explaining what we do as user experience practitioners. He mentioned a shared pet peeve, the slashing together of UI/UX. I see this most often in job postings, but it appears in technology news, blogs, and even how some people describe their work. The concern that my colleague […]

Marc Andreessen believes that “software is eating the world” – that companies thriving today are doing so with the competitive advantage they’ve developed through technology and software. While Lytro may not be dominating the photography industry yet, it is a frontrunner in the technology and software quickly developing in the world of photography. Lytro is a […]

Enlighten was acquired by Perficient Digital in December 2015. We’re thrilled the rest of the world is beginning to discover the awesomeness of Enlighten’s WhatWasThere web- and mobile-based application, which allows anyone to upload historical photos, place them precisely on a Google map, and then within Google Street View to create a near seamless melding […]

In UI design communication: General approaches and tips for Axure, I discussed the kind of content to include in a UI design specification and showed how to customize the information you annotate in Axure. This post discusses customizing the final specification. While this post describes using Axure to create a specification, the underlying organizational principles […]

I attended Barcamp Tampa Bay 2011 this past Saturday. Among many excellent sessions, two on user experience and design generated great interest. Justin Davis presented “5 User Experience Basics Everyone Should Know” to an overflowing room: People expect online interactions to follow social rules. Successful interactions provide appropriate feedback and engagement with a appropriately conversational tone.  (A […]

In my last post, I discussed the value of design documentation. In this post, I share some practical tips on writing design documentation. The first part outlines general approaches. The second describes customizing annotations in Axure. Approaches to communication In my presentation on communicating design, I talk about four types of design documentation: Walkthrough presentation […]

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been looking over a number of books designed to teach X/HTML & CSS. It’s a bit overwhelming knowing where to begin with all the versions and types of web coding. I landed on a book that I really enjoyed: Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML. Of the […]

I have recently read a number of blog posts, articles, and commentary arguing that design documentation is no longer needed as UI prototyping tools become more sophisticated and commonly used. While I agree that eliminating a 250-page design document can be a positive result, it’s not that documentation is inherently bad or unnecessary. The problem is […]

I’ve done this several times now, and I bet I’m not alone. I go a popular web site to look at used cars. My eyes scan for the first input area, which is how the majority of users who have a specific task in mind approach a page, and I immediately see a series of search […]

I’ve had this discussion several times in my career in the user experience field: Should this link open in a new tab/window (HTML link attribute target=”_blank”) or in the same window? My understanding has generally been that if the link goes to an external site or to a help or informational-type page, it should be […]