Articles about Editor’s Note

Editor’s Note: The Question of Motivation

UX (magazine logo)

We ask users about their motivation, but this theme also applies to our own work as researchers, designers, managers, and team members. [Read More]

Editor’s Note: UX as a Goal

UX (magazine logo)

A look at the many ways UX is a goal in our work. [Read More]

Editor’s Note: Collaboration for Survival and Creativity

The ability of ants to work together to build colonies, communicate, and even survive floods is an inspiring model of collaboration, with lessons for UX. [Read More]

Editor’s Note: In Search of Inspiration

UX (magazine logo)

Inspiration comes from many sources. This issue explores ideas that can stimulate creativity, from experiences in Kyrgyzstan to new work habits for productivity. [Read More]

Editor’s Note: Let’s Talk About User Experience Careers

UX

Learn to successfully navigate your UX career with this collection of articles. There is valuable advice for everyone from junior to senior UXers. [Read More]

Announcing User Experience Online

Handwritten design notes

Beginning now, each new issue will also be available online, right here, in a site that will work on your laptop or mobile phone. The magazine archives are available to the entire UX community, for open access. [Read More]

Editor’s Note: Reality Trumps Preconceptions

UX

Six views on the role of trust in user experience, from professionals who are working to develop on-the-ground definitions of that T word. [Read More]

Editor’s Note: What’s in a Name?

UXPA

UPA has changed its name to UXPA—the User Experience Professionals’ Organization. [Read More]

Editor’s Note: The World is Mobile

UX

The theme for this issue is Beyond Books. It has a nice balance of research- and design-related topics, ranging from note-taking, making sense of user feedback, and report writing to designing for entertainment and persuasion. [Read More]

Editor’s Note: Behind the Scenes

UX

Are you interested in adding a working editor’s notch to your resumé? Our volunteer staff is always interested in growing with new talent. [Read More]

Editor’s Note: Audience Participation Please

UX

The theme for this issue is Beyond Books. It has a nice balance of research- and design-related topics, ranging from note-taking, making sense of user feedback, and report writing to designing for entertainment and persuasion. [Read More]

Editor’s Note: Games, Gameplay,
 and Gamification

UX

Game design has come a long way. Game-conscious UX, whether in traditional games or gamified-applications, will play an important role in the future. [Read More]

Editor’s Note: Short and Tweet

UX

Our Editor’s Notes usually focus on a theme, but this issue (gasp) doesn’t have a theme! Instead, there is something here for everyone. [Read More]

Editor’s Note: Designing for Social Change

UX

This issue’s theme of “Designing for Social Change” focuses on the challenge of UX design for constructive social change. [Read More]

Editor’s Note: Combining Children, Technology, and Usability

UX

This issue addresses our understanding and insights into how children interact with technology and how usability professionals can include children in the design process. [Read More]

Editor’s Note: Communicating the Usability Message Around the World

UX (magazine logo)

This issue's theme of “Communication” bring the experiences of contributors in several international settings to our global community of readers. [Read More]

UXPA International Conference: Moving UX Toward the Future

UXPA

This issue of UX follows the most recent UPA International conference, which was held in Munich, Germany in May, 2010. One of the things about our field that I find so interesting is the amazing breadth of topics that we need to know about. Lucky for us, the field is also such an inclusive one—organizationally […] [Read More]

User Experience: What? So What? What Now?

UX (magazine logo)

“User Experience” is a phrase that seems to be catching on in many places. But what does it mean? [Read More]

Editor’s Note: Why Usable Accessibility?

UX (magazine logo)

Say the word “accessibility” in a room full of usability professionals and you will get many reactions. For some it’s a cause. To others, it’s yet another requirement that has to be met. For many of the authors in this issue, it is simply part of usability. The ISO 9241-20 standard agrees, defining accessibility as […] [Read More]

Editor’s Note: Transitions at UX Magazine

UXPA

This issue of User Experience brings with it a set of transitions. As last issue’s readers learned, former editor-in-chief Aaron Marcus has stepped down and we have flattened the UPA Publications hierarchy by not replacing him—in part, because he’s irreplaceable. As director of publications, I have accepted the challenge to integrate our UPA Publications portfolio, […] [Read More]

Editor’s Note: User Experience Development: What? So What? Now What?

