User Experience Design, Usability, Usability Testing, and Usability Consultant

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USER EXPERIENCE (UX)

Articles and Resources for User Experience Design.

Explanation of UX

User experience, often abbreviated UX, is a term used to describe the overall experience and satisfaction a user has when using a product or system. It most commonly refers to a combination of software and business topics, such as selling over the web, but it applies to any result of interaction design.

This field has its roots in human factors and ergonomics, a field that since the late 1940s has been focusing on the interaction between human users, machines and the contextual environments to design systems that address the user's experience. The term also has a more recent connection to user-centered design principles and also incorporates elements from similar user-centered design fields:

Human computer interaction
Information architecture
Interaction design
Interface design
User interface design
Usability
Usability engineering
Visual design

As with the fields mentioned above, user experience design is a highly multi-disciplinary field, incorporating aspects of psychology, anthropology, computer science, graphic design and industrial design.

At its core, user experience design incorporates most or all of the above disciplines to positively impact the overall user experience with a particular system or device. User experience design defines a sequence of screen presentations, user interactions, and system responses that meet user goals and tasks while satisfying business and functional requirements. (Wikipedia)

User Experience Expert Services

Usernomics can assist your company to create a high level of user satisfaction for your products. Part of the UX outcome is to make your product: easy to learn, easy to use, aesthetically pleasing, and marketable. Our user experience experts can systematically ensure an optimum experience for both hardware and software products. Their expertise covers a wide range of products including web-based and application software, consumer products, communication systems, and vehicles such as automobiles and aircraft.

User Experience Design Articles & Resources

As a service to our professional community, we are pleased to bring you a great starting place for locating articles and resources for user experience design.

Scroll down or click on one of the following topics:

See User Interface Design for additional links to major UI sites.

