There's a belief that user experience insight is lacking in Agile development. Trying to shoehorn UX practices into an Agile process results in a lot of frustration. Often, developers build stuff faster than the designers can design it. The whole process often focuses on the delivery more than the quality of the experience. Anders Ramsay believes that UX and Agile can coexist.

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Technologies are often misunderstood at their outset. This misunderstanding leads to a lack of adoption. This lack of adoption leads to the technology not reaching it’s full potential or not being utilized in useful ways. This is essentially what happened to JavaScript. Its detractors said it wasn’t a real programming language, and it’s capabilities were ignored. Dave McFarland notes that Google’s use of JavaScript in Google Maps makes a lot of people take notice.

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It’s like one of those adventure movies where the hero, surrounded by their motley crew of misfit recruits, is looking across the valley at the approaching army, thinking, “What did we get ourselves into?” That’s the sense I get after talking with UX professionals about the challenges their organization faces as they move to Agile [...]

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If your team is transitioning from static documentation to iterative HTML prototypes, then Nathan Curtis’ March 7 seminar, Start Full Screen, is right up your alley. Nathan will talk about how his team at EightShapes brought it’s renowned modular philosophy of modular components and libraries for producing PDFs to prototyping using simple HTML, CSS and [...]

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Mobile is greatly influencing the user experience community. It’s challenging traditional approaches to design, but also bringing with it a host of new opportunities. Being a user experience practitioner in this changing environment is a bit scary. Yet coupling existing skill sets with the constraints of designing in the mobile space makes for an exciting world full of possibility.

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Touchscreen devices give you the ability to directly manipulate content. This allows designers to create interfaces where the content itself is the control. This lessens the need for buttons and can reduce the level of complexity within your design. The problem is making the user aware of the availability of gestures in your design. Gestures, especially multi-touch gestures, are powerful control mechanisms but useless if the users aren't aware of them.

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Sure, you already know that data-driven decision-making can be a great thing. And a survey can be a great way of getting hold of a lot of data. But if you’ve ever had to complete a frustrating survey asking seemingly mindless questions, and we all have, then the idea of having to design one yourself [...]

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It’s easy for web applications to get overly complicated. Ideally, complex applications help their users solve complex problems, making their lives simpler. Unfortunately this isn’t always the case. Vague commands, useless dashboards, and confusing navigation create headaches for users by otherwise well-meaning applications. Often this can be a product of the structure of the application [...]

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Dashboards are a great idea. The problem is, many are useless. In this seminar, Hagan Rivers will show you which elements to include, how to structure them, and what to slash out of your existing dashboard that needs some UX TLC. She’ll show you a bunch of dashboards. And she’ll give you tips for helping [...]

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The goal of any site is for the right audience to find the right information. But beyond your actual content there are many things that can cause findability issues. These tend to be unanswered questions about your primary audience and whether or not you’re satisfying the need of that audience. Good information architecture can help guide your design decisions so that your users can effectively engage with your content.

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Seats for the premiere Agile development and mobile design conference are going fast We started out with 100 spots, but already we’re down to 80 for the UX Immersion 2012 Conference in Portland, OR April 23-25. You can register at the lowest rate of $1,349 to secure one of the remaining 80 spots. After these [...]

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New can be very scary. It’s easy to get comfortable with what we know, only to have everything turned topsy-turvy when we encounter major changes. The world of mobile design is new, and therefore, scary for many. The comforts of designing for the desktop disappear when we have to deal with these portable, tiny devices. [...]

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Peer into Your Future You’re about to see a project we’ve been working on for several months. A brand new conference bringing the newest, most critical thinking around two separate and important topics: mobile design and Agile development. These experts will dive deep and get to the nitty-gritty details that will make you a stronger [...]

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A common trap in designing data visualizations is focusing on all the different ways to represent the data, rather than the questions that the data should answer. The presentation of a data set is pointless if it’s not useful, usable, or if people can’t understand it. With so much data to choose from how do you keep the goal of the visualization in mind? How are you sure you’re telling the right story?

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In the last two years, the UX world has seen some drastic changes. Our designs, and the processes to get to them, are undergoing a transformation that forces UX designers to rethink what they do. Users’ behaviors change based on how they view digital content. The desktop computer is no longer the norm for reading [...]

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