UIE Brain Sparks

SEO and User Experience shouldn't be at odds with one another. That's what Vanessa Fox and Tamara Adlin tell us in this week's SpoolCast with Jared Spool.

Leah Buley discusses her latest findings in her work with small teams and solo UXers with our Jared Spool.

Scenarios are comprehensive stories that describe the way a persona would interacts with your product or service. If there is a grand dutchess of personas, scenarios, and design processes, it's Kim Goodwin. That's why we asked Kim to do a workshop on turning user research into action at UI15. Jared Spool spoke with her to preview that workshop, and clear up confusion surrounding scenarios in this podcast.

To give you a taste of Luke Wroblewski's upcoming UI15 talk, Jared Spool had a chance to speak with him about some of the latest trends, good and bad, in web input.

Today we're revisiting search patterns by sharing the followup podcast Jared Spool recorded with Mark Burrell of Endeca. Jared and Mark discuss a few bonus questions from the previous Virtual Seminar. Included in the full post are a few highlights from the podcast.

Jared Spool chats with Nathan Curtis about the reuse and standardization of components that make up your web site.

This week, calling in from beautiful Salt Lake City, Utah, is Grady Kelly. Grady is inspired by Seth Godin's new book, Linchpin. He wants to know how UX professionals can work to become indispensable team members and not just another cog in the machine.

Joe Sokohl calls in with a question about using distributed teams on UX projects. Robert Hoekman and Jared Spool have plenty to say on the topic!

Hugh Griffith from Boise asks Jared and Robert, what happens when you swap radio buttons and checkboxes with more stylish graphic replacements?

Web applications can get wild. You know the kind; something that's on your corporate intranet with an obscure purpose, hundreds of screens and some kind of navigation kudzu growing in every direction. Hagan Rivers is one of our favorite wranglers of such apps. Listen to a sample of Hagan's Escaping Navigation Hell from the Web App Masters Tour in this episode of the SpoolCast.

Our guest Jon Wold from Oslo brings up a really great point about test results: It’s hard to report on problems without providing suggestions for correcting the problems you observe in testing. Tune in to get Jared and Robert's suggestions on the topic.

It's becoming common to see behavioral cues in everyday web applications. Stephen Anderson is the first person we think of when it comes to these kinds of interactions. Stephen is an independent consultant and creator of the Mental Notes, a set of reference cards with design insights from the world of psychology. Stephen is one of the most popular speakers at the Web App Masters Tour and we want to share a sample of his talk, Designing Seductive Business Apps.

We tell our clients this constantly: the organizations who are most successful are the ones who are on intimate terms with how and why their customers use their product. But how? To answer that question, we invited our friend Steve Portigal to host a UIE Virtual Seminar recently on the topic of interviewing. In this podcast we revisit the topic and answer several remaining questions from his seminar.

It seems we've failed to offend our international audience sufficiently, so this week we'll try again by chatting with Jay Vidyarthi, a designer hailing form Montréal, Québec, Canada. Jay is working on a project with social design aspects. He's helping design a site where the goal is to build "an involved and contributing community of users." He wants to know if there are any user experience techniques to encourage participation.

Bill Scott's Designing for Interesting Moments was one of the highlights of the first stop on UIE's Web App Masters tour, in San Diego. We wanted everyone to benefit from his research into web interactions, so we're bringing you this audio and visual sample.