Category: User Research and Experience

Silicon Valley has a UX Problem

Warning: This contains major spoilers if you arent caught up with HBOs Silicon Valley. Ive waited two weeks: I hope you are all caught up

Getting stakeholders to agree on things

We get asked this question all the time: How do you get stakeholders to agree during a project? Its a good one. A really good one. It might be the the most important question to ask when youre trying to do something new.

5 Keys to Writing Great Web Copy

Weve seen it all: the good, the bad and the achingly terrible. Writing anything, especially your own copy is one of the hardest things to do for most people. Its the thing that blows our timelines all the time and the thing that seems to scoot down the to-do list again and again. Weve changed how we work a little to get ahead of this, but we see the same issues pop up all the time.

Stop telling me where to click

Sometime near the beginning of links on the internet, people decided that click here was a good way to get people to click there. If I had to guess, the reason for this is probably that at the beginning of the internet people didnt know what links were, so you had to explicitly tell them to click here. The good news is that now its 20 years later, and people know what to do when they see links. Here are some reasons you should change your click here ways…

Donate ButtonsRoundup

We work with a lot of nonprofit and education clients, and one of the biggest questions we always face is, “What should we do with the donate button?” It’s a tricky business asking the public for money. The organization generally wants and needs people to donate, but how can we appeal to the public without seeming entirely desperate? Well, let’s see how the big guys do it, and decide if what they’re doing is effective.

Taking donations online: Making your website do the work for you

If youre a nonprofit organization, you probably already take donations on your website. There are so many payment receiving options: GiftTool, PayPal, Authorize.net, its barely even worth going through them all. Just make sure you arent being charged a fortune per transaction!

Why we write user guides

In 1999, I bought a manual transmission car without ever driving one before. It was small, black, shiny, had a spoiler and I was sure I looked great in it. The salesperson showed me how to drive it in the dealership parking lot and somehow I made it home. The next day I drove it from Des Moines, IA to Chicago, IL.