What Should a UX Design Portfolio Contain?

Your UX design portfolio is the key that gets you a job interview, and it is therefore vital that you include everything necessary in it. After all, a recruiter spends only a few minutes to form an opinion of you through your portfolio. If you’re new to UX, however, you might not know what exactly needs to go inside a UX portfolio. Fret not—we’l...

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• 1 hour 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...

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• 4 hours ago

Workshops to Establish Empathy and Understanding from User Research Results

Honestly, how much do you enjoy reading research reports? And how engaging do you find them? Unsurprisingly, receiving a report with your insights into the target group may not get your clients to empathize with the potential users of their product or service optimally. Alternatively, you might consider organizing a workshop for them. This allow...

• 201 shares
• 23 hours ago

How IDF Courses Can Help You Create Great UX Case Studies for Your Portfolio

If you want to be a UX designer, you’ll need to create a UX design portfolio containing 2 to 3 UX case studies. But if you’re new to UX design, it can be difficult to create those first UX case studies—after all, you’re still building up your UX knowledge. What if there’s a way for you to learn UX design, and at the same time build up a solid UX...

• 175 shares
• 1 day ago

The Basics of Recruiting Participants for User Research

Recruiting the right participants is crucial if your user research is to get your design anywhere. Your research participants must be able to represent your target group or end users; otherwise, your results will not translate into something you can use. The level of difficulty you will face when recruiting participants depends on your criteria....

• 162 shares
• 1 day ago

How to Create Visuals for Your UX Case Study

As designers, one of the first things we think of when we create our UX case study is what visuals we can add to spice things up. But the visuals you add to your case study cannot just be pretty decorations—they have to help you sell your skills and thus get a job interview. That’s why you should also use visuals to show your design process and ...

• 127 shares
• 2 days ago

Improve Customer Experience with UX Investments that Increase ROI

When User Experience (UX) improves the customer experience, it affects the company’s ROI (Return on Investment) because good UX investments enhance customer satisfaction. Satisfied customers are loyal; they trust a company’s products, and they want to come back for more, which is why satisfied customers are vital to a company’s success – and are...

• 188 shares
• 2 days ago

Learn to Create Accessible Websites with the Principles of Universal Design

“Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning and focused effort.” — Paul J. Meyer, premier international authority on goal setting, motivation, time management, and personal and professional development Accessibility is not the first item we consider when we start designing a w...

• 238 shares
• 2 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...

• 214 shares
• 3 days ago

Service Blueprints - Communicating the Design of Services

Service blueprints were first described by Lynn Shostack, a banking executive, back in 1982 in the Harvard Business Review. They’ve become popularized over the last few years as service design has grown as a profession. In addition to being useful in service design they are often used by operational management to gauge the efficiency of work wit...

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• 3 days ago

Laws of Proximity, Uniform Connectedness, and Continuation – Gestalt Principles (2)

In this, the second part of our examining Gestalt principles, we’ll look at another Law – the Law of Proximity. This one is especially useful as it deals with how our eyes and brains draw connections with design images. Of course, connecting is also important to us – that’s what we want to make happen between our users and our designs!“The eye t...

• 283 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...

• 196 shares
• 4 days ago

How to Handle Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) When You Write Your UX Case Study

Most designers are familiar with non-disclosure agreements. Usually, your employer asks you to sign such an agreement to prevent you from revealing confidential information. But when you write your UX case studies, your NDAs suddenly seem like an obstacle. How should you write about your design projects if you’ve signed an NDA? Well, a simple so...

• 260 shares
• 4 days ago

Workshops to Establish Empathy and Understanding from User Research Results

Honestly, how much do you enjoy reading research reports? And how engaging do you find them? Unsurprisingly, receiving a report with your insights into the target group may not get your clients to empathize with the potential users of their product or service optimally. Alternatively, you might consider organizing a workshop for them. This allow...

• 300 shares
• 4 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...

• 156 shares
• 5 days ago

A Very Useful Work of Fiction – Mental Models in Design

Mental models play an important role in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and interaction design. They relate to the way that a user perceives the world around them and are based in belief as opposed to being a factual concept. However, if you can understand your users' mental models, you can simulate these models within your designs to make them...

• 178 shares
• 5 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 ...

• 293 shares
• 5 days ago

Design Thinking: Get Started with Prototyping

Prototyping is an integral part of Design Thinking and User Experience design in general because it allows us to test our ideas quickly and improve on them in an equally timely fashion. The Institute of Design at Stanford (d.school) encourages a “bias towards action”, where building and testing is valued over thinking and meeting. However, why i...

• 153 shares
• 6 days ago

10 Great Ideas to Improve Your Productivity when You Work From Home

I love working from home. I love the fact that I can crawl out of bed 5 minutes before work and still be on time. It thrills me that there’s no dress code and if I want to work in my birthday suit, I can. In fact, the Interaction Design Foundation’s philosophy of “work where you want” has allowed us to bring together a team of incredible talents...

• 217 shares
• 6 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 ...

• 215 shares
• 6 days ago