If I may first ask who likes tutorials? Yeeeeey… And who reads tutorials? Yeeeeey…

I’d rather stop with my clumsy attempts to be ironic and try to reason why tutorials as a concept are flawed, elaborate with a few examples of tutorials done wrong and finish by giving my tips on how to design a tutorial as if there were no tutorial at all.

The human brain is a bizarre entity with a vast number of chemical…

I don’t spend a lot of time on Twitter. I have nothing against it, I just usually have other things to do. Recently though, a designer friend of mine, @mattbartholomew, tweeted something that got me thinking.

In the field of Ecology, these sorts of boundaries are known as ecotones – areas of transition between two relatively homogeneous areas. Look it up – it’s pretty cool. Literally, the word means, “a place where…

The creative process can be an emotional roller coaster for both designers and clients alike.  Clients must trust the design team to conceive a solution that will meet the needs of their customers. The experience our client has throughout the design process is just as important as the design itself.  It can lead to a more successful project, better relationship and future work.

In the design world, we often use Jakob Nielsen…

Amazon just gave me something high on my wish list of improvements to their website. They recently added the ability to drag and drop the items in your wish list to reorder the list. I’d like to think it was all due to my December 20^th, 2013 blog post, Amazon’s Wish List Problem, but in reality, it was probably something they had intended to do for a long time.

Previously, Amazon placed your most recently…

Here’s a cool data viz story. A large weekly magazine in Europe has recently published some statistics about Ebola cases in four African countries. It’s in German, but bear with me here.

Per country, the outer bubble depicts the number of Ebola cases and the inner bubble shows how many of those have died.

If you read the other parts of this blog series about user-centered data visualization, you’ll recall…

Friends and colleagues,

I’ve submitted a presentation proposal to the 2015 SXSW Interactive Conference. If you like my proposal, please take a moment to visit the SXSW PanelPicker (http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/32599) and vote for me. Thank you very much!

Kent

Software maintains the design traditions developed for print media. Mastheads, columns, and photo blocks are layout components carried over from the…

Friends – I’ve submitted a talk to the 2015 SxSW Interactive conference. If you like my concept and my video, please take a moment to follow the link (http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/31967) and vote for me. Thanks very much!

Kevin

Businesses tend to believe that innovation means “one big idea” that erupts from the minds of a chosen few “creative” individuals. 

Sticking to this model, innovation occurs unreliably, infrequently…

I recently redesigned a community site for developers. The site has the typical blog and discussion boards, meeting information and general background information about the community.  The client said the site was old and unattractive, she also noted that people had trouble searching for meeting locations and submitting requests. I also saw issues with poor navigation, the organization of content areas and the writing…

As a user experience professional, I often take it for granted that everyone knows the difference between user research, usability testing, and expert reviews. It’s true that more people than ever are aware of user experience these days, but I still find there are a lot of misunderstandings about the difference between these methods. So let’s explore each of these methods, the types of findings they produce, and when…

One Rule of UX Consulting

There is a rule in consulting that many professionals don’t seem to understand (or want to believe). This rule applies regardless of your specialty. It doesn’t matter whether you call yourself a UX Architect, a Design Researcher, a UI Visual Designer, a Production Artist, an Intern or the local big cheese. If you are a consultant in this wild and wonderful profession of ours, this one rule applies…

Here’s one of the epic questions in UX design: should the OK buttons be to the left of the Cancel button or should it be the other way round?

Before I go into details, here’s the executive summary: there’s neither a significant difference in performance (task execution speed) nor in user preference.

It’s interesting that although it’s a source of constant discussions, it’s not something that would…

Recruiting user research participants can be difficult and time consuming. Unless you already have lists of potential participants (such as customers, employees, or members) it can be hard to find and recruit the right people, and using a recruiting company can be expensive. Luckily, social media provides new options for reaching the right audience.

