Category: user experience
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Why Lean UX Might Just Rock Your World
I was standing at the front of a training room at about 2 pm a week ago in Chicago. The room was on the 5th floor of a building in downtown Chicago. It wasn’t a very inspiring room. The windows looked out at another tall office building, so there was no natural light in the…
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The 4 Magic Questions To Ask Before You Design Anything
I’ll go so far as to say that if you don’t know the answers to these four questions before you design, then your design will be, at best, mediocre, and possibly a disaster. Designing anything — websites, software, apps, TV ads, physical spaces, documents – is tough. It takes art and science. Most design principles…
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Top 10 Skills and Knowledge Set Every User Experience (UX) Professional Needs
The user experience (UX) of your products is only as good as the knowledge and skills of your UX staff. As organizations realize how important the user experience is to the success of their products, UX teams are expanding. People come to role of UX from more and more diverse backgrounds. Some UX staff used…
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How Do You Design Something So It Is Engaging?
We’re bringing our Design For Engagement class to San Francisco on July 30, 2014, and to Chicago on October 22, 2014. If you’re not sure what Design For Engagement is all about, here’s a short video that explains what it means to design for engagement, why care about engagement, and gives you a sneak peek at…
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5 Myths of Lean UX
Today I gave a webinar on the topic of 5 Myths of Lean UX. I’ve created a slideshare from the webinar. If you are interested in what Lean UX is and isn’t, then you might want to check out the slideshare. If you’d like more information on Lean UX check out our Lean UX one…
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Top 10 Favorite UX And Usability Books
It’s been over a year since I wrote my last Top 10 book list for Usability and UX, so I decided it’s time to update the list. Since I’m limiting the list here to 10, chances are high you have a favorite that I’ve not included. Let me know what your favorites are in the…
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Obstacles To User Experience Success
Have you ever been the User Experience point person on a product team and found yourself explaining over and over again what it is you are actually doing? Working with a team that doesn’t “get” user experience is one of the obstacles to creating a great user experience. I talk about that obstacle plus a…
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Why I’m Still In Love With User Testing
I’ve been doing user testing for (I’m afraid to admit) decades. And I still love it. It’s a great way to get feedback from people about how effective your design, your product, your assumptions are. In these days of Lean everything you can’t beat user testing as one of the best Lean UX techniques to…
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Is UX a “Rose by any other name?”
I’m going to be somewhat honest here: I’m no “spring chicken”. I don’t know if I’m prepared to tell you exactly how old I am, but here’s a story that will give you some hints: When I was in graduate school I had to file a formal appeal with the dean of the graduate school…
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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…
