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Prototyping: Learn Eight Common Methods and Best Practices
There can never be an exhaustive list of prototyping methods, since there is quite literally an endless number of ways you can build prototypes. What we can do, however, is provide a useful list of the eight most common prototyping methods, together with best practice tips that help you maximise your prototyping and testing sessions. By arming y...
An Introduction to Usability
Usability and user experience (UX) are not the same thing: the usability of a product is a crucial part that shapes its UX, and hence falls under the umbrella of UX. While many might think that usability is solely about the “ease of use” of a product, it actually involves a great deal more than that. So, let’s find out more about usability here ...
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...
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...
14 Barriers to Ideation – and How to Overcome Them
Would you like to facilitate successful ideation sessions? Or would you like to learn how to contribute to ideation processes in your team more effectively? In either case, you should know the ideation traps and how you can prevent yourself and your team from falling into them. You should give the following 14 important barriers to ideation your...
Micro-moments: Are you designing for them?
Today, we’ll start with the rants of a Manhattan restaurant to exemplify the relevance of what Google calls “micro-moments”. Why? Because with the pervasive culture that mobile devices have generated, as UX designers, we’re needed now more than ever! This is why we need to equip ourselves with methods and tools to research our users’ lives befor...
Dieter Rams: 10 Timeless Commandments for Good Design
Let’s pay a virtual visit to a famous industrial designer’s workshop. By examining the principles of his winning approach, we can incorporate vital elements into our designs in the “less is more” age. As user experience practitioners, most of us have worked with Nielsen and Molich’s 10 heuristics or rules of thumb and the Eight Golden Rules by ...
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...
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...
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...
The Law of Similarity - Gestalt Principles (1)
Gestalt is a German word that carries much importance, especially for us as designers. Let’s have a close look at its principles so that we can see how much information this little word encompasses!The central principle to the Gestalt theory was neatly summarized by the Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka: "The whole is other than the sum of the pa...
Customer Journey Maps - Walking a Mile in Your Customer’s Shoes
Perhaps the biggest buzzword in customer relationship management is “engagement”. Engagement is a funny thing, in that it is not measured in likes, clicks, or even purchases. It’s a measure of how much customers feel they are in a relationship with a product, business or brand. It focuses on harmony and how your business, product or brand become...
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...
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....
A Simple Introduction to Lean UX
Lean UX is an incredibly useful technique when working on projects where the Agile development method is used. Traditional UX techniques often don’t work when development is conducted in rapid bursts – there’s not enough time to deliver UX in the same way. Fundamentally Lean UX and other forms of UX all have the same goal in mind; delivering a g...
10 Principles of Accessibility
Do you want to get serious about accessibility, but finding it hard to know where to start? In this video, we’ll take you through 10 principles you can use to get started creating great accessible websites and interfaces right now. Among other things, you’ll learn how to create ALT text that makes sense (and why it’s important), why hamburger me...
5 Awesome TED Talks for Designers
We know, TED talks can sometimes feel a little… overblown. While there are loads of great talks; some of them go nowhere and don’t seem to add much to your life at all. To make things worse… there are a lot of TED talks and it’s hard to tell which are going to motivate you to do something new and interesting and which are going to bore the socks...
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...
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...
How to create the perfect structure for a UX case study
UX case studies form the core content of a UX professional’s portfolio. They are essential to getting you hired, because case studies are a window to your professional practice, by showing how you think, adapt, cooperate and ultimately solve challenges. A UX case study has to tell a story about you. Like all good stories, case studies benefit gr...
