Interpreting today’s digital landscape and how it is transforming the human experience.
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 [...]
As a front-end designer or developer, managing today’s complex web, mobile-web, and multi-device digital ecosystems can become a nightmare. Since you’re often responsible for keeping your designs and code base in line for reuse over the duration of a project (and probably long after its completion), it is important to consider building a UI pattern library – one that makes [...]
As user experience designers, developers and researchers, we’re charged with improving the users’ experience so companies can increase customer happiness and retention. As such, we are typically held responsible for activities and roles such as content strategy, interaction design, visual design, and development of the front and back end of digital products — all of which, yes, influence the customer’s [...]
During a recent internal meeting at EffectiveUI, a colleague explained to the group how a client would not implement a certain feature (fairly integral to the overall user experience) because of SEO concerns. At the time, this led me to label the SEO industry as nothing more than snake oil salesmen. After that fairly knee jerk reaction, I would like [...]
I’ve never been a fan of long, exhaustive proposal documents. Reams of paper filled with jargon and buzzwords frustrate me; as someone with a development background, I value simplicity in communication above all else. Early in EffectiveUI’s history, we would respond to RFP’s with such big proposal documents. We’d assign three or four people to a proposal, and each of [...]
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. [...]
About a year ago, I had the opportunity to co-speak at the Interaction ’11 conference with my co-worker Lindsay Moore. Having come from different educational and practical backgrounds, we had very different approaches to interaction design. Mine was mostly informed by my industrial design training, while hers was perhaps a more roundabout education in painting, followed by a transition to [...]
Industry conferences provide an opportunity to share ideas, learn from experts, and network with our peers. However, with so many events in the digital marketing and technology space, how does one decide which conferences to attend? For many, proximity to the event is a factor, as well as cost. But the most important criteria is finding an event that suits [...]
The sales process has changed dramatically since I started out years ago selling commerce sites to consumer packaged goods and technology companies. Back then, the sales person was the face of the vendor organization, and 95 percent of the first sales call was to see if the buyer could trust the person sitting across from them – and by extension, [...]
