The Basics of Recruiting Users for Usability Testing

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....

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• 3 hours ago

Don’t Make Me Think – Key Learning Points for UX Design for the Web

Don’t Make Me Think is the title of a book by the HCI and Usability engineer Steve Krug. It teaches UX designers how to deliver great user experiences in a very simple and accessible way. Since its release in the year 2000 it has become one of the defining texts in the industry and an invaluable guide to UX professionals around the world. Don’t...

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• 5 hours 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...

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• 8 hours 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...

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• 1 day 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...

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• 1 day ago

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...

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• 1 day ago

Shadowing in User Research - Do You See What They See?

The idea of shadowing someone to see what they are doing is not new. It is a technique that is widely implemented in user research. The idea is simple; the researcher accompanies the user and observes how they use the product or service within their natural environment. Shadowing also takes place in other fields of business and in particular in...

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• 2 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...

• 152 shares
• 2 days 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...

• 137 shares
• 2 days ago

How to manage the users’ expectations when designing smart products

Smart products that adapt to aspects of the users’ activity, context or personality have become commonplace. With more and more products which act intelligently emerging in the market place, users often end up expecting to interact with them more like they would among themselves, as humans. In the first decades of the 21st century, technical lim...

• 212 shares
• 3 days ago

The Myths of Mobile Design and Why They Matter

When it comes to any school of thought surrounding a new concept – there comes a point when there is a body of “accepted knowledge”. That body of knowledge then becomes sacrosanct and instead of being treated as a guide to inform our work – it becomes practical dogma. It is worth challenging such myths and seeking to explore beneath the surface ...

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• 3 days ago

Appropriation: The Reasons that Users Appropriate Products

When you get up in the morning do you brush your teeth? You almost certainly do. If you use a mouthwash, such as Listerine, as part of your teeth cleaning ritual then we’ve got a nasty surprise for you. Did you know that Listerine wasn’t invented as a breath freshener? It was first marketed 133 years ago for something entirely different; as a su...

• 165 shares
• 3 days ago

7 UX Deliverables: What will I be making as a UX designer?

What does a UX designer actually produce? Here, we will explore the concept of UX Deliverables, a term that describes the outputs of a UX design process during its various stages. The deliverables produced by UX designers vary according to their role in the design team and also depending on the methods and tools used by each role. We will provid...

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• 3 days ago

Appropriation and Design: A Tale of Two Concepts

Appropriation is an unusual word for designers in that it has two very distinct meanings. Both are relevant to designers and both need careful consideration but for very different reasons. Appropriation is either: The use of pre-existing objects/images within a design or art with marginal amounts of transformation applies to them. Yet there...

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• 3 days ago

Understanding Early Adopters and Customer Adoption Patterns

Customer adoption patterns are important to understanding how to market new product for adoption. Without a clear understanding of what each type of adopter values it can be difficult, if not impossible to target them through marketing. In his book, Diffusion of Innovations (1962), Everett M Rogers the communication scholar and sociologist, des...

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• 3 days ago

Guidelines for Good Visual Information Representations

Information visualization is not as easy as it might first appear, particularly when you are examining complex data sets. How do you deliver a “good” representation of the information that you bring out of the data that you are working with?While this may be a subjective area of information visualization and, of course, there are exceptions to t...

• 178 shares
• 4 days 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...

• 261 shares
• 4 days ago

How to design great 404 Error Pages

Getting a 404 Error page is very similar to many real-life situations. What do we mean? Well, for example, if you are an “I-don’t-need-a-map” kind of person in an unknown place, you will most likely get lost. And while your frustration level rises to the level of Leonardo Di Caprio at The Oscars, imagine that someone approaches you and gently he...

• 126 shares
• 4 days ago

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...

• 303 shares
• 5 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...

• 276 shares
• 5 days ago