As the user plays with our product, we gently prod them at certain checkpoints to give us more info. This results in a better and more natural user experience.

Recommendations from personal acquaintances or opinions posted by consumers online are the most trusted forms of advertising, according to the latest Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey of over 25,000 Internet consumers from 50 countries.

To stay ahead of the curve when it comes to user research and UX design, we must keep in mind the new technologies that are currently under development and could influence the fundamental ways in which people interact with the products we design and develop.

As good design further penetrates the Web, once highly-regarded conventions fall into disfavor and are replaced by more effective ones. Yet some flawed conventions persist. In fact, they persist on some pretty high-profile websites; to their detriment.

No. One word, a complete sentence. We all learned to say it around our first birthday, so why do we have such a hard time saying it now when it comes to our work?

Wireframes, your time is up. You’ve served your purpose. You’ve brought order where there was once chaos and provided gainful employment for thousands of UX designers, but I’m afraid now it’s time for you to go to the big recycling bin in the sky.

When given a pencil and paper, most people (myself included) will tend to doodle words rather than draw pictures. Art was never my subject at school, so when I see wonderful, artistic renditions of user interfaces, I tend to feel somewhat humble.

Last year I compiled a league table of the most popular UX books read by UX Book Clubs around the World. I’d actually forgotten about the list but recently witnessed a resurgence of interest in the post so I thought it might be a good idea to revisit the league table and update it based on the activities of book clubs in 2010.

If you want to increase your conversions, here are 101 tips to follow.

Use cases, sometimes called user scenarios, are narratives or flow diagrams that describe how users will interact with a Web site.

Remote user research has increased the demands for people willing to take surveys, provide website feedback and participate in usability tests.

…I conducted interviews with six prospective users (people who at the time had never used Boxee) and five existing users. I also performed usability testing with five existing users (three on their laptop and two on their home TV)…

…As mobile UX designers, we have both opportunity and choice in front of us. The opportunity is to establish the foundation principles of a stable, yet still emerging, experiential space…

There’s more to visual balance than I mentioned in those previous posts and I thought the topic deserving of its own post…

Students are multitaskers who move through websites rapidly, often missing the item they come to find. They’re enraptured by social media but reserve it for private conversations and thus visit company sites from search engines.

..HEY WAIT! WOAH! NO-ONE’S TOUCHING PHOTOSHOP OR DOING ANY CSS FANCYWORK UNTIL I’M DONE WITH YOU!..

Freelance development- chances are you’ve done some at one time or another. Be it as your day to day job or a few hours on the side, most developers at some point in their career have dipped their fingers into this particular honey pot…

Apps for iPad/iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Nokia, Windows Phone, Palm, etc… it’s really amazing to see so many designers and developers working to create great experiences on mobile devices.

Analysis is a crucial part of any design process. Without it, it’s impossible to know if the right problem is being solved and if it is being solved in the right way…

Choosing which content to serve to your mobile website requires a good understanding of your users and the devices they use…

When people are visiting your site, do you know what they are looking for? Is it obvious to your visitors what you want to promote? …

Nobody needs to convince you that it’s important to test your website’s design and interaction with the people who will use it, right? But if that’s all you do, you’re missing out on feedback about the most important part of your site: the content…

The subject of design education, UX careers, and mentoring has been on my mind a lot lately. It wasn’t long ago that I was looking for UX job…

PR agencies, full service media agencies, social media pure plays, search agencies and client-side teams are all staking claim to social media monitoring, but who should really be responsible for it?