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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...

  • 160 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...

  • 237 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...

  • 215 shares
  • 4 days 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...

  • 146 shares
  • 2 weeks 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....

  • 156 shares
  • 5 days ago

Latest UX articles

Laws of Proximity, Uniform Connectedness, and Continuation – Gestalt Principles (2)

Laws of Proximity, Uniform Connectedness, and Continuation – Gestalt Principles (2)

In this, the second part of our examining Gestalt principles, we’ll look at another Law – the Law of Proximity. This one is especially useful as it deals with how our eyes and brains draw connections with design images. Of course, connecting is also important to us – that’s what we want to make happen between our users and our designs!“The eye t...

  • 170 shares
  • 14 hours ago
Heuristic Evaluation: How to Conduct a Heuristic Evaluation

Heuristic Evaluation: How to Conduct a Heuristic Evaluation

Learn to conduct a heuristic evaluation on any given user interface design. This article will teach you how to generate and conduct your own heuristic evaluations so you can improve the usability, utility, and desirability of your designs. The best practice is to use established heuristics like Nielsen and Molich's 10 rules of thumb and Ben Shn...

  • 121 shares
  • 16 hours ago
How to Handle Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) When You Write Your UX Case Study

How to Handle Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) When You Write Your UX Case Study

Most designers are familiar with non-disclosure agreements. Usually, your employer asks you to sign such an agreement to prevent you from revealing confidential information. But when you write your UX case studies, your NDAs suddenly seem like an obstacle. How should you write about your design projects if you’ve signed an NDA? Well, a simple so...

  • 170 shares
  • 19 hours ago
Workshops to Establish Empathy and Understanding from User Research Results

Workshops to Establish Empathy and Understanding from User Research Results

Honestly, how much do you enjoy reading research reports? And how engaging do you find them? Unsurprisingly, receiving a report with your insights into the target group may not get your clients to empathize with the potential users of their product or service optimally. Alternatively, you might consider organizing a workshop for them. This allow...

  • 230 shares
  • 1 day ago
Display Achievements to Encourage Website Usage

Display Achievements to Encourage Website Usage

You are doing so great; you’re top of the class! Don’t you just love to hear a compliment like this? We’re all human, and this is the way we are wired. We thrive on accomplishment. Whether you want to be better than everyone else or simply be better than your former self, knowing your achievements is essential for keeping on doing whatever you a...

  • 120 shares
  • 1 day ago
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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 ...

  • 308 shares
  • 1 week 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...

  • 237 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...

  • 351 shares
  • 2 weeks ago
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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...

  • 305 shares
  • 1 month 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...

  • 139 shares
  • 1 day 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...

  • 377 shares
  • 10 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 ...

  • 302 shares
  • 3 years ago
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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...

  • 146 shares
  • 2 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...

  • 293 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 ...

  • 244 shares
  • 2 days 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...

  • 175 shares
  • 11 months ago
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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...

  • 237 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...

  • 293 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 ...

  • 261 shares
  • 3 weeks 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...

  • 334 shares
  • 7 months ago
View all articles in "Usability" 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...

  • 160 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...

  • 215 shares
  • 4 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....

  • 156 shares
  • 5 days 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...

  • 478 shares
  • 1 month ago
View all articles in "Design Thinking" Browse all topics