Back in 1987, Apple (under the direction of John Sculley, not Steve Jobs), released a video of what Apple products could be like in the future. Called the Knowledge Navigator, it showed a sci-fi mythical tablet computer from 23 years in the future (yup, 2010) that the user talks with to get things done. Fast [...]

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In the 30+ years I’ve been working in designing online experiences, I’ve met a lot of folks. Good folks, interested in creating really great products, services, and designs. I’ve seen my share of really great designs. However, I’ve also seen many bad designs. Yet, interestingly enough, I’ve never met anyone who wanted to make a [...]

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When we prepare for our user research sessions, it’s easy to focus on the questions we should ask. But what about the ones we shouldn’t ask? Our goal, of course, is to learn everything we can. We need to leverage the research time to ensure we’re filling our brains with the information. Then we’ll need [...]

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It’s easy for applications to get overcomplicated and bogged down with data - especially in an enterprise setting. It’s hard to keep track of so many different things. When dashboards and widgets are employed, the goal is to make your life easier, but often that’s not the result. The solution - simplifying these applications for specific use cases and giving the right people the right information they need for their given task. Hagan Rivers spends her time meeting with teams to show them exactly what they need to do to streamline these complex applications.

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I love red velvet cake. I’ve got a great recipe to make it. And I stick with that recipe. I don’t decide to leave out the baking soda (even though I don’t really know what the baking soda does). Nor do I decide to cut the sugar in half (even though I think lots of [...]

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JQuery facilitates the vital steps of designing and testing complex interactions of today’s modern websites and web applications. In the next UIE Virtual Seminar, Rich Rutter gets you started with JQuery—assuming no prior knowledge—and shows you lots of examples, hints, and tricks. Just 5 minutes into this seminar, you’ll see JQuery in action and have something you can use in your own wireframes.

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As we use a multitude of devices to access the same content, we expect a similar experience across platforms. If you have a great user experience on the desktop, it would be easy to rationalize that your mobile experience, for example, shouldn’t be painful. User experience professionals now need to consider how and where their applications and content are being accessed more than ever before. Developing rich interactions across all of these platforms can be a daunting task. Bill Scott discusses how employing design patterns can help ensure that your users have a great experience wherever they use your product.

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With the amount of content coming at you from all sides, it can be difficult to make sense of it all and present it in a logical fashion. Curation allows you to create order out of all the chaos. Borrowed from the world of museums, curating your content allows you to form a narrative, showing your users what they can and should do with your content. Margot showcases lessons she has adopted from museum curators. She shows what content strategists take from these lessons and apply to their practice.

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Could the new changes with HTML5 and CSS3 create a utopian society? Doubtful, but what it can do is make a designer’s life a lot easier and bring about more SEO results. A few weeks ago I interviewed Stephanie (Sullivan) Rewis and Greg Rewis to find out what they’ll cover in their UI16 workshop, Everything [...]

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Back in the early days of PC computing, we were interested in how people used all those options, controls, and settings that software designers put into their applications. How much do users customize their applications? We embarked on a little experiment. We asked a ton of people to send us their settings file for Microsoft [...]

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Everybody strives to arrive at the end of a project with a great design. But often times the “brilliant idea” isn’t easy to communicate and takes a long time to develop. Brandon Schauer believes that you can develop techniques to help this communication, arriving at good design in shorter amounts of time. By putting your ideas on paper and post-its, and getting everyone participating, you create a collaborative environment that allows these ideas to grow and develop.

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Need another reason to be in Boston, November 7-9 for the User Interface 16 Conference? How about your own personal designer’s toolkit? C’mon, you know you want one. Communicating your design ideas is hard enough. You certainly don’t want to worry about the tools you use to get your message across. So we made a [...]

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Incorporating CSS3 into your designs allows you to create innovative designs with less code and reliance on images. The level of compatibility with many of the browser options out there is already impressive and it continues to grow. Taking advantage of the new CSS3 features helps to shift heavier visual elements to the browser itself. [...]

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Developing a good set of fundamentals is key to successful user experience design. But if you work for an organization that doesn’t recognize the importance of design, just possessing the skills isn’t enough. It will prove difficult for you to change the company’s culture if they view UX as this huge, disruptive endeavor. Cennydd believes that you can take a lightweight approach to introducing user experience without people realizing that you’re actually doing it.

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You see the value in attending the User Interface 16 Conference. You see how the full-day workshops provide the tools and techniques to create a better user experience. But how do you convince your boss to send you? Why you need to be in Boston, November 7-9. Invest in your skills Spend a little money [...]

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