Using Mobile Apps – The One Thumb, One Eyeball Test for Good Mobile Design

Mobile designs need to take into account the way that users work with a mobile phone. That means understanding that distractions can come into play when the smartphone is in use and also ensuring that you make the input process as simple as possible to counteract their impact. Luke Wroblewski suggests the “one thumb, one eyeball” test as an effi...

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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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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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Improve Customer Experience with UX Investments that Increase ROI

When User Experience (UX) improves the customer experience, it affects the company’s ROI (Return on Investment) because good UX investments enhance customer satisfaction. Satisfied customers are loyal; they trust a company’s products, and they want to come back for more, which is why satisfied customers are vital to a company’s success – and are...

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Native vs Hybrid vs Responsive: What app flavour is best for you?

At some stage, during the design of your mobile app, you’re going to have to make a decision about how you will develop the app. Your choices include native apps, hybrid apps and responsive web sites and the decision you make will affect the final product. Learning to make the right decision requires understanding the way each type of developmen...

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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...

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How to improve your UX designs with Task Analysis

One of the most important steps in the Design Thinking process that is often employed as standard practice in UX design is to define the users’ problems. This means being able to clearly identify and articulate problems in the user experience so that you can later begin the process of ideating (i.e., generating great ideas on how to solve them)....

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Natural User Interfaces – What are they and how do you design user interfaces that feel natural?

User interfaces that you interact with using modalities such as touch, gestures or voice are often referred to as Natural User Interfaces (NUI). We consider them interfaces that we find so easy to use that they feel natural. However, what does it mean for an interface to be natural? Also, how do you design NUI interfaces? Here, we’re going to ex...

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• 1 week ago

Tell Me About Me – User Profiles for Mobile Applications

With the move away from websites to applications on mobile devices; there’s a need for many apps to create, maintain and manage user profiles so that users can effectively interact with the app and so that the app’s creators can collect and analyse data useful to their businesses. There is no “one size fits all” method of building user profile i...

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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

The Interaction Design Foundation is live on Product Hunt!

The Interaction Design Foundation (IDF) is finally live on Product Hunt! As a nonprofit organization, we’re on a mission to make UX education both accessible and affordable, and we hope to spread this message further and wider via the Product Hunt platform. We live in a time where community-building initiatives can slip under people’s radar, so ...

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Heuristic Evaluation: How to Conduct a Heuristic Evaluation

Learn to conduct a heuristic evaluation on any given user interface design. This article will teach you how to generate and conduct your own heuristic evaluations so you can improve the usability, utility, and desirability of your designs. The best practice is to use established heuristics like Nielsen and Molich's 10 rules of thumb and Ben Shn...

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Empathy Map – Why and How to Use It

Did you know that users are more likely to choose, buy and use products that meet their needs as opposed to products that just meet their wants? An Empathy map will help you understand your user’s needs while you develop a deeper understanding of the persons you are designing for. There are many techniques you can use to develop this kind of emp...

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How to Change Your Career from Web Design to UX Design

Changing careers isn’t as hard as it’s often made out to be, especially if you’ve got the right resources to help you make the change. For many web designers, now is the perfect time to make the switch into UX design. To start with, there’s the monetary boost that comes with the change in career. According to PayScale, web designers in the US ea...

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Affinity Diagrams – Learn How to Cluster and Bundle Ideas and Facts

Affinity diagrams are a great method to help you make sense of all your information when you have a lot of mixed data, such as facts, ethnographic research, ideas from brainstorms, user opinions, user needs, insights, and design issues. Affinity diagrams or clustering exercises are all about bundling and grouping information, and this method can...

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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...

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Apple’s Product Development Process – Inside the World’s Greatest Design Organization

Apple’s Product Development Process may be one of the most successful design processes ever implemented. With the company verging on becoming the world’s first $1 trillion business organization – there’s a lot that designers can learn from Apple and introduce into their own design environments.Apple is a notoriously secretive business. In Steve ...

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• 1 week ago

Accessibility: Usability for all

Let’s examine a topic we often take for granted to understand what it’s really about. Doing so, you’ll be able to proceed with a broader appreciation of how users engage your designs. The Overlooked, Misunderstood Nature of AccessibilityAuthor/Copyright holder: WhisperToMe. Copyright terms and licence: Public Domain A design is only useful if ...

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How to Use Voice Interaction in Augmented Reality

The user experience with augmented reality applications is at its best when it’s multimodal. As much as possible, users should be able to use gaze, gesture and voice in a seamless blend to create an interaction with the digital world that’s as natural as interaction with the physical world -but with all the added action possibilities that the di...

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Information Overload, Why it Matters and How to Combat It

Designers often need to convey information to the users of their designs. Specialists in information visualization design in particular find themselves presenting data over and over again to their users. However, it’s important when developing your designs that you don’t create “information overload” – that is presenting so much data that you le...

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• 1 week ago