A common dilemma for product teams: whether to pursue a revolutionary strategy or one that's more evolutionary. The best products help users make the unfamiliar familiar. If you're set on changing the industry standard, look for ways to model other familiar patterns, so users can focus on their task rather than learning a new way of doing things.
UX industry pioneer Jesse James Garrett recently published a piece in Fast Company reflecting on the state of the UX design industry 20 years in. This prompted our Cofounder to reflect on her own experience — from in-house UX, to agency UX, to freelance and finally owning a UX consultancy. Has product design become less insight-driven during that period?
You can definitely geek out over the analytics of optimizing conversion, run some A/B tests, and whatnot. But there's also a more qualitative side of it: understanding why users won't or don’t proceed from step to step in an experience. We can study users to understand the reasons for their behavior.
When launching a new company or product, logo design should be one of the first things you consider in your marketing toolkit. A well designed and impactful logo gives your company or product an identity of its own at a glance, and can set your company or product apart from competitors in the same field.
Bad UI is costly, as Citibank recently learned when an employee accidentally wired 100X the intended amount, costing Citibank $500M. (Source: Ars Technica)
There’s not just one cost to bad user interfaces. The price manifests in various ways:
What do you do when you run a study and you don’t know what the results mean?
I saw it happen and the experience stuck with me.
A long time ago, I worked with a team that wanted to test a new site navigation prototype. Could users find what they where asked to find? Because they wanted to ensure ‘statistical significance’, they tested with hundreds of users, so qualitative input was out of the question.
