5 Ways to Improve the UX of Your Applications

Application design is the biggest field of endeavour in technology at the moment. It seems that ever since Apple launched the iPhone that clever people are coming together to try and make our lives ever more interesting via the various app stores. Yet, there are some simple things that these wonderful folks could do to improve our overall user e...

• 14 shares
• 41 minutes ago

Design Failures

Steve Jobs once said: ''Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.'' Normally, we like to showcase great design but there’s a lot you can learn from dreadful design too. We don’t think Steve Jobs had anything to do with the 30 howlers that follow. From lousy usability to no utility we’ve got all your design fa...

• 14 shares
• 2 hours ago

Information Visualization – A Brief Introduction

Have you ever thought about how much data flows past each of us in an ordinary day? From the newspaper you read at breakfast, to the e-mails you receive throughout the day, to the bank statements generated whenever you withdraw money or spend it, to the conversations we have, and so on? There is a tidal wave of data associated with each aspect ...

• 71 shares
• 5 hours ago

How to Advocate and Evangelize User Experience

It’s getting better and better but, still, how many times have you had to justify why user experience matters and what it actually means? To be prepared, as part of your UX toolbox, you should have a set of examples and visuals to ground your arguments. Case studies are great ways to exemplify the relevance of UX for product and service developm...

• 110 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...

• 140 shares
• 1 day 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...

• 91 shares
• 1 day ago

Natural User Interfaces – What are they and how do you design user interfaces that feel natural?

User interfaces that you interact with using modalities such as touch, gestures or voice are often referred to as Natural User Interfaces (NUI). We consider them interfaces that we find so easy to use that they feel natural. However, what does it mean for an interface to be natural? Also, how do you design NUI interfaces? Here, we’re going to ex...

• 280 shares
• 2 days ago

Player-Centred Design: Moving Beyond User-Centred Design for Gamification

We’ve all come to think in terms of user-centred design over the years. It’s a critical component of UX design, and it helps us focus on what really matters when developing products. However, user-centred design is not enough for gamification. Here, we introduce the concept of player-centred design, which takes the idea of user-centred design to...

• 224 shares
• 2 days 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...

• 131 shares
• 2 days ago

Creating Emotional Connections

People form emotional connections and associations with the things they use and come across throughout their lives. These connections and associations help guide our behavior and determine how we perceive the world. Designers must grasp how to encourage emotional connections between users and their products. In order to influence emotions, you m...

• 88 shares
• 3 days ago

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 ...

• 78 shares
• 3 days 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...

• 244 shares
• 3 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...

• 240 shares
• 4 days ago

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 ...

• 270 shares
• 4 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 the...

• 176 shares
• 4 days ago

Information Overload, Why it Matters and How to Combat It

Designers often need to convey information to the users of their designs. Specialists in information visualization design in particular find themselves presenting data over and over again to their users. However, it’s important when developing your designs that you don’t create “information overload” – that is presenting so much data that you le...

• 209 shares
• 6 days ago

Design Scenarios - Communicating the Small Steps in the User Experience

Design scenarios are useful tools for communicating ideas about user actions. Mapping design scenarios also has the added benefit that it helps formalize ideas and to take creative approaches to those ideas. Most importantly of all, it will ensure that your designs are firmly rooted on terra firma and taking a “what our users want/need” approach...

• 238 shares
• 6 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...

• 159 shares
• 6 days ago

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...

• 165 shares
• 1 week 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...

• 218 shares
• 1 week ago