In this issue, we seek to integrate the worlds of UX and software development in order to create better products, services, and user experiences. [Read More]

Editor’s Note: Greening the User Experience, and Goodbye

UX (magazine logo)

Achieving sustainability, reducing one’s carbon footprint, “going green,” whatever one might call it, has gone from being a peripheral concern supported by a relative few—but dedicated—group of people, to a mainstream issue, talked, videoed, printed, blogged, and Twittered about among the masses on a daily basis…thanks in part to those earlier savants and prophets, but […] [Read More]

Editor’s Note: A Gourmet Meal of Content, Context, and Analysis Awaits You

The worldwide economy is suffering greatly. Consequently, many corporate, government, educational, and organizational budgets have become diminished. That situation always affects new product development and, with it, the decisions to undertake a variety of usability and user-experience activities—from ethnographic observations, contextual and task analyses, to usability tests, remote testing, and many other usability evaluation and […] [Read More]

Editor’s Note: Forms and Usability

This issue of UX explores forms, one of the most ubiquitous but under-noticed areas of usability among technology-oriented interactive communication. Where would we be if we could not log on to our computers or email systems, order products or services, search for data, and compare the results? In some cases, these displays of text, graphics, […] [Read More]

Editors’ Note: A Fascination with Forms

A few years ago, when we needed a book on usable forms to recommend to a client, there was little available. Now there are several, two of which (one our own) are reviewed in this issue. In the course of researching our book, we came across Robert Barnett, the distinguished Australian leader in the world […] [Read More]

Editor’s Note: Platinum Perspectives on Usability and User Experience

The role of seniors have important implications for the policies and focus of attention for our professional organizations and daily life. [Read More]

Editor’s Note: Mobility, Usability, and Transportation: Design a Go-Go

UX (magazine logo)

This issue explores how transportation impacts culture and society and to examine how people interact with vehicles, infrastructure, technologies, security, and finding their way through an environment. [Read More]

Editor’s Note: Think Locally, Test Remotely

Remote testing, the special concern of this issue, is increasingly important to usability professionals. [Read More]

Editor’s Note: Remote Testing: Less Time, More Reach, and More Participants

Five years ago, when the term remote testing was brought into a conversation between usability practitioners, everyone knew what it meant. The moderator of a usability test was located in the lab and the participant was not. [Read More]

Editor’s Note: A Blurring of Boundaries

One hot topic within the user-experience and usability professions, as UX readers understand it, is how we relate to the worlds of marketing, market research, marketing communications, and branding. Almost all of our sister/brother professions—like industrial/product design, user-interface/interaction design, graphic/visual design, and ethnography/social research—have faced a growing blurring of boundaries of profession-definitions, principles, and techniques. […] [Read More]

Editor’s Note: User and Market Research

At the risk of oversimplifying, most marketing professionals would probably say there is no difference between a vertical market and what usability professionals call a specific user profile or persona. Marketing’s traditional focus is on demographic information supported by large sample sizes. User research, on the other hand, traditionally focuses more on the specific user’s […] [Read More]

Editor’s Note: The Greening of World Usability

This issue of User Experience introduces 2008 with a rich set of articles from a wide range of real-world perspectives. Rick Starbuck, Washington Mutual Bank, USA, shows us how user-centered design achieves bottom-line business success. Jerrod Larson, University of Washington, USA, analyzes why some companies make poor decisions about software usability. Anu Kankainen, Idean, Finland, […] [Read More]

Editor’s Note: Usability and Medical Systems

This issue of User Experience seeks to drive home the importance of usability, usefulness, and appeal—the full range of user-experience development—for medical systems and for healthcare delivery in general. [Read More]

Editor’s Note: Coming Soon to a Screen Near You

This issue’s theme focuses on usability and user-experience issues of interactive and mobile video, informing us about many new technology developments that make headlines in our daily news media. We all have our childhood experiences of viewing television and of using the phone. What happens when these two media are combined, and the experience becomes […] [Read More]

Editor’s Note: Usability and Sociability for Mobile and Pervasive Interactive Television

Interactive Television (iTV) is slowly replacing the traditional “passive” TV platform due to better audio/video quality and interactive services such as electronic program guides (EPG) and communication services, made possible by a set-top box with a return channel. These new interactive services allow viewers to actively participate, and substantially influence, their experience with television and […] [Read More]

Time to Get Moving!

I’m excited and grateful for the opportunity to share the work of UPA’s Usability in the Enterprise project with the broader usability community. This issue of UX is the culmination of nearly three years of work by more than 100 members of the UPA family. The objective of our research is also the objective of […] [Read More]

Editor’s Note: Making Ourselves Usable, Useful, and Appealing

We know that our profession is concerned with making products and services more usable, useful, and appealing so that end-users have a better user experience. The same can be said about what we ourselves need to accomplish within our own business environment. We need to learn how to make sure that our clients have a […] [Read More]

With Access for Many, a New Way to Govern

Could the founders of the United States of America have envisioned what the Internet, telecommunications, and the PC enable in terms of government organization, publications, and the electoral process? Were they alive today, visionaries like Thomas Jefferson might have been keenly interested in technology that influences education and the electoral process, and Benjamin Franklin might […] [Read More]