User experience design
Nimble Partners is no longer taking on work.

We are grateful to our clients and friends for 11 exciting and rewarding years!

deborah a. levinson

Deborah A. Levinson photo

Contact Debby for web and mobile UX strategy and design.

Deborah A. Levinson bridges gaps between the design, engineering, and communications worlds, with over 20 years of experience helping these groups develop well-organized and intuitive sites and applications. As a principal at Nimble Partners, she provided expert UX design and consultation, usability testing, and content assessment to software companies, higher education, and nonprofit institutions.

Debby is an MIT graduate, and in addition to co-writing Visual Usability: Principles and Practices for Designing Digital Applications, co-authored Build Your First Web App (Sterling Publishing, 2017) and The MIT Guide to Teaching Web Site Design (MIT Press, 2001).

@debby_levinson
linkedin.com/in/debbylevinson/
debbylevinson.com

tania schlatter

Tania Schlatter photo

Tania leads UX, UI, IA, and information design efforts, currently for projects at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. She has designed digital products, websites, signage, identities, and print publications in her 25+ year career. Her toolkit contains research and design methods for any stage of design and development.

In addition to practice, Tania teaches interactive information and infographic design courses at Northeastern University.

@taniaschlatter
linkedin.com/in/taniaschlatter/
taniaschlatter.com

book

Digital interfaces rely on visual design to communicate – layout, type, color, and imagery, along with controls and affordances. We've written Visual Usability: Principles and Practices for Designing Digital Applications to help teams design and evaluate visual user interfaces using a common language grounded in how people perceive and interpret what they see.

Each chapter offers guidance on how to make strategic decisions about layout, type, color, imagery, and controls and affordances that will bridge the gap between beautiful and useful applications.

"Unlike many simplistic show-and-tell how-tos, this thoughtful, serious, and clearly written book is organized to first provide the logic for design decisions and then the tools to make them. This approach delivers a deep appreciation for designing intuitive digital applications that promote understanding and satisfaction for the user." Chris Pullman, senior critic, Yale School of Art, and former VP of design and branding, WGBH Boston
"This book provides very valuable information on how to improve the usability of visual human-computer interfaces. All of the chapters will interest researchers, practitioners, and students of usability, human-computer interaction, interaction design, graphic design, and other related fields who want to know more about the important and expanding area of visual usability." Computing Reviews, May 28, 2014
"[A]n excellent choice for the instructor looking for a textbook detailing the major principles and practices of designing Web site or mobile device interfaces. Particularly effective is the authors' running critique of the USDA Web site, SuperTracker, for its strengths and weaknesses in visual usability." Technical Communication, May 2014
Visual Usability book cover

work view portfolio

We're proud of the work we've done and the clients we've collaborated with. Following is a sample of archived projects we can share. Please contact Debby or Tania for other or more recent examples.

Expert user experience, UX, IA, UI design, consulting, and advising • Boston, MA | © 2015 Deborah A. Levinson and Tania Schlatter