UX Power Up: Discoverability

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on December 9, 2013 - 5:58pm

Discoverability describes how users discover your features and functionality. Since most users ignore what’s in a design, how can you point out important content or features to your users? How can you help users discover that a feature even exists?

In this week's UX Power Up, Frank covers discoverability, a problem that every design has to deal with. We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below! 

Transcript of video above...

Hi, Frank Spillers, founder of Experience Dynamics, and it’s time for this week’s UX Power Up.

Today we’re talking about the topic of Discoverability.  Just like the way the word sounds, it’s how able your users are to discover: content, features, functionality, and even the controls as they go through and use your website or web application.

UX Power Up: Task Magnifier

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on September 10, 2013 - 1:50pm

Task oriented design is a powerful approach. Designing around the most important task on a page helps magnify a users attention to that key area of the screen. What does that look like for your site or app?

In this week's UX Power Up, Frank walks us through the single biggest technique of Task oriented design and how it impacts usability. We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below! 

Transcript of video above...

Task Magnifier

Frank Spillers, founder of Experience Dynamics.  It’s time for this week’s UX Power Up. Today, we’re looking at the topic of tasks and we’re going to explore a technique called the Task Magnifier.

One of the common approaches that user experience professionals take when they design a website or web application or product - is to focus on the user's task. So, the task magnifier is a way for you to do that on a page.  I’m going to show you two examples, one bad and one good, of how the task magnifier works.

Avoiding Train wreck User Experiences

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on August 15, 2013 - 9:00pm

A UX train wreck is a user experience that makes you work- really work. UX that's so broken, it breaks you down psychologically or emotionally. In this post we'll explore some big train wreck user experiences from Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft. These companies do a lot of great UX work, but they also do some 'train wreck' ones that make for good learning. Do the opposite of these and you'll end up closer to an elegant user experience. 

Designing for the multi-user: missed by Apple, Google and others

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on April 30, 2013 - 9:00pm

The iPad is a multi-user device according to industry reports. But you wouldn't know it from picking up even the latest generation iPad, especially if you are a physician or business user handling sensitive data. The design approach of designing for lone users misses out on a fundamental nature of mobile devices: they are social. To design for the multi-user is to recognize this need for delivering a rich social user experience.   

Are your users dumb or are your designers the dummies?

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on March 18, 2013 - 9:00pm

In this post, we'll explore the basic user experience skill of not taking for granted what your users can do.

Why is this important? If your assumptions about your users are incorrect, you'll make unwise design decisions...and you'd never want to do that now, would you?!

Those of who follow my work via my ux trainings or web seminars, know we don't believe in the myth of the stupid user. We say there are no user errors, only designer errors. That attitude let's us understand user error, and design around it.