Tools of the Trade: Software for Prototyping
What is the best tool for creating prototypes? This is a surprisingly controversial topic. Just like asking someone whether they prefer Coke or Pepsi, you’re bound to get a reason behind why their choice is best, or why water is…
Paper Prototyping with Magnets and Dry Erase
Paper Prototyping with Magnets and Dry Erase What is Paper Prototyping? Paper Prototyping is a low fidelity (Low-Fi) way to create and test designs before an application has been built. The nature of a these prototypes as paper and pencil…
Take Advantage of Existing Standards
What are standards? Standards are agreed upon conventions for a particular process or visual pattern based on research and proven best practices. They provide a basis for commonality across many diverse things. They allow us to learn something once, and…
My Top 10 UX RSS Feeds
Technology is constantly changing. Everyday research is done, things are discovered and advancements are made. With the rise of RSS feeds I have found my feed reader becoming an indispensable source of information to help keep me up to date…
Design Review: Lotus Notes 8 vs. MS Outlook 2007
Design Review: Lotus Notes 8 versus Outlook 2007 Recently our office started upgrading some employees to Lotus 8 and I decided to give it a try. Before I get started, let me give you a little information on my email…
Forms: Comcast Sign In Redesign
Regardless of the vast information available on form design best practices there are online forms everywhere which break many of the standards. Forms stand between users and your product or service and should be given priority as a major portal…
Designing for the Global Market
What does it take to make your website global? I mean technically people can already access it from anywhere if it’s a public site, so all you need is a little bit of translation from babblefish right? Wrong. Translation Believe…
Image Search on Bing
I search the web a lot. I use Google probably 90% of the time by typing information into the chrome address bar. It’s quick, easy, and provides a wealth of results. However while Google is a great quick fix for…
The Value of Intuitive Interfaces
Never underestimate the value of an intuitive interface especially when designing for the general public. Nothing can be made too easy, but it can definitly be too hard. Below is a picture that was sent to me of a pay…
Who are you designing for?
As the name “User Experience” professional implies, many of us would say we design for “users”, “potential users”, or “user groups”. However there are currently many trends in place trying to get us to permanently move away from this term…