Guidelines Done Right: Microsoft Metro
I’m working on apps for three platforms at the moment: Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, and Microsoft’s Metro. Because the three are similar yet different in critical ways, I’ve had to refer to the respective UX guidelines for each several times in the past few weeks. Wihtout equivocation, and with some surprise, I can report that ...
Users Are Humans
In the healthcare space, they’re called patients. In the commerce space, they’re called customers. In the professional services space, they’re called clients. But when we’re talking about how they interact with our digital systems and products, we suddenly start calling them ‘users.’ Heck, my field is called User Experience. But let’s think about that first ...
The UX is Broken: Here’s Why
Most of the time, a broken user experience has little to do with the design or implementation of the UX itself. Scrape the surface of even the smallest problems, and you’ll usually find: A broken product A broken organization A broken set of priorities Some combination of the above All too often, our job as UX ...
User Testing on the Subway
On the subway this morning, I spied a passenger playing a sudoku app on his iPhone. At the risk of disturbing him (and winding up with a broken nose), I said, “Pardon me, but I see you’re playing a sudoku app. Would you mind looking at one I’m developing for the iPad?” “Sure!” he said. ...
Information Architecture According to Dinosaurs
“So what, exactly, do you do?” Every information architect dreads this question. Fear not, now you can just point your inquisitors to this little gem:
What I Do
Describing what I do for a living to people unfamilar with the UX profession often elicits confused looks and/or polite head nodding. With that in mind, a few months ago I asked several UX professionals whom I admire how they describe what they do for a living. I received some great answers, and one of my ...
Magical Weather
Magical Weather is a new weather app for the iPad, and I can already hear you asking if we needed yet another weather app. I thought the same thing, until I tried it. Magical Weather differentiates itself from other apps in its minimalist approach. Instead of trying to make the most of the iPad’s capacious ...
Follow the User
Are you trying to dictate the path your users will take through your experiences? If so, you might be making the same mistake as the urban planner who designed the right-angle-only pathway in the photo above. As the image shows, people have decided — quite correctly — that they can get from A to B ...
A Better Restaurant Website
If you own a restaurant, chances are your website is frustrating the customers who visit it. Restaurant websites on the whole are so bad that it’s actually become a bit of a joke in the user experience community (you know, those of us who design and build websites for a living). In fact, Matthew Inman over ...
The Backlash Backlash
We all know the story: Facebook introduces a new feature or revises an existing feature, and there’s a cacophonous outcry from disgruntled users. Then, time passes, and people get used to the changes. Or they don’t, but they get by anyway. But this time there’s a backlash backlash afoot, people who are frustrated by those ...
The Extra Step
Remove that extra step. Look for it…find the thing that isn’t necessary…and kill it. If you find more than one, kill ‘em all. Maybe it’s an extra click. Maybe it’s a bit of copy that needs to be read because a UI element isn’t self-explanatory. Maybe you’re loading a new page when you could have used ...
Musing on Muse
In case you haven’t heard, Adobe is about to release a new AIR-based website design and building tool code-named Muse (the actual product name hasn’t been made public yet), and it’s currently available to download in beta format. I spent some of this past weekend using it, and below are my impressions. The promise of Muse ...
Edge Cases
If you’re doing your UX job right, you’re spending a lot of time thinking about edge cases, perhaps far more even than on happy paths. Edge cases are what define the quailty of the experience under extreme circumstances, and that’s what really matters, isn’t it? But the problem is that most of us are forced to spec ...
Lorem
Some UX professionals will tell you never to use lorem ispum, aka greek copy, and their reasons are very valid. In the real world, however, project deadlines often require us to start work without final (or any) copy. What are we to do? Because I agree that a block of phony text isn’t very useful, I ...
Top 3 UX Design Principles
Over in the Linkedin User Experience group, someone asked members for their top three UX design principles. While my answer would probably change from day to day, below are three I came up with rather quickly tonight: Users should always know where they are, what they can or should do, and what’s coming next. Plain, ...
