Why and How to Add Heat Mapping to Your Analytics Toolkit

Summarizing and reporting data about your website can be difficult to do in an engaging way. Data tables and complex visualizations from Google Analytics show larger trends, but don’t always communicate what users are doing on the page-level: Heatmaps can help you answer these questions. Many tools are low cost and easy to use, and […]
Why “Read More” is Less Effective

Rather than creating separate fields in our CMSs for titles and link text that reference the same destination content, we make the title the link. It’s easier to write, easier to scan, and better for screen readers. A win-win-win!
Why Do We Still Use Lorem Ipsum?

If you’ve ever worked on a website redesign project, you’ve read something like this:Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
Infinite Scroll: A Bad Idea for Usability and Accessibility

Though a common interaction on the web, infinite scroll causes problems for accessibility, usability, and performance. The cost to work around them is usually not worth the tradeoffs, and in the end, it can have a negative impact on the user experience.
Herding Cats (and Building Consensus) with Workshops

Building consensus can be hard. Really hard. Especially when you bring together a group of smart, opinionated people to develop a new approach or solve a problem. That’s why we use workshops.
Defeating the Monsters of Web Design

Maybe you remember the Monsters of Web Design? They’re the gnarly issues that menace your website, threatening to wreak havoc on your site (and your sanity). They’re back!
Selling UX: Lessons From The Firing Line

Ever had to fight for the budget to do real audience research? Convince someone of the value of usability testing? Explain how your research informed the design you created? We took a huge gamble in 2005 when we sold Virginia Tech on the idea of doing mental models to inform their redesign. Since that initial […]