I am a lifelong fan of LEGO© toys and games and of J.R.R. Tolkien. So when LEGO began to release The Lord of the Rings sets, I was delighted. I then came across this video about designing Shelob™ Attacks while reviewing the new sets: As a user experience researcher and designer, I enjoy learning about […]
Posts Tagged ‘UX’
#IdeaNotebook: User Response Bingo
Since my last post about making emotional response part of the design process and a defined focus of research, I’ve been wondering how you help make user responses, not just success, matter to a design and development team and get them to focus on it. One idea I came up with is user response bingo.
It’s Going To Take How Long?
A mobile colleague pointed out a blog post that really hit home based on some recent estimating work I had done. If a client comes to you and asks for a web-based application that satisfies some business need, you discuss the high-level requirements, get an idea on sizing and tell the client 5 months and […]
Microsoft Launches modern.ie to Help You Write Better Code
Thursday, Microsoft launched modern.ie, a site with tools to help developers write better code. The tool is really a set of three different components. The first part of the tool is a subscription to BrowserStack, allowing you to test your code on a multitude of combinations of Web browsers and operating systems. This subscription is […]
Blackberry z10. Great Specs, But What About the UX?
From the first time I picked up an iPhone, I found the interface intuitive and easy to use. The user experience fit my paradigm for how I would expect to interact with the device, even though I had not interacted with it before that day. Of course, it’s been a few years since that day […]
We want our users to use….
This statement comes up a lot during the initial phases of a design project. On the outside I nod my head, note down the feature or interaction that is being described, but on the inside I’m wondering, “Does your user want to do that?” Frankly, the question I’m thinking about is way more interesting than […]
The Need for Emotional Goals for Design
Adam Connor shared this brief insightful blog post that really caught my attention: On emotion and experience (Thought for the Day) If you aren’t at least considering people’s emotions, you probably aren’t designing for an experience. I have written about the need to have empathy with our users before, but Adam has very eloquently and succinctly pointed out why […]
Delighting the User
I have a weird obsession with elevator buttons. Some are just really fun to press! I’ve started making a mental catalog of why I find such giddy delight in such a mundane task—the weight of the button, the texture, the material, the temperature, how it fits the curve of my finger, the distance it presses […]
Mobile Prototyping Part Deux
Hot on the heels of my post on the general ease of mobile prototyping and the number of tools available on the market to quickly generate these prototypes, Alexis Piperides (CEO of Proto.io) just published an article for .Net Magazine. Alexis’s article provides a deeper dive into mobile prototyping with additional information and guidance on mobile […]
A Mobile-First Approach (aka, Death to the Separate Mobile Site)
Over the course of the last four years, I’ve worked on many “mini-mobile” websites—that is to say, a client tasks us with picking a half-dozen “important” pages from the full website and building them out in mobile-friendly ways with an m.website.com URL. The crucial point here is, who is to say what is “important” to […]
The User Experience IS Your Brand
I was going to take the leap today and cancel my landline (insert your “old-fashioned” joke here). But when I went to [insert communication provider’s] website, I was led down a rabbit hole of bad user interface decisions, one after another—it was the web equivalent to the annoying “press 1 for option A” recorded customer […]
Driving Enterprise User Adoption – the Band-Aid Approach
“If you build it, he will come.” This mantra may have worked for “Field of Dreams,” but it doesn’t cut if for new or redesigned enterprise-level applications. User adoption, like all change really, is never easy. It requires breaking habits and changing mindsets and doing so on a large, enterprise-level scale. But at the end […]