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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...
Three Ideation Methods to Enhance Your Innovative Thinking
“In a world where business is more interested in ‘best practice’ rather than different practice, is it any wonder that products and services, companies and organisations are all beginning to look the same?” the three authors rhetorically ask in ?What If!'s classic book on creativity and innovation, Sticky Wisdom. How to Start a Creative Revoluti...
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. ...
Ideation for Design - Preparing for the Design Race
Ideation is easy to define. It’s the process by which you generate, develop and then communicate new ideas. Ideas can take many forms such as verbal, visual, concrete or abstract. The principle is simple to create a process by which you can innovate, develop and actualize new products. Ideation is critical to both UX designers and learning exper...
7 Key UX Topics that Every Manager Should Understand
The new entrant into UX in an established business often has a tough time of things. People understand what UX stands for (some of the time at least), they may even have an idea of why it is important but they often have no real understanding of what is required to achieve a good UX. This lack of understanding and particularly from management; ...
10 Ideas to Help You Sell UX Work
We know that UX is important. Google knows that UX is important. But when it comes to selling in UX work it can often feel like nobody else knows that it’s important. Clients and colleagues often seem completely intractable on ideas when we present them. So how can we better serve those customers and get them to take on board what we do as valua...
How to Develop an Empathic Approach in Design Thinking
Empathy requires us to put aside our learning, culture, knowledge, opinions, and worldview purposefully in order to understand other peoples’ experiences of things deeply and meaningfully. It requires a strong sense of imagination for us to be able to see through another person’s eyes. It requires humility so we can seek to abandon our preconcei...
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...
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 wh...
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...
5 Inspiring Freelance Designers’ Websites and Portfolios
We’ve found five great inspirational websites for freelancer designers – these can provide insight into how to construct your own website and online portfolios. However, please don’t copy them but rather seek to emulate things that you think work well. RadiumCosmin Daniel Capitanu of Romania runs Radium, and he’s a freelance designer and archit...
How to Change Your Career from Marketing to UX Design
There are a few good reasons why you might want to change your career from marketing to UX design. First, there’s the pay—sources like UXDesignerSalaries(1) show that UX designers are paid a fairly handsome salary across the world (even as high as $97k in Switzerland). Furthermore, according to recuiting and HR company Brazen(2), UX design is th...
Micro-moments: Are you designing for them?
Today, we’ll start with the rants of a Manhattan restaurant to exemplify the relevance of what Google calls “micro-moments”. Why? Because with the pervasive culture that mobile devices have generated, as UX designers, we’re needed now more than ever! This is why we need to equip ourselves with methods and tools to research our users’ lives befor...
Dieter Rams: 10 Timeless Commandments for Good Design
Let’s pay a virtual visit to a famous industrial designer’s workshop. By examining the principles of his winning approach, we can incorporate vital elements into our designs in the “less is more” age. As user experience practitioners, most of us have worked with Nielsen and Molich’s 10 heuristics or rules of thumb and the Eight Golden Rules by ...
How to use Design Thinking to build the Perfect Portfolio
All the UX training in the world would be for nothing if you couldn’t get a job as a UX professional and fulfill your dream. Hiring for UX positions is difficult – recruiters need to assess many applicants’ skills, experience and attitudes towards their work. Contrary to being measured by traditional text-based résumés, UX candidates are typical...
Functionality and Mobile Design – Don’t Shrink the Screen, Focus on the Tasks
Mobile design and design for other devices such as laptops and desktops does not mean producing the same product, just smaller. It means focusing on what matters to the mobile user and delivering a differentiated user experience. To do this successfully, you need to focus on tasks and how they are executed. Design for mobile is no longer option...
10 Great Sites for UI Design Patterns
You don’t want to spend your whole life redesigning the wheel do you? No, neither do we. If you are looking for a design that solves a problem that has been solved inside a different application before; then the template for your wheel is probably already out there. That’s a design pattern to you and me. We’ve put together a list of some of the...
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....
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
Abraham Maslow has provided one of the most prominent accounts of human motivation with the 'Hierarchy of Needs', representing his most well-known contribution to psychology. Maslow researched both 'exemplary people' from the past, such as Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt, and elite college students. Following these studies, Maslow produced...
Habits: Five ways to help users change them
Let’s take a look at a subject that might appear tricky for designers to influence. However much control we have over our designs, we still have the power to reach beyond. Guiding our users toward a better UX isn’t only simpler than you might think; it will also pay dividends to both you and them and avert potential catastrophes.Habitual Choice ...
