August 2010
10 posts
2 tags
How To Change Things
Let’s face it, change is difficult. For most human beings, change evokes fear and stress. Familiarity, on the other hand, is comforting. It allows us to live and operate with a certain level of ease which doesn’t require active thought at all times. This applies to your product just as much as our daily lives.
Building successful products rarely happens by doing what everyone else...
1 tag
Customers as Guests
There are lots of ways to think about user experience, but one of the ways I like best is how Jeff Bezos describes how Amazon.com treats their customers:
“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”
Too often we fall into marketing-speak and...
2 tags
Finding Your Way
Have you ever found yourself staring at something that is supposed to be helping you understand where you are and where you are going? Have you ever stood there long enough to finally realize that you won’t be able to decipher the unidentifiable cluster of lines, shapes and letters on the map without the aid of another human being. It’s frustrating, somewhat humiliating, and above...
2 tags
Software that Teaches
There is an old saying:
“Give a man a fish, and you’ve fed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed a man for a lifetime”
Too much of our software simply gives people a fish instead of teaching them how to fish. That is, most software acts as a dumb tool…can do a particular thing but doesn’t teach how to use it well.
But teaching is increasingly part of...
4 tags
Copycat Design
Many years ago I was working on a design project with an e-commerce company who was selling electronics on the Web. The design team was working on a large redesign of their web site in response to their latest thinking on what works best for selling their products. At one point I noticed they were making several changes to their web site that reminded me of something I had seen before. So I...
1 tag
UX Won't Save You
I have this sneaking suspicion that a fair number of people are under the impression that User Experience is the hot new “silver-bullet”. Sorry to burst any bubbles, but I am afraid that just isn’t the case. While there can be no doubt that UX plays an important role in shaping, defining and creating a successful product, it is important to understand that there are often other...
5 tags
Chart Junk isn't as bad as you think
This week’s esteemed guest author is Brian Suda, a master informatician residing in Reykjavik, Iceland whose wonderful new book is A Practical Guide to Designing with Data.
Every day we are bombarded with poorly designed graphics ranging from TV news reports to magazine info-graphics, horribly pedestrian Powerpoint and Excel charts to signage that is impossible to decipher. The...
3 tags
Information overload is not the problem
A good reminder from Edward Tufte:
“There is no such thing as information overload, just bad design. If something is cluttered and/or confusing, fix your design.”
This is a deceptively strong statement. It seems to merely be suggesting we don’t blame information overload for the pain it causes, and instead blame design.
On a more subtle level, however, Tufte is asking...
2 tags
Reward the Passionates
What’s the best way to bring in new customers? That question is posed by almost everyone at one point or another, no matter what product or service they’re offering. The common way to attack this problem is to go out and advertise…to redirect attention to your offering and convince people that yours is better than what else is out there.
But in an age of empowered consumers...
2 tags
Next-generation UX
We are in the midst of a dramatic shift in human-computer interaction. The inputs, devices and mental models we’ve had to adapt to in order to get this far are slowly becoming obsolete. Even an “average” computer user has already been re-wired and adapted to the hundreds of mental hurdles that a traditional computer interface throws in our way.
However, a new way of...
