Posts Tagged ‘user experience’

For years, Starbucks has served only dark roast coffee drinks, implying that the dark roast was a better roast and appealed to everybody. I’ve previously written about a very interesting TED talk where Malcolm Gladwell discusses the trend toward understanding customer preferences instead of relying on one absolute “best” product.  Gladwell actually mentions coffee at about the […]

A little while back I wrote this nugget of wisdom: Creating a great user experience extends beyond the research, beyond the wireframes, and even beyond the visual design. All that hard work is ultimately for nothing if your website or web application isn’t fast. Why? Because if your site doesn’t load quickly, your users will […]

It’s something many folks in my profession struggle with—explaining to other people exactly what we do. When people I don’t really know (like my father’s poker buddy, my tailor, the lady making polite chit-chat while she bags my groceries…) ask me what I do, I respond, “I help build websites.” It’s simple. People understand it. […]

Tactus Technology has introduced a new way to interact with your phone: The Tactus Tactile Layer. This morphing layer of magic goo [paraphrasing] can raise up to form actual tactile buttons on your device, and disappear again when not needed. Previously, the only form of realistic haptic feedback available to touch devices was to have […]

I’ve seen a lot of bad CMSs. Systems that take multiple steps and six different screens to publish and categorize a page. In-page editing that looks completely different once it’s published. And my favorite was a previous client (I led a project redesigning the intranet for a state’s judiciary department) who had an employee that […]

The Surface Pro pricing details were released recently and with little fanfare.  The Pro model is essentially an expensive Ultrabook that is packaged as a tablet.  The advantages of the Pro model are backwards compatibility with all pre-existing Windows software and more powerful hardware.  Those advantages are going to cost about $500 and half of […]

My colleague Martin Ridgway recently posted on how your web site’s performance is important to the user experience. Of course this is true for WebSphere Portal sites as well, so I wanted to steal…er, leverage his recommendations and elaborate with some specifics on how we see those implemented within WebSphere Portal sites. Before I go […]

Well, it’s about time.  It looks like SharePoint and Exchange are finally integrated in the ways users have been wanting for years now– tasks, document sharing and e-Discovery. Some of the most common questions I’ve fielded over the last few years, both as a consultant and a SharePoint specialist at Microsoft, have concerned getting these […]

It won’t surprise anyone that I’m a longtime fan of analyst services like those of Gartner and Forrester. They’ve had a very positive impact on my career in consulting.  In fact, one of my formative career experiences was developing a web portal content architecture used by Giga Information Group, the technology advisory founded by Gideon […]

The SharePoint Conference kicks off on Sunday November 11th and the Perficient team will be there in force. From demo’s showing what can be accomplished with SharePoint 2013, our Rockstar giveaway where someone will win a Home Theater System to interactive sessions with community members, booth 904 will be a hub of activity. From the […]

Part I: Philosophical Differences The new Microsoft Surface runs Windows RT, a curious product.  It is basically a stripped down version of Windows 8, re-engineered to work on the mobile, low power ARM architecture.  Apple’s iOS and Mac OSX are the closest comparisons to the new Windows Operating Systems. Microsoft has played to their strength by scaling […]

SharePoint can be leveraged as a comprehensive information platform for the enterprise, including public websites (“in front of the firewall”) and intranet and extranet portals (“behind the firewall”). The following presentation focuses on SharePoint user experience in a “behind the firewall” context. Within your SharePoint environment, an investment in user experience (UX) is critical. From […]