To understand how recruiting with social media can work, let’s look at…

In the user experience profession, as in sports and school, there is often a time “between”… between projects, between seasons, between semesters. Call it down-time, the local minima between the peaks of craziness that is consulting or just a short breather before throwing yourself into another business you know little about, it is a special time. As I write this, it is early March, the snow is (finally) beginning to…

I am writing this blog as I fly back to Newark from the 15th annual Information Architecture Summit held in San Diego, California. As the steady hum of the engines lulls most passengers asleep, I am still thinking of the great speakers I listened to. One was the inspirational morning keynote by Irene Au, she’s worked at some of the most legendary companies of the Internet - Netscape, Yahoo! and Google. But now her journey…

Usability testing and expert reviews are both great methods to discover design and usability problems, but it can be overwhelming to receive a deliverable with a long list of problems and recommendations. You can’t fix everything at once, so you may wonder where to begin. Should you focus first on the easy items to fix, or should you try to tackle the most serious problems, even though those require a lot more time and…

I recently attended a unique user experience conference, ConveyUX, from February 5^th – 7^th in Seattle. I was pleasantly surprised by the size, organization, and quality of content.

The idea of a privately-organized conference was new to me. So I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’ve only been to conferences organized by professional associations, such as the UXPA conference (organized by the User Experience Professional’s…

The “Unicorn” concept (a rare individual who can do every UX job) has been talked up lately. I last heard an impassioned talk about this at UI18 in Boston. The idea goes something like this: There are so many enterprises that need UX services but there are just not enough people to do them. So what we need to do in the UX community is to avoid specialization and become a super generalist. If we become Unicorns then there…

Usability testing is observing how users interact with a technical system, a product or a service in order to learn how this system can be optimized for a better user experience. While usability tests should be run at various phases during a system’s lifecycle, they’re especially valuable in the early stages - before the design is complete and before we do any development. At this point there’s no prototype built in code…

Someone gave me Quicken 2014 for Christmas.

Don’t get me wrong, it was a good gift, a very practical gift, I needed it, and I’ll definitely use it, but compared to the other things on my Amazon wish list, it wasn’t exactly a fun gift. Certainly not the kind of fun that the video game, Resident Evil 6, would have been.

Why did I put it on my wish list, then? Well, it was something that I needed, and I…

Sadly, a lot of usability testing doesn’t happen because people think it requires an expensive usability lab. The term “lab” itself implies some kind of high-tech science experiment. It sounds formal, expensive, time consuming, and out of reach. But you don’t need a lab, and usability testing is actually often better when it’s not conducted in a lab.

Usability Testing in a Lab

Sure, there…

What follows is a primer for the professional who has been tasked with creating a web site or application that may be accessed via multiple devices (aka responsive design). Whether you are a product manager, user experience professional, designer or developer, follow these guidelines and your users will thank you.

Regardless of the platform(s), you must:

1. Understand the technical requirements
2. Understand the business …

I’m about to buy the fifth new car that I’ve bought in my lifetime, a Toyota Prius. This will be the fourth time that I’ve done most of the car buying process online, and so far it’s been a great experience. Unfortunately, I’ll eventually have to go to a car dealership, and that’s where the great customer experience will break down.

The car shopping user experience is better than ever

The user experience of auto manufacturer…

I listen to developers of software and websites all day, they have great ideas and observations but I try to balance what I hear with what I see. Many product managers tell me what their customers want -- they say, “Customers tell me all the time…” or “I’ve been using this software for 10 years – I know what customers want…”
I tell my clients, “Don’t listen to what people say but watch what they do!” People tend to…

Overview

Essentially, Semiotics is the study of signs or symbols and their meanings. It is a science that seeks to investigate how signs are formed and its core concept is to define the transfer of meaning to a sign. It is comprised of three main parts: Semantics which refers to the relationship between a sign and the meaning of what it represents, Syntactics which deals with the formal properties of language and systems…

The Innovation Problem

Business tends to believe that innovation means “one big idea”. It also tends to believe that innovation erupts from the minds of a chosen few “creative” individuals. And finally, sadly, business believes that innovation results from the tireless work of marketing teams. We should not be OK with this.

Over and above the obvious problems associated with the costs of slow and…