There are almost three weeks of summer left, all of the leaves are still on the trees and I’m already craving pumpkin. How has this traditionally Thanksgiving flavor taken over the third of the year between Labor Day and New Year’s Eve? The pumpkin spice people have a Svengali hold on us with their delicious lattes, muffins, ice cream and pancakes – mmmm don’t even get me started on the pancakes – not to mention a bevy…

Translating characters for better usability

A text box. Image attributed to: http://www.igniteui.com/editors/overview

The text box is one of the most common UI elements.

Despite the fact that, conceptually, it is a better fit for desktop environments, where typing text is the de-facto…

You built your site six years ago and in an effort to keep it current, you have been diligent about regularly adding new and relevant content. Great job, you are not only keeping your users engaged, you are also giving your SEO a natural boost. Life is good!

So what’s the problem?

When adding new pages, articles, videos and pictures to your site, have you given any thought to where this leaves the older stuff? Many…

What are microinteractions? Microinteractions are the tiny details of a process that create the flow from beginning to completion. Dan Saffler defines Microinteractions as single moments within a use case.  They are discreet touch points that support over all user experience.

Why do you care? Microinteractions appear in the digital world as well as in the physical. They can be the make or break moments that become the…

For the second year in a row, in Bulgaria, we hosted UXify – a conference about usability and design in the month of June. We followed the steps of our US colleagues, who kicked 2015 off with UXify US, an inspiring event held this past April. For us, several months of preparation culminated in two amazing days of people sharing their UX knowledge and experience with the local community.

This year our team joined…

Tutorials, welcome screens, help messages… in my opinion we’re experiencing an unnecessary abuse of them. Despite their utility, they’re misused, trying to present the full power of our wonderful software and explain how to use it. It's easy to do that and forget the users, blaming them for not reading the instructions.

For this reason I’m interested in talking about games. Why games? The process of game design faces…

Recently, we had the great pleasure to welcome Mark Hurst to the Infragistics headquarters. Mark is the founder of the well-known annual GEL conference in New York City. He’s also the founder and CEO of Creative Good, a consulting and services company dedicated to everything revolving around customer experience. He has just published the 2^ndedition of his book “Customers Included”.

Mark and Infragistics…

You may have heard that to design a good user experience you first need to understand the users and their needs, but what exactly do you need to know? It comes down to five W and one H question – Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How. The answers to these six questions reveal the context of use – the people, their tasks, their tools and technology, and the environment in which they will be using the product you’re designing…

In case you missed out on UXify 2015 last month, check out the recent Infragistics blog UXify North America – Conference Videos for all 8 presentations covering “The Future of UX Design”.

In addition to an afternoon of free lectures, conference goers also received interactive animating name badges. At first glance, the name badge appears to be the attendee’s name printed on a card along with an abstract…

Pitching your talk and listening to other amazing people

The #uxcampcph logo. Image attributed to: http://uxcampcph.org/Uploads/UXCampCPH_HVID_transparant.png

This is a continuation of an earlier blog about my experiences at UX Camp CPH 2015 with a focus on the topics presented there.

In a blog last week I tried to explain what lean stands for…

As I’ve written in the past, there are a lot of parallels to be drawn between motorcycle racing and User Experience Design. And now, as Spring finally arrives here in NJ, it’s that time when all the physical and mechanical preparation, like user experience research prior to starting the design phase of a consulting project, is finished and it’s time to take the motorcycle back to the track.

The first…

There are many ongoing discussions about User Experience, Usability, Design, Development, Agile, etc.  I’m hearing – more and more - a theme of ‘Design, Build, Test’ or ‘Design, Test, Build’.   The theory is that as long as you test your design with users, you are doing User Experience.  Something about this just seems to miss the mark.  It excludes the ‘Art’ of User Experience.…

The 2015 ux(bar)camp in Copenhagen through the eyes of an Infragistics employee

The #uxcampcph logo. Image attributed to: http://uxcampcph.org/Uploads/UXCampCPH_HVID_transparant.png

What is lean and how does it find its way in our daily life?

