Interaction Design News & Articles

Usability expert, Jakob Nielsen has finally reviewed the iPad and offered his perspective of the magical tablet’s usability.

Although he immediately acknowledges that “from an interaction design perspective, an iPad user interface shouldn't be a scaled-up iPhone UI,” Nielsen compares its functionality to the iPhone and talks about what focus groups are saying.

As we all drown in today's unparalleled access to mostly disorganized information, the holy grail for many has become to perfect search. O'Reilly Media (news, site) has released a new book to help those following this path.

2010 is proving to be about user experience. Even in the past few weeks, we have covered the trends and needs associated with improving usability online, from web design to promoting transparency.

With the upcoming MX: Managing Experience conference that will focus on usability and user experience best practices, we'd like like to revisit the three key variables Jared Spool once indicated as being critically important to the field.

User research works best when you match your participants to the people who will use your designs. It makes sense that teams would try to use the demographics, often compiled by the organization's market research team, as the basis of their recruiting efforts. However, this can be problematic.

Creating an effective search results page takes hard work. In the first installment of this article, I introduced how designers need to understand the users' tasks and ensure every result delivers great scent. In this installment, I'll elaborate on the specific principles of the scent of information that play an important role when designing search results.

When creating a search results page, it's unfortunately too easy to produce an ineffective design. We know this because, in the course of our research, we've studied hundreds of search results pages. Many of the pages we've studied hurt the user's experience purely because of their design.

Somewhere, right now, there's a team creating a new design with some amazing, never-before-seen functionality. And to take advantage of that awesome, groundbreaking functionality work, their users will need to login.

Login functionality isn't new. It's not awesome. It's not very challenging to develop. Teams are designing this functionality as if it's never been built before.

But it has been built before. Teams, all over the world, have built login functionality into their applications about a million times. And yet, here we are, doing it all over again.

All this re-creation and re-invention isn't just inefficient, it leaves the team open to problems. Because it's not the sexy part of their project, it's likely to get less attention, resulting in an unusable and frustrating experience.

This is where the Re-use Trinity -- Patterns, Components, and Interaction Design Frameworks -- comes in.

Since its release in 2007, the last volume of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, has garnered 3,286 reviews from Amazon.com customers. While response has been overwhelmingly positive for the book, several hundred Amazon customers rated the book as mediocre or worse.

I have been working with Visio for many years now for making mock-ups and wireframes, but a few weeks ago I bought Balsamiq Mockups. It’s a tool that lets you make simple mock-ups that look simple. Here's a quick review.

It's been more than six months since we published our popular list of the Top 5 Wireframing Tools. Since then various readers have been eager to share with us their experience with the tools they have used for wireframing, information architecture and interaction design. We hear you!

Therefore, herewith we are are expanding the list, adding details and tying-in updates on the latest releases.

While Luke Wroblewski was writing his well-received book, Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks, he asked if I could think of an example where a change in a form's design made a noticeable difference in business. "You mean like $300 million of new revenue?" I responded. "Yes, like that." said Luke. So I wrote this article, which he published in his book.