“If you need to use something like Readability or Safari Reader to read my articles, I’ve failed as a designer.”

Can mobile developers find a way to make paid apps work at scale?

Like it or not, we, the UX community, are the new brand leads. Don’t believe me? My 65-year old mother used the words “poor user experience” recently with that disdainful look in her eye that said “Never again, brand X.” Our work has become the new decider in brand preference. It’s time to take the reins and move into our new role.

Whenever I have to communicate what it is I do, or the benefits of UX, I sometimes feel like a bit of salesmen, as if I’m having to convince someone why they should care about user experience as much as I do…

A multivariate test provides insight into which creative variation gets the best improvement in the defined goals of a website. Read about my test results.

Hidden features, reduced discoverability, cognitive overhead from dual environments, and reduced power from a single-window UI and low information density. Too bad.

Advising any business is hard. I’m hesitant to do it. It’s all too easy to give bad advice, which steers companies in the wrong direction, all based on my whimsical throwaway idea shared over coffee.

Embracing the fluid & flexible aspect of responsive web design was an easy decision, but I’ve been less sure-footed when it comes to balancing that with setting type on the web.

This year we’ve taken a look at the state of e-commerce checkouts by documenting and benchmarking the checkout processes of the top 100 grossing e-commerce websites based on the findings from the original research study.

The Gamification trend merely borrowed simple game mechanics, from badges to progress bars. But now designers are looking more closely at core game design principles like design for flow and mastery, blending them with our old friend, ease of use. But how many of these techniques are relevant for more everyday sites, like ecommerce and productivity apps?

One of the most important color tricks I’ve ever learned was to avoid using the color black in my work. Mrs. Zamula, my childhood art teacher, first warned me about black when I was in middle school. And I heard the same again multiple times at RISD. It sounds weird at first, but it’s good advice.

Direct comparisons between multi-device design solutions for the Web often miss the point: each is better suited for particular things. Specifically, responsive Web design is an excellent solution for adapting to the capabilities of any given device. Server-side device detection solutions are great at optimizing for many of the same capabilities. There’s a reason for both techniques.

What’s worth the most — field studies or user tests? Depends on your company’s usability maturity, but user testing is the safe bet if you can do only one thing.

Ever been on one of those project teams that just lacks talent. You are pretty aware of what is going on, but the people around you are clueless. You find yourself asking, “How is it possible for the project to progress from here with this type of team?”

When we benchmarked the checkout process of the 100 largest e-commerce sites we found that 72% made the mistake of using an “Apply” button to submit distinct sections of the checkout form.

A lot has happened in the field of User Experience the last couple of weeks. As we’re coming to the end of the month, I went through my tweets, posts and shares to collect the five greatest stories on UX that got my attention.

When carrying out research do we place enough importance on geography? Based on the sparsity of research recruitment agencies outside of London I’m guessing we don’t. There’s certainly an appreciation for regional variation when designing on a global scale, but do we put as much rigor into our approach when the audience is limited to just one country, and do we need to?

The human computer interface helps to define computing at any one time. As computers have become more mainstream the interfaces have become more intimate…

Tabs, collapsed menus, accordion forms, and the ever popular hover items such as mega menu drop-downs – progressive disclosure is a great way to cut down visual clutter while still offering the user lots of content and features.

Let’s face it, we want more: More readers, more users, more signups, more app downloads, more page views,… more sales. Anticipating which problems users have when they use software may help us to get a step closer to our goals and make our users happier.

Usability is dead (or at best on life-support and not conscious), and I’m sorry to be the one that has to tell you this, but it’s been mortally wounded by UX (aka User Experience).

I have become an enormous fan of the iPhone App store after having used the phone for a couple year now. The quality of interface designs are light-years above what you can find on Windows Mobile and even most Android apps. It’s because of this reason I like to celebrate the best interfaces I can find and share with the design community. This encourages new developers to jump onto these trends and build up a small viral market.

Thinking about UX design as a two-way conversation can be the key to creating smart sites and apps that meet users expectations, because when you begin to think about all design as a conversation, you are able to apply the rules of basic conversation to your design process.

The perfect message for Call to Action buttons is about finding the right emotional triggers for your target audience. I will show you how.

The simplest definition. Design is so many things, executed in many different ways, but the function is always the same. Whether it’s blueprints, a clever UI, a brochure, or a chair – design can help solve a visual or physical problem. 1

Do you know what your website’s conversion rate is? The rate of conversion doesn’t just have to equate to the percentage of visitors that actually buy from you. It could also equate to visitors acting on a different call to action, such as filling out a form, signing up for more information, or emailing you to contact them for an appointment or consultation.

You can’t become an ‘indie’ UX designer until you have proven yourself as a ‘successful’ UX designer and have the portfolio and references to back you up.

Platform product owners must be concerned with assisting developers in accomplishing this if end users are to have a good user experience overall. Attention to these details is called developer experience (DX), and enabling app developers to be successful through better DX will create a more successful UX for the platform product.

He said, it’s fine to disagree, it’s fine to push back, it’s great to have strong opinions and beliefs, but give my ideas some time to set in before you’re sure you want to argue against them.

This study examined the effects of line length on reading speed, comprehension, and user satisfaction of online news articles. Twenty college-age students read news articles displayed in 35, 55, 75, or 95 characters per line (cpl) from a computer monitor. Results showed that passages formatted with 95 cpl resulted in faster reading speed. No effects of line length were found for comprehension or satisfaction, however, users indicated a strong preference for either the short or long line lengths.