Recently, I posted a tweet about conversion rates. Conversion rate’s big crime is it focuses purely on pressing the purchase button, independent of the quality of the experience. — Jared M. Spool (@jmspool) May 13, 2012 Immediately, I received several responses, all of them showing the common misunderstandings that people have about conversion rates. The [...]

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I’ve been fascinated by critique lately. It’s a fabulous tool to help the entire team – designers and non-designers alike – learn more about what makes great design great. I’ve learned that you can tell that a team is taking advantage of well-done critiques by the new, personalized language they are now sporting. They have [...]

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Storytelling is a natural form of expression. We’ve all been telling stories from a very young age. In the design process, personas become the tool we use to tell our users’ stories. And with good personas in place, usage scenarios can become the micro-stories that drive your design decisions. Kim Goodwin tells us that scenarios [...]

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Last week, I attended a conference presentation where a team presented findings from their A/B Testing efforts. It was a cute presentation where they posted the control and test variants, then asked the audience to pick which one “won” the A/B test. They compared the audience answer to the variant that demonstrated the best increase [...]

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A data visualization, when done well, can be an incredibly powerful way to communicate information. It ultimately boils down to the choices you make in how to design and present the data. If you make the wrong choice you can run the risk of not accurately displaying the data or struggling to effectively tell its story.

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Personas are one of the most controversial tools in the professional UX toolbox. People either swear by them or swear at them. When they work, they are awesome, but when they fail, well, they fail gloriously. For the past few years, we’ve been researching why so many persona projects have such dismal results. We discovered [...]

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For many projects, self design works great. By designing for our own use, we can optimize the user’s experience to be smooth and seamless. A while back, I wrote about the advantages of self design and the alternatives to self design. Of course, to be successful at self design, you have to use your design [...]

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Small is good. We love small products. Why not small processes? Mobile phones used to be big and bulky. Then we found ways to make them smaller and pack more stuff into them. Now we walk around with multi-purpose computers in our pockets. And guess what? We use them more than ever for things we [...]

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The other day, I wrote about how choosing the right words in your tasks makes a critical difference to the outcome of your user research. Mike Pauley wrote a comment, asking how to make sure you’ve got the right words: Great timing on this, as I am dealing with the same issue with a test [...]

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Years ago, we were watching people try to find products on IKEA.com. (Not for IKEA, but for our other nefarious purposes.) We took several stabs at our study because, well, the first ones seemed fishy to us. Our initial stab had simple tasks. One of them was “Find a bookcase for your living room that [...]

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Probably more used than any other tool in the toolbox, the critique is the lost orphan of the user experience world. There are books written about usability testing, endless debates on the validity of heuristic evaluations, and hours of lectures on persona development. But, when it comes to developing the essential skills for a good [...]

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Content is everywhere. With the amount of content users are confronted with everyday it can be challenging to garner their attention. Compounding this problem is the fact that designers and developers are often tasked with writing content that end users see. This can be an intimidating prospect if you’re unaccustomed to crafting copy.

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The research is clear: The most valuable activity a team can do is collect user research on their design. Seeing the design through their users’ eyes will pinpoint areas of improvement, which will help with every business metric for the product or service. Choosing that first user research project is critical. If you choose right, [...]

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Recently, I’ve been talking about having your portfolio tell the story of your best work. One part of any story is the main character, who, in this case, would be you. After all, a project is like an adventure. You start out heading in one direction, then things happen, and you end up growing your [...]

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After listening to my interview with UX Immersion speaker, Jeff Gothelf, Ziv posed this this question: I was wondering about the viability of integrating this methodology into a design agency that basically ends it’s work with a recommendations document with no real access to the development teams. It sounds like major shifts in people’s understanding [...]

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