November 6, 2012 — The rapid pace of UX design in the agile world can lead to shortsighted design decisions. Focusing on addressing the immediate needs of particular user stories within the limits of a sprint can lead to neglect of larger design questions, which can come back to haunt UX … Read More…

October 30, 2012 — Growing up, weekends were about worship in the Hinman household. Sunday mornings were reserved for a laborious worship ritual dictated by my parents. It required dressing up in uncomfortable clothes, going to church and pretending to listen to long-winded sermons about Jesus … Read More…

October 26, 2012 — Editor’s Note: This article expresses the author’s personal opinion and covers experimental UX techniques which aren’t considered to be best practice. Masking passwords is an old practice that’s commonly implemented in sign-up and log-in forms. It’s used to … Read More…

October 10, 2012 — When Albert Einstein was a professor at Princeton University in the 1940s, there came the time for the final exam of his physics class. His assistants passed the exam forms to the hundreds of students, and the hall was dead silent. One of the assistants suddenly noticed … Read More…

September 27, 2012 — Unless you’re developing completely new products at a startup, you likely work in an organization that has accumulated years of legacy design and development in its products. Even if the product you’re working on is brand spanking new, your organization will eventually need … Read More…

September 25, 2012 — In the first television advertisement for the iPad, the narrator intoned, “It’s crazy powerful. It’s magical. You already know how to use it.” This was an astonishing claim. Here was a new, market-defining, revolutionary device, unlike anything we had seen before, and we … Read More…

September 19, 2012 — Today we are happy to release two printable UX sketching and wireframing templates, designed by Pixle for Smashing Magazine’s readers. This article presents Outline, a set of sketching and wireframing papers for mobile platforms and Tapsize, a set of templates for checking … Read More…

September 14, 2012 — My relationship with the Internet oscillates between waves of euphoria and waves of angst. Some things make me extraordinarily happy: like a client who loves usability testing so much when they first experience it that they can’t sleep for days; or connecting with someone … Read More…

September 14, 2012 — As we’ve seen, audio is used as a feedback mechanism when users interact with many of their everyday devices, such as mobile phones, cars, toys and robots. There are many subtleties to designing with audio in order to create useful, non-intrusive experiences. Here, we’ll … Read More…