User Experience News & Articles

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.

For more than seven years, I’ve been teaching and coaching design teams on how to conduct usability tests and gather user feedback early on in the development process. One of the questions that comes up time and time again from clients is, "How can we get buy-in for usability tests from management and other team members?"

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.

Recently, in a set of interviews UIE conducted with avid users of Netflix.com, the online DVD rental web site, we asked "What are the things you like best about the site?" Lots, apparently.

At the J. Boye Philadelphia 2009 conference, Wienerberger's Volker Gruenauer was awarded the Overflight Award for the best presentation of the event. An interactive marketer at Wienerberger -- the Austria-based largest brick manufacturer in the world -- Gruenauer designed and deployed a customer-centered web presence that transformed Wienerberger's business even in a tough economy for builders.

A second-place award was given to Donna Spencer, author of the new book Card Sorting from Rosenfeld Media and a respected information architecture practitioner with MaadMob in Australia.

The Overflight Award is given to J. Boye conference presentations that are highly credible -- from fresh voices or perspectives to the discipline of information management -- and are rooted in actual accomplishments, such as projects that have been built and that are "take it home and do it Monday" practical.

Special consideration was given to those presentations that were likely to have a lasting effect on the field.

A panel of industry experts selected the winners, who received trophies and an additional cash prize for first place.

The libraries at Oxford University are the heart of one of the oldest organizations in the world. Oxford's centuries of immutable traditions aren't just old musty rituals that get in the way: they're the reason Oxford has persisted even as so many other institutions have perished. But what if change is essential or even critical? At the J. Boye Philadelphia 2009 conference, the OULS, or Oxford University Library System, gave a presentation on how they'd managed to unite forty separate libraries under a shared portal. However did they do it?

Shibani Kapoor, human factors engineer for Intel, was at the the J. Boye Conference this week. She described the many user experience benefits of consolidating a multinational intranet into a single portal -- and some unexpected challenges.

At the 2009 J. Boye Philadelphia conference, Lou Rosenfeld, co-author of 'the polar bear book' on information architecture and principal of Rosenfeld Media, called for web analysts and user experience people to work more closely together. The result? A solid basis for identifying the right design questions, and the power of surprise and vision brought to data.

The team was happy to be together. Forty-six folks from eight different offices, traveling from all over the world, had come together for their annual meeting.

They were excited to be there. It was good to see faces of people who were often just an email address or voice on a conference call. It was nice to reflect on all the great things they'd accomplished.

Over the past 3 years, the team worked diligently on server reliability, eliminating dead links, and consistent navigation and branding across all 200 of the sub-sites. They'd installed a new enterprise-wide content management system, a better process for editorial work, and new application tools to help their franchise owners sell more high-margin products. By all measures, the web site had become a critical element in their multi-national business.

Yet, there was still an unsettled tone amongst the group. Given all the progress they'd made, they felt they still had a long way to go. They weren't sure what the next step was.

The biggest challenge a website manager has is to understand how humans work, not how content management software or search engines work.

As designers, we rely on communicating detail to our teammates and collaborators. Sometimes a picture is a thousand words, but often, we need more words and explanation to make those diagrams effective.

We had a chance to sit down with Dan Brown, the co-Founder and co-Principal of EightShapes, to talk about his experience with creating successful annotations. Here's what he shared.

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.

Yes, we know we have already mentioned the J. Boye Conference coming up in Philly this May. It's just that... some good conferences are really worth mentioning more than once. And this one fits the bill. If you are looking to get more information on web content management and all that comes with it, then this conference is definitely one to attend.

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.