Experience Design (XD)

I recently listened to an interview with accessibility expert Derek Featherstone. He provided some of the following practical and valuable tips for Web accessibility. A site designed to conform to good usability, copywriting, and Web standards goes a long way to making a site accessible. Things like using the proper heading structure (H1 on every page, […]

As I flipped through my idea notebook recently, Musicovery’s mood pad jumped out at me as a particularly fun and inspiring UI. Breaking with more conventional controls for web radio, the site creators realized that most people listen to music according to  their mood. They developed the mood pad to allow you to select music […]

The thing you figure out fairly quickly when designing for a touchscreen device, like an iPad, is that most of the usability rules you studiously absorbed for the last 10-15 years have been flipped on their heads. The surgical precision of the point-and-click mouse is replaced by stubby-finger pinching, tapping, and swiping. Where once there […]

Search Engine Optimization can be an almost infinitely complex subject. You can easily get caught up in all the fun details of latent semantic indexing, canonicalization, and c block hosting, but it’s much easier to focus on a simple holistic approach. One concept that has helped me learn most in this field is to look […]

Today UIE’s Jared Spool posted an article criticizing mega menus. I’ve confidently designed a couple of these based on Jakob Nielsen’s assessment that Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well. I’m not convinced that “mega menus aren’t evil, just troubled” based on Spool’s article. My primary issue with the article is that five out of the […]

It’s almost redundant to talk about aggressive project schedules. The constantly evolving demands of markets, strong competition for market leadership, and increasing expectations for engaging user experiences require rapid delivery of products and services. While delivery may have to meet these schedules one way or another, true innovation rarely follows a Gantt chart so docilely. […]

Your iPhone native application has been extremely successful and of course, customers have been asking when a similar Android native application will be available.  So, you assign the design of the Android application to your user interface design person who in turn dusts off the iPhone wireframe documents.  But wait, where does your user interface […]

Caroline Jarrett’s article “Putting the “Long” into Longitudinal: UX Lessons from Survey Research” shares three insights for UX from the European Survey Research Association conference in July 2011: Try Asking Less, But More Often and Earlier. If you want to learn about users’ engagement with your product over a longer-term experience, might you try asking […]

Last week I got the chance to speak at the St. Louis Day of .Net Conference for the 3rd year in a row. I love coming and speaking at this conference because I’m always amazed at the attendees interest in User Experience. It’s a welcome sight to see at a developer based conference. I’d like […]

Perficient UX team members often use Axure to create design prototypes. We prototype varying levels of fidelity based on the stage of the design process and the particular project’s needs, from basic wireframes to advanced interactive prototypes. A generated prototype includes HTML and JavaScript files as well as associated images. If you don’t have a […]

I recently had a discussion about a proposed web architecture with a client who was making the request to “keep things simple.” I interpreted this as a plea to “keep things cheaper,” but played the Einstein-quote-card reassuring him that we will keep things “as simple as possible, but no simpler.”  I’ve always liked this quote […]

When considering the challenges of designing over time and designing for context, emotion is essential to address these issues. Emotional reactions can reach deeper than intellectual experiences often do and those impressions may last longer. We may not remember the particulars details of certain experiences, but we often remember our reactions to them, how they […]