UX Articles

We’re curious people by nature. And we love to teach others what we’ve learned. So explore our blog to gain fresh insights from our expertise in areas ranging from culture to AI.

SEP Wins TechPoint’s 2025 Exceptional Employer Mira Award

SEP Recognized as Indiana’s Top Tech Employer, Winning TechPoint’s Prestigious Mira Award Westfield, Indiana - SEP has been named Exceptional Employer by TechPoint at the 26th annual Mira Awards. This award recognizes companies that are developing talent through skills-based hiring…
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CommunityHERO: A Lesson in Collaborative Design

Here at SEP, the PXT (product experience team) has been making a push for more collaborative design on the projects we’ve been involved in. By collaborative design I mean including not only designers, but engineers, product owners, and project managers in the design process. We’ve had success with it on several of our past projects, […]
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Starting Full-Time At A Place That Is Hard To Define

I knew I could grow there—fast. That’s how I respond when asked why I chose to work for SEP. Subsequently, my co-workers later told me they felt they ‘just knew’ I was a fit for this culture and the work we do here when I asked them why I was chosen. Knowing which job to […]
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Why Does Every Pixel Matter?

Why is the UI designer making me move something just 1px over? Does that 1px even matter? The quick answer is yes, it does matter. I can give you the answer in design speak and say it’s all about balance, consistency, and maintaining the grid, but I don’t think that does it full justice. Below […]
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Why I Like Being An Interaction Designer

You know when people say, “I can see you as a (insert career title, oftentimes a common one and easy to define, here).”? Well, I never got Interaction Designer in that insertion. I discovered that I wanted to be a interaction designer not because it was a choice in a career questionnaire test or looked […]
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SEP hex pattern overlay of person working on laptop

Can you measure “quality”? (spoiler – yes you can!)

There are 3 main questions that I need to be able to answer in order to monitor a project. How many “thingies” can we get done each iteration? – a.k.a. Velocity yep, “thingies” is a technical term…the units of measure are neither man-days nor gummy-bears…they are just thingies how long will it take me to […]
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Importance of User Research

Unfortunately, the word research has gotten a bad rep over the years. Someone hears research and suddenly they think high dollars and waste of resources. Most people think of it being a waste of time without understanding it’s value, importance, and outcomes. But it’s important. So important that it’s probably the reason the experience of […]
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The Point of Particularly Personal Personas

The Agile software development movement has a concept called user personas. During a project’s spin-up, developers are encouraged to create these personas as representative users. A typical persona may be “Victor the Vice President”. Victor is a VP at his company. He will use the software for high-level data reporting, but not data entry. On […]
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Lessons Learned in Automated UI Testing

Automated UI testing can be tricky and is very easy to do wrong.  At SEP we’ve done several projects using TestComplete; it is a nice tool, but the early days were painful.  We made every mistake in the book, and learned our lessons the hard way.  These days, our TestComplete testing efforts are pretty slick.  […]
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Android UI/X – don’t go overboard with your list views

The Android ListView is one of the simplest UI widgets to implement.  There are plenty of ListView tutorials and examples, so I’m not going to talk about how to implement a list. Instead, I’m going to focus on the User Experience and ways to improve your lists. To see a really well implemented ListView, take […]
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