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It sounds like common sense but it’s always worth remembering, you should conduct research to watch people actually using your product. Once you start to get an idea of how your audience navigate your product you’ll come up with loads of improvements you can make.

Shazam have obviously done this and it’s resulted in a small but very nice feature. Read the full review

I’ve lost count of the times I’ve read articles or comments from designers moaning about clients making their life a misery. Usually, the people making these points tend to have numerous experiences from which to draw upon. The one thing staying consistent in all of their stories is them.

I’m here to tell you it can be different, but first you have to stop thinking of your client as inferior to you and instead except them for what they are, far more experienced in their business than you are.

I’ve always known involving your clients early in the design process leads to a far smoother client relationship and eventually far better work but a recent case study has proved such a success I wanted to share it with you. Read the full review

I’ve never been a fan of light boxes, they do have their uses, but in general they cause usability issues and seem to be used to please clients rather than being the right thing to do. On the iPad light boxes are even worse so I was pleased to find a delightful alternative from eBay. Read the full review

A lot has been said about the aesthetics of the current mac calendar app with a lot of people thinking apple have taken skeuomorphism too far. However, if you stop thinking about how it looks and focus on the features, there’s a lot to like about it. Read the full review

You may have noticed a whole host of new design elements being added to the Foursquare in recent weeks. These new designs seem to be moving Foursquare into a new direction, putting less attention on the point system and more emphasis on exploring the location. Read the full review

You may have heard about the launch of a social decision making engine called Seesaw. It’s a simple idea allowing you to post mini polls to your friends to get their advice. It’s a neat app and you should check it out, but I wanted to talk about the sign up process. Read the full review

If the only thing you produce before diving into design or code is a wireframe, then you’re not a UX designer.

Instead, you’re a clever designer who has realized wireframes or sketches are a great way to quickly explore various solutions without wasting too much time on the design details.

To truly add some form of UX terminology to your CV you need to do far more than just wireframes. Depending on the budget and time constraints you should also be doing stakeholder interviews, competitor analysis, card sorts, personas, brand personas, task analysis, mental models, user flows, depth interviews, remote testing, user testing etc. As a UX designer you should be spending time thinking about, you know, the user and their experience, not just focusing all of your time on the interface.

By all means sketch and make wireframes, just don’t tell people you’re ‘do’ UX because of that.

It’s the little things in life that really make a difference. Those extra details that really make experiences a delight. The use of emoticons on the windows phone messaging tile is an example of a detail I love. Read the full review

I’ve spent the Christmas holidays trying to persuade my family to use Skype more as a way of video calling. After getting them interested, I downloaded the Skype app for Windows phone to show them how it worked and found a beautiful little animation that really made me smile. Read the full review

During my Nokia Lumia 920 tests, I needed to find an alternative app for my Pocket account. Sadly an official Pocket app hasn’t been released yet but luckily I found the app Articles, which seemed to do everything I needed it to, albeit not quite as nicely as Pocket does it.

All that aside, I did receive the most pointless error message ever while using it today, and wanted to share it. I was happily reading an article I had saved for later, when I was shown a “Generic server error message” which I had to click on to dismiss. What a stupid message that is.

Good error messages should explain, in a human manner (not using default computer/developer language) exactly what problem has occurred and if possible help the reader to rectify it. This message does neither and I hope I wont see it ever again.