Simplify your work and your life by learning the tools and techniques that authors have used to conquered gnarly problem spaces. From avoiding burnout to doing scrappy research on a shoestring budget, you’ll benefit from their experience, avoid making the mistakes they made, and go on to make all new mistakes of your own. (Then contribute your learnings back to us!)
I can draw. I went to art school. I studied painting until I fell out with the abstract expressionists and switched to photography. But I can draw. What I cannot do is diagram. I always wanted to. I have models in my head all the time of how things work. But when it comes time to make a visual model of those ideas, I can’t figure out to to represent them. I find myself resorting to pre-existing models like four-squares
Continue reading“Above all else show the data.” –Edward Tufte Survey responses. Product reviews. Keyword searches. Forums. As UX practitioners, we commonly scour troves of qualitative data for customer insight. But can we go faster than line-by-line analysis? Moreover, how can we provide semantic analysis to project stakeholders? Enter Wordle. If you haven’t played with it yet, Wordle is a free Java application that generates visual word clouds. It can provide a compelling snapshot of user feedback for analysis or presentation. Using
Continue readingForms are important—they’re the most common way to get information from our users. But just making wireframes of a form misses a big piece of the picture—what it’s like to interact with it. An HTML prototype of a form, on the other hand, can look and behave just like the real thing. In the first post, I showed you how to lay out a form and align the labels the way you want, using HTML and Foundation. In the second
Continue readingForms are one of the most important parts of any site or app—they are the most common way for our users to give us the information that we need to help them do what they want to do. But in many instances, we design forms statically, often as wireframes. But so often, what makes or breaks a form is what it’s like to interact with it. When the user clicks on a particular radio button, some additional inputs appear. How
Continue readingSo you want to extend your website’s account management features to mobile devices. Well you’re not alone; most major websites today have cross-platform accounts and profiles that make for a more engaging and cohesive user experience. And many sites enable account management features on mobile devices. After all, you want people to be able to interact with your product or service whenever and wherever. The trick is knowing which features to add to the mobile account management experience. Devices and
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