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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• 6 days ago

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...

• 191 shares
• 6 days ago

Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and Design - Balancing Risk to Gain Reward

The idea of the minimum viable product (MVP) has been around for some time. The term itself was coined by Frank Robinson but was made popular by two influential names in product design – Steve Blank, a serial-entrepreneur and academic, and Eric Ries, the pioneer of the Lean Startup movement.What is an MVP?The simplest definition is that an MVP m...

• 274 shares
• 6 days ago

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)....

• 185 shares
• 6 days ago

User Stories - Capturing the User’s Perspective Quickly and Simply

User stories are a simple tool for articulating the user’s perspective. They are not long, wordy stories to be told around a camp fire but rather short (often only a single sentence) descriptions of what a user will do with a part of a system. They are written in plain English or in the language of the business in which they will be used and req...

• 299 shares
• 1 week ago

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...

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• 1 week ago

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 ...

• 192 shares
• 1 week ago

5 Awesome TED Talks for Designers

We know, TED talks can sometimes feel a little… overblown. While there are loads of great talks; some of them go nowhere and don’t seem to add much to your life at all. To make things worse… there are a lot of TED talks and it’s hard to tell which are going to motivate you to do something new and interesting and which are going to bore the socks...

• 113 shares
• 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

Design Failures

Steve Jobs once said: ''Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.'' Normally, we like to showcase great design but there’s a lot you can learn from dreadful design too. We don’t think Steve Jobs had anything to do with the 30 howlers that follow. From lousy usability to no utility we’ve got all your design fa...

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• 1 week ago

How to Design an Information Visualization

Designing information visualizations offers you endless possibilities when it comes to end products and it would be impossible to provide step-by-step instructions for all these possibilities. However, it is fair to say that while the end products may vary dramatically – the process by which we reach the best possible end product is consistently...

• 173 shares
• 1 week ago

Don’t Make Me Think – Key Learning Points for UX Design for the Web

Don’t Make Me Think is the title of a book by the HCI and Usability engineer Steve Krug. It teaches UX designers how to deliver great user experiences in a very simple and accessible way. Since its release in the year 2000 it has become one of the defining texts in the industry and an invaluable guide to UX professionals around the world. Don’t...

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• 1 week ago

Design Scenarios - Communicating the Small Steps in the User Experience

Design scenarios are useful tools for communicating ideas about user actions. Mapping design scenarios also has the added benefit that it helps formalize ideas and to take creative approaches to those ideas. Most importantly of all, it will ensure that your designs are firmly rooted on terra firma and taking a “what our users want/need” approach...

• 266 shares
• 1 week ago

7 UX Deliverables: What will I be making as a UX designer?

What does a UX designer actually produce? Here, we will explore the concept of UX Deliverables, a term that describes the outputs of a UX design process during its various stages. The deliverables produced by UX designers vary according to their role in the design team and also depending on the methods and tools used by each role. We will provid...

• 209 shares
• 1 week 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

The Golden Ratio - Principles of form and layout

Now, we’re going to look at a subject that comes directly from mathematics and that we can also find all around us – the golden ratio. Don’t worry; we’re not going back into the classroom for long. We will examine what this concept is and exactly how much it is a fundamental part of making designs pleasing to the user’s eye. The golden ratio’s ...

• 244 shares
• 1 week ago

15 Guiding Principles for UX Researchers

We’ve found that a lot of first time UX researchers have similar questions and concerns when they start working in UX design. So, we thought we’d round up and tackle some of the most common questions to form a set of useful principles for UX researchers. Of course, this isn’t a complete guide to UX research (there are some fairly weighty tomes o...

• 147 shares
• 1 week ago

9-Step Guide to Creating a Freelance and Business-to-Business Contract

A freelance and business-to-business contract sets out the relationship between a business owner and client. Knowing how to draft a contract is one of the most important skills a freelancer and entrepreneur must have – a contract protects both the business owner and the client when it is well-designed and used properly. The first and most import...

• 260 shares
• 1 week ago

Putting Some Emotion into Your Design – Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions

Emotional design is a big buzz word within the UX community. Designs which tap into the user’s emotions are considered to do more than just respond to their stated needs and provide a greater level of user experience. One way of understanding emotions is Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions – this may help you deliver better experiences to your users wh...

• 322 shares
• 1 week ago

How to Prevent Negative Emotions in the User Experience of Your Product

Learn to prevent negative emotions in the user experience of your product. As a User Experience (UX) designer, you want users to enjoy using your product by eliminating negative experiences and inducing positive emotion in your users. This article will teach you how to prevent anger and frustration from your users as you design the optimal user ...

• 290 shares
• 1 week ago