User Experience & Design
2 Apr 2011
The dust has settled from SXSW 2011. I’ve had a chance to catch up on email, get over the conference crud I brought back, and my hearing in my right ear is slowly returning, so I thought now would be a good time to share some of the things that I learned at SXSW with you.
The great news is...
10 Dec 2010
In the interactive world everyone has their own opinion and ideas on what makes a pleasant, effective user experience. Usually that leads to the exclusion of the real question, “what do users want /need?” When done correctly, A/B Testing can settle the argument, giving the...
4 Dec 2010
A few months ago, my colleague Brian provided an introduction to Card Sorting. Card Sorting is an Information Architect’s tool used to help organize a site based on how real world users think about organizing information. If you’re unfamiliar with the specifics of card sorting, I...
15 Sep 2010
Colleen Gray contributed to this post.
Turning bureacracy on its head with storytelling strategy
As many of you know, I'm a huge proponent of online storytelling. I frequently blog about it, facilitate trainings around it, and regularly promote its benefits to the groups we work with. We all...
13 Aug 2010
How do you organize your music library? By genre? Alphabetically? Remember High Fidelity (2000)? John Cusack’s character organized his collection autobiographically. Cusack plays the role of Rob Gordon, a record store owner and compulsive list maker. In the scene below, Rob’s friend...
16 Feb 2010
On January 23, Forum One sponsored UXCampDC, an unconference focused on all things user experience-related attracting close to 100 practitioners from the DC metro area. From Forum One, we had Suzanne Rainey, Brian Verhoeven, Courtney Clark, Matt Humphrey, Kate Bogh and myself. The...
4 Feb 2010
It seems every time I conduct a usability testing session, I learn something new and the experience, however humbling, leads to a number of important discoveries for the client. Usability testing is valuable because every site is different and clients goals vary, so you really must do it to make...
2 Dec 2009
There are a number of ways to learn about your site's audiences. Many of them are expensive and time consuming - focus groups, interviews, and personas for example. Here are three relatively cheap and easy ways you can learn more about your audiences.
Utilize Your Site Statistics
Statistics...
3 Dec 2008
Earlier this year, the University of Baltimore (UB) conducted usability testing on Drupal's admin interface with web developers already familiar with other CMS in the same space, but with no prior Drupal experience.
Users mostly struggled with nomenclature, key functionality burried within...
31 Oct 2008
I attended the latest IxDA DC event and listened to Todd Zaki Warfel present his InterVu research framework.
Todd's talk was mostly about the difficulty that user experience professionals face when capturing and analyzing data. He explained that often the greatest challenge is that analyzing data...
