How to Calculate the Return on Investment of a Design Education

One of the biggest challenges facing designers is how to begin and how to further their design education. Do you go for the university degree or book-learning or e-learning or pay for classroom learning? While we all have some natural preference for one (or more) of these learning methods, one thing we really need to consider is the return on in...

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• 1 week ago

Creating Personas from User Research Results

When you’re in the beginning stages of your design project and you have just finished some highly informative interviews and observations in the context of your users, your head is full of impressions. You have a feeling for the different types of users who exist, and you have heard some similarities in their stories that you feel should guide t...

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• 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...

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• 1 week ago

The Rule of Thirds: Know your layout sweet spots

Now that we’ve started covering the topic of proportion in design (beginning with the Golden Ratio article), let’s look at another vital subject. Getting a firm grasp of the Rule of Thirds will empower you to fine-tune your eye to bring out the best of the elements in your design by placing them where they belong best. What Is the Rule of Th...

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• 2 weeks 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...

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• 2 weeks ago

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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• 2 weeks ago

How to Change Your Career from Marketing to UX Design

There are a few good reasons why you might want to change your career from marketing to UX design. First, there’s the pay—sources like UXDesignerSalaries(1) show that UX designers are paid a fairly handsome salary across the world (even as high as $97k in Switzerland). Furthermore, according to recuiting and HR company Brazen(2), UX design is th...

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• 2 weeks ago

From Prototype to Product: Ensuring Your Solution is Feasible and Viable

The end goal of a Design Thinking work process is to create a solution that is desirable, feasible, and viable. This means that your product or solution should not only satisfy the needs of a user but be easy to implement and have a commercial model as well. During the bulk of your Design Thinking work process, desirability would be at the foref...

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• 2 weeks ago

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

Abraham Maslow has provided one of the most prominent accounts of human motivation with the 'Hierarchy of Needs', representing his most well-known contribution to psychology. Maslow researched both 'exemplary people' from the past, such as Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt, and elite college students. Following these studies, Maslow produced...

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• 2 weeks ago

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...

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• 2 weeks ago

Customer Journey Maps - Walking a Mile in Your Customer’s Shoes

Perhaps the biggest buzzword in customer relationship management is “engagement”. Engagement is a funny thing, in that it is not measured in likes, clicks, or even purchases. It’s a measure of how much customers feel they are in a relationship with a product, business or brand. It focuses on harmony and how your business, product or brand become...

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• 2 weeks ago

Empathy – How to Improve Your Designs by Developing Empathy for Your Target Group

Empathy is the ability to understand and identify with another person’s context, emotions, goals and motivations. In order to design great experiences, successful design firms actively search for empathic insights into their target group. In a design context, empathy serves a distinct purpose: to inspire design decisions in the early stages of t...

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• 2 weeks ago

The Law of Similarity - Gestalt Principles (1)

Gestalt is a German word that carries much importance, especially for us as designers. Let’s have a close look at its principles so that we can see how much information this little word encompasses!The central principle to the Gestalt theory was neatly summarized by the Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka: "The whole is other than the sum of the pa...

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• 2 weeks ago

10 Principles of Accessibility

Do you want to get serious about accessibility, but finding it hard to know where to start? In this video, we’ll take you through 10 principles you can use to get started creating great accessible websites and interfaces right now. Among other things, you’ll learn how to create ALT text that makes sense (and why it’s important), why hamburger me...

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• 2 weeks ago

Understand the Social Needs for Accessibility in UX Design

As UX designers, we have a lot on our plates. The term “UX Unicorn” exists for a reason. We are responsible for our clients’ goals as well as our users’ needs. You might ask then, why should you think about Accessibility in your UX Design process? Imagine going into a design workshop and telling your client that you need more hours to make his...

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• 2 weeks ago

How to Design Gesture Interactions for Virtual and Augmented Reality

Gesture interactions have become an easy and convenient form of interaction on touch devices largely because we have developed conventions for how gestures should be performed. In virtual and augmented reality, gestures are also a very natural way to interact with digital artifacts and menus, but we don’t have as clear conventions for how to des...

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• 2 weeks 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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• 2 weeks ago

An Introduction to Usability

Usability and user experience (UX) are not the same thing: the usability of a product is a crucial part that shapes its UX, and hence falls under the umbrella of UX. While many might think that usability is solely about the “ease of use” of a product, it actually involves a great deal more than that. So, let’s find out more about usability here ...

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• 2 weeks ago

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...

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• 2 weeks 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...

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• 2 weeks ago