Best practices
The goal is to have a product that’s well designed, but getting there can be tricky. There’s a huge gap between wanting to be good at design, and actually being able to do it. I’ve seen a number of companies make this jump, and have noticed there are a few ingredients that have to be in place before great design happens automatically.
Ingredients for automatically great design — Designing Startups
The Greatest Secrets of UX Revealed!
I’m a big fan of Penn and Teller , and have been for many years. I saw them live for the first time last month and was blown away by their performance. What I really love about Penn and Teller is that they often “pull back the curtain” and reveal how they do their magic. Other magicians produce an air of mysticism and pretense around their craft, but Penn and Teller will have none of that. They know they are playing tricks, fooling the audience, and by letting everyone in on what they are doing they debunk mysticism while also (hopefully) teaching you something. Their attitude towards their work inspired me to write an article that hopefully “pulls back the curtain” on some of user experience design’s “greatest mysteries.”
Gamification
An experience map is a holistic view of all of the touchpoints or interactions people have with a brand.
Experience Maps Identify Inefficiencies and Opportunities
Mobile prototyping: a new paradigm
Emerging mobile devices place new challenges in front of UX designers that cause significant shifts to traditional methods of work. For more than a decade, wireframes and mockups have perhaps been the most predominant ways of simulating and validating the user interface, layout, navigation, structure, content and design elements of a website. Can wireframes and mockups sufficiently simulate mobile apps as they do websites?
When the mockups for the new Financial Times application 1 hit our desks in mid-2012, we knew we had a real challenge on our hands. Many of us on the team (including me) swore that parts of interface would not be possible in HTML5. Given the product team’s passion for the new UI, we rolled up our sleeves and gave it our best shot. We were tasked with implementing a far more challenging product, without compromising the reliable, performant experience that made the first app so successful. We didn’t just want to build a product that fulfilled its current requirements; we wanted to build a foundation that we could innovate on in the future. This meant building with a maintenance-first mentality , writing clean, well-commented code and, at the same time, ensuring that our code could accommodate the demands of an ever-changing feature set.
Building The New Financial Times Web App: A Case Study
Planning user experience (UX) projects is a balancing act of getting the right amount of user input within the constraints of your project. The trick is to work out the best use of your time. How can you get the most UX goodness for your client’s budget?
Effectively Planning UX Design Projects
In October 2008 I joined a great group of guys over at Daily Challenge to lend some creative firepower to an already blazing group of talented young individuals.
Applications of usability principles on a social network | creative briefing
Better User Experience With Storytelling – Part One - Smashing Magazine
Stories have defined our world.
Software development is built around quantitative measurements.
Quantifying Usability: How injecting usability principles into standard bug tracking software can reshape how your organization approaches UX design
Bill Gates On Microsoft: Damn, Our Usability Sucks
Todd Bishop has published a 2003 e-mail from Bill Gates to some Microsoft developers. It's basically Bill complaining about certain Windows features not working, and others being so convoluted that it's irrational to expect a rational person to go through this hell to get an update or a piece of free software. Read Bill's entire e-mail here , it's worth it.There has been too much nonsense spouted about the effectiveness of certain successful companies’ websites and it’s time to correct it.
Hungry? Want another bullshit sandwich?
Onboarding: Designing Welcoming First Experiences
Last May I was given the great privilege to write a sidebar in Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone 's fabulous new book, Designing Social Interfaces . The topic I was asked to write about is " onboarding "—designing welcoming experiences for new users by easing them in.If you hadn’t noticed, every Google service has been trending toward a certain understated elegance. The company’s infamous era of championing 41 shades of blue is long over, as the company has learned to embrace clean lines, airy typography, and liberal white space across their platforms. But amidst implementing these long-established good design practices, Google rediscovered an old idea: index cards. Just like index and business cards of yore (or at least the late '90s), Google’s cards are plain, white rectangles peppered with nothing more than a little bit of type and maybe a photo. Are cards the epitome of flat modernism, or are they subconscious skeuomorphism? Even Google’s designers debated this point when I posed the question.