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Page 1 of 2 User Experience

UX Articles

7 User Experience Lessons from the iPhone slideshow discussing iPhone UX. (Sldeshare, Stephina)
10 Principles Of Effective Web Design Usability and the utility, not the visual design, determine the success or failure of a web-site. Since the visitor of the page is the only person who clicks the mouse and therefore decides everything, user-centric design has become a standard approach for successful and profit-oriented web design. After all, if users can't use a feature, it might as well not exist. (Smashing Magazine)
About User Experiences And Design FAD: Is the profession of webdesigner moving more towards interaction design that is graphic design + information design + human-computer interaction? Andy: Most definitely. As the industry matures, website owners and users want more than just a pretty interface. Website owners want to differentiate their products and services from their competition by providing their customers with a better experience. Users want something that solves real problems in an enjoyable and easy to use way. (fantastic)
Aesthetics and Usability: A Look at Color and Balance a study focused on the role aesthetics plays in website usability. (Usability News)
Ambient Intimacy Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn't usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible. (Disambiguity)
All Those Opposed: Making the case for user experience in a budget-conscious climate how user experience design makes money for businesses. (Dr. Dobb's Portal)
The Battle Between Usability and User-Experience The main reasons why it is so hard to create usable products is that there is a conflict between a high-usability level and great user-experience. You might think this as strange, but there is a important difference between the two. (Baekdal)
Beauty is Only Screen Deep paying attention to the little features, not just making a site pretty. (Boxes and Arrows)
Building the UX Dreamteam Since you can't truly know a candidate from an interview, you gamble that their personality and skills are what they seem. Aimed at managers and those involved in the hiring decision process, this article looks at the facets of UX staff and offers ways to identify the skills and influence that will tune your team to deliver winning results. (Boxes and Arrows
Can you have too much ease of use? talks about challenging the user rather than making it too easy.
Configuration Hell- The Case for the Plug and Play User Experience describes how users are not usually successful at configuring software, websites or devices and the configuration experience can be a major source of frustration. Instead we need to move toward a world where everything is auto-configured and user experiences are "plug and play". (Demistifying Usability)
The Complexity of Simplicity Though many business strategies and publications continue to trumpet the power of simplicity in the design of digital products, for lots of companies and product teams, simplicity doesn't come easy. (UX Matters)
Crappy Personas vs. Robust Personas No one is going to make you use personas. If you create a design without using personas, I'll promise you the sun will continue to rise on schedule, without variation. The universe will remain intact. However, how do you know you're actually meeting the needs of your users? After all, that is why you were designing in the first place, right? (UIE, Jared Spool)
Creating prototypes with OmniGraffle Podcast: With this simple process you can create working prototypes with exported PDFs or HTML with clickable images/image maps. The next step to get this to be a richer tool would be to have working form fields in the prototype, but not sure yet how you would do that natively. (urlgreyhot)
The Customer Experience Forget faster or cheaper. The Web challenges you to rethink the most basic relationship in business: the one between you and your customers. (Fast Company)
Customer Experience in Four Steps, and a Whitepaper describes four steps in transforming the customer experience within a business: 1. Listen to the business. 2. Listen to the customers. 3. Synthesize the two inputs. 4. Suggest improvements. (GoodExperience)
Design as Communication each placement of an object, the choice of materials, the addition of hooks, handles, knobs, and switches, is both for utility and for communication. (jnd.org)
Design starts with Proposition So, if you really want my advice about usability, it's that it starts right at the very beginning. Before a line (or a box) has been drawn. If you're not designing the *right thing* then no amount of design expertise is going to get you a really usable product. (Disambiguity)
The Designer Is Dead, Long Live The Designer! Usability maharishis, with idiosyncratic attitudes and blaring random opinions about design, irritate me. While the importance of their field has been acknowledged for some years now, it is simply a sham to assume or suggest their role is principal (or sole) in shaping user interaction. In this column I will go as far as stating the contrary: design comes first, usability second. Admittedly, this statement is a tad more complicated, but you will get the gist of my point. (Digital Web)
Designers' Roles in Communicating with Users If a site is visually attractive, they may be more motivated to expend extra effort to understand and use it. If they feel it's easy to use, maybe they'll be motivated to use it more often. (Usability News)
Designing Breakthrough Products While user-centered design (UCD) techniques can sometimes be valuable on new-product projects, more often, they don't seem to work particularly well when designing breakthrough products. (UXMatters)
Designing For Flow In web design, when we think about flow we usually think about "task flows" or "flow charts" but there's another type of flow that we should keep in mind. It's that feeling of complete absorption when you're engaged in something you love to do without being disrupted by anxiety or boredom caused by tasks that are confusing, repetitive or overly taxing. (A List Apart)
Designing From the User's Experience While user experience interpretations may not guide every product decision, they lead to deeper recognition of a product's meaning to people, and show the drivers behind observed behavior and trends. In managing design research, we want valid user feedback to evaluate products. (Design Management Institute)
Designing Web Applications for Use Web-based applications, like all software systems, are obviously intended for people to use. Not so obvious is that users may not be the single most important factor in the application design equation. This is not an academic argument, particularly for the harried designer or development manager who must decide how and where to spend limited time and other resources. (UIE)
Dilbert on User Experience The problem is that 'brand' will always be about the impression companies want to make, and are by their nature an 'inside-out' proposition - a company figures out its brand and what it means, and does what it can to communicate or otherwise impart that message to people. Brand always starts with the company. Experience, though, needs to be about the people. What do they want to accomplish, achieve, do? For experience to succeed, it must start with the person, and from there, impress upon the company. 'Experience' is outside-in. (Adaptive Path)
