Tag: theory

There’s a belief close to dogma in UX design and product management: that examining data will reveal something that will improve the UX or the product in some way. Some even refuse to do any design until they have done “research” or have access to web analytics, customer feedback, or some such. There is nothing…

I am suspicious of designers who use the first person in the explanations of their designs. Why should we care what they personally like or want? What makes their opinion any better than anyone else’s? Those who state an idea about a design on the basis of even a handful of data points, a thought…

A recent conversation I had about UX research centred on whether such research is to help designers predict eventual outcomes of design interventions, or whether its role is to “de-risk” UX or business ideas. They were keen to frame research as a way of lowering risk to the business. This applied both to design validation…

(If you’ve come to this from Twitter, I’m just testing my new Twitter WP plugin with this article) Shortly after I wrote up some thoughts on test-driven UX, I happened to notice “Bridging User Research into Design” over on UX Matters. In the article, 11 of the great and the good offer their thoughts on…

Several months ago, we made some changes to the search results of hotels.com, and among these was the creation of a “pinned header”. As you scroll down through the list of results, a portion of the page header stays with you. Here’s the UI before scrolling. And here it is with the header pinning (linking…

Whether or not you think that “user-centred design” is generally a good way of  designing a web site, most would agree that before doing any real design work, you first need to listen. Ideally, you should listen to the people who will be using your site. At the very least, you should listen to some…

I’ve just been watching this video from Adaptive Path in response to Mozilla Lab’s call for participation. The video seems to be more of a PR play for Adaptive Path though, and not a serious attempt at design direction – which is a bit disappointing, but no matter. There are a number of things that…