5 Proven Tactics for Evangelizing UX

If you work in an area related to UX, you’ll probably agree that good UX has a huge business value. Good UX helps you create the most relevant products and services for your customers and ensure that they are a joy to use. But if you have any practical experience of working with UX in organizations or as a consultant, you might also have found t...

• 68 shares
• 18 hours ago

5 Things Everyone Should Know About UX Work

The howls of frustration that we hear on many UX projects are often to do with how badly misunderstood the UX role is in business. Here are 5 things that everyone should know about UX work: 1. UX Research is EssentialThe first barrier to many a UX project is people in the company who think they already know the customer inside out. “We’ve done...

• 84 shares
• 20 hours ago

Putting Some Emotion into Your Design – Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions

Emotional design is a big buzz word within the UX community. Designs which tap into the user’s emotions are considered to do more than just respond to their stated needs and provide a greater level of user experience. One way of understanding emotions is Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions – this may help you deliver better experiences to your users wh...

• 179 shares
• 23 hours ago

Empathy – How to Improve Your Designs by Developing Empathy for Your Target Group

Empathy is the ability to understand and identify with another person’s context, emotions, goals and motivations. In order to design great experiences, successful design firms actively search for empathic insights into their target group. In a design context, empathy serves a distinct purpose: to inspire design decisions in the early stages of t...

• 214 shares
• 1 day ago

Principle of Consistency and Standards in User Interface Design

Learn to design with consistency and standards in mind and understand the reasons why they’re important to incorporate them into your work. Derived from Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich’s Ten User Interface (UI) Guidelines, ‘Consistency and Standards’ are evident in many of the widely-used products created by some of the most successful companies. ...

• 212 shares
• 2 days ago

Affinity Diagrams – Learn How to Cluster and Bundle Ideas and Facts

Affinity diagrams are a great method to help you make sense of all your information when you have a lot of mixed data, such as facts, ethnographic research, ideas from brainstorms, user opinions, user needs, insights, and design issues. Affinity diagrams or clustering exercises are all about bundling and grouping information, and this method can...

• 189 shares
• 2 days ago

Creating Personas from User Research Results

When you’re in the beginning stages of your design project and you have just finished some highly informative interviews and observations in the context of your users, your head is full of impressions. You have a feeling for the different types of users who exist, and you have heard some similarities in their stories that you feel should guide t...

• 126 shares
• 2 days ago

Design Thinking: A Quick Overview

If you have just started embarking your journey through the Design Thinking process, things might seem a little overwhelming. This is why we have prepared a useful overview of the Design Thinking process, as well as some of the popular Design Thinking frameworks commonly used by global design firms and national design agencies. To begin, let’s ...

• 98 shares
• 2 days 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 ...

• 189 shares
• 3 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...

• 173 shares
• 3 days ago

From Prototype to Product: Ensuring Your Solution is Feasible and Viable

The end goal of a Design Thinking work process is to create a solution that is desirable, feasible, and viable. This means that your product or solution should not only satisfy the needs of a user but be easy to implement and have a commercial model as well. During the bulk of your Design Thinking work process, desirability would be at the foref...

• 227 shares
• 3 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; ...

• 159 shares
• 4 days ago

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...

• 113 shares
• 4 days ago

The Rule of Thirds: Know your layout sweet spots

Now that we’ve started covering the topic of proportion in design (beginning with the Golden Ratio article), let’s look at another vital subject. Getting a firm grasp of the Rule of Thirds will empower you to fine-tune your eye to bring out the best of the elements in your design by placing them where they belong best. What Is the Rule of Th...

• 208 shares
• 4 days ago

Designing for the Mobile Environment – Some Simple Guidelines

If you’re going to design for mobile, then it’s likely you’re going to need to consider the way that the device is used and the specifics of the device itself. There are some general principles that can help designers for mobile get started but don’t forget that these don’t replace the need for user research. They are guidelines not hard and fas...

• 211 shares
• 5 days ago

Affect and Design

“...we now have evidence that aesthetically pleasing objects enable you to work better...products and systems that make you feel good are easier to deal with and produce more harmonious results. When you wash and polish your car, doesn't it drive better? When you bathe and dress up in clean, fancy clothes, don't you feel better? And when you use...

• 53 shares
• 5 days ago

Information Visualization – Who Needs It?

Jesse James Garrett, the information designer, says; "What makes people passionate, pure and simple, is great experiences. If they have great experience with your product and they have great experiences with your service, they’re going to be passionate about your brand, they’re going to be committed to it. That’s how you build that kind of commi...

• 166 shares
• 6 days ago

Customer Lifecycle Mapping - Getting to Grips with Customers

Customer experience is the key to running a successful business just as user experience is key to developing a successful product. Customer experience encompasses a larger range of interaction than user experience in that it not only takes into account UX but also the needs of those paying for the product or service (which may be very different ...

• 204 shares
• 6 days ago

How to Align UX with Product Management

The introduction of UX to a company’s workflow is often a straightforward process. There’s a common understanding that you will be delivering improvements to products that will enable better acceptance of those products in the market.However, the role of the product manager can often clash with the UX role. Why? Well… they really ought to be the...

• 152 shares
• 6 days ago

I’m a business manager. How do I become a UX designer?

Career changes aren’t always money oriented. While UX designers can earn up to $120,000 a year according to Dashburst’s(1) analysis of UX jobs, it’s fair to say that many business managers make similar salaries. However, business managers like you are often concerned with the bottom line, and there’s no doubt that UX design has a huge impact on ...

• 212 shares
• 6 days ago