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...

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• 1 hour ago

Three Common Models of the Brain to Help You Develop Better User Experiences

There are many different conceptual models of the brain. It’s important to note that many of them lack any scientific basis – this does not, however, negate the fundamental importance of these models. They are not there to “prove” anything but rather to stimulate creative thought as to how designers (and others) may offer all round stimulation o...

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• 20 hours ago

Conducting Ethical User Research

In any type of research that involves human participants, it’s important to consider the ethics of the research project. That is also the case when you do user research. You are responsible for your participants’ wellbeing, for representing them honestly, and for keeping their personal information safe. That is a big responsibility, so it’s impo...

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• 22 hours ago

Essential Design Thinking Videos and Methods

The following resources are recommended in order to assist you to better understand Design Thinking. These resources, videos, and tools should be explored so as to familiarise yourself with how Design Thinking is being taught and applied currently. The resources listed below are only a sample of a wide array of information available on the subje...

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• 1 day ago

5 Stages in the Design Thinking Process

Design Thinking is a design methodology that provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It’s extremely useful in tackling complex problems that are ill-defined or unknown, by understanding the human needs involved, by re-framing the problem in human-centric ways, by creating many ideas in brainstorming sessions, and by adopting a ha...

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• 1 day ago

What is Design Thinking and Why Is It So Popular?

Design Thinking is not an exclusive property of designers—all great innovators in literature, art, music, science, engineering, and business have practiced it. So, why call it Design Thinking? What’s special about Design Thinking is that designers’ work processes can help us systematically extract, teach, learn and apply these human-centered tec...

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• 1 day ago

Bad Design vs. Good Design: 5 Examples We can Learn From

Looking at examples of bad design alongside counter-examples of good design is not only fun but also draws important lessons for designers. They highlight pitfalls for designers to avoid and let us understand how to translate design theories into solutions that work in the real world. Jared Spool, the American writer, researcher and usability ex...

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• 1 day 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...

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• 1 day ago

The Seven Simple Principles of Conversion Centred Design (CCD) and How to Use Them

Oli Gardner – the Creative Director of Unbounce (a landing page builder for marketers), is an advocate of CCD. He says that deploying CCD makes each page you create on a website a piece of “accountable content”. In that you can measure the impact, purpose and success of each page as that page plays a part in converting visitors into customers. D...

• 256 shares
• 2 days ago

Design Thinking: A Quick Overview

If you have just started embarking your journey through the Design Thinking process, things might seem a little overwhelming. This is why we have prepared a useful overview of the Design Thinking process, as well as some of the popular Design Thinking frameworks commonly used by global design firms and national design agencies. To begin, let’s ...

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• 2 days ago

Simplicity in Design: 4 Ways to Achieve Simplicity in Your Designs

Learn ways to achieve simplicity in your designs and recognize why certain designs are overly complex. Simplicity is evident in many of the widely-used products created by some of the most successful companies. Simplicity is also one of the key reasons why some companies do better than their competitors. Google’s search engine, Apple iPhones, an...

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• 2 days ago

How to Visualize Your Qualitative User Research Results for Maximum Impact

When thinking about visualization of research results, many people will automatically have an image of a graph in mind. Do you have that image, too? You would be right in thinking that many research results benefit from a graph-like visualization, showing trends and anomalies. But this is mainly true for results from quantitative user research. ...

• 225 shares
• 3 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...

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• 3 days ago

No-UI: How to Build Transparent Interaction

Here, we will explore and teach you about the incredible user experience opportunities which you can take advantage of when designing for interaction beyond the classical Graphical User Interface (GUI). Non-visual User Interaction (no-UI) is pioneered by the ground-breaking work of researchers who have realized that, in today’s world, we are sur...

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• 3 days ago

How to Create an Intuitive Design

“The main thing in our design is that we have to make things intuitively obvious,” the founder and former CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs, explained. We can easily agree that design should be intuitive. We can also easily agree that something is intuitive when we can use it without thinking about it. Making a design intuitive is much tougher. Solving t...

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• 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...

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• 4 days 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 ...

• 178 shares
• 4 days ago

What Kind of Prototype Should You Create?

So, you want to create prototypes to help in your design process or Design Thinking project. However, what kind of prototype should you create? How detailed should your prototype be? What should your prototype be created for? If you’re asking yourself these questions, then great, because you’re on the right track! We will go through the differen...

• 196 shares
• 5 days ago

Norman's Three Levels of Design

In the human mind there are numerous areas responsible for what we refer to as emotion; collectively, these regions comprise the emotional system. Don Norman proposes the emotional system consists of three different, yet interconnected levels, each of which influences our experience of the world in a particular way. The three levels are visceral...

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• 5 days ago

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...

• 212 shares
• 5 days ago