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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

In today’s fast moving design/development environments and straining economy demands that teams become more resourceful in how they practice quality control in interface design.
Not every project has the budget to perform interface design testing. That is a given. However, there are options. Nielsen and Molich developed one such option called Heuristic Evaluation. It is considered [...]

What often fascinates me about formulating user experience is essentially that in order to think out of the box, we have to exist in the box….or sphere…or honeycomb, you get the point. It makes sense though. Consider this – in Holger Maassen’s post on “UX Design-Planning Not One-man Show” he writes “experiences are momentary and [...]

As an advocate of being consistent at every point of contact, I began taking a better look at my digital properties this week. And I started with Twitter. Sure I did the normal tweaking the color palette a little and uploaded a custom backdrop but it really didn’t jive all that much with the look [...]