Ethical or merely inept?discusses many variables that lead to a good UX from shipping a product to treatment of staff. (Usability News)
Exercise in Customer Experience asks you to compare some experiences: dining, going to the dentist and using an e-commerce website. In each case, the better experience is one where meeting the user's needs is the focal point. (GoodExperience
Expanding the Approaches to User Experience Jesse James Garrett's "The Elements of User Experience" diagram (17kb PDF) has become rightly famous as a clear and simple model for the sorts of things that user experience professionals do. But as a model of user experience it presents an incomplete picture with some serious omissions - omissions I'll try address with a more holistic model. (Boxes and Arrows)
Five Experience Fundamentals in times like this, most successful business leaders understand the importance of investing back into the business. The most successful customer experience leaders follow this principle, as well: investing in ways to iteratively innovate and improve customer experience across online and offline channels. (GoToMedia)
Five Principles to Design By Technology Serves Humans. Too often people blame themselves for the shortcomings of technology. When their computer crashes, they say "I must have done something dumb". If a web site is poorly designed, they say "I must be stupid. I can't find it". They might even turn to a book for Dummies to get it right. (Bokardo)
First Principles of Interaction Design The following principles are fundamental to the design and implementation of effective interfaces, whether for traditional GUI environments or the web. Of late, many web applications have reflected a lack of understanding of many of these principles of interaction design, to their great detriment. Because an application or service appears on the web, the principles do not change. If anything, applying these principles become even more important. (AskTog)
Form + Content + Context) / Time = Experience Design a new discipline of design is emerging from the needs and forms of communication in the network economy. Experience design is a discipline created by the reality of communication today, when no point of contact has a simple beginning and end and all points of contact must have meaning embedded in them.
A Framework for Analysing User Experience describes how we cannot design an experience- there are no guarantees. But we can design for an experience. (Usability News)
How To Quantify The User Experience This article outlines a quick-and-dirty methodology for quantifying the user experience, which I've found to be very useful in providing clients with a quick, objective, visual representation of where their site stands vis-à-vis the competition or past development efforts. (SitePoint)
Human-to-Human Design A good website is built on two basic truths-that the internet is an interactive medium and that the end user is in fact human. In other words, it is meant to be an experience. As with any adventure, a little strategic thought is needed to ensure that the experience is enjoyable. (A List Apart)
Imaginative User Interfaces Narrative user interfaces are based on the storytelling paradigm and set out to revolutionize the way people interact with computers. They promise to ultimately make computers accessible for everyone. (SAP Design Guild)
Improving Customer Experience: Usability Testing Is Not Enough With the right data in hand, both marketers and designers can do their jobs better and work together more effectively to design products and services their customers value and ensure satisfaction with the customer experience. Integrated customer experience research methods are a critical tool every business needs to win high-value customers and keep them coming back. (eCommerce Times)
Influencing the customer experience through the internet Despite the rapid development of the internet, the overall goal of designing an intuitive, easy to use website has not changed. The challenge that exists is how to gauge customers' emotional responses accurately so that businesses can understand and influence online decision making and increasing conversion rates. (MyCustomer)
An introduction to user journeys Creating a user journey places a strong emphasis on personas and also merges the creation of scenarios and user flows. However, unlike user flows, hierarchies, or functional specs (which explain the interaction between a user and a system's logic and processes), user journeys explore a user's mental and lived "patterns, processes, and paths" and translate these into web-based experiences. (Boxes and Arrows)
Investing in UX Despite the rapid development of the internet, the overall goal of designing an intuitive, easy to use website has not changed. The challenge that exists is how to gauge customers' emotional responses accurately so that businesses can understand and influence online decision making and increasing conversion rates. (UX Magazine)
Make it all about the user describes the key components of user experience design. (Hesketh)
Making Personas Work for Your Site
Mastery, Mystery, and Misery: The Ideologies of Web Design Simple, unobtrusive designs that support users are successful because they abide by the Web's nature -- and they make people feel good. (Alertbox)
Microsoft Surface a flash show showing the new Microsoft Surface.
More Alike Than We Think What happens when a site has to appeal to a wide range of people? How do you sort out their different usability requirements? Will they conflict, and if so, how do you prioritize them? (UXMatters)
The Most Important User Experience Method If you really want to become a better user experience practitioner, learn how to work with and change the organization. This is in contrast to most UX books and events, which are endless discussions of *methods*: Card sorting. Remote usability. User profiles (ohh, this industry's obsession with user profiles and personas, ohh my aching head). (Good Experience)
No matter what you do for a living, design matters. Meet and learn from 20 visionary men and women who are using design to create not just new products, but new ways of working, leading, and seeing. (Fast Company)
Packaging Design for Web-based Products While the front of a package is about quickly communicating a central message, the back is there to support the story. This back of pack is responsible for outlining the benefits, abbreviated instructions, and features of a product. (Digital Web, LukeW)
Pattern-based design Design patterns are general repeatable solutions to commonly occurring problems. There's a putative measure of objectivity or optimality attributed to design patterns, distinguishing them (in theory at least) from what are often called "best practices," which tend to be derived through convention. To sort things out in my own head, I came up with this visual scheme for slotting patterns into the interaction designer's toolbox. (Teehan+Lax)
People Designing for People Every design is defined by three basic components: inspiration, tools and people. Inspiration is how we begin or improve the direction of the design. Since good design is not linear, inspiration occurs throughout the design process. (Thread Information Design)
