Discovery Week is an experimental and learning process to look at the next phase of the Guardian's digital future. The plan for the week is for the various teams and departments within the Guardian to collaborate and build a wide variety of projects and then demo them across the organisation at the end of the process. There are five themes for the week: Content Journeys, Visual Design, Social, Live and Commercial. Teams from Google, Mozilla, and the Guardian's US office have travelled to work on one or more project within these themes.

Today, customers can interact with your storefront in various digital places--desktop, mobile, and tablet--and expect experiences tailored to where they do so. You can no longer simply build a website and assume your digital job is done. Here's how to build a digital strategy that makes sense across platforms

T-commerce tastes like it sounds. It's the use of television to facilitate transactions over the Internet. Research by PayPal in late 2011 found 49% of TV subscribers have interest in purchasing goods and services through their television or other "screen" like smartphones and tablets. At least 11 t-commerce initiatives are taking advantage of connected TV's transactional capabilities today

Verify is the fastest way to collect and analyze user feedback on screens or mocks. See where people click, what they remember, or how they feel.

Andy Weissman, a partner at Union Square Ventures, laid out his firm's investment thesis this morning. USV has invested in grand slams like Zynga and Twitter. It is also an investor in Tumblr, Etsy and Foursquare. Weissman's colleague Brad Burnham tweeted the essence of the firm: "Large networks of engaged users, differentiated through user experience, and defensible through network effects."

The new business meeting was going swimmingly-that is, until the client started asking questions about our design process. Then we unleashed our lexicon of specialized user experience (UX) research terminology. Why should we do that thing you called...what was it, task analysis? We'd like some of those personas. They're important, right? What the heck is contextual inquiry?! As mental models flew about the room, I realized how hard it is for clients to understand the true value of UX research. As much as I'd like to tell my clients to go read The Elements of User Experience and call me back when they're done, that won't cut it in a professional services environment. The whole team needs a common language and a philosophy that's easy to grok.

Practical tips and tricks to better survey design

You may be thinking, oh no, not another Pinfographic! This week's infographic takes a look at why both etailers and content marketers should take this exploding social network seriously. I've said it before, I'll say it once more - Pinterest is a social network not about what people are doing, but about the things that people want to consume. And it already refers more traffic than Twitter. The network is growing beyond the Midwest. Though still predominantly female, the entrance of well-known brands are drawing more and more XY chromosomes. So who are you talking to and how should you plant your flag? Maxymizer's pinfographic has some great pinformation.

Screen sharing tool

Screen sharing tool

Nielsen Norman paper

Nielsen Norman report on iPad usability

Diary Study Program

Why did you click on this blog post? Right now, you're probably able to answer that question with relative ease. Micro-surveys are short and to the point. Similar to the question above, they only have one or two questions and they're extremely targeted. This means that they're not only easy to answer, but easy to create, implement, and analyze. If your company is practicing agile, or just trying to move quickly, you can easily integrate micro-surveys into your existing schedule.

Usability and user experience testing is vital to creating a successful website, and only more so if it's an e-commerce website, a complex app or another website for which there's a definite ROI. And running your own user tests to find out how users are interacting with your website and where problems might arise is completely possible.

Originally published: May 11, 2004 Back in the late 1970's, the US government commissioned a study to look at effective group decision making. In the study, they asked 30 military experts to study intelligence data and try to construct the enemy's troop movements. Each expert analyzed the data and compiled a report.

UX practitioners, both consultants and in house, sometimes conduct research. Be it usability testing or user research with a generative goal, research requires planning. To make sure product managers, developers, marketers and executives (let's call them stakeholders) act on UX research results, planning must be crystal clear, collaborative, fast and digestible.

This Sample Size Calculator is presented as a public service of Creative Research Systems survey software. You can use it to determine how many people you need to interview in order to get results that reflect the target population as precisely as needed. You can also find the level of precision you have in an existing sample.

If you are a UX professional, you've probably struggled at times to get your voice heard. Between ladder-climbing product managers, cowboy engineers, and a workload that leaves you out of breath every day, rising above the shenanigans of corporate life can be a challenge. All you really want to do is design truly amazing experiences for your customers, but the politics and red tape of your workplace get in the way. Or do they? It's easy to blame the "system," but in reality, we all control our own destinies. The following tips will help you take control, especially if you work on a product team in a corporate setting. Using any combination of these strategies will help you push past your day-to-day challenges to have an even bigger impact on your team.