Articles

Healthcare Web Healthcare

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.

Beyond Scope Severity

2 min

Beyond Scope & Severity: A Better Way to Prioritize Usability Issues

A list of usability findings can be difficult to parse: they are long, highlight negative aspects of your design, and no matter how diligently your team works, they never seem to disappear completely. Despite these facts, there is hope.

Strawberries Red Fruit Royalty Free 70746

0 min

Usability Testing of Fruit

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you did a usability test of fruit? We did. Blink created this fun look at something near and dear to our hearts – usability testing. We hope you enjoy it!

In Home User Research Building Rapport Before After Stepping Through the Door

5 min

How to Build Rapport Before & After Conducting In-Home User Research

I was asked recently what steps we take to make participants feel more comfortable with in-home interviews or observations. This article contains some practical tips about ways to build trust and rapport prior to and while interacting with participants in their homes. Why bother? Because raising comfort levels leads to better research observations, which is why we go out to people’s houses, condos, or apartments in the first place!

Livescribe pulse xl 1

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.

Understanding User Expectations

1 min

Understanding User Expectations

Understanding user expectations has enabled us to make detailed recommendations and help clients deliver great user experiences. From our research, here are two examples showing how expectations influence the user experience.

Blinks New Offices with a View

5 min

Blink’s New Offices with a View

Blink’s new office space had many requirements; workstations, client meeting rooms, project collaboration rooms, training and event space and most importantly, state-of-the-art usability labs with adjoining client observation rooms. All this, plus it had to be a highly usable space, comfortable to work in and look good.

Card sorting 1

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.

The Value and Limitations of Customer Initiated Feedback

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.

Designing a Unified Web and Mobile Web Experience

5 min

Designing a Unified Web and Mobile Web Experience

Understanding and attending to the user experience, in addition to the end product, across platforms as a guiding focus for design, can encourage greater customer satisfaction and minimize user confusion.

Mobile Text Entry Methods Usability Study

0 min

Mobile Text Entry Methods Usability Study

The mobile device and application market has grown rapidly over the last few years, allowing users to stay in touch and work with data more effectively on the go. Text entry methods vary significantly across devices, raising an important question: Which input methods actually work well for entering text?

Best Practices for Writing on the Web

3 min

Best Practices for Writing on the Web

Great websites guide users to content with elegance and ease, through usable information architecture and a pleasing visual design. But, user experience doesn’t stop there. Users spend more time engaging with your site’s content than using its navigation or admiring its style. Once on the right page, it’s the quality of writing that delivers the value.

Why Usability Professionals Care About Privacy

5 min

Why Usability Professionals Care About Privacy

Social networking and content sharing web sites like Facebook and Flickr make it easy for users to connect and share details of their lives with others. Unfortunately, it is all too common to hear stories of users unknowingly sharing embarrassing status updates or photos with their professional colleagues, due to misunderstanding or ignoring available privacy settings in these sites.

Lessons from Usability Testing Designing for the Real World

3 min

Lessons from Usability Testing-Designing for the Real World

When designing a new system (or redesigning an existing one), it’s important to keep the user’s real-world context in mind. A lot of thought and effort will hopefully go into making sure the product delivers the right set of features, has the right look and feel, and abides by standard UI conventions. But designs that seem solid conceptually can still fail if they do not take into account how real users will interact with them in the real world.

Increasing Your Chances of Successful Design Decisions

3 min

Increasing Your Chances of Successful Design Decisions

In the ideal world, every design decision would be informed by user research or usability testing. But in the real world, that’s not always possible. Sometimes, you just have to rely on your own internal decision‐making abilities. Below are some tips we’ve found helpful for increasing the odds of a successful user experience, regardless of the resources available for a project:

01 Turning usability findings into design changes

7 min

Turning Usability Findings into Design Changes

A Recipe for Effective User Interviews

4 min

A Recipe for Effective User Interviews

The ingredients are simple: two people, a quiet place to sit and talk, and a video camera to record the session. Still, getting the most out of an interview requires careful planning and a thoughtful technique. Here I share some insights that guide my own approach to interviewing.

Eye tracking heatmap

5 min

Eye Tracking Usability Studies

To determine what usability study participants look at and take in while viewing online media, we used to watch their mouse cursors, interactions with links and controls, and body language. We also listened carefully to their think-aloud narratives and comments. These traditional testing techniques, however, could never tell us definitively what users notice and what they don’t. Eye tracking usability studies open up a new frontier.

Understanding Older Users Is Your Website Senior Friendly

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.

Real World User Centered Design

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?

Minimizing Usability Risks in Web Applications

5 min

Minimizing Usability Risks in Web Applications

In the year 2000, there were two neatly divided user experience worlds: the world of the web and the world of desktop applications.

The Art of the Conceptual Prototype mark gsellman

3 min

The Art of the Conceptual Prototype

If you’re not familiar with mind mapping, it’s a handy way to visualize ideas and the connections between them for all sorts of contexts.

Making Design Collaboration Work

6 min

Making Design Collaboration Work

At Blink, we feel one of the greatest strengths we bring to clients is the extent to which we leverage our internal expertise—and work with clients—in a collaborative way. But effective collaboration is not a slam-dunk. The key is to tap into individual competencies and perspectives in a way that improves the outcome rather than hinders it.

Aesthetics and Usability

3 min

Aesthetics and Usability

A common question Interface Designers face is, how does one present a lot of information without making the interface seem too busy or overwhelming?