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...

• 316 shares
• 6 days ago

Monitoring Player Motivation for Gamification

One of the big questions facing us as gamification designers is, “When will your player get bored of your gamification project, and how can you keep their interest as long as possible?” Fortunately, there are ways to monitor player motivation so that you can respond to them accordingly. In their book, Gamification at Work: Designing Engaging Bus...

• 189 shares
• 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...

• 189 shares
• 1 week ago

Design iteration brings powerful results. So, do it again designer!

The iterative design process is a simple concept. Once, through user research, you have identified a user need and have generated ideas to meet that need, you develop a prototype. Then you test the prototype to see whether it meets the need in the best possible way. Then you take what you learned from testing and amend the design. Following that...

• 234 shares
• 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...

• 139 shares
• 1 week ago

Service Blueprints - Communicating the Design of Services

Service blueprints were first described by Lynn Shostack, a banking executive, back in 1982 in the Harvard Business Review. They’ve become popularized over the last few years as service design has grown as a profession. In addition to being useful in service design they are often used by operational management to gauge the efficiency of work wit...

• 256 shares
• 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...

• 212 shares
• 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 ...

• 107 shares
• 1 week ago

The Design Career Map – Learn How to Get Ahead in Your Work

Most people put a lot of effort into their work. Unfortunately, they often neglect themselves in the process. Time served is no longer enough to progress your career (if it ever was). You need to consciously develop your personal and professional skills to succeed and you need a plan to get from where you are to where you want to be. Developing...

• 279 shares
• 1 week ago

20 People in UX that You Have to Follow on Twitter

If you’re stuck for where to get started in UX then one of the easiest things you can do is get active on social media. If you connect with the industry’s biggest names, you can learn a ton of new information, find out about job opportunities and network with many other UX designers at the same time. But where do you start? Well, we’re here for ...

• 175 shares
• 1 week ago

How to adopt the right attitude towards your UX work

If you’re going to graduate from your university or design school this year, or if you’re in your first UX design job, you’ll be wondering what you can do to improve your chances of progressing on to or up the career ladder. So, what skills do you need? And is the job all about your design skills? Read on to see what’s really involved, and how a...

• 209 shares
• 1 week ago

Help Users Skim Contents with Titled Sections

Text-heavy websites, such as those of all the major newspapers that have embraced the web as an essential medium for the future, know the importance of using titled sections to reel the readers in. There’s a perfect art to the craft, and it stems from an exact science concerning how human beings process information. So, learn from The New York T...

• 185 shares
• 1 week 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 ...

• 296 shares
• 1 week ago

Ideas for Dealing with Terrible Clients in Your Design Practice

The prospect of winning a new client is something that leaves us all a little excited. Yet, the more clients we bring on, the more we realize that there are great clients and there are clients with whom every interaction sucks our will to live. Signing the former is a great shot in the arm and leaves us enthusiastic and signing the latter usuall...

• 256 shares
• 1 week ago

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...

• 118 shares
• 1 week ago

Creating Emotional Connections

People form emotional connections and associations with the things they use and come across throughout their lives. These connections and associations help guide our behavior and determine how we perceive the world. Designers must grasp how to encourage emotional connections between users and their products. In order to influence emotions, you m...

• 114 shares
• 1 week ago

Service Design - Design is Not Just for Products

Service design is concerned with the design of services and making them better suit the needs of the service’s users and customers. It examines all activities, infrastructure, communication, people, and material components involved in the service to improve both quality of service and interactions between the provider of the service and its cust...

• 241 shares
• 1 week ago

Design Management (An Introduction) - Taking Charge of Processes and People

Design management is a complex field; it doesn’t relate to a single design discipline and the exact responsibilities attached to a design manager will depend on the organization they work for, the size of that organization (and the tier in the hierarchy at which the manager operates), the industry they work in, the current market position and to...

• 287 shares
• 1 week ago

The Power of Stories in Building Empathy

Storytelling plays a huge role in User Experience design and in the Design Thinking process. Storytelling creates a compelling narrative around the people we’re designing for so that we as designers can develop a deep and emotional understanding of their motivations and needs. Stories have the ability to form a common thread throughout a project...

• 217 shares
• 1 week 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...

• 143 shares
• 1 week ago