Lean manufacturing, lean software development and a lean methodology from a book called “The…

I usually write blogs with an eye toward how I see our profession progressing so this one will be a bit different. For the past 2 years, the UX Design organization here at Infragistics has hosted a local conference associated with World IA Day (held each year in February). February in NJ has never worked well for us and, after having to reschedule both of those events due to snow storms, we decided to create our own professional…

Which is a better method of analyzing user research and usability testing data, typing up your notes in a spreadsheet or creating an affinity diagram? In part 1 of this series, I discussed the advantages and disadvantages of using a spreadsheet. Here, in part two, I’ll discuss the advantages and disadvantages of affinity diagrams.

Analysis Spreadsheet

To review, in an analysis spreadsheet, each participant is listed…

In my 15 years in the field of user experience, I’ve analyzed a lot of user research and usability testing data. For most of that time, I’ve typed up and organized my notes in spreadsheets. I find a spreadsheet to be an ideal format for research notes, because it allows me to list participants in each column and tasks, problems, and themes across rows.

On larger projects, when analyzing data with a group of people, I…

As a visual designer at Infragistics I am always keeping my eyes open for effective dashboard designs to lend inspiration to projects. By browsing design-rich websites like Pinterest, Behance, or Dribbble I easily find collections that stimulate me. Many of the dashboards I come across are beautiful or at the very least aesthetically pleasing, but are they effective dashboards? Well, that would really depend on who the…

Whether you’re a developer, designer, project manager, or exec, if you have any part of any project that your customer will see or consume, you are creating something they will experience. Your customers – your users – can’t NOT ‘experience’ your site/app/product. You are ‘doing’ User Experience. If at NO point during the execution of that project did you even consider those…

We had a great turnout for the webinar on Dashboard design, thank you for joining! There were so many great questions and comments about User Experience and Design that we could not cover them all during Q&A. Because of this, I’ll address some more here in this blog.

How to cope with a lot of data and concepts to visualise but can't fit in one screen?

The first consideration should be: what information…

Some of the best user experiences come when something delightful and unexpected happens that help users or customers with a problem they didn’t even know they had. The art of creating a need that never existed before lies in not just understanding the problem at hand, but also understanding the people that have the problem.

Here's an example: The other day, my sister messaged me: "Is there anyone you are feeling…

Frank Lloyd Wright was a pioneer, an Avant-Garde architect who broke free of the design traditions of his era. His ideals are still used in architecture today, and his buildings have stood the test of time, remaining relevant in today’s digital age. As designers, we’re frequently asked to create digital experiences (especially in software) that will have a life expectancy of five to ten years. This is an eternity in …

Usability testing is probably the most well-known user research method in the user experience design process. In the distant past, user experience professionals spent a lot of time explaining and persuading clients and product team members about the need to perform usability testing on designs before beginning development. In the last decade, more and more business people have understood the need for user experience…

Back in November I had the opportunity to attend the Dublin Web Summit. With over 614 speakers in 9 stages, 700 investors, 2,160 exhibiting start-ups and 22,000 attendees from 109 countries, it was certainly a colossal event. There was enough variety to cater for anyone remotely interested in technology.

As a designer and front end developer, I chose some talks in the Main stage but mostly the ones in the Builders…

Affordances are what we directly perceive as a possibility for action. False affordances are very similar but differ in that these actions are actually undesired or impossible… we are tricked into something that should not be done in first place.

These two concepts (affordances and false affordances) have long been established in the area of Human-Computer Interaction and I don’t want to go into the debate of…

Earlier this month I had the opportunity to travel to the West Coast to take part in Portland, Oregon's Design Week. Among other independently organized events, ISITE Design’s Delight Conference was hosted in the Portland Art Museum along with workshops and interactive breakout sessions. I joined over 400 attendees at the ten-year-old conference to learn about creating experiences that “delight” customers.

To kick…