Category: User Experience
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Why don’t nonprofit sites convert?
Living in New York and working in media, I talk to nonprofit organizations a lot. Big or small, they all say the same. No matter how much work they put into their apps and websites,…
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Big Web Show ? 159: If You Can’t Stand the Heatmaps, Stay Out of the Conversion, with @nickd
NICK Disabato (@nickd) and I discuss heat maps, conversion rates, design specialization, writing for the web, Jakob Nielsen, and the early days of blogging in Episode ? 159 of The Big Web Show – “everything web that…
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Authoritative, Readable, Branded: Report from Poynter Design Challenge, Part 2
THIS year’s Poynter Digital Newspaper Design Challenge was an attempt by several designers and pundits, working and thinking in parallel, to save real news via design. In Part 1 of my report from Poynter, I discussed…
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Digital newspaper design challenge: a report from Poynter, part 1
CAN design create a better user experience that engages readers and drives revenue? Can it fight fake news and help save real journalism at a time when news organizations large and small are underfinanced and…
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To Save Real News
IN a world where newspapers are dying and half the public believes fake news, what online news experiences need is design that is branded, authoritative, and above all, readable: Branded, because we need to convert…
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Do Not Go Gentle into that iTunes Store
AT HOME, sick with a cold and bored, my daughter buys a single packet of “My School Dance” in a freemium iTunes game. The manufacturer charges her (well, charges me) for ten packets. This same…
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Solve the Right Problem: Derek Featherstone on designing for extremes
12 LESSONS from An Event Apart San Francisco – ? 3: Derek Featherstone was the 10th speaker at An Event Apart San Francisco, which ended Wednesday. His session, Extreme Design, showed how creating great experiences…
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Measure Customer Time, Not Organization Time: Gerry McGovern
We need to manage speed on the page, not just the speed of the page load. Manage the customer’s time on task. We won’t become customer-centric until we change our metrics—focusing on customers’ time to…
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Private Parts: unlikely advocate fights for online privacy, anonymity
MESMERIZED as we have been by the spectacle of the flaming garbage scow of U.S. election news, it would have been easy to miss this other narrative. But in the past few days, just as…
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Spotify to music subscribers: drop dead
Since at least 2010, subscribers to Spotify’s paid music service have asked the company to include the ability to sort playlists alphabetically in the desktop player. It’s the sort of drop-dead obvious feature that should…
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Ten Years Ago on the Web
2006 DOESN’T seem forever ago until I remember that we were tracking IE7 bugs, worrying about the RSS feed validator, and viewing Drupal as an accessibility-and-web-standards-positive platform, at the time. Pundits were claiming bad design was good for the web…
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Pinterest giveth, and Pinterest taketh away
AS MY design career has taken on more and more strategic and managerial freight, I’ve done less and less hands-on design. This year, I decided to change that. As part of my reimmersion, I found…
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The Year in Design
Mobile is today’s first screen. So design responsively, focusing on content and structure first. Websites and apps alike should remove distractions and let people interact as directly as possible with content. 90 percent of design…
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Ad Blocking Phase II
The world has finally caught up with Been, Inc. Three years ago, this tiny start-up company shared my studio space in New York. Their product idea was remarkably original: instead of passively accepting the data…
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Progressive Enhancement FTW with Aaron Gustafson
Longtime web developer, lecturer, and web standards evangelist Aaron Gustafson and host Jeffrey Zeldman discuss the newly published update to Aaron’s best-selling industry classic “love letter to the web,” Adaptive Web Design: Crafting Rich Experiences…