What happens in the end-to-end experience? Can the intended audience find what they’re looking for? What is the actual problem being solved? Are you designing the right product for the customer need? Information architecture, accessibility, findability, taxonomy, interaction design, research, usability, case studies, interviews, surveys, and more.
Meg Hourihan, co-founder of Pyra – the company behind Blogger, shares her team’s experience in the discovery of Alan Cooper and the use of personas. Through their practical application, she tells the tale of how a product cycle was turned on its ear as the team discovered they weren’t anything like their users.
Continue readingThe way you communicate the personas and present your deliverables is key to ensuring consistency of vision. Without that consistency, you’ll spend far too much time arguing with your colleagues about who your users are rather than how to meet their needs.
Continue readingJakob Nielsen has brought usability to the attention of the general public, but within the user experience community he’s been criticized by those who say he emphasizes a view that excludes other dimensions of user experience. So is he the defender of ease-of-use or the enemy of creativity?
Continue readingIt should come as little surprise that the basic flow of Yahoo! Mail has hardly changed at all since the portal first acquired the RocketMail service in 1997. But rather than offering an outdated solution to the web-based email problem, Yahoo! Mail demonstrates the lasting effectiveness of a simple approach.
Continue readingWhat lessons have we learned about how design improves the interface between customers and companies? Perhaps we can start by asking how websites have actually changed over time, and from that we can learn how websites should change in the future.
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