The home page of your web site is your online store-front. The inside pages are the equivalent to customer facing insides of your shop. So what kind of first impression are you giving to your customers? Are you a high end retailer on the posh side of town, a quaintly decorated boutique, or maybe a brightly lit warehouse with hundreds of products? Or are you a small building with plain white walls and price charts scattered amongst rows of products on metal shelving? (more…)

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Do you ever obsess about the little details in your website, and then tell yourself “it’s not that big of a deal”. Well it just may be a big deal. Everything on your website has the potential to make a big impact and the text on your website plays a major role in this.

It’s important that what your users read and pay attention to align with your goals for the website. For example, let’s say your goal is to get people to sign up for your newsletter. How do you tell them to sign up? Are you explaining the product/service to your users including the benefit of signing up? Is it clear where to go to sign up and what information they might need? (more…)

There are many types of design methodologies: Behavior-Centered Design, Task-Centered Design, Goal-Directed Design, etc. However the two most popular methods are User-Centered Design and Activity-Centered Design. The key goal of all of these methodologies is to create a usable, efficient, effective design. Each method has its own unique approach for creating the design. (more…)

I recently read an article published in the JUS (Journal of Usability Studies) entitled User Experience Design: The Evolution of a Multi-Disciplinary Approach by Deborah J. Mayhew. In this article Mayhew talks about how no one person can successfully perform all aspects of a development need. She begins by talking about how programmers used to run the show in the 60’s and 70’s and made all the decisions concerning a project for the business. However over time as the industry grew and became more specialized, that role had to become more specialized as well. This led to the creation of job roles like Business Analyst, Project Manager and Account Manager. Mayhew then moves the article into the context of User Experience by highlighting many of the emerging and common specialties of the field, such as Information Architect and Graphic Designer.

Her main point, I believe, is a good one. That a “powerful combination of separate skills…[is] much more effective as a user experience design team than any of us would have been alone.” (more…)