Category: usability
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What’s The Best Way To Train User Experience Professionals?
What’s the best way to get knowledge and skills to be a user experience professional? Can you learn it all on the job? Is there a role for education and classes? If there is, what kind of classes? Should you try and get a college degree? (There are very few undergraduate schools, that actually have…
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Should Technology Follow Human-To-Human Communication Rules?
What do we expect when we communicate with technology? Do we expect that the technology will communicate with us following the same rules as when we communicate with other people? The answer is yes, and I explain the implication of this in this video excerpt from my Design For Engagement online video course. Below the…
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Top 10 Best Usability, and UX Books You Should Read
Part of the work I do is to consult, mentor and teach how to design technology products so that they better fit how people work, think, and play. The teams I work with often ask me for my ideas on the best books to read in this field. So I thought I’d update my list…
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5 Ways A Task Analysis Results In Great Design
A task analysis is the one document that really spells out what the users’ experience is going to be before you design anything at all. I think the process of task analysis ,and the document that comes out of the process, are some of the most interesting and useful things one does as a UX…
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4 Ways Personas & Scenarios Result In Great Design
I find myself these days working on two streams: on the one hand I’m working on my next new project (which is another book called “How To Get People To Do Stuff”) and on the other hand I’m recording a series of online training videos that cover the basics of doing usable design. Sometimes I…
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7 Tips To Get A Team To Implement Your Recommendation: #7
This is the 7th post in a 7-part series on how to get a team to implement your recommendations. Tip #1 was: Hide Your Top 3 Recommendations Tip #2 was Say “You”, “They”, “Customers”, “Users”, or “Research”. Don’t say “I” Tip #3 was Give Them A Presentation, Don’t Send Them A Report Tip #4 was Use The Word “Because”…
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Do people have relationships with forms?: Podcast with author Caroline Jarrett
I met Caroline Jarrett in 2010 in Lisbon Portugal, where we were both speaking at a conference. Caroline is a usability consultant in the UK, and she specializes in designing forms. She has a great book, Forms That Work. In this podcast Caroline and I have a fun conversation about designing usable forms. You can listen…
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7 Tips To Get A Team To Implement Your Recommendations: Tip #3
This is the 3nd in a series on how to get a team to implement your recommendations. Tip #1 was: Hide Your Top 3 Recommendations. And Tip #2 was Say “You”, “They”, “Customers”, “Users”, or “Research”. Don’t say “I”. Now for Tip #3. The context is that you want to see your recommendations implemented. How…
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The Only Two Things You Really Need To Know About Web Design
In his (great) book, Don’t Make Me Think, Steve Krug has a chapter called “Billboard Design 101: Designing pages for scanning not reading.” The idea is that people don’t read all the text at a website, they scan it. So you should think “billboard” when you are deciding what to put on the page, instead of…
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Losing Sleep Over Poor Design
I’m writing this from the CHI (Computer-Human Interaction) conference in Vancouver, BC. I’d like to enjoy Vancouver, but I’m having a hard time doing so because I have a Sony clock radio in my hotel that keeps waking me up. The alarm goes off at 5:50 am every day. I can’t figure out how to…
