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 ...

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• 6 days ago

The Pareto Principle and Your User Experience Work

There are two things that are always in short supply on any project; time and money. The Pareto Principle can, in the long-term, help you save both. It can also help you make intelligent decisions based on your user research. Our story begins with a Management Consultant Joseph M Juran back in the 1940s. He noticed that there is a general rule ...

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• 6 days ago

Stage 1 in the Design Thinking Process: Empathise with Your Users

Design Thinking cannot begin without a deeper understanding of the people you are designing for. In order to gain those insights, it is important for you as a design thinker to empathize with the people you’re designing for so that you can understand their needs, thoughts, emotions and motivations. The good news is that you have a wide range of ...

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• 6 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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• 1 week ago

Google’s Material Design - Android Design Language

Material Design (originally referred to as and codenamed “Quantum Paper”) was developed by Google and is a design language used for Android devices. The idea, according to Matias Duarte Vice President of Design for Google, is to provide a design language which mimics the feel of pen and paper. Material design offers the user physical edges and s...

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• 1 week ago

7 Simple Ways to Get Better Results from Ethnographic Research

The first step in any User Experience or Design Thinking process should involve getting to know your users. When starting a project from scratch or moving into a new market, you may not have any experience or a deep understanding of your users. Ethnographic research, such as user observation and interviews, will allow you to discover who your us...

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• 1 week 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 week ago

Bartle’s Player Types for Gamification

Gamification is not the same as game design, because it adds game-like elements to non-gaming environments. However, there is some overlap between game design and gamification design, and one area in which this is the case is with player types. The better you understand your players, the better you can cater to their needs. The Psychology of th...

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• 1 week 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...

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• 1 week ago

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...

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• 1 week ago

An Introduction to Usability

Usability and user experience (UX) are not the same thing: the usability of a product is a crucial part that shapes its UX, and hence falls under the umbrella of UX. While many might think that usability is solely about the “ease of use” of a product, it actually involves a great deal more than that. So, let’s find out more about usability here ...

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• 1 week 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...

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• 1 week ago

9 Free to Use Wireframing Tools

We all know that wireframing is a great way to test ideas in our UX projects but we also know that there are a ton of wireframing tools available to do it with. It can be hard to choose the right tool but one of the easiest ways to get an idea – is to get hands on with the tool and have a play with it. The wireframing tools in this article are ...

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• 1 week ago

Best Practices for Qualitative User Research

No matter how big or small your user research project is, if you are going to do user research, you want to make sure that you are doing it right. You don’t want to waste your time doing research that does not truly represent your users’ opinions and behaviors. That is a waste of both your and your research participants’ time, and it’s bad for b...

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• 1 week ago

User Research: What It Is and Why You Should Do It

When thinking about user research, many people primarily think of classic usability testing. While usability testing to ensure that your design is easy to use is certainly an important part of user research, there are many other types of user research that are essential to working in a user-centered process. First, we’ll dive into what user rese...

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• 1 week ago

10 Simple Ideas to Get Your Creative Juices Flowing

Writers deal with writer’s block and designer’s often find that they get stuck for ideas too. There’s no shame in it but learning to smash through the block is a necessary professional skill. Time waits for no-one and when there’s a deadline looming… you’ve got to pull something out of the bag. There are better techniques for getting creative t...

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• 1 week 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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• 1 week 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...

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• 1 week ago

The IKEA effect and Convivial Tools – Leveraging our human need for creativity

Let’s examine some concepts that involve our users’ worlds. Both concepts inhabit the same scale; understanding them, you’ll be able to appreciate your users far better.AssemblingIKEA is a heavyweight multinational that needs little introduction. Founded in 1943 in Sweden, by early 2008 it had become the world’s largest furniture retailer. IKEA’...

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• 1 week ago

How to Conduct Focus Groups

Focus groups have long been a popular tool in market research and have become more popular in user research in the recent past too. They consist of a group of between 5 and 10 users who work with a moderator/facilitator/researcher. The moderator will pose questions from a script to the group. Their answers are recorded, sometimes by the moderato...

• 124 shares
• 1 week ago