Design Patterns for Fluid Navigation – How to Use Inline Linking

When you’re designing a website for an online newspaper, your users will probably want to read some background information relating to a new government policy, a new whistle-blower, or any other word or phrase they don’t have all of the information on yet. When you’re designing something completely different, such as a complex online tax return ...

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• 1 week ago

Bad Design vs. Good Design: 5 Examples We can Learn From

Looking at examples of bad design alongside counter-examples of good design is not only fun but also draws important lessons for designers. They highlight pitfalls for designers to avoid and let us understand how to translate design theories into solutions that work in the real world. Jared Spool, the American writer, researcher and usability ex...

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• 1 week ago

14 Barriers to Ideation – and How to Overcome Them

Would you like to facilitate successful ideation sessions? Or would you like to learn how to contribute to ideation processes in your team more effectively? In either case, you should know the ideation traps and how you can prevent yourself and your team from falling into them. You should give the following 14 important barriers to ideation your...

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• 1 week ago

How to Design Voice User Interfaces

If you are new to designing voice user interfaces, you may quickly find yourself unsure of how to create great user experiences. The way users interact with voice user interfaces is very different from how they interact with graphical ones. Not surprisingly, users' expectations for voice user interfaces are that the interaction will be more like...

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• 1 week ago

Customer Touchpoints - The Point of Interaction Between Brands, Businesses, Products and Customers

There are as many different definitions for the word “touchpoint” in customer experience design and marketing as there are flavors on the average restaurant menu. Why? Because these disciplines have been evolving rapidly over the last decades and terminology has become fluid rather than static. To make matters more complicated – the term “touchp...

• 380 shares
• 2 weeks ago

User Interface Design Guidelines: 10 Rules of Thumb

Learn to design with your user’s needs and expectations in mind by applying Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich’s Ten User Interface Guidelines. These heuristics have been reflected in many of the products designed by some of the most successful companies in the world such as Apple, Google, and Adobe. Further evidence of how their design teams incorpo...

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• 2 weeks ago

Web Fonts are Critical to the Online User Experience - Don’t Hurt Your Reader’s Eyes

Bill Gates said; “Content is King” and when it comes to the online user experience it is the 100% truth. Delivering a great user experience doesn’t just mean delivering great content – it also means providing that content in a usable and useful format that encourages reading and interaction rather than clicking out of the site because it’s unrea...

• 419 shares
• 2 weeks ago

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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• 2 weeks ago

User Stories: As a [UX Designer] I want to [embrace Agile] so that [I can make my projects user-centered]

Let’s examine a tool so simple yet so powerful that once you’ve learned about it, you will apply it in all your projects. It is a great design method that enhances collaboration among all stakeholders. Users’ Needs are a core part of Agile: the User Stories There are so many articles about UX and Agile. Lots of them are rants about how Agile i...

• 481 shares
• 2 weeks ago

Essential Design Thinking Videos and Methods

The following resources are recommended in order to assist you to better understand Design Thinking. These resources, videos, and tools should be explored so as to familiarise yourself with how Design Thinking is being taught and applied currently. The resources listed below are only a sample of a wide array of information available on the subje...

• 185 shares
• 2 weeks ago

Hick’s Law: Making the choice easier for users

Now let’s see a topic about keeping our users’ lives easy. “Isn’t that the theme of most articles here?” you may ask. Well, this one is especially geared towards users. Understanding Hick’s law means you can design so that more users will visit and stay on your website. Delivering a good user experience requires that first you find out the fu...

• 212 shares
• 2 weeks ago

The User Experience of Recruitment – Why You May Not Get the UX Talent You Really Want

Businesses are still stuck in the idea that UX is about the products and services they offer their customers. They are yet to grasp the idea that UX can be applied to all services within a business. A UX focused of review of recruitment or accounting (or whatever) can quickly improve the way that a business function, which will never (or rarely)...

• 416 shares
• 2 weeks ago

Do I Need a Degree to Work In User Experience?

This is a question that, in slightly different forms, gets asked a lot by those considering a UX design career. The question is a simple one but the answer..? Well, that’s a bit more complicated. A lot depends on you and your approach to life and your career. So let’s take a look at the benefits of a degree and the alternative paths you might pr...

• 189 shares
• 2 weeks ago

The Seven Simple Principles of Conversion Centred Design (CCD) and How to Use Them

Oli Gardner – the Creative Director of Unbounce (a landing page builder for marketers), is an advocate of CCD. He says that deploying CCD makes each page you create on a website a piece of “accountable content”. In that you can measure the impact, purpose and success of each page as that page plays a part in converting visitors into customers. D...

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• 2 weeks ago

Map the Stakeholders

Having faced the problem statement and defined the challenge space, the challenge owner or initiator now needs to gather the troops. In more complex settings or larger organisations, drafting a stakeholder map, outlining people involved, affected, or influenced both internally and externally is a necessary first step. If you’re a project owner ...

• 123 shares
• 2 weeks ago

What is Interaction Design?

Interaction design is an important component within the giant umbrella of user experience (UX) design. In this article, we’ll explain what interaction design is, some useful models of interaction design, as well as briefly describe what an interaction designer usually does. A simple and useful understanding of interaction designInteraction de...

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• 2 weeks ago

Create Some Space – for Ideation Sessions and Design Thinking

The spaces we occupy deeply influence our experiences, our feelings, and our behaviours. Our state of health, psychology, productivity, mood, and creativity spaces influence us on many levels and also influence our interactions with each other. The spaces in which we journey through Design Thinking and Ideation sessions must be set up in such a ...

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• 2 weeks ago

Making Use of the Crowd – Social Proof and the User Experience

Social proof (sometimes referred to as informational social influence) is a psychological concept. It refers to the tendency of human beings to follow the actions of others when making decisions and placing weight on those actions to assume “the correct decision”. It’s a concept that can be used in product design for the Internet and mobile web ...

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• 2 weeks ago

No-UI: How to Build Transparent Interaction

Here, we will explore and teach you about the incredible user experience opportunities which you can take advantage of when designing for interaction beyond the classical Graphical User Interface (GUI). Non-visual User Interaction (no-UI) is pioneered by the ground-breaking work of researchers who have realized that, in today’s world, we are sur...

• 218 shares
• 2 weeks ago

Embrace the Mental Models of Users by Implementing Tabs

Users of all ages will still remember the tabbed file folders people used to bring order into a vast amount of information and make it super simple to find what they were looking for. If you’re trying to design a good way to prevent your users from having to search for a needle in a haystack every time, the tabbed user interface is just what you...

• 234 shares
• 2 weeks ago