New job: reshaping the pension experience
Last week I joined a Copenhagen based fintech startup on a bold mission to redefine pension. You know, that black box phenomenon most of us struggle to relate to even though it’s effectively the financial backbone of our old age?
That’s what we want to change. We want to change the entire idea of what a…
Read moreGetting started with hypothesis driven design and why you should
The assumptions held by everyone involved in a product development process are dangerous for one simple reason: they might be wrong.
Hello Group experience designers on a hypothesis driven design project
Whether it’s a digital product, architecture, urban planning, social innovation or classical product…
Read moreThe minimum viable product comes with a maximum of confusion
Startups have taught us a thing or two about product development in recent years. Particularly the idea of the minimum viable product (MVP) has made a huge impact all the way to creative agencies, product development teams, and sometimes even top level management.
One of the core ideas of the MVP approach…
New job at Hello Group
In exactly a week I’ll start working in my new position as UX Design Lead at Hello Group!
Hello Group is a strategic design company with lots of talented people that I look forward to meeting and lots of interesting projects that I look forward to working on.
Read moreWhat does it take to design the user experience of a virtual or mixed reality?
Looking at something like Magic Leap, it’s obvious that something very extraordinary is about to happen in the world of digital experiences.
Image courtesy of Magic Leap.
Pushed forward by the gaming industry and legacy media like New York Times and The Guardian, virtual reality has already established…
Read moreWorking in teams with atomic design using a Sketch template file, symbolic links and Dropbox
I work in a department with two multidisciplinary scrum teams, each team with two designers. We’re currently working on a big project using atomic design. That’s all good.
Sketch is a good tool for atomic design, especially when using a shared template file via Dropbox.
As designers, we needed a way of…
Read moreAd blockers and the failed user experience of online advertising
In the first part of Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s trilogy about the harsh lives of Icelandic fishermen around the turn of the twentieth century, the main character Bardur grabs a local Reykjavik newspaper.
Old image of a fishing village in Iceland. Photo: Wikipedia
After a while he mutters something like…
Read moreWho controls the user experience in the age of distributed content?
For a long time editors and designers have produced their magazines, daily newspapers and websites based on editorial and aesthetic considerations and done so with a large degree of control over the user experience.
Until recently “the website” has been the primary digital channel for distribution of…
Read moreHow to avoid ux design trends and why you should
As digital designers we make design decisions all the time, but sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we just imitate trends in order to make something look cool instead of reflecting or thinking.
In our pursuit to make jaw-dropping designs we turn to the stuff that make us drop our own jaws and then we copy…
Read moreInput validation is still an ambiguous design pattern
Recently I had to design something of a digital design classic: form input validation. In the early days of the web, notifying the user that the input he or she had typed was erroneous, was handled by a javascript alertbox. It would even make a nasty sound by default on windows computers as far as I…
Read moreThe importance of designing empty states
When designing digital products with dynamic content, it’s tempting to design for the user who’s been using the product for a while. Designing a stream of content that has content in it just somehow seems like a more natural or more interesting point of departure than designing an empty stream of content.…
Read moreRecommended: The New York Times Cooking
Earlier this year, The New York Times launched their beta version of The New York Times Cooking, which is a vast collection of food recipes. 
It is the most impressive piece of user experience design I have seen in a long time. The visual design is stunning and the responsive solution provides a fantastic…
Read moreCan the digital IKEA effect increase user engagement and brand loyalty?
According to behavioral scientists Michael I. Norton, Daniel Mochon and Dan Ariely, people who participate in the creation of something tend to evaluate what they have created more positively than they would have done if they had not participated in it. This is referred to as the IKEA effect.
On a…
Read moreThe moment of clarity: How to avoid internet enabled fridges using thick data. Inspiring thoughts from ReD Associates.
The Danish consultancy ReD Associates specializes in innovation and strategy based on social science. Not the usual run-of-the-mill survey or ditto focus group, but real rigorous social science applied to the world of business via sociology and anthropology. The stuff that creates “thick data” rather than…
Read moreA new tool for interaction designers: Origami from Facebook
All interactions design tools I have tried leaves a gap between the final product and the ideas that the design deliverables try to illustrate.
Sometimes the gap is small, sometimes it’s big, but developers, designers, stakeholders and users can all agree that this gap should be minimized.
When Facebook…
Read moreLightweight team projects: Axure custom libraries and Dropbox
When designing in Axure, I often need to collaborate with other designers. Until recently I would achieve this by creating a team project in Axure and place the working file on a shared drive or in a cloud based repository. In my opinion, this approach has some severe limitations and annoyances though.
The…
Read moreUsing Evernote to share designs with colleagues and stakeholders
For years I have been looking for an ideal way to share designs with people. However, I never really found a good solution up until a couple of weeks ago when my colleagues and I started using Evernote as a design sharing tool. It’s not perfect, but unlike most other tools I have tried, it does a really…
Read moreDesigning Magasinet: a new rich content format at Politiken
My colleague and I have designed a new section on Politiken that invites stories to be told in more rich and exiting ways than what can be achieved in usual content templates.
Magasinet is the new digital flagship of Politiken and after months of iterative prototyping and fine tuning, I really look…
Read moreProductivity tip: use font awesome for prototyping in Axure
When working with rapid prototyping it’s important not to indulge yourself in details in the beginning of a project.
