Understanding what beginners, intermediate and expert users need — I never fully understood one aspect of personas, technological expertise, until it was the focus of my design.

Three factors that help persuade your users that your organization is worth engaging with — I realized that I didn’t know much about garnering trust as an organization until I had to design an “About Us” page. “About Us” pages are weird, especially since many people might not pay attention to them while using a company’s site. …

How to address ‘doorknob questions’ that might give you crucial users insights — Sometimes, the last fifteen seconds of a user interview can be the most shocking and insightful. One of your last user interview or testing questions is likely to be, “Is there anything else you would like to tell me about?” Most of the time, the user will likely say no…

How to design to best support your user’s content — Sometimes, you’ll find that your website’s focus isn’t specifically on the product but instead on what users do with it. This is when you’ll want to design pages that emphasize your community. This tends to take the form of a Featured Content page, an Online Marketplace, or some Community page. …

What you should do if no one knows how to write good copy — My writing habit and UX work crossed paths when I did UX writing for a re-designed website. One thing you’ll encounter when working with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) is that they often spent a ton of time working in specific environments and using certain terminology. As a result, they’re often…

Finding a way in to a specialized community is important — Recruiting people isn’t my favorite part of the user research process: coordinating e-mails, setting up conference lines, and wrangling people can feel like a chore. But it can be a necessary part of the research process, especially if you don’t have a recruiter to help gather participants for user testing. …

Marketing people are a great resource for UX to answer tricky questions — Working as a UX designer means you’re often exposed to several different team members for your projects. These often involve team members like developers, product owners, and various subject matter experts. However, sometimes you’ll find yourself working with team members you don’t often encounter. This was the case when I…

Asking users to “Schedule a Demo” requires more than one page — Keeping important points ‘above the fold’ was one of those fundamental design rules I always followed until I had to break it. The ‘fold,’ in recent times, has become more of a concept rather than a hard measurement. With our users having a wide range of devices and screen resolutions…

Evaluating your competitor’s designs help you understand what might be important. — If you’re designing something and are entirely new to a field, conducting a shortened competitive analysis is one of the best ways to find your footing. Competitive analyses tend to be a little controversial, as you’ll often hear axioms like don’t do a competitive analysis before conducting user research. This…