“So, Megan, what do you do?”
What a loaded question, geeze. I do lots of things. I run. I eat. I hang out with my 5 rabbits (yeah, they’re awesome). Everyone asks me this question at every networking event, and I still don’t have a succinct, articulate answer. I usually reply with something along the lines of,
“I do user research and product strategy consulting for early stage startups.”
Hey! This is an excerpt from my book Designing Products People Love, which will be published by O’Reilly in December. Learn more about the book and the 20+ product designers from Facebook, Twitter, Slack, etc. who were interviewed about how they work.
Have you ever experienced a user interface that feels lifeless? Have you created a UI that just seems to be missing…something?
Summary: Users are often distracted from the task at hand, so prevent unconscious errors by offering suggestions, utilizing constraints, and being flexible.
One of the 10 Usability Heuristics advises that it’s important to communicate errors to users gracefully, actionably, and clearly. However, it’s even better to prevent users from making errors in the first place.
Businesses someday getting on board with virtual reality will need to do some self-examination. Various VR tools are aimed at reclaiming productivity and improving interactions.
The fabled “promise” of virtual reality is expansive. At its loftiest, we’ve been promised not only changes to how we live and how we consume entertainment, but also to how we work.
UX design does not have an official, standard definition because apart from its various visual components, it encompasses information architecture, user research, wireframing and many elements that together decide the fate of UX. The closest to a definition of UX is the one provided by Nielsen and Norman which states that “User experience encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.” Thus, UX involves knowing what end-users want from a product or a system and meeting those requirements with perfection and in a way that delights them.
Microsoft, Samsung, GoPro, and others take their best guesses at the next five years of consumer electronics.
When Apple introduced the iPad 2 in 2011, it laid out a noble goal for the future of technology.
“Technology alone is not enough,” an Apple ad proclaimed. “Faster, thinner, lighter, those are all good things, but when technology gets out of the way, everything becomes more delightful, even magical. That’s when you leap forward.”
A View-Master for virtual reality: Hands-on with Mattel’s new AR, VR phone toy
Mattel is relaunching View-Master, but as a virtual reality and augmented-reality phone toy. And I got to play around with it for a bit…or at least, some of the tech behind it.
Up close with the HoloLens, Microsoft’s most intriguing product in years
We just finished a heavily scripted, carefully managed, and completely amazing demonstration of Microsoft’s HoloLens technology. Four demos, actually, each designed to show off a different use case for a headset that projects holograms into real space. We played Minecraft on a coffee table. We had somebody chart out how to fix a light switch right on top of the very thing we were fixing.
Every day, people visit your store and leave because they couldn’t find what they wanted.
You need more than top rankings on Google. People have to be able to navigate to the product they want and trust you enough to buy. Your website’s user experience (UX) should focus on building your visitor’s confidence by helping them complete their goals.
What matters more: killer UX that makes people want to use your product, or shipping the things people want quickly and staking down a huge share of the market? If the UX is bad, people won’t want to use it. On the other hand, if someone else gets it there first, people are happy to use what is available and help to improve it with feedback as it grows.