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Player-Centred Design: Moving Beyond User-Centred Design for Gamification
We’ve all come to think in terms of user-centred design over the years. It’s a critical component of UX design, and it helps us focus on what really matters when developing products. However, user-centred design is not enough for gamification. Here, we introduce the concept of player-centred design, which takes the idea of user-centred design to...
Product-Service Hybrids – When Products and Services Become One
Mikal Hallstrup,, the Chief Visionary Officer of Designit says; “The world doesn’t necessarily need more products, it needs better solutions.” While a solution may commonly be a product or a service, it’s more likely to be a combination of the two in many instances today.The combination of a product and a service is a product-service hybrid. For...
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...
Display Achievements to Encourage Website Usage
You are doing so great; you’re top of the class! Don’t you just love to hear a compliment like this? We’re all human, and this is the way we are wired. We thrive on accomplishment. Whether you want to be better than everyone else or simply be better than your former self, knowing your achievements is essential for keeping on doing whatever you a...
Implement Global Navigation to Improve Website Usability
When you’re designing a new website, application, or other product, you always start with the global idea and structure before addressing more detailed issues. Designing the navigation on a website is no different. Getting the global navigation right is the first step in designing a great user experience. Get to know all about the Global Navigat...
10 Great Ideas to Improve Your Productivity when You Work From Home
I love working from home. I love the fact that I can crawl out of bed 5 minutes before work and still be on time. It thrills me that there’s no dress code and if I want to work in my birthday suit, I can. In fact, the Interaction Design Foundation’s philosophy of “work where you want” has allowed us to bring together a team of incredible talents...
Rapid Prototyping, Faking It Until You Make it in a UX Driven World
The idea of “faking it, until you make it” is not new but it has a unique UX twist. The ability to develop and test prototypes at rapid rates of iteration lets you “fake” new products, get user feedback and make improvements without ever “making the product” until you have things just right. This can be a very valuable way of making a small budg...
How to Use Movable Pieces to Support Multitasking
Now, our guess is that you’re quite an experienced computer user. Perhaps Linux is a bridge too far, but using Windows or Mac OS X will not have many secrets anymore. We can imagine you’re multitasking right now, reading this article, and keeping an eye on your incoming email at the same time. From a design perspective, you’re an expert user, ad...
6 Tips for Better International UX Research
The whole world is coming online. Even here in Cambodia there’s internet available in nearly every town and village and Cambodia is one of the world’s “least developed nations”. Then there’s the fact that globally there are dozens of emerging economies starting to grow impressively the BRICs nations and MINT nations in particular.Accessibility a...
The Building Blocks of Visual Design
Visual design is about creating and making the general aesthetics of a product consistent. To create the aesthetic style of a website or app, we work with fundamental elements of visual design, arranging them according to principles of design. These elements and principles together form the building blocks of visual design, and a firm understand...
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...
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...
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...
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 M...
Show Me the Way to Go Anywhere – Navigation for Mobile Applications
It doesn’t matter how great the functions and content, that your mobile apps serve, are – if your user can’t find them, they aren’t going to contribute to a great user experience. Navigation on the mobile web comes with challenges thanks to the reduced screen real estate available on smartphones. However, there are some good best practice guidel...
Etch A Sketch: How to Use Sketching in User Experience Design
Have you ever wondered how you could convey your design decisions more effectively to your colleagues and users in a timely and cost-efficient manner? Have you found yourself stuck in a design, unable to see alternative approaches? Are you sure you are applying usability engineering to the right design or to the only design you have? You can rel...
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...
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...
How to Implement Sitemap Footers to Keep Users Going
In your attempts to minimize the effort your users need for performing actions on the website you’re designing, you just might be overlooking one major opportunity: sitemap footers. You might think about footers as a page section where you can dump any links or contact information you couldn’t fit anywhere else. Allow us to convince you of a mor...
The Heart of the Matter, Information Architecture in the Mobile Age
Content is the key ingredient in so many user experiences. So how does it change when it comes to planning a mobile user experience? Should you rewrite your content for each platform or do you need a different strategy to make the most of your content on all platforms? Handling content on mobile doesn’t need to be a chore but it does take planni...
