9 minutes
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.
9 minutes
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.
14 minutes
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.
14 minutes
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.
15 minutes
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.
14 minutes
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.
9 minutes
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?
12 minutes
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.
13 minutes
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.
12 minutes
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.
11 minutes
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:
16 minutes
13 minutes
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.
14 minutes
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.
14 minutes
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.
14 minutes
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?
13 minutes
In the year 2000, there were two neatly divided user experience worlds: the world of the web and the world of desktop applications.
11 minutes
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.
14 minutes
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.
11 minutes
A common question Interface Designers face is, how does one present a lot of information without making the interface seem too busy or overwhelming?
11 minutes
Objects and actions analysis is a method of documenting what data (objects) need to be manipulated and what functions (actions) can be performed on the objects. A key benefit of the analysis is representing system functionality without consideration of how the interface needs to look or behave.
11 minutes
One of the most important parts of planning for any type of user research or usability testing is a clear set of research questions: what do you want to find out as a result of the study? It seems like an obvious step, yet sometimes this is overlooked.
14 minutes
At Blink we create behavioral profiles, along with key scenarios, to characterize users and usage.
