I’ve worked in this field for a very long time, yet explaining how User Experience works to my parents is one of the most frustrating conversations I always have.

They consistently get asked by friends what their sons do. My brother is easy, he owns a bowling pro shop. Me, not so.

A lot of designers seem to be talking about user experience (UX) these days. We’re supposed to delight our users, even provide them with magic, so that they love our websites, apps and start-ups. User experience is a very blurry concept.

Once users reject a design technique due to repeated bad experiences it’s almost impossible to use it for good because people will avoid it every time.

Usability is ridiculously important to your website. It doesn’t matter how cool your website looks or how amazing your content is if visitors can’t quickly, easily, and enjoyably access and use it. Many of them will eventually just give up and look elsewhere.

When conducting user research on checkout usability we made an interesting observation in regards to form fields arranged in multiple columns.

One thing I love about UX designers is our diversity of backgrounds. We tend to be refugees from other disciplines…

Mobile technologies have diversified the scope of the human experience, and spread it over multiple devices. To reach people where they are, companies work with Punchcut to extend value across channels and distribute experiences across devices.

UI designer requirements checklist.

Cameron Moll famously stated that “good designers redesign, great designers realign“. But what does that mean exactly? To get a better understanding of the term, here’s a real-life example.

It is hard to say what truly makes something desirable because the answer is: It depends.

Users often have some difficulty being objective and thinking outside the box when it comes to factors that affect their own lives on a day-to-day basis.

Still, the underlying idea of confirmation screens is sound: good interfaces make you work just a little bit harder to do something you might otherwise regret later.

Similar to any other design project that follows a user-centered approach, UX design projects for children also require a thorough knowledge of your audience.

…To date, I would say that of all the disciplines in creating software and especially web sites, UX people are the slowest and most resistant to adopting Agile principles and practices.

Great article about the popular Angry Birds and the user experience decisions.

User experience design for the Web (and its siblings, interaction design, UI design, et al) has traditionally been a deliverables-based practice. Wireframes, site maps, flow diagrams, content inventories, taxonomies, mockups and the ever-sacred specifications document (aka “The Spec”) helped define the practice in its infancy.

Recently, we found ourselves explaining why we wireframe, and what it brings to the project: clarity of purpose, a streamlined set of features, and a focused, compelling way to communicate with users.

If you emerge from university today with a web design degree, chances are rather slim that you’re employable as a user experience (UX) or web designer. Maybe you learned a lot of stuff; it’s just probably the wrong stuff. Congratulations, you’ve been defrauded. Hope it didn’t cost you or your parents too much.

We’ve discussed different personality types and soliciting feedback, but how do we deal with the bigger issues designers face when launching a web project?

Deliverables help us build commodities and describe solutions and actually, they can be pretty handy to work backwards from when we’re selling into a client.

The goal of any new e-commerce website appears to be to challenge (and be better than) Amazon.com. The well informed among us would say this is an impossible task and anyone suggesting different is overly ambitious or crazy.

…One of the most common points was that wireframes are a valuable part of an agency’s design process and help kick off the project, get it approved by the director, get client sign off…

Technology is a catalyst for new possibilities, but as digital designers we must evaluate how those new possibilities can add value to a user’s experience, not detract from it.

Usability reviews are a structured means of examining the usability of an interactive system by evaluating it against a set of recognized usability best practice principles.

Great product is never the product of a lone genius, but rather the collective wisdom of a motivated team with a shared vision. Sketching is the best way to codify that vision and strengthen your team.

With the launch of Basecamp Mobile just a couple of weeks behind us, we wanted to take a look back at some of the design decisions we made along the way.

The key areas, or “pillars”, of User Experience are: User Interface, Interaction Design and Usability. These three areas work together to create a good or bad User Experience.

A great start point in understanding creativity and analyzing the creations.

Creativity can be either emotionally or cognitively based, and it can also be spontaneous or deliberate. That gives you the four quadrants.

The user is king. It’s a phrase that’s repeated over and over again as a mantra: Companies must become user-centric.