Many designers come to me for usability testing consulting services. One of the reasons they reach out is because they assume usability testing must be a complex, scientific process. As a result, they’d prefer to have an outside company conduct their usability tests…

…When the interface isn’t helpful, information is internalized by the user, meaning they have to think longer about the problem and learn more fully the inner workings of their task…

Having a usable blog means less frustration for your readers, which in turn improves their overall experience, user retention and conversions.

The term color blindness is actually misleading. Most people who are “color blind” are not blind to all colors, but really have a color deficiency that makes it hard for them to see differences between some colors.

Teams that consistently turn out great experiences do one cool thing with data from user research and usability testing. They Talk To One Another. A lot. That’s the process.

…Change is inevitable. Individuality is the new norm. Mac UI design is only just starting to take influence from iOS UI design.

In this edition of Ask UXmatters, our experts discuss what skills are essential and desirable for a UX Designer.

You launched a web app or product. You’ve got customers. How do you communicate with them?

There are several ways to make sure your web forms are optimized for your users. Here are some tips for making sure that your form submission process is user-friendly.

A key aspect of usability is efficiency. Users should be able to complete tasks quickly.

A good design begins with a good design concept. You’re trying to solve a problem and your concept will lead the way and give you direction for your design decisions.

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…