The secret to winning fans and pleasing customers might just be simplicity of design. We talked to a trio of user-experience pros about how they create intuitive (and highly successful) products.

Conveying user research findings so people can understand them, believe them, and know how to act on your recommendations can be challenging. And providing enough detail without boring your audience is a difficult balance. But there are some best practices in communicating user research findings that can make them more effective—and even entertaining.

The Scent of a Site: A System for Analyzing and Predicting
Information Scent, Usage, and Usability of a Web Site

If the presentation of your content is attractive and easy to follow, visitors will likely stick around to read what you have to say, no matter where it is located on the page.

ClickTale, for me, is one of the best tools to use when you want to improve your website performance. However, it is difficult to find any guides on how to extract insight from the videos and heat-maps you are seeing

The Fogg Behavior Grid describes 15 ways behavior can change.

Agile does not mandate how to define concepts or overall design direction, but it is a great way to execute on solid design research and well laid plans. UCD needs to be flexible enough to respond to the reality on the ground when the implementation team encounters issues that mandate a different design solution. Document only what is needed to get the message across and co-locate if at all possible, because cross-disciplinary collaboration and face to face communication are vital. Working a sprint ahead of the development team is helpful in allowing the design team enough time to test and iterate. If these rules of engagement are followed, the two approaches can work very well together.

Video of a new kind of ATM from IDEO

How Starwood Builds Emotional Connections and Brand Loyalty Online

Here is some of the cognitive science behind why Angry Birds is a truly winning user experience.

I’ve saved large amounts of time working on process rather than output. I call these “invisible deliverables.

Inspired by Lean and Agile development theories, Lean UX is the practice of bringing the true nature of our work to light faster, with less emphasis on deliverables and greater focus on the actual experience being designed.

The Kano model is both a precious User Centered Design tool and a precious decision-making aid tool.

Persuasion in design is often regarded as a subset of UX, but it goes beyond UX and the mechanics of traditional usability. It’s about understanding the emotions that influence people’s behavior and decision-making, and then acting on that information to design compelling user interactions. Persuasive design applies psychological principles of influence, decision-making in a consumer context, engagement strategy, and social psychology to every stage of the design process, and it identifies potential barriers and emotional triggers to elicit the desired actions.

Designing websites for kids is a fascinating, challenging, rewarding, and exasperating experience: You’re trying to create a digital experience for people who lack the cognitive capacity to understand abstraction. You’re trying to establish brand loyalty with people who are influenced almost exclusively by their peers. And you’re trying to communicate subjective value propositions to people who can only see things in black-and-white.

Consider some ways that all users or groups within a system could enjoy shared recurring experiences.

Alphabetical list of all user experience evaluation methods in this collection.

Card sorting is one of the most fun methods in user research. People really enjoy organising things into groups according to how they'd like them to be categorised.

In my UX research practice, I learn about what people experience in real life and try to draw parallels to interactions with technology. Is there a way for designers to elicit raw positive feeling in the person who is using a design? Perhaps there are design patterns that UXers can look to as they develop the next great software products and web apps.

There are many things that large corporations can do to combat negative public perception of their brand—namely, improve their user experience!

This model predicted the reaction of users as the key elements of Flickr's personalized homepage propagated to other web sites. It predicted why users were initially delighted and why the delight faded over time. We find the Kano Model to be an indispensable tool for designers.

For UX leaders, … one of our most important functions: To win the support of our organizations’ senior leaders, thereby ensuring the strategic relevance of our UX teams.

The short answer is that OpenID is the worst possible "solution" I have ever seen in my entire life to a problem that most people don't really have. That's what's "wrong" with it.

Mobile appears to be identified as a critical part of an overall brand experience, and the survey results revealed that 76% of mobile application users agree that all brand name companies and organizations should have mobile apps to make shopping or interacting with them easier. However, 38% of mobile application users agree that they are not satisfied with most of the apps currently available from their favorite brand name companies/organizations, and 69% agree that if a brand name mobile app is not useful, helpful or easy to use it results in a negative perception about the brand.

Current advances in technology are being driven by consumers, not business, which is a marked change from how it used to be. And the thing about consumers is that they have high expectations and minimal patience. No studying manuals for them; it’s all point and click, drag and drop, shake and make.

Compressing multi-page wizards into a single page with an accordion. Users can complete forms like this faster and they perceive a simpler process.

Disney, UberCab, and many others show us it's possible to fill in the activity gaps to create great continuous experiences. They've made the investment and produced results that delight their customers and generate profitable returns. Is your organization ready to make that investment?

There are 7 main weapons of influence in the persuasion architect’s arsenal:
* Reciprocation * Commitment * Social Proof * Authority * Scarcity * Framing * Salience

Game mechanics is a part of design and usability – it’s a part of “understanding users”. Users today want to use useful software also as an end in itself. Producers really, deeply attentive to users understand this and provide tools and software that satisfy this need.

What should we know about an organization that will help us sell UX more effectively? What sort of questions should we ask about the organization, its people and its culture? What can we learn from organizations where UX has become part of the corporate DNA? What factors can increase our chances of promoting UX successfully to an organization now and in the future?

UX Professionals are not feeling valued enough to be included in the upfront strategic product planning to help drive product success.

As our UX profession matures, UX professionals are beginning to explore how they can help businesses design their strategy and better understand the kind of culture they need to design successful products.