Marshall McLuhan’s phrase sums up that the medium through which we choose to communicate holds as much, if not more, value than the message itself. Jason Gross shares why understanding the meaning behind this theory revolutionized the way he approaches Web design.
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Nothing ruins a great website UI like people using it. At least, it often feels that way. You put in days or weeks building the interface, only to find that a vast majority of visitors abandon it partway through the process that it supports.
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How do print design and digital/Web design get along? Mark Cossey explains why these two trades have to get together and make friends: the future of online content depends on it.
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User engagement can be optimized using performance metrics. Trace behavioral and emotional responses to learn (and improve) how much information and engagement the user has with your website.
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In this article, we present a couple of new ideas to design sign-up and log-in forms that might be useful for your next designs. Find some innovative techniques that could make your forms simpler and more efficient to fill out.
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Why do customers abandon their shopping cart so often? Based on a 2010 study of web users testing 15 e-commerce websites, in this article, Christian Holst shares 11 fundamental guidelines from that report.
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User experience design for the Web (and its siblings, interaction design, UI design, et al) has traditionally been a deliverables-based practice. Wireframes, site maps, flow diagrams, content inventories, taxonomies, mockups and the ever-sacred specifications document (aka “The Spec”) helped define the practice in its infancy. These deliverables crystallized the value that the UX discipline brought to an organization.
Over time, though, this deliverables-heavy process has put UX designers in the deliverables business — measured and compensated for the depth and breadth of their deliverables instead of the quality and success of the experiences they design. Designers have become documentation subject matter experts, known for the quality of the documents they create instead of the end-state experiences being designed and developed.
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Start-up organizations provide an extraordinary example of chaos organized into manageable chunks. Perhaps more than anyone else, the individuals who comprise a start-up team are required to understand their team’s goals across a variety of disciplines — research, marketing, design, development, architecture, etc. — as well as their own responsibility to move the company’s overarching objective forward. Entrepreneurs must choose the direction, designers must think through the options, and developers must cull a functional product or service, all while giving feedback to and receiving it from their colleagues.
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Where do good ideas come from? It’s a question that matters a great deal to designers, yet seems to be curiously discounted in the common perception of graphic design. Any time I talk with, say, an uncle at Thanksgiving about my work, I’m reminded that, in most people’s minds, the job of being a designer is mainly a matter of learning a set of computer applications — programs which, when properly operated, presumably do the work of generating ideas on their own.
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Good web design is a balance between UX (creating personas, testing usability, and improving the user experience) and focus on business (its objectives and good calls to action).
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