Join us

UX Daily: The world's largest free online
resource on UX Design

Top UX Articles Latest UX Articles Top UX Topics

Top articles

5 Stages in the Design Thinking Process

5 Stages in the Design Thinking Process

Design Thinking is a design methodology that provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It’s extremely useful in tackling complex problems that are ill-defined or unknown, by understanding the human needs involved, by re-framing the problem in human-centric ways, by creating many ideas in brainstorming sessions, and by adopting a ha...

  • 159 shares
  • 3 weeks ago
Bad Design vs. Good Design: 5 Examples We can Learn From

Bad Design vs. Good Design: 5 Examples We can Learn From

Looking at examples of bad design alongside counter-examples of good design is not only fun but also draws important lessons for designers. They highlight pitfalls for designers to avoid and let us understand how to translate design theories into solutions that work in the real world. Jared Spool, the American writer, researcher and usability ex...

  • 238 shares
  • 3 weeks ago
10 Great Sites for UI Design Patterns

10 Great Sites for UI Design Patterns

You don’t want to spend your whole life redesigning the wheel do you? No, neither do we. If you are looking for a design that solves a problem that has been solved inside a different application before; then the template for your wheel is probably already out there. That’s a design pattern to you and me. We’ve put together a list of some of the...

  • 160 shares
  • 1 month ago
Apple’s Product Development Process – Inside the World’s Greatest Design Organization

Apple’s Product Development Process – Inside the World’s Greatest Design Organization

Apple’s Product Development Process may be one of the most successful design processes ever implemented. With the company verging on becoming the world’s first $1 trillion business organization – there’s a lot that designers can learn from Apple and introduce into their own design environments.Apple is a notoriously secretive business. In Steve ...

  • 241 shares
  • 2 days ago
Personas – A Simple Introduction

Personas – A Simple Introduction

Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research in order to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way. Creating personas will help you to understand your users’ needs, experiences, behaviours and goals. Creating personas can help you step out of yourself....

  • 183 shares
  • 1 week ago

Latest UX articles

What is Design Thinking and Why Is It So Popular?

What is Design Thinking and Why Is It So Popular?

Design Thinking is not an exclusive property of designers—all great innovators in literature, art, music, science, engineering, and business have practiced it. So, why call it Design Thinking? What’s special about Design Thinking is that designers’ work processes can help us systematically extract, teach, learn and apply these human-centered tec...

  • 92 shares
  • 6 hours ago
Recalling Color Theory Keywords: a way to refresh your memories!

Recalling Color Theory Keywords: a way to refresh your memories!

Choosing the best combination of colors for an interactive design layout is not, as it may appear, a guessing game. Knowing which ones to use will save you time (and headaches). Getting it right will also keep your users connected.Since the early days of art and design, the use of color has followed many rules and guidelines, which are collectiv...

  • 117 shares
  • 8 hours ago
Occam’s Razor: The simplest solution is always the best

Occam’s Razor: The simplest solution is always the best

Now that we appreciate the need for simplicity in designs better, let’s see another great concept. You may have heard of Occam’s Razor; did you know that you can apply it to web design? When you’ve got it in your “toolbox”, you’ll have an edge in the marketplace. Occam’s Razor, put simply, states: “the simplest solution is almost always the bes...

  • 114 shares
  • 11 hours ago
How to Conduct Focus Groups

How to Conduct Focus Groups

Focus groups have long been a popular tool in market research and have become more popular in user research in the recent past too. They consist of a group of between 5 and 10 users who work with a moderator/facilitator/researcher. The moderator will pose questions from a script to the group. Their answers are recorded, sometimes by the moderato...

  • 74 shares
  • 1 day ago
10 Great Ideas to Improve Your Productivity when You Work From Home

10 Great Ideas to Improve Your Productivity when You Work From Home

I love working from home. I love the fact that I can crawl out of bed 5 minutes before work and still be on time. It thrills me that there’s no dress code and if I want to work in my birthday suit, I can. In fact, the Interaction Design Foundation’s philosophy of “work where you want” has allowed us to bring together a team of incredible talents...

