You’ve probably read at least one book that has changed your life. For many UX designers, there are certain books that helped them decide to enter this industry. Reading books has made my life better – it has helped me transition into UX, become a better communicator, improve my health, and countless other benefits I don’t have room…

Customer: “Wait, I thought this place closes at 11pm?” Barista: “No, we close at 6” C: “But Yelp says 11pm!” B: “Yeah…that’s weird. Sorry.” This is a real interaction I overheard at the local coffee shop, but not the first time I’ve seen this interaction unfold. As a coffee & tea lover, it’s hard for me…

On the drive home today, I listened to an incredible episode of This American Life (you can listen to it directly for free). The story is about Daniel Kish, a blind man who bikes, runs, and operates just as freely as those who can see. But this story is much more about a blind man. It’s about the…

Throughout most of our academic careers, we’ve been taught that copying is a bad thing. Getting caught copying an author’s work is considered plagiarism. Copying someone else during an exam can lead to expulsion. So it’s not a surprise that we have negative associations with copying, even to this day. But what about copying as…

A few weeks ago, I took a weekend to redesign one of my favorite sites, Hacker News. Having not done a redesign in a while, I knew the first thing I had to do was establish some baseline of why I was motivated to redesign the site. Original HN Design: news.ycombinator.com My HN Redesign:  TL;DR…

this post is inspired from a conversation with a UXB subscriber, who asked… I feel overwhelmed with the number of things to learn in UX. There’s visual design, usability testing, information architecture…not to mention skills like coding. Where do I start? Indeed, learning UX isn’t necessarily the smoothest user experience itself. One Google search can easily…

In a competitive UX job market, those who pay attention to the details and ask the high-level questions stand out. Questions like: Do our designs solve problems in the best possible way?  Here’s a quick and effective framework to answer that very question: Know Your Usability Laws + Test Your Designs  It sounds simple, but you’d be surprised…

For those of you who want a solid intro to user experience in a traditional class setting, UCLA Extension puts forth a damn good offering. I’ll be writing specifically about my experience with the Fall 2012 User Experience Design course taught by professors Jaime Levy and Mark Sloan. Both professors are extremely talented and run…