February 14, 2012 — Have you ever looked at a bizarre building design and wondered, “What were the architects thinking?” Or have you simply felt frustrated by a building that made you uncomfortable, or felt anger when a beautiful old building was razed and replaced with a contemporary eyesore? … Read More…

February 1, 2012 — Like most well-designed things, the magic of an iPad app comes from a union of usefulness, usability and meaning. Games aside, the app must be useful by solving a problem that people actually have through the right set of functionality at the right time. It must be easy to … Read More…

December 16, 2011 — In this article, we’ll explore a scoring system for rating and comparing websites, we’ll visualize those ratings using infographics, and we’ll see what data and structure this method provides for reviewing websites. We are all reviewers. We review many websites every day … Read More…

November 10, 2011 — The country selector. It’s there when you create an account for a new Web service, check out of an e-commerce store or sign up for a conference. The normal design? A drop-down list with all of the available countries. However, when conducting a large session of user testing … Read More…

November 8, 2011 — Contrary to what you may read, peppering your form with nice buttons, color and typography and plenty of jQuery plugins will not make it usable. Indeed, in doing so, you would be addressing (in an unstructured way) only one third of what constitutes form usability. Read More…

October 7, 2011 — Forms, forms, forms, often overlooked when it comes to design. In this post we are glad to release a Form Design Cheat Sheet, created by Joe Leech and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers. This crib sheet contains an Omnigraffle template, Photoshop (PSD) and PDF … Read More…

September 22, 2011 — Part 1 of “Improving the Online Shopping Experience” focused on the upper part of the purchase funnel and on ways to get customers to your website and to find your products. Today, we move down the funnel, looking at ways to enable customers to make the decision to buy and … Read More…

September 15, 2011 — Amazon turned sweet sixteen this year, and, by extension, so did online shopping as we know it. As online shopping has grown over the past 16 years, so have user needs and expectations related to the online shopping experience. Setting up shop online is easy, but creating an … Read More…

September 9, 2011 — Anyone designing Web-based properties today requires a basic understanding of interaction design principles. Even if your training is not formally in human-computer interaction, user experience design or human factors, knowing the fundamentals of these disciplines greatly … Read More…