7 min
Getting Started: First Steps to Improving the Utility Customer Experience
How to get the most value from your current tech investments, lower costs, and increase customer satisfaction with better UX.
CX
6 min
Mixed Methods Research: The Key to Confident Product Decisions
Why leveraging qualitative and quantitative data gives you more robust insights for better business decisions.
3 min
NASA × Blink UX Work Recognized with Webby Awards
NASA honored with 2024 Webby Awards for the reimagined NASA.gov website and the new streaming service, NASA+.
6 min
Pro Bono Partnership: An interview with Partner to Decide founder, Dr. Ann Peralta
Learn more about Blink’s pro bono client, Partner to Decide, directly from the founder.
6 min
7 Ways To Improve Your Mobile Banking App
Your guide to creating a modernized mobile banking or investment app experience — based on our latest banking research.
10 min
Customer Success Outcomes: Breaking Down Data Silos
With multiple data sources, it can be hard to know which insights to trust and how to take action on what customers are saying. Connect your research findings with Customer Success Outcomes and act on the insights.
5 min
How to Create Consistent Fintech Experiences With a Brand Ambassador Team
Want to improve your customers’ experience across all channels? Building a UX framework and cross-branch ambassador program can help. Here’s how to get started.
5 min
Delight Your Customers With Age Inclusive Design
Data shows that global populations are tipping the demographic scale toward adults over 65. With age-inclusive design, product adoption and reach could spread like wildfire.
5 min
Why You Should Treat Your Website Like a Product
Understanding your website as a product will set your company apart from competitors.
5 min
Five Tips for Designing Better Conversational Interfaces
From chatbots to intelligent assistants, conversation interfaces are changing the way that people interact with their computers, and designers have a unique opportunity to shape this medium at the ground level. Like all emerging tech, best practices are still being developed, but here at Blink we’ve had the opportunity to design a few of our own and learned a lot along the way.
2 min
Quick Testing of Accessibility for iOS Apps
There's an easy way to test how users will experience your designs on iPhone and iPad with accessibility features enabled.
7 min
Target These Three Innate Needs to Improve User Engagement
We set design objectives for creating engaging products that will keep a user’s attention, encourage task completion, and be enjoyable to use. However, of those objectives, we find “enjoyable to use” the hardest to design for and measure. This is in large part because humans perceive experiences differently – what one person thinks is clever and clear, someone else may see as complex and opaque.
4 min
How Wedding Planning Taught Me The Secret To Winning UX Clients
In just over two months I’m tying the knot. I’ve always considered myself a perfectionist and highly organized, which is why I opted to do all the planning myself and not hire a coordinator. Food, music, venue, photography, décor, invitations, that’s all me.
10 min
The UX of Car2Go
A few of us here at Blink are big fans of Car2Go, the point-to-point carsharing service that operates the iconic blue and white SmartCars in several cities worldwide, including here in Seattle (you can typically find three or four outside our office on any given morning).
3 min
Creativity, Collaboration & Confidentiality
So how do we get together and collaborate on ideas when a project is top secret? When only one person at Blink knows what the client is working on, and only a handful of employees at the client’s company even know what it is?
6 min
Why UberX is Blowing My UX Mind
Which brings me to UberX. I’ve been using this service a lot lately, both for work and personal transportation, and it’s blowing me away from a UX standpoint.
2 min
Preparing for Takeoff: 5 Steps to Better Airline Apps
Some airline apps can truly help make travel a breeze, and others are a bit more turbulent. So what differentiates a great app from a mediocre one? Here are my five tips for success.
1 min
28,000 Sounders Fans Enjoy New Loyalty Program & Website
We were thrilled when the Sounders approached Blink to help them design their new MatchPass loyalty program in late 2012. There were three major components to the project: 1. Conduct primary end-user research to learn what fans wanted in a Sounders loyalty program and 2. Design an intuitive and engaging website and 3. Conduct usability testing for the MatchPass website prototype.
1 min
Improving the User Experience of Healthcare Provider Websites
Blink has worked with a variety of healthcare providers over the last several years to understand the users of their websites. The results of this work have been research-based recommendations and design solutions that address many common challenges. Today, we are publishing a whitepaper that summarizes the challenges providers face online, and how a research-based approach to user experience can help meet the needs of their patients and employees.
1 min
Using the Livescribe Smartpen for Research
Stakeholder interviews, user research, user testing—all are integral to our approach on a Blink design engagement—and all require superior note-taking skills. Enter the Livescribe Smartpen. I’ve found the Smartpen to be an invaluable tool for note taking of all kinds, but particularly for note taking during research.
5 min
How to Use a Modified Card Sorting Technique to Uncover User Insights
When Blink conducts usability evaluations, we seek to do more than simply identify the pain points of a web site or application. Our goal is to uncover users’ honest impressions and the impact of these impressions on the overall user experience.
7 min
The Value and Limitations of Customer-Initiated Feedback
Blink once evaluated an in-flight email application for a client. It had already been in use as a beta and the client was aware of a few wrinkles in the UI. So it came as a shock when not a single participant in the study could figure out how to open an email in the application. All the while, a feedback option had been available.
5 min
Understanding Older Users: Is Your Website Senior-Friendly?
Seniors are increasingly using the web to shop, find news and information, and connect with friends and family. But many websites are not designed with seniors in mind. You can make your website more senior-friendly by following a few simple rules of thumb… and the end result is often improved usability for users of all ages.
6 min
Real-World User-Centered Design
A couple of months ago, I was part of a panel discussion on “Real-World User-Centered Design.” The topic was the outgrowth of questions from a more introductory forum on user-centered design (UCD) principles. After the introductory forum there were still many burning questions—specifically, how do you adopt and adapt UCD principles to real-world organizational constraints?