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Test Your Prototypes: How to Gather Feedback and Maximise Learning
Once you’ve built your prototypes based on the ideas you and your team generated, it’s time to gather feedback from the people on whom you are testing these. Optimising how you gather feedback — and, therefore, learn from your prototypes and users — is essential to help you save time and resources in the Prototype and Test stages of the Design T...
Visual Hierarchy: Organizing content to follow natural eye movement patterns
Let’s look at a topic that deals with, oddly enough, how we look at designs. Once you understand how the human eye processes these, you’ll find yourself better able to arrange your elements more effectively. Content in any digital page layout will follow a specific hierarchy. Headers appear above body text. Menus go at the top, bottom, left, or...
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...
Our Three Brains - The Rational Brain
The triune brain model may not be an entirely accurate depiction of the human brain and its development, but the concept of our three brains (reptilian, paleomammalian, and neomammalian) represents a useful guide for us as designers who are looking to capture what it means to be a human user. Thus, many of the insights we derive in this way can ...
Empathy Map – Why and How to Use It
Did you know that users are more likely to choose, buy and use products that meet their needs as opposed to products that just meet their wants? An Empathy map will help you understand your user’s needs while you develop a deeper understanding of the persons you are designing for. There are many techniques you can use to develop this kind of emp...
How to improve your UX designs with Task Analysis
One of the most important steps in the Design Thinking process that is often employed as standard practice in UX design is to define the users’ problems. This means being able to clearly identify and articulate problems in the user experience so that you can later begin the process of ideating (i.e., generating great ideas on how to solve them)....
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...
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....
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...
The Grid System: Building a Solid Design Layout
Now that we’ve seen some grids at work in the Rule of Thirds article, let’s examine them a little more deeply. As a concept that deals so fundamentally with the fabric and background of our work as designers, it’s easy to overlook the power of grids and think more about the elements we want to create. Many traditional artists still paint their m...
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 m...
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. ...
Wicked Problems: 5 Steps to Help You Tackle Wicked Problems by Combining Systems Thinking with Agile Methodology
Learn five steps to tackle wicked problems by combining systems thinking with agile methodology. Many successful organizations like Boeing, Walmart, Chrysler and Hewlett-Packard (HP) have adopted agile methodology and have been achieving success and innovation through this collaborative method. By becoming more agile, the team at Chrysler had in...
Create Some Space – for Ideation Sessions and Design Thinking
The spaces we occupy deeply influence our experiences, our feelings, and our behaviours. Our state of health, psychology, productivity, mood, and creativity spaces influence us on many levels and also influence our interactions with each other. The spaces in which we journey through Design Thinking and Ideation sessions must be set up in such a ...
One Size Fits All? Definitely Not in Task-Oriented Design for Mobile & Ubiquitous UX
In the 1980s and ‘90s, our technology-loving civilization rode the wave of Personal Computing – one computer per person. As computers became smaller and less expensive to produce, every worker—or indeed, every person—could have one at his/her disposal. With the rapid rise of Ubiquitous and Mobile computing, the situation had certainly changed by...
How to Calculate the Return on Investment of a Design Education
One of the biggest challenges facing designers is how to begin and how to further their design education. Do you go for the university degree or book-learning or e-learning or pay for classroom learning? While we all have some natural preference for one (or more) of these learning methods, one thing we really need to consider is the return on in...
Rapid Prototyping, Faking It Until You Make it in a UX Driven World
The idea of “faking it, until you make it” is not new but it has a unique UX twist. The ability to develop and test prototypes at rapid rates of iteration lets you “fake” new products, get user feedback and make improvements without ever “making the product” until you have things just right. This can be a very valuable way of making a small budg...
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: Rep...
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 of...
The User Experience of Recruitment – Why You May Not Get the UX Talent You Really Want
Businesses are still stuck in the idea that UX is about the products and services they offer their customers. They are yet to grasp the idea that UX can be applied to all services within a business. A UX focused of review of recruitment or accounting (or whatever) can quickly improve the way that a business function, which will never (or rarely)...
