Category Archives: User Experience Design
Book Review: About Face: The Secrets of Emotionally Effective Advertising by Dan Hill
I am an avid reader of design and advertising books. As geeky as it sounds, I read those types of books as my pleasure reading. I always want to know more about how to excel at my craft. Every so often there comes along a book that completely changes the way that I think about… More
Understanding culture
Part of my goings-on about the user experience include knowing your audience and understanding what makes them tick. A huge part of the behavioral information that you can glean about a particular audience segment is culture. I came across an article on Business Insider that represents visually how cultures around the world negotiate. Why should… More
no way out, or, is the juice worth the squeeze?
Wow. A year can fly if you’re not paying attention. That’s how long it’s been since my last post. Lots has happened in the interim, a new job that brought me back to my home state of Virginia, lots to learn, new people, new processes, etc, but that’s another post entirely. So I was re-reading… More
speak the language
About a year ago, I accepted a Creative Director position at Capital One. Yes, I went to work for the “What’s in your wallet?” guys. I love it. Good people, challenging work. One of the headwinds (Capital One term; I’ll be noting them throughout this post) to getting the hang of things there is the… More
We’re gonna need a bigger boat
So I’m spelunking around the web as I like to do on a quiet Saturday evening after burping up code all day… I revisited the HUGE website. These guys rock as far as creative is concerned and I feel connected to them in that we chose the same color to represent our brand. It takes… More
No inside jokes
So UX has been coming up in conversation lately as I have been speaking to new and current clients. I’ve talked about managing the user’s expectations, but what about the trust factor? The digital space can be a scary place. Lots of bad people are are sending you emails from Nigeria or Kansas asking for… More
Conversion rate coolness
As I mentioned in my last blog post, I have been working on building a brand and sales for a client, Cal Smith, who not only is a great client, he is just a fun guy, period. I have been working with him very closely and educating him on how marketing works, especially in the… More
make sure they are the RIGHT thousand words
I recently came across an RSS feed about do-s and don’t-s of web site design and one of the points that they made was that the ornamental design element and irrelevant stock image actually detracts from the user experience. I couldn’t agree more, with the operative word being irrelevant. I have many small business clients… More
a UX anatomy of evil
Here is an example of great user-centric design. I saw this commercial for Money Mutual, a non-bank lending institution (they make Wall Street look like choirboys) with a very official-sounding name and an oddly familiar logo. Here is a screen shot from their website: Yes, that’s Montel Williams. I’ll save him for another post. Right… More