  • 152 shares
  • 1 day ago
View all latest UX articles

Top topics

User Experience (UX) Design

Apple’s Product Development Process – Inside the World’s Greatest Design Organization

Apple’s Product Development Process – Inside the World’s Greatest Design Organization

Apple’s Product Development Process may be one of the most successful design processes ever implemented. With the company verging on becoming the world’s first $1 trillion business organization – there’s a lot that designers can learn from Apple and introduce into their own design environments.Apple is a notoriously secretive business. In Steve ...

  • 241 shares
  • 2 days ago
How to Change Your Career from Graphic Design to UX Design

How to Change Your Career from Graphic Design to UX Design

If there’s an occupation that is 100% linked with the public’s idea of what design is all about, it’s graphic design. From the familiar golden arches of the McDonald’s brand to the typography and colors of movie posters, graphic designers create some of the most iconic and ubiquitous designs around us. So why would a graphic designer like you wa...

  • 240 shares
  • 1 week ago
What is Interaction Design?

What is Interaction Design?

Interaction design is an important component within the giant umbrella of user experience (UX) design. In this article, we’ll explain what interaction design is, some useful models of interaction design, as well as briefly describe what an interaction designer usually does. A simple and useful understanding of interaction designInteraction de...

  • 191 shares
  • 2 weeks ago
The Principles of Service Design Thinking - Building Better Services

The Principles of Service Design Thinking - Building Better Services

Service design is all about taking a service and making it meet the user’s and customer’s needs for that service. It can be used to improve an existing service or to create a new service from scratch. In order to adapt to service design, a UX designer will need to understand the basic principles of service design thinking and be able to focus on...

  • 364 shares
  • 3 weeks ago
View all articles in "User Experience (UX) Design" Browse all topics

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)

Design iteration brings powerful results. So, do it again designer!

Design iteration brings powerful results. So, do it again designer!

The iterative design process is a simple concept. Once, through user research, you have identified a user need and have generated ideas to meet that need, you develop a prototype. Then you test the prototype to see whether it meets the need in the best possible way. Then you take what you learned from testing and amend the design. Following that...

  • 250 shares
  • 1 week ago
A Very Useful Work of Fiction – Mental Models in Design

A Very Useful Work of Fiction – Mental Models in Design

Mental models play an important role in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and interaction design. They relate to the way that a user perceives the world around them and are based in belief as opposed to being a factual concept. However, if you can understand your users' mental models, you can simulate these models within your designs to make them...

  • 149 shares
  • 2 days ago
Human Data Interaction (HDI): The New Information Frontier

Human Data Interaction (HDI): The New Information Frontier

After more than 40 years in the field, Human Computer Interaction (HCI) is already a well-established design discipline. Now, the pervasiveness of big data, new data collection and interaction techniques is giving rise to a new but related discipline: Human Data Interaction (HDI). This is likely to be a field with major new opportunities for des...

  • 367 shares
  • 8 months ago
Guidelines for Design for Appropriation

Guidelines for Design for Appropriation

Appropriation occurs when a user takes a design and puts it to use in a way that wasn’t anticipated by the designer. This can have real benefits for a product; it enables the product to become more useful and can increase the product’s appeal to different audiences and increase its market life too. However, how do you design for things that you ...

  • 300 shares
  • 3 years ago
View all articles in "Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)" Browse all topics

Usability

Bad Design vs. Good Design: 5 Examples We can Learn From

Bad Design vs. Good Design: 5 Examples We can Learn From

Looking at examples of bad design alongside counter-examples of good design is not only fun but also draws important lessons for designers. They highlight pitfalls for designers to avoid and let us understand how to translate design theories into solutions that work in the real world. Jared Spool, the American writer, researcher and usability ex...

  • 238 shares
  • 3 weeks ago
User Interface Design Guidelines: 10 Rules of Thumb

User Interface Design Guidelines: 10 Rules of Thumb

Learn to design with your user’s needs and expectations in mind by applying Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich’s Ten User Interface Guidelines. These heuristics have been reflected in many of the products designed by some of the most successful companies in the world such as Apple, Google, and Adobe. Further evidence of how their design teams incorpo...

