The best products don’t focus on features, they focus on clarity. Problems should be fixed through simple solutions, something you don’t have to configure, maintain, control. The perfect solution needs to be so simple and transparent you forget it’s even there.

As I expected, the usual suspects like paper, PowerPoint, Flash, and HTML showed up on the most common tools list. Also, not surprising is that participants used more than one tool. For instance, they might use a combination of paper for sketching and then go into Photoshop and finally HTML…

User experience is comprised of a) content strategy, b) interaction design and c) visual design, all ruled by a process of user research…

…Unobtrusive for the person using it – this isn’t easy by any means but I wanted to try and stay out of the way as much as possible, meaning the sled and camera had to be small, lightweight (light enough to hold in one hand) and have minimal impact on the participants field of vision…

…This is a brilliant encapsulation of what’s wrong with so many companies’ customer experiences: what the company sees is different from what the customer sees….

Consider the brand of the website. The brand is a reflection not only of the aesthetic but of the experience. If a website is gorgeous, but its beauty makes completing a transaction impossible, then the website (and brand) will ultimately fail.

…Should it be clickable (really clickable, i.e., working code) or a mocked up experience created using Axure, Powerpoint, Fireworks or any other tool?

…People aren’t simply “designers” or “developers”, these are just masks that we place on them to help us organize our environment, masks that we’re often too eager to wear ourselves too…

It’s really easy to simplify things and make bold assertions like “designers should code”. As constantly happens, it’s more complicated than that. I will reject that assertion, and I’ll propose what isn’t really a proposal, but an acknowledgment of what’s already done for the best projects out there.

A designer who does not write markup and css is not designing for the web, but drawing pictures…

…Graphical user interfaces are full of symbols. Symbols need to be reduced to their essence. This helps avoid cluttering the user interface with meaningless distractions, and makes it easier for people to «read» the symbol and figure out the meaning of an interface element…

…When we greet users with succinct messages—organized in a defined hierarchy—we pique their interest through immersive experiences that keep them learning…

These handy-dandy equations give you a ballpark estimate of how much to spend on acquiring a new customer. But they don’t tell you how to spend that money — and that’s where things get interesting.

Opportunity recognition is important for both startups and mature businesses. New business is the life’s blood of any company. Due to the fast pace of change in today’s business climate, if you are not constantly innovating you are falling behind.

Carefully devising your personas involves embracing the nitty gritty. It’s true that personas should not be based on actual people, but represent a product’s archetypal users and their hypothetical behaviour and goals.

Some of us just have a hard time with the softer aspects of UI design (myself especially). Are “back-end coders” doomed to only design business logic and data layers? Is there something we can do to retrain our brain to be more effective at designing pleasing and useful presentation layers?…

Ideally, UX professionals should be involved in the entire software development lifecycle…

Asking questions effectively is a major underlying part of a manager’s job — which suggests that it might be worth giving this skill a little more focus.

In the art that user experience has become, we talk a lot about not letting our client’s personal preferences get in the way of what would be best for the user. Yet no matter how often we remind our clients and teams of this throughout the design process, we still find that users are unpredictable, and some changes need to be made post-launch to reflect how they actually use the product.

User Experience, or ‘UX’ as it’s commonly shortened to, is how a person uses and experiences an interface. This is just part of design. Whether it’s designing a website, application or a physical product, the user experience should be the sole motivator for direction and decisions.

It is an honest question: how smart are your users? The answer may surprise you: it doesn’t matter. They can be geniuses or morons, but if you don’t engage their intelligence, you can’t depend on their brain power.

Think before acting. Sounds right, doesn’t it? Think before starting to design. Yup. Do some research, learn more about the requirements, the people, the activities. Then design. It all makes sense.

As web design matures, so do the tools used for web pages. As with any industry there are standards that are widely accepted and used. There are also trends that become popular over time. Modal boxes have recently become a popular tool for Internet marketing websites…

Last week I commented on Michael Wilson’s post about ‘sort by default’ as an option when customising search results or product listings. I shared my personal experience with a recent client and thought it was worth sharing here too…

Usability testing is a form of user research, in so far as it allows you to make conclusions about a large population based on observations of a small sample of that population. Essentially, we try to assess our products’ suitability for our marketplace—as well as its usability for the population of interest—by testing it with a group of typical users.

To accomplish simplification, user experience designers employ a variety of design exercises to make the UI more efficient. We limit the amount of choices available to a user, reduce the size of content and site copy, progressively disclose UI options, and synthesize unruly navigation elements.

User testing on 3 continents confirmed that the main usability guidelines hold worldwide, but many other considerations exist to better support international users.

Users are scrolling more than they have in the past. It is still important to place critical page elements high on the page, but it is no longer necessary to show all page content as high on the page as possible.

iPad apps are much improved, but new usability problems have emerged, such as swipe ambiguity and navigation overload.

…The redesign is the wonder drug of the Web: Bad experience with an app? Give it a new design. Don’t like how Craigslist works? Here’s a free redesign for you…