However, as you move along you often want to increase the fidelity of your prototype and as a part of that process, you might sometimes want to use icons.
Earlier, I would usually look for…
Read moreBook recommendation: why we fail by Victor Lombardi
I just read a really good book about experience design. It’s called Why we fail and it’s written by Victor Lombardi. As the title says, the book asks the question of why some experience designs fails while others succeed.
A question like that could be answered in many ways and on many levels, but Victor…
Read moreIs the new design trend in visual storytelling good for telling stories?
The combination of fullscreen images, elegant use of good typography, chaptered navigation, odd grids and fancy microinteractions form a new trend in digital journalism.
It looks fantastic and allows stories to be told in a more rich way than the usual, generic content templates and though they provide a…
Read moreThe broken information architecture of Netflix content exploration. Or why multiple categories suck
When browsing for content in Netflix, I have always noticed that the same titles appear again and again across categories.
This is annoying for several reasons. First of all because browsing categories is the Netflix interface per se. Secondly because categories tend to loose their meaning if they are…
Read moreMofibo: a danish spotify for books
Some months ago, I wrote about Readmill: the social ebook reading experience. I praised the design and the overall user experience, but at the same time I argued that because I have so many physical books and so few ebooks, I needed Readmill (or someone else) to create a Spotify for books rather than just…
Read moreAxure 7: my favorite features so far
A new version of one of my most frequently used tools has been beta-released: the much awaited Axure 7.
One of the main features, which I guess is also one of the main reasons why the release is somewhat delayed is the ability to work with responsive prototypes.
It’s too early for me to say whether Axure…
Read moreGoing to EuroIA in Edinburgh
A colleague and I will be attending the Annual European Information Architecture Conference in Edinburgh. The entire conference programme looks very promising, but the following talks seem particularly interesting from my point of view:
- Future Reading — New Reading Spaces and Emerging Patterns for…
The ergonomics of the three line navigation pattern: left or right
Providing good, clean and simple navigation on small screens is still a big challenge for interaction designers, especially when working on large websites with complex content hierarchies.I have discussed this topic earlier, but this time I will focus on the three line navigation pattern. You know, the…
Read moreResponsive Easter Egg by Alistapart
It’s been three years since @ethanmarcotte wrote his legendary article on responsive design, which sparked a revolution in the world of user experience design and frontend development. The image below is from that original article.
Responsive design has since become a de facto, best practice…
Read moreIntroducing the metered model at Politiken
At Politiken, we have been working hard to finish our interpretation of the metered model, which means that from this day on, we will be charging money for the high-quality journalistic content that Politiken produces. The video below shows the campaign animation made by Philip Ytournel.
The user…
Read moreThe horrible user experience of security questions: the future of authentication?
What was the name of you first pet? What is your mother’s maiden name? Where were you born? Who is your favorite author or your favorite historical person? What was the name of your first school teacher?
These are all real examples of questions that users are confronted with when using systems that make…
Read moreVoice controlled interfaces: the end of interaction design as we know it?
Like millions of other people, I was mesmerized by a recent video from Google that shows the technologically impressive Google Glass. However, what puzzled me the most, was not the vast possibilities of the glasses themselves, but rather the fact that they are controlled by voice alone.
This made me…
Read moreReadmill: the social ebook reading experience
I recently discovered Readmill, which is an interesting and extremely welldesigned app that attempts to add a social layer to your ebook reading experience.
The concept is very simple. You sign up using Facebook or twitter. You follow other people in order to discover new things to read and in order to…
Read moreDon’t use software for user experience design
When using a computer to build prototypes for user experience design, you are bound to loose yourself in a world of details. At least I often do.
Even though I use tools that are designed for rapid prototyping (whether it’s Axure, Fireworks or simply html, css and javascript) such tools still make me think…
Read moreReverse skeuomorphism: the case of our washing machine
2012 was the year when skeuomorphism became part of everyone’s vocabulary, mainly because of Apple’s much discussed visual interface of its calendar application that tries to imitate Steve Jobs’ preferred color of leather in his private jet and more generally tries to imitate analogous calendars. In…
Read moreAre mobile users less interested in music, tennis and books?
Navigation on websites that have lots of content is tricky in the era of small screens. Proven design patterns from the old desktop world that we usually rely on in order to organize content, do not work very well in smaller contexts.
However, user experience designers tend to agree that content is more…
Read moreMerry uxmas
A few days ago, I stumbled upon UXMAS which is a user experience advent calendar. So far, it has enlightened me with Jared M. Spools talk on how the kano model can inspire ux strategy and a rant about the stupid design of many payment form designs.
UXmas is made by Thirst Studios and UX Mastery and…
Read moreJesse James Garret on the maturing of user experience design
In an interview with Brian Solis, Jesse James Garrett, the founder of Adaptive Path and author of The Elements of User Experience talks about user experience design and the way it has shifted from simple interface design towards a more holistic perspective, where imagined experiences are at the heart of…
Read moreUser Experience Design is a slippery concept. But that’s good.
Back when I studied sociology, it always struck me how obsessed academic sociologists were with defining the field of sociology. The fundamental question “what is sociology” was a very important one that occupied (and probably still does occupy) many sociologists around the world.
In the field of…
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