Interpreting today’s digital landscape and how it is transforming the human experience.
We’ve all been there: you’re at a party, speaking to someone new. You ask their name, maybe what they do for work. They mumble a response, hesitate to make eye contact, constantly scanning the room for someone more important to speak to. Once found, they give you a comic-book smile, a perfunctory handshake, mumble something else, and walk away. It’s [...]
At EffectiveUI, we live and breathe user research. We work to make sure we have a thorough understanding of our clients’ customers for every digital interface that we create. To us, it is second nature. I can’t tell you how often, though, we run across companies that do not take the time to truly understand their customers through user research. [...]
About six months ago I attended a relationship workshop with 20 or so other couples. My wife and I went hoping to learn some things about how to better relate with, understand, and better serve each other. The thing that most stuck with me was the phrase “Decide, Don’t Slide.” The presenter used this phrase to help teach us that [...]
“Our app is done!” Famous last words and possibly a sign of a bad user experience. It’s natural to want to proclaim the end of a project, but the nature of application design — especially web app design — means that an app is never really done. Even the most robust and well-planned app should be evolved to meet the [...]
Testing the “excerpt” field
User Experience often encompasses both User Experience Design and User Research. When this is the case, the User Experience designer does the generative research as well as the usability testing on their own designs. While having the designer do both is helpful because they get exposure to the research findings, this approach introduces bias that can compromise product success. Here’s [...]
A few years back, we all heard a steady rumble of excitement about gestural interfaces and how controlling your computer Minority Report-style was the new frontier of human-computer interaction. People were doing all kinds of neat DIY experiments with their video cameras, projection screens, Wii sensors, and later Kinects, and makers and geeks alike were clamoring to make the next [...]
When I was taking the metro in the most romantic city in Europe, Paris, I encountered the “Franklin D. Roosevelt” station, which serves lines 1 and 9. This was an interesting station. Besides the modern decoration, it had an interactive metro map – a great idea for this station, one of the busiest in Paris, a city that serves approximately [...]
Last week I was involved in a kickoff meeting for a quick hit project with a small travel company. As with every project, we gathered all client stakeholders, subject matter expert, and members of our research, design and development teams in one room to level-set on expectations, goals, methods and timelines. Halfway through the meeting, we began to ask questions [...]
When was the last time you had an interaction with a company that truly made your day — the kind of experience where you felt like you wanted to shout from the rooftops about how good it was? For me that experience happens every time I visit my pharmacy. Beattie’s Health Mart is a locally-owned compounding pharmacy in Erie, CO. [...]
