There are many things happening now in the field of design research. And I am not talking specifically about marketing and communications design research, rather research that will help us design, build and bring more meaningful things into the world.
“The Breakup Letter is a design research tool that Smart Design uses to understand the emotional [...]

In creating effective experiences, I have always found that developing personas helped our design teams better align their mindset with the users we were targeting. This is often a daunting task especially when faced with  high profile public brands whose message transcends among a diverse user base.
Many believe that it requires a large research investment [...]

ROI. Three letters that lead just about every planning meeting. And in “O” 10, it will be louder then ever. But is tracking mobile habits as easy as its desktop counterparts?
In rebuilding or exploring any new desktop online experience I heavily rely on analytics to provide us with that important, real-time data on how users [...]

The gap between online and offline – offline and online retailing is closing and no one proves this like Google. Recently, Google launched their newest effort to connect both worlds by sending window decals to the most searched upon local retailers.
Behold Google Favorite Places.
“Businesses unlock their free business listing with Google’s Local Business Center, allowing [...]

Constantly looking looking for easy ways to aggregate those searches on buzz sites that you find yourself doing daily? I certainly do and came across this fun little tool. Addictomatic claims to search the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. It allows you to keep up [...]

You may have noticed that with the release of this post, I’ve added a little “Feedback” tab on the left side of my website so I can, more or less, be my own lab rat for purposes of this discussion. If for some reason it doesn’t exist, this is simply a widget to access my [...]

Earlier in the year, Sanitarium Health Food Company, scrambled to redesign a Weet-Bix promotion, for which they had already spent $1.3 million, featuring All Blacks collector cards because the children that the website was aimed at was a bit too hit-tech and difficult to use. Article here.
But this post isn’t about a particular misstep. It [...]

The next time you are taking that final run through on your laptop or desktop of that brilliant website or application your team just built, consider hitting a simple record button. And capture.
Instructional documentation is an extremely important part of product support. But it could also prove to be mind-numbing to create. Especially if you [...]

As you look at the products that Apple produces, any of them, you could certainly create a one sided argument that simplicity and usability are parallels. And why not. There’s a massive amount of complex logic that runs the interfaces, operating systems, connectivity, etc. And yet, their designers were able to bring it all together [...]

I was fortunate enough to be a part of a discussion last week on LinkedIn about opinions around using usability evaluation tools as well as recommendations on what others have used successfully on client projects.  If you want to simply access my bookmarks here. My immediate response was this:
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Automatic usability evaluation applications have their place [...]