Design Thinking: The New Paradigm for Building Applications
Aug 29,
2017
A confluence of business trends and development best practices is changing the way developers need to think about building applications. For want of a better term, the mindset that most software developers follow when building applications might be called ‘systems thinking’: Design a database that holds the data the company needs, design the software components […]
The Two Fundamental Mistakes in Usability Testing
Aug 10,
2017
There are two mistakes that organizations make when doing usability testing. And once those mistakes are made, two things are certain: either end users won’t get an application they can actually use or, if they do, it will cost more and take longer. Organizations often make a fundamental mistake by thinking of usability testing as […]
How to Ensure You Don’t Violate UI Design Patterns
Jun 8,
2017
This blog post is, admittedly, a list of “User Interface failures” that you’ve suffered through, from badly designed elevators to the screen in the dashboard of your car. However, it’s also about what leads to these UI failures and how they could have been avoided — including a useful list of resources. I stay at one hotel […]
Why You’ll Never Know When You’re Working with a Great UI
Jan 11,
2017
You’ve probably never noticed the really great UIs you’ve worked with or the fabulous UXs they were part of. Why? Because the only reason you’d notice a UI is when something has gone horribly wrong. In fact, you’re already working with a bunch of really great UIs that do your bidding without you doing anything, let alone […]
Leveraging Scenarios (Why Apps Fail Before They Even Get Started)
Mar 23,
2016
The financial planning site/application Wesabe failed because they didn’t understand how to use scenarios effectively. You can avoid that mistake by realizing that UX scenarios are about life, not about optimizing the human/computer interface. Wesabe was a financial management website/application that didn’t succeed. Instead, it lost out to Mint (which, by the way, was eventually bought […]