Category: UI/UX

Why does user experience design depend on understanding users and their scenarios? Because it’s just like buying a house. Every once in a while, I’ll be working with a client on a UI design and they’ll get tired of me badgering them with questions about the application’s users, goals, mental models, and scenarios. It’s easy […]

So I’m in a hotel (again) and, the first morning that I’m there, I stagger into the shower to sluice off the grime of a couple of days of traveling. The shower’s faucet is a single flat handle like the diagram on the left (but without the arrows — I added them for reasons that will become clear in […]

There are far more users for your application than you can possibly design for.  Alan Cooper has some advice on how to pick the ones that will let you deliver the right UX for everyone. Most applications will have a wide variety of users. In UX design, we assume that we can group those users into groups […]

It’s unlikely that the user experience that you’ll craft will ever be ‘fun’ for your users. But, on the other hand, you can support making your application a habit…and that’s almost as good. Let’s face it: most of our applications aren’t fun or exciting or immersive. Users don’t long to work with our applications — they regard […]

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 […]