The web and its related disciplines have grown organically. I think it’s safe to say the web is not the domain of just the geeks anymore—we all live here. And those of us who work here should have sophisticated, native tools to do our jobs.

A perspective on storytelling in User Experience Design.

A perspective on storytelling in User Experience Design.

Stories are a great way to introduce a concept in an imaginative way or sell an idea to your team or management.

Virgin America is my favorite domestic airline, in part because of the way it treats an overlooked part of the flying experience: the safety demonstration

The other day I was asked the question “To what level does any website legally need to be made accessible?”

One of my favorite parts of creating web apps is being able to make subtle changes to our sales pages and see the impact it has on our signups.

If you’re looking for a quick way to sketch some iPad concepts, you may want to download one of the iPad UI templates listed below.

iPad eReader apps have only been around for a few months but they build upon a formidable predecessor—the book. They also benefit from the relatively recent success of the Kindle and iPhone apps like Stanza.

With the ingress in the market of products like Nintendo Wii, Apple iPhone and Microsoft Kinect, developers finally started realizing that there are several ways a person can control a computer besides keyboards, mice and touch screens. These days there are many alternatives, obviously based on hardware sensors, and the main difference is the dependency on software computation.

For retailers, shopping is the art of persuasion. Though there are many factors that influence how and what consumers buy. However, a great deal is decided by visual cues, the strongest and most persuasive being color.

It would be nice if we could just say “give us feedback” and our customers could just turn on the faucet and dump out all of their concerns and experiences and ideas. But that’s not the way our brains work.

Hierarchy in web design is centrally about influencing a user to understand and embrace the principal goals of a website and interact with the material in the ideal order to facilitate a smooth and pleasant experience with the website.

Adobe is pleased to announce the availability of the Adobe® Illustrator® CS5 HTML5 Pack. This add-on for Illustrator CS5 15.0.1 provides initial support for HTML5 and CSS3, extends SVG capability in Illustrator CS5, and helps you easily design web and device content.

I naturally expected to see lots of buzz around the dConstruct conference, run annually on the first Friday of September. I had booked myself a space but the opportunity for a last minute holiday was too tempting to miss so I begrudgingly passed my ticket on. Looking through my feeds it seemed that the overwhelming topic of conversation was focused not on dConstruct itself, but a comment made during the conference by a high profile attendee discrediting the term ‘UX Professional’.

You all know the project. After months of working with your client’s web team consisting of a web developer and a marketing manager, the project has gone seemingly well. The client is happy and you are happy. You have clocked up months of research into who the users are and what their objectives are, and have transformed the userflows into wireframes and a working prototype. Concepts have been designed and you are proud of what you have created.

Presentation showcasing design tips about Amazon.com

Trying to fix an organization’s content problems by installing a content management system (CMS) is like trying to save a marriage by booking a holiday. We know that a successful web project needs a content strategy—but when it comes to the CMS, we stop thinking strategically.

Axure is a great application to use when mocking up interaction design concepts for usability testing…

A Brief History of the Future

Want to increase your website’s conversion rate? Want more subscribers, opt-ins, members, customers? How about doing less work while you’re at it?

Just like there are different client types, and different people in general – there are a few different types of designers. In this article we will have a look at some of the characteristics of some of these and give you some tips on how to improve.

Usability is a study of human-computer interaction that helps designers analyze our users’ patterns as they use our creations.

Ever read a great book? What do you remember about it? Maybe a few dramatic moments, some wild story twists, and most definitely the ending.

There seems to be this idea going around that usability testing is bad, or that the cool kids don’t do it. That it’s old skool. That designers don’t need to do it. What if I told you that usability testing is the hottest thing in experience design research?

Design is often seen as a subjective and creative pursuit. I tend to agree, but feel that the more subjective and detached you are from specific strategic goals, the more problems will arise. If there’s any ambiguity regarding how something should be used and how visuals are incorporated to your advantage, you should expect a lot of waste.

Sometimes you just want to get the information you’re after, save it and move along. And you can’t. Usability nightmares — which are rather the daily routine than an exception — appear every now and again; usually almost every time you type your search keywords in Google.

The level of usability on your website takes on a vital role when we’re designing for the end-user.