UX Daily: The world's largest free online resource on UX Design
Latest UX articles
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...
The Myths of Mobile Design and Why It Matters
When it comes to any school of thought surrounding a new concept – there comes a point when there is a body of “accepted knowledge”. That body of knowledge then becomes sacrosanct and instead of being treated as a guide to inform our work – it becomes practical dogma. It is worth challenging such myths and seeking to explore beneath the surface ...
Giving Your Users Freedom with Editable Input Fields
When you want to purchase something on the internet, no matter what it is, or which e-commerce service you use, you don’t want to encounter any restrictions. Just imagine what your user experience would be like if a web shop presented you with a limited set of options to choose from when asking for your contact details. And what would you say if...
Task Analysis a UX Designer’s Best Friend
Task analysis is a critical part of any design project and one that is all too often skipped in favour of other seemingly more interesting actions. In fact, task analysis is essential to the success of a design project and once you’ve got the hang of it – it’s surprisingly easy too. It can be used equally successfully on both mobile and desktop ...
What is Design Thinking and Why Is It So Popular?
Design Thinking is not an exclusive property of designers—all great innovators in literature, art, music, science, engineering, and business have practiced it. So, why call it Design Thinking? What’s special about Design Thinking is that designers’ work processes can help us systematically extract, teach, learn and apply these human-centred tech...
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...
Help! I need some help! Not just any help… Help in mobile applications
When users start getting to grips with your mobile app they’re going to need a little help from time-to-time. The good news is that there are standard design patterns which can be employed to reduce design time for help in mobile apps. There are also some useful guidelines that can be employed to improve the UX of help in general. Familiarizing ...
Key Question in User Experience Design – Usability vs Desirability
The question of what usability is compared to desirability comes up a lot in UX design and it’s important to be able to distinguish the two. Why? Because usability is the base level of the user experience and without usability it is difficult to create a worthwhile user experience; however, without desirability it is unlikely that the user exper...
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...
The MAYA Principle: Design for the Future, but Balance it with Your Users’ Present
Learn to design for the future, while balancing your design with your users’ present stage of skills and mindset.This is called the MAYA Principle and it’s the secret behind the industrial design of the Coca-Cola bottle, Shell Oil logo, and the Greyhound logo. Author/Copyright holder: Raymond Loewy. Copyright terms and licence: All right...
How to Change Your Career from Graphic Design to UX Design
If there’s an occupation that is 100% linked with the public’s idea of what design is all about, it’s graphic design. From the familiar golden arches of the McDonald’s brand to the typography and colors of movie posters, graphic designers create some of the most iconic and ubiquitous designs around us. So why would a graphic designer like you wa...
Information Visualization – A Brief Introduction
Have you ever thought about how much data flows past each of us in an ordinary day? From the newspaper you read at breakfast, to the e-mails you receive throughout the day, to the bank statements generated whenever you withdraw money or spend it, to the conversations we have, and so on?There is a tidal wave of data associated with each aspect of...
Tips for Writing a CV for a UX Job Application
It’s not really fair that before we can show an interviewer how great we are for their position – we have to land that interview in the first place. A good CV can make or break your career prospects; you cannot get a great job without getting an interview. Sadly, in nearly all professions including UX many CVs are simply not fit-for-purpose.Why ...
7 Great, Tried and Tested UX Research Techniques
Thinking about conducting some user research? Wondering which techniques are most likely to provide useful results? Then look no further. We’ve compiled a list of 7 excellent techniques which are tried and tested and have been proven to deliver real value in UX projects. Let’s take a look at each technique and see what it is and why it works: T...
The Use of Story and Emotions in Gamification
Gamification projects can benefit from storytelling features; these features can help arouse emotional connections with players. They can enhance the player experience and improve the longevity and fun factor of the gamified features. Let’s take a closer look at how that might work, even if you don’t feel that you are a natural story teller. An ...
My Head Hurts! Cognitive Friction in the Age of Mobile
There’s nothing more annoying than when things don’t function the way we expect them to. When we develop user interfaces (UI), we try to relate it to the “real world” – think the floppy disk for “save” in most applications. Why? Because we take our cues in the digital world from ones we’ve already developed in our ordinary lives. Cognitive frict...
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...
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 process 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 Jo...
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 ...
External Cognition in Product Design: 3 Ways to Make Use of External Cognition in Product Design
Learn to design products and systems that make your user’s lives easier by relieving them of their cognitive load, the amount of effort being used in their working memory. As you design your user flows, minimizing the need for people to remember things as they navigate through your product or system will increase your user’s desire to continue u...
