Stop Yourself from Becoming Content Fried and Free Your Mind to be Productive

Content fried is the point we reach when we subject ourselves to too much data. It commonly affects content curators but it can affect any of us. The “always on” Internet may be a blessing much of the time but it can also be a curse. The term “content fried” was defined Beth Kanter, who is a trainer, researcher, speaker and motivator. Content ...

• 185 shares
• 19 hours ago

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...

• 175 shares
• 21 hours ago

Best Practices for Qualitative User Research

No matter how big or small your user research project is, if you are going to do user research, you want to make sure that you are doing it right. You don’t want to waste your time doing research that does not truly represent your users’ opinions and behaviors. That is a waste of both your and your research participants’ time, and it’s bad for b...

• 94 shares
• 1 day ago

An Overview of The Factors of Success for New Product Development

Bringing a successful product to market is a team effort. While designers are responsible for usability, utility and the rest of the user experience there are many factors which contribute to the success or failure of new product development and many of these are outside of the designer’s direct control. The figure above shows the main factors ...

• 159 shares
• 1 day ago

User Stories: As a [UX Designer] I want to [embrace Agile] so that [I can make my projects user-centered]

Let’s examine a tool so simple yet so powerful that once you’ve learned about it, you will apply it in all your projects. It is a great design method that enhances collaboration among all stakeholders. Users’ Needs are a core part of Agile: the User Stories There are so many articles about UX and Agile. Lots of them are rants about how Agile i...

• 312 shares
• 1 day ago

Customer Touchpoints - The Point of Interaction Between Brands, Businesses, Products and Customers

There are as many different definitions for the word “touchpoint” in customer experience design and marketing as there are flavors on the average restaurant menu. Why? Because these disciplines have been evolving rapidly over the last decades and terminology has become fluid rather than static. To make matters more complicated – the term “touchp...

• 253 shares
• 2 days ago

The Power of Stories in Building Empathy

Storytelling plays a huge role in User Experience design and in the Design Thinking process. Storytelling creates a compelling narrative around the people we’re designing for so that we as designers can develop a deep and emotional understanding of their motivations and needs. Stories have the ability to form a common thread throughout a project...

• 160 shares
• 2 days ago

The Concept of the "Triune Brain"

In the 1960s, American neuroscientist Paul MacLean formulated the 'Triune Brain' model, which is based on the division of the human brain into three distinct regions. MacLean's model suggests the human brain is organized into a hierarchy, which itself is based on an evolutionary view of brain development. The three regions are as follows: Re...

• 143 shares
• 2 days ago

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...

• 159 shares
• 3 days ago

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...

• 192 shares
• 3 days ago

Make Your UX Design Process Agile Using Google’s Methodology

In an age of tight resources and constrained finances companies are more reluctant than ever to commit to big design projects without a thorough understanding of their chances of success. Google has developed a methodology to make the design process fast and still offer valuable insight. Forget minimum viable products and focus on prototypes and...

• 217 shares
• 3 days ago

Customer and User Perception of Value and What it Means to Designers

Often we talk about value and we mean “financial value” a concept that can be measured in dollars and cents or pounds and pennies or whatever currency is near to hand. However, financial value is not the only motivating factor for users and consumers to invest in a product. In fact, it is the perception of value both financial and non-financial ...

• 208 shares
• 4 days 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...

• 202 shares
• 4 days ago

Map the Stakeholders

Having faced the problem statement and defined the challenge space, the challenge owner or initiator now needs to gather the troops. In more complex settings or larger organisations, drafting a stakeholder map, outlining people involved, affected, or influenced both internally and externally is a necessary first step. If you’re a project owner ...

• 98 shares
• 4 days ago

Essential Design Thinking Videos and Methods

The following resources are recommended in order to assist you to better understand Design Thinking. These resources, videos, and tools should be explored so as to familiarise yourself with how Design Thinking is being taught and applied currently. The resources listed below are only a sample of a wide array of information available on the subje...

• 149 shares
• 5 days ago

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...

• 156 shares
• 5 days ago

Web Fonts are Critical to the Online User Experience - Don’t Hurt Your Reader’s Eyes

Bill Gates said; “Content is King” and when it comes to the online user experience it is the 100% truth. Delivering a great user experience doesn’t just mean delivering great content – it also means providing that content in a usable and useful format that encourages reading and interaction rather than clicking out of the site because it’s unrea...

• 354 shares
• 5 days ago

7 Key UX Topics that Every Manager Should Understand

The new entrant into UX in an established business often has a tough time of things. People understand what UX stands for (some of the time at least), they may even have an idea of why it is important but they often have no real understanding of what is required to achieve a good UX. This lack of understanding and particularly from management; ...

• 166 shares
• 5 days ago

Where’s the UX Representative in Your Senior Management Team?

We’re not here to tell you how to run your business but (and isn’t there always a but in a sentence like that?) we would like to ask many of the companies that we come across; “why is there no UX representative in the senior management team?” UX is not Customer Experience Author/Copyright holder: Borys Kozielski. Copyright terms and licence: C...

• 274 shares
• 6 days ago

The Reflective Level of Emotional Design

“Few products become iconic in people's lives in the way that, say, the Sony® Walkman® did. The iPod is quickly ascending to that status. Clearly there are some products that stand little chance of ever becoming symbolic in people's lives-like Ethernet routers, for instance - no matter how wonderful they look or well they behave. However, when t...

• 189 shares
• 6 days ago