Empathy Map – Why and How to Use It

Did you know that users are more likely to choose, buy and use products that meet their needs as opposed to products that just meet their wants? An Empathy map will help you understand your user’s needs while you develop a deeper understanding of the persons you are designing for. There are many techniques you can use to develop this kind of emp...

• 17 shares
• 1 hour ago

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...

• 62 shares
• 3 hours ago

Design Thinking: Get a Quick Overview of the History

To understand almost anything, we need at least some appreciation of its roots and origins, and how it came to be as it is. Design Thinking emerged from an exploration of theory and practice, in a range of disciplines and sciences, as a means of addressing the human, the technological and strategic innovation needs of our time. Let us take a loo...

• 114 shares
• 1 day ago

10 Simple Ideas to Get Your Creative Juices Flowing

Writers deal with writer’s block and designer’s often find that they get stuck for ideas too. There’s no shame in it but learning to smash through the block is a necessary professional skill. Time waits for no-one and when there’s a deadline looming… you’ve got to pull something out of the bag. There are better techniques for getting creative t...

• 110 shares
• 1 day ago

3 Reasons Why You Should Have a UX Design Portfolio

Your portfolio is in many ways your most important asset as a UX designer. That’s because it helps you in 3 powerful ways: it helps you get an interview for a job; it helps you attract clients for freelance projects; finally, and perhaps surprisingly, it helps you stay focused on your UX career. It’s a significant task to create and maintain yo...

• 113 shares
• 1 day ago

Service Design - Design is Not Just for Products

Service design is concerned with the design of services and making them better suit the needs of the service’s users and customers. It examines all activities, infrastructure, communication, people, and material components involved in the service to improve both quality of service and interactions between the provider of the service and its cust...

• 166 shares
• 2 days ago

20 People in UX that You Have to Follow on Twitter

If you’re stuck for where to get started in UX then one of the easiest things you can do is get active on social media. If you connect with the industry’s biggest names, you can learn a ton of new information, find out about job opportunities and network with many other UX designers at the same time. But where do you start? Well, we’re here for ...

• 127 shares
• 2 days ago

UX Tools Matter Less Than You Think

Oh, how we UX designers love our tools. After all, with new UX tools released every year and tons of new articles on tools published every day, it’s difficult not to get swept away by the newest and shiniest. Here at the Interaction Design Foundation, we also get a lot of questions about what UX tools a newcomer should learn. But what if we told...

• 143 shares
• 2 days ago

Don’t Make Me Think – Key Learning Points for UX Design for the Web

Don’t Make Me Think is the title of a book by the HCI and Usability engineer Steve Krug. It teaches UX designers how to deliver great user experiences in a very simple and accessible way. Since its release in the year 2000 it has become one of the defining texts in the industry and an invaluable guide to UX professionals around the world. Don’t...

• 205 shares
• 3 days ago

Norman's Three Levels of Design

In the human mind there are numerous areas responsible for what we refer to as emotion; collectively, these regions comprise the emotional system. Don Norman proposes the emotional system consists of three different, yet interconnected levels, each of which influences our experience of the world in a particular way. The three levels are visceral...

• 123 shares
• 3 days ago

Bartle’s Player Types for Gamification

Gamification is not the same as game design, because it adds game-like elements to non-gaming environments. However, there is some overlap between game design and gamification design, and one area in which this is the case is with player types. The better you understand your players, the better you can cater to their needs. The Psychology of th...

• 114 shares
• 3 days ago

Hick’s Law: Making the choice easier for users

Now let’s see a topic about keeping our users’ lives easy. “Isn’t that the theme of most articles here?” you may ask. Well, this one is especially geared towards users. Understanding Hick’s law means you can design so that more users will visit and stay on your website. Delivering a good user experience requires that first you find out the fu...

• 162 shares
• 4 days ago

How to Change Your Career from Web Design to UX Design

Changing careers isn’t as hard as it’s often made out to be, especially if you’ve got the right resources to help you make the change. For many web designers, now is the perfect time to make the switch into UX design. To start with, there’s the monetary boost that comes with the change in career. According to PayScale, web designers in the US ea...

• 182 shares
• 4 days ago

Visual Mapping – The Elements of Information Visualization

Information visualization requires mapping data in a visual or occasionally auditory format for the user of the visualization. This can be challenging because while some data has a spatial relationship built in (for example, temperatures in cities around a country) many data sets don’t have a traditional spatial relationship (for example, salari...

• 243 shares
• 4 days ago

Co-Cultures and Value Framing: Know your users

To improve the chances that your design will engage an audience, we must focus on how it can stand out. To do that, we need to know who our audience is. There’s no room for “everybody” when we’re targeting: far from it, so we split “cultural groups” into many divisions or co-cultures and aim at those instead. Once we know on whose devices our de...

• 144 shares
• 4 days ago

How to Write Great Case Studies for Your UX Design Portfolio

Well, the answer is really simple: write your UX case studies like stories. You see, when you present your case study as a story, you’ll find it far easier to give it a satisfying structure and captivate your reader. What’s more, you’ll make it easy for recruiters to imagine what it’s like to work with you, as they get to understand how you work...

• 208 shares
• 5 days ago

The Heart of the Matter, Information Architecture in the Mobile Age

Content is the key ingredient in so many user experiences. So how does it change when it comes to planning a mobile user experience? Should you rewrite your content for each platform or do you need a different strategy to make the most of your content on all platforms? Handling content on mobile doesn’t need to be a chore but it does take planni...

• 267 shares
• 5 days ago

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....

• 152 shares
• 5 days ago

Remote Research Methods for Mobile Applications

Mobile app user research in the lab may not be as effective as remote research. Users of mobile apps are going to face continued distractions when using their smartphones and there’s no better simulation for these distractions than monitoring the user in their ordinary environment. There is a strong business case for remote research for mobile a...

• 205 shares
• 6 days ago

The Moment of Truth - Build Desirable Relationships with Users and Customers

In order to understand “the moment of truth”; it’s important to understand the customer lifecycle with a brand or product. There are many moments at which a customer (or potential customer or former customer) will interact with a brand. A moment of truth is simply any interaction during which a customer may form an impression of your brand or p...

• 306 shares
• 6 days ago