  • 289 shares
  • 3 weeks ago
The 7 Factors that Influence User Experience

The 7 Factors that Influence User Experience

User Experience (UX) is critical to the success or failure of a product in the market but what do we mean by UX? All too often UX is confused with usability which describes to some extent how easy a product is to use and it is true that UX as a discipline began with usability – however, UX has grown to accommodate rather more than usability and ...

  • 280 shares
  • 1 month ago
KISS (Keep it Simple, Stupid) - A Design Principle

KISS (Keep it Simple, Stupid) - A Design Principle

It was Albert Einstein who said; “If you can’t explain it, you don’t understand it well enough.” Though it is often mis-reported as being; “If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it well enough.” What Einstein was driving at was a particular application of “keep it simple, stupid”. From scientific concepts to products t...

  • 319 shares
  • 5 months ago
View all articles in "Usability" Browse all topics

User Interface (UI) Design

10 Great Sites for UI Design Patterns

10 Great Sites for UI Design Patterns

You don’t want to spend your whole life redesigning the wheel do you? No, neither do we. If you are looking for a design that solves a problem that has been solved inside a different application before; then the template for your wheel is probably already out there. That’s a design pattern to you and me. We’ve put together a list of some of the...

  • 160 shares
  • 1 month ago
User Interface Design Guidelines: 10 Rules of Thumb

User Interface Design Guidelines: 10 Rules of Thumb

Learn to design with your user’s needs and expectations in mind by applying Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich’s Ten User Interface Guidelines. These heuristics have been reflected in many of the products designed by some of the most successful companies in the world such as Apple, Google, and Adobe. Further evidence of how their design teams incorpo...

  • 289 shares
  • 3 weeks ago
Shneiderman’s Eight Golden Rules Will Help You Design Better Interfaces

Shneiderman’s Eight Golden Rules Will Help You Design Better Interfaces

Follow Ben Shneiderman’s 'Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design' if you want to design great, productive and frustration-free user interfaces. Apple, Google and Microsoft are among some of the highly successful companies whose well-designed products reflect Shneiderman’s rules. The characteristics derived from Shneiderman’s golden rules can be ...

  • 358 shares
  • 2 weeks ago
Adaptive vs. Responsive Design

Adaptive vs. Responsive Design

The differences between responsive and adaptive design approaches spotlight important options for us as web and app designers. Choosing with insight can empower you to plan and execute your designs with better aim, purpose and results.With the pervasiveness and diversity of mobile devices, as designers we need to cater to the variety of screen s...

  • 170 shares
  • 8 months ago
View all articles in "User Interface (UI) Design" Browse all topics

Design Thinking

5 Stages in the Design Thinking Process

5 Stages in the Design Thinking Process

Design Thinking is a design methodology that provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It’s extremely useful in tackling complex problems that are ill-defined or unknown, by understanding the human needs involved, by re-framing the problem in human-centric ways, by creating many ideas in brainstorming sessions, and by adopting a ha...

  • 159 shares
  • 3 weeks ago
What is Design Thinking and Why Is It So Popular?

What is Design Thinking and Why Is It So Popular?

Design Thinking is not an exclusive property of designers—all great innovators in literature, art, music, science, engineering, and business have practiced it. So, why call it Design Thinking? What’s special about Design Thinking is that designers’ work processes can help us systematically extract, teach, learn and apply these human-centered tec...

  • 92 shares
  • 6 hours ago
Personas – A Simple Introduction

Personas – A Simple Introduction

Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research in order to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way. Creating personas will help you to understand your users’ needs, experiences, behaviours and goals. Creating personas can help you step out of yourself....

  • 183 shares
  • 1 week ago
Stage 2 in the Design Thinking Process: Define the Problem and Interpret the Results

Stage 2 in the Design Thinking Process: Define the Problem and Interpret the Results

An integral part of the Design Thinking process is the definition of a meaningful and actionable problem statement, which the design thinker will focus on solving. This is perhaps the most challenging part of the Design Thinking process, as the definition of a problem (also called a design challenge) will require you to synthesise your observati...

  • 412 shares
  • 3 weeks ago
View all articles in "Design Thinking" Browse all topics