The Search for Seducible Moments When looking at the opportunities for seducible moments on your site, is your design more like Sears or more like Dell? Are you giving users the necessary hooks to entice them to explore your content at the right moments in their process? Or, does your design bury your important content, by hiding the links and diverting the user's focus? (UIE, Jared Spool)
Seductive Design for Web Sites We used to think it was impossible to design a web site that successfully supported both information retrieval and browsing. We now believe a site can do both - but only when designers know what their audience is interested in. (UIE)
Simplicity vs. Innovation A site should be innovative in design and content, but, when it comes to usability, a slightly conservative mindset is the best option. Your visitors are used to particular ways of navigating sites and entering data in forms. If you keep it simple by sticking to those well-known ways, you're reasonably certain that most of your users will understand how your site works. (Digital Web)
Sketchboards: Discover Better + Faster UX Solutions The sketchboard is a low-fi technique that makes it possible for designers to explore and evaluate a range of interaction concepts while involving both business and technology partners. Unlike the process that results from wireframe-based design, the sketchboard quickly performs iterations on many possible solutions and then singles out the best user experience to document and build upon. (Adaptive Path)
Something from Nothing Great creativity can come from great constraint. I've often found that interactive technologies, born under some heavy limitation, create a better experience than those applications enjoying much richer resources. That some innovators work better under pressure is interesting, but it's more than that. (Goodexperience Blog)
Strategies for handling customer feedback If your Web site doesn't include a feedback mechanism, it probably should. In this month's Cranky User column, Peter explains the importance of listening to the customer, and helps you develop strategies for dealing with the different types of feedback you will receive. (IBM, Cranky User)
The truth about Google's so-called "simplicity" Is Google simple? No. Google is deceptive. It hides all the complexity by simply showing one search box on the main page. The main difference, is that if you want to do anything else, the other search engines let you do it from their home pages, whereas Google makes you search through other, much more complex pages. Why aren't many of these just linked together? Why isn't Google a unified application? Why are there so many odd, apparently free-standing services? (jnd.org)
The user experience The iceberg analogy of usability. Find out why starting with the user experience leads to better application design, whether for Web users or unplugged users. (IBM, Dick Berry)
User Experience Design is a good introduction to UX design. (Semantic Studios)
The user experience, Part 1 It's a matter of style -- GUI versus the Web. Dick Berry focuses first on the differences between GUI and Web environments, and reveals effective approaches for each that can enable the best possible user experience. (IBM, Dick Berry)
The user experience, Part 2 Using controls in forms. In effective application design, forms facilitate entry of information through effective controls, easily identifiable structure, and efficient navigation. In this installment, Dick Berry offers a range of useful guidelines for choosing and designing the most appropriate controls for each element on a form. (IBM, Dick Berry)
User Expectations in a World of Smart Devices I'm increasingly convinced that, as networks of smart objects permeate our environment, people's attitudes toward technology will become more animist. In other words, we'll start to anthropomorphize our stuff. (Adaptive Path)
User Experience & Cognitive Pleasures User experience and usability are two different things. And usability does not always imply a system or interface that does not require any learning, or any enquiry, or any challenge on the part of the user. (Disambiguity)
User Experience Diagrams links to various UX diagrams and maps. (Functioning Form)
User Interface Design Patterns This collection consists of user interface design patterns (interaction patterns) that seems to be recuring problems when trying to make design based on the user's goals. These design patterns have been analyzed during the past five years by going through hundreds of designs, to give instructions and design examples to the students of design courses. (University of Helsinki) (
Users Interleave Sites and Genres When working on business problems, users flitter among sites, alternating visits to different service genres. No single website defines the user experience on its own. (Alertbox)
UX Roles & Titles: Trend or Profession? A nonscientific study to aid in the formulation of thoughts on the current and future User Experience Design professions in the Web space, roles and titles. (Challis Hodge)
Walking Through Your Product Design With Stakeholders You are the lead designer-or perhaps even the sole designer on a product team. You have just completed your product design, and it's time to walk through your design approach with the project stakeholders, including management, developers, and users. What do you need to do to prepare for your presentation? (UX Matters)
Web Design for All the Senses Most technological experiences-including digital and, especially, online experiences-have paled in comparison to real-world experiences and have been relatively unsuccessful as a result. What these solutions require is for developers to understand what makes good experiences first, and then to translate these principles, as well as possible, into the desired media without the technology dictating the form of the experience. (Digital Web)
When Web pages don't work Puzzled why your site is not living up to your expectations? The problem may not lie with your content or products, but rather in your site's user experience. Find out what common pitfalls to avoid by following a few simple guidelines to improve the user experience and transform surfers into customers. (IBM)
Why Features Don't Matter Any More As computing and digital devices move more and more into the consumer space, features and functionalities will increasingly take the back-seat as motivators for technology adoption: as the iPod abundantly shows, user experience (along with a strong brand, and clever marketing) is much more important for the success of a device then technical specifications. (Ubiquity)
Why is Simple so Difficult? Simple websites are easy to use, easy to understand, nice to look at. In practice, websites are either unusable or ugly and in general filled with too many complicated words. Why do designers have such a hard time to keep it simple? (IA)
Why People Matter Saying that people are the focus of user experience is stating the obvious, but when we are deeply engaged in our own work as user experience designers, it can be difficult to constantly remember to keep people at the center of design. (UXMatters)
Why UX Should Matter to Software Companies User experience is a core competency within today's software companies, and an expert in UX strategy and design is an indispensable part of a software product team-just as the product manager and software architect are-particularly if a team is working on a new product. (UXMatters)