Sometimes, To See “The Big Picture”, You Need To Draw A Big Picture

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To truly understand and design the best possible information architecture for an application or website, find the biggest whiteboard in your office and start drawing.

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The Disappearing Email Preheader

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For the last few years, marketers have used ‘teaser text’ to give users a sneak peak of an email’s content. Email clients on mobile as well as desktop devices pull that teaser text from the first line of the email body. Lately, we’ve found that the teaser text is often invisible in the email. Knowing that 56% of emails are opened on mobile devices1, we can guess why.

1Source: https://litmus.com/blog/mobile-friendly-email-september-2016-email-market-share

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Why User Experience is More Than Just User Interface Design

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If I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with you or for you, you’ve probably heard me preach on my soapbox more than once about how User Experience is so much more than just the design of a user interface. User Experience is, as the term implies, about everything and anything that can impact the experience a user has when interacting with a software product or website.  In this post, I touch on a few areas that can have a direct impact on a user’s experience – but have nothing to do with UI design. Read more

How UX Design Plays a Vital Role in Preventing Medical Errors

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In a recent article published in Fast Company’s Co. Design, Jonathan West of the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design was interviewed about a project he worked on called DOME (short for “Designing Out Medical Error”). The entire DOME team is comprised of designers, clinicians, psychologists, and human factors experts all focused on studying and designing solutions that could reduce medical mistakes made in hospitals. What is especially interesting is how the article sights many of the same methods and activities UX Team often uses on our software design projects Read more

Why Self-Doubt and Empathy are Ideal Traits for UX Designers

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Like most jobs, UX designers need to posses certain skills in order to do their job effectively but there are also certain personality traits that can help someone make the leap from a good UX designer to a great UX designer. Those traits are self-doubt and empathy. Read more

Every Dollar Invested In Ease Of Use Returns $10 To $100

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For most of my career, I have been standing on my soapbox preaching the importance of User Experience to anyone that would listen. Usually it’s during an initial sales presentation where I’m trying to convince a client why they should spend more time and focus on the upfront design work of their software because it will save them a ton of time and money on the development work. Read more

User Experience Conferences

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Here is a list of conferences with a focus on User Experience that are mostly in the Northeast of the United States. If you are interested in learning more about User Experience, you should consider checking these out. Read more

What Is Responsive Web Design?

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Responsive Web Design is designing and coding the front-end of a website or app so that the layout “responds” or automatically adjusts (using CSS) to a layout that is optimized for user’s display size. Read more

You There! Step Away From The Design!

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As designers, we often get so deep into our work that we lose the ability to see our designs through eyes of the end-users or viewers. So, before considering any design to be “complete,” try letting it sit for a day or two without looking at it. Read more

The UX Process and UX Design Principles

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A web application’s design and usability is just as important as that application’s functionality. If our clients, their users, their partners, and their vendors can’t immediately figure out how to use a web application, then we haven’t done our job correctly. Read more