User Shadowing on The Trading Floor at Morgan Stanley

For about four months, I had the pleasure of working on an exciting new project for Morgan Stanley. The details of the project can not be disclosed for obvious confidentiality reasons but I can speak in general terms about the experience. As with most UX projects, we like to spend as much time as we can observing users in their natural work environments while they perform their daily activities. In the case of Morgan Stanley, this meant spending a good amount of time in the trenches, on the trading floor, sitting with the traders and sales reps. My job was to not only observe the users but also build a sense of empathy for how they perform all their job activities. In fact, one of the main purposes of user shadowing is to build empathy so that you can see your design through the eyes of the users. Read more

But First, Prototype – Correcting Mistakes Before They’re Made

Source: quotesondesign.com

Sometimes ideas sound great in theory, but don’t work well in practice. That’s why prototyping with actual users is essential. We usually think of prototyping in terms of software, but it has real world applications, too.

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If You’re Not A/B Testing, You’re Already Losing Money

What would a 46% increase in conversion rates mean in terms of additional revenue for your business or funds for your charity? What about a 32% decrease in bounce rates? A 12% increase of Time On Page? An 8% increase of Page Value? A 27% increase in sign-ups? Read more

Treat Your Ecommerce UX Like Your In-Store Sales Reps

If 10,000 pre-qualified, motivated customers came into your brick and mortar store each month and 75% of them walked out without buying anything, what would you do? Read more

Why You Need a UX Team (Part 1)

In Part 1 of this series on “Why You Need a UX Team”, we examine what specific roles, responsibilities and skill sets a UX Team typically brings to the table. Read more

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

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

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

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

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

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