And It was Just Right: Stories and Narrative in the Development Process
Constructing stories is designing a complex, multi-dimensional communication. Stories allow us to share the union of our experiences, not just the intersection. [Read More]
Experience Schematics: Diagramming the User Experience
Experience boundaries and schematics are tools for visualizing personas’ key experiences. They provide a recognizable format for communicating overarching design frameworks to teams of engineers, designers, managers, and marketers. [Read More]
Zooming In and Zooming Out: Real-life Customer Experience Research
Evolving our customer-centric tools forms the basis for mutual understanding and challenges us to find the optimal moments for integration. [Read More]
A Clever Startup: Combining Qualitative and Quantitative UX Research
Our Spout project illustrates how smaller organizations and startups can benefit from conducting cutting-edge, integrated qualitative and quantitative user experience research. [Read More]
From Good to Great: Blending Market Research and Usability Methods for Online Marketing Effectiveness
Measuring quality means knowing definitively that your online product will meet clearly defined business objectives and finding the right tools to measure against those objectives. [Read More]
Selling the Sizzle: The Importance of Managing Expectations
Marketing people can be brought to understand that good usability research is an important tool for understanding and enhancing the process of effective marketing. [Read More]
The View from Here: Jazz Brand
Brand-building is aligning the design of customer touch points with business strategy. Alignment is created by asking for collaboration among all the specialists working on the brand. [Read More]
What’s News: Lassoing the Web
A product called Twine, currently in beta testing, aims to help users keep track of online information and make them available for easy retrieval and sharing. [Read More]
Editor’s Note: A Blurring of Boundaries
One hot topic within the user-experience and usability professions, as UX readers understand it, is how we relate to the worlds of marketing, market research, marketing communications, and branding. Almost all of our sister/brother professions—like industrial/product design, user-interface/interaction design, graphic/visual design, and ethnography/social research—have faced a growing blurring of boundaries of profession-definitions, principles, and techniques. […] [Read More]
Editor’s Note: User and Market Research
At the risk of oversimplifying, most marketing professionals would probably say there is no difference between a vertical market and what usability professionals call a specific user profile or persona. Marketing’s traditional focus is on demographic information supported by large sample sizes. User research, on the other hand, traditionally focuses more on the specific user’s […] [Read More]
Rubes: Early Market Testing
Cartoons from the wild and twisted world of Leigh Rubin, syndicated cartoonist. [Read More]
