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Column: Envision the Future

UXmatters has published 12 editions of the column Envision the Future.

Top 3 Trending Envision the Future Columns

  1. Malware: Whether on the Desktop or the Web, It’s a Perception Thing

    Envision the Future

    The role UX professionals play

    A column by Paul J. Sherman
    September 8, 2008

    Since the advent of the World Wide Web and the growth of ecommerce, social networking, and Web-based applications, greater connectedness and interaction have characterized the personal-computing user experience, both between users and between users and their far-flung applications and systems. It’s not a very daring prediction to say that the amount of connectedness and interaction will continue to increase, offering users many new varieties of user experiences.

    In this column, I’ll explore the user experience of malicious software, or malware. My position is that, like many qualitative attributes, malware is in the eye of the beholder. And, I’ll suggest a method that product or service developers can use to assess the risk that their users, the media, or the market at large might perceive their offerings as malware. Read More

  2. Your Design Is Infringing On My Patent: The Case Against User Interface and Interaction Model Patents and Intellectual Property

    Envision the Future

    The role UX professionals play

    A column by Paul J. Sherman
    July 10, 2007

    Imagine, if you will, that you’re working for a small Web-application startup. For the sake of argument, let’s say the company wants to build a Web-based application to help product marketers and brand managers—the primary user group—manage and maintain the digital assets for their company’s products and services.

    Further assume the application would also allow users to publish updated digital collateral to the distribution channel—that is, resellers such as retail stores and ecommerce sites who sell a company’s products.

    The startup has asked you to create a user interface for this Web application, and you’ve struggled for weeks to come up with an elegant, efficient way for users to quickly and efficiently upload, manage, and publish a wide variety of digital collateral, including product box shots, spec sheets, warranties, coupons, rebates, and so on. Read More

  3. Aligning UX Issues’ Levels of Severity with Business Objectives

    Envision the Future

    The role UX professionals play

    A column by Paul J. Sherman
    October 4, 2010

    Many of us in the field people now generally refer to as user experience have long used levels of severity as a means of indicating the criticality of a product’s or service’s usability issues to clients.

    Over the past several years, I’ve grown increasingly dissatisfied with the vague and somewhat solipsistic nature of the gradations UX professionals typically use to describe the severity of usability issues. High, medium, and low don’t begin to sufficiently explain the potential brand and business impacts usability issues can have.

    After incrementally iterating on several existing classifications of severity, I finally decided in late 2008 to simply create some new ones, which I’ll present in this column. For lack of a better term, I call them business-aligned usability ratings. Read More

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