Experience Design (XD)

The US Department of Agriculture announced yesterday a new icon to replace the food pyramid that has been the image for nutrition in the US for almost two decades. MyPlate provides a more usable image that matches the real-world use for this information. It provides “an uncomplicated symbol to help remind people to think about their […]

Recently I attended Ginny Redish’s Plain language, Web Sites, Documents, and UX: You can do all that!, event hosted by the Usability Professional Association (UPA), DC Chapter. As usual, when I attend dc events like IXDA and other miscellaneous UX meetups, I am usually the anomaly visual designer in the room. The thing that I enjoyed […]

May is National Inventors’ Month. Established in 1998, this celebration of inventors and their contributions to the world had been celebrated in August until this year. The sponsors of the event – Inventors Digest, the Academy of Applied Science, and the United Inventors Association of the USA – decided that May would better coincide with the National Inventors Hall of […]

Last week, I followed, nearly real time via Twitter, how Sean Power successfully recovered his stolen laptop. The full story is available, but here are a few excerpted tweets from @SeanPower on 13 May 2011: If you’re getting up to speed: Laptop was taken 4 days ago, but I had to fly to Canada the […]

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 […]

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 […]

How many notices did you receive about the Epsilon email breach that was discovered on March 30? How did the news of that make you feel toward a compromised company you do business with? Even though only email addresses were stolen, did you wonder whether you needed to worry about more than just watching for […]

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 […]

In “Why Failure Drives Innovation,” Baba Shiv, Professor of Marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business writes: “Failure is a dreaded concept for most business people. But failure can actually be a huge engine of innovation for an individual or an organization. The trick lies in approaching it with the right attitude and harnessing […]

I had the privilege to present at SxSW this year in Austin, TX. This was my first year attending SxSW and my first chance at presenting on such a large scale. Ethical Frameworks For Behavioral Design provided practical ethical frameworks for designs that effect human behavior, and gives guidance to designers on how to use these […]

Enlighten was acquired by Perficient Digital in December 2015. If you’ve ever wondered what once occupied the parcel of land on which your home, office, favorite restaurant, or local coffee shop now sits, you could benefit from the use of a virtual time machine. WhatWasThere.com has launched with the intention of being just that. A […]