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Posts Tagged ‘interaction design’

Designing the small details – “Microinteractions”

Part 1 of 2 As a usability researcher it’s important for me to stay aware and informed of guidelines for designing user interactions. Also, I want to be literate about topics within user experience design. So Dan Saffer’s book Microinteractions – Designing with Details caught my attention. His text is interesting; it focuses on the importance […]

STLUX Recap: Practical Interaction Design for Developers

St. Louis had a user experience conference last month (yes, I am very timely) called STLUX, and I’m starting a series of blog posts to recap some of the sessions I attended.  Instead of the typical essay type of blog post, these will be a more in depth breakdown of my notes, which come in […]

Disney Parks Enhance the Customer Experience With Tech Bracelets

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 […]

Keystroke Level Modeling: Another Usability Insight from UPA 2011

At UPA 2011, Michael Rawlins, Lori Hawkins, and Jeff Sauro presented about Keystroke Level Modeling (KLM), a tool for estimating the actual movements and the time to perform each step that a particular UI design requires for users to complete a given task. KLM offers a way to analyze the time on task required by a design […]

Marking required fields on forms: should you or shouldn’t you?

When I first started working in user experience design, the thought of designing a form filled me with dread. It’s something that seems like it would be so easy, but creating a really good form requires a lot of thought (which is why poorly designed forms still abound). Many Web conventions exist around form creation, […]

Plain Language and User Experience

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 […]

iPhone Built-In Application Design Issues

As a regular iPhone user, I do certain things over and over again. Mostly, Apple gets the design of their common applications pretty spot-on, but a couple of issues trip me up regularly that could be easily addressed with small interface design changes. Placement of the Send button in Messages   I have a couple […]

Controlled Failure and UX: A Key to Innovation

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 […]

Posture for Mobile Applications

Perficient has recently launched a new blog called “Spark”, dedicated to discussing innovations in technology. On that blog, I discussed the use of a sovereign posture for mobile applications in today’s post and when it might be a good strategy. The explosion of mobile has led to many more variations on context of use than […]

Posture for Mobile Applications

When talking about mobile applications, the concept of the software’s posture doesn’t come up often. Posture is essentially the program’s behavioral stance, or the way it presents itself to the user. Alan Cooper, in About Face 3.0, explains that desktop and Web applications can fit into four posture categories: sovereign, transient, daemonic, and auxiliary. You’ll […]

Ethical Frameworks For Behavioral Design

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 […]