The Pros and Cons of Guerrilla Research for Your UX Project

If there’s a more fun way to conduct user research than guerrilla research; we’ve not found it yet. Nothing beats getting out into the “wild” and talking to users and finding out what makes the tick. The informality of this style of research also appeals to the rebel in us – no big expensive user testing labs but rather coffee shops and office c...

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• 3 years ago

Enhancing UX with Credible Content – Offering Support

Welcome back to our series on improving the UX of your online platforms through the use of credible content. The whole series can be found under the UX Daily tab on our website.Today, we’re going to look at, perhaps, the most obvious way to help your users – providing support when they need it.Offering SupportYes, we know – support costs money. ...

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• 3 years ago

You Have to Design the Details Too

In my head, the UX Daily, was my idea. Yet, it’s not the first time the idea of a magazine style offering has been kicked around at the IDF HQ but it is the first time it came into fruition. It turns out that though the UX daily was my idea; it’s been a lot of other peoples’ ideas first. We recognize that in trying to bring people the best possi...

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• 3 years ago

Enhancing UX with Credible Content – Clear Communication

Welcome back, our series on enhancing UX with credible content continues today but if you’ve missed any of the rest of the series – you can find it under the UX Daily tab on our website.One of the simplest ways to enhance the user experience is to communicate clearly and meaningfully with your users. Let’s take a look at how that can work in pra...

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• 3 years ago

5 Awesome Tips to Get the Most from Your UX Research

UX research is the most essential part of the UX design process. If you don’t find out what your users want (or need); it is nearly impossible to provide them with the right user experience. That often means that we need to build a team of researchers that can be thrown into action when they’re needed by a client. Here are 5 great tips to get mo...

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• 3 years ago

Enhancing UX with Credible Content – Handling Feedback

Welcome back to the part of our series designed to help you enhance the user experience through the use of credible content. The rest of the series, and the final part when it is published tomorrow, may be found under the UX Daily tab on our website.Today, we’re going to look at a critical issue – how to handle customer feedback in public spaces...

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• 3 years ago

User Testing: Why are we still having to fight its case?

Why conduct user testing?There are no guarantees in design; something embraced by one group may well be rejected by another, but this does not mean we should discount the benefits of speaking to, observing, and testing a sample of users. User-centred design emphasises the importance of engaging the people who will ultimately use a product or ser...

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• 3 years ago

The User Experience of The Written Word

There’s an awful lot of conflicting information about the way people read on the web. There was a time when search engines were designed to find any text with any content that had your keywords in it. Then people started to realize that that sucked. We wanted useful information and not just text.Then the algorithms changed and text had to have a...

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• 3 years ago

Enhancing UX with Credible Content – Ethical Concerns

This week we’re examining how content can help enhance the user experience and add credibility to your online offerings. You can find all the parts of the series (as they’re released) under the UX Daily tab on our website.Today, we tackle ethical concerns. In particular we’re going to look at some of the concerns your users may have and how you ...

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• 3 years ago

Don't Put That There! The Importance of Proximity in Design

The arrangement of items within user interfaces may, at times, seem a minor detail, but we are finely tuned to perceive order and structure. When items are in close proximity we see them as belonging to, or forming the same group. When users are meant to view items as grouped, place them close to one another, but if you do not want users to...

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• 3 years ago

7 Key Questions to Help You Define the Scope of Your Design Project

Enthusiasm can be the death of us. Being a great designer isn’t enough to keep your projects on track and in budget; it’s vital that at some point early in the project – that you define the scope of that project. This is useful for many reasons including: your clients will know when you have delivered what you said you would, you will know when ...

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• 3 years ago

The Three Types of Formal Methods of Human Computer Interaction

"Formal methods" sounds kind of scary but it in reality it’s a way of saying; “the system with which we record ideas/information/etc.” and that’s rather less scary. In Human Computer Interaction (HCI) there are a multitude of formal methods, in use, to record ideas and other types of information. Today, we’ll take a look at the three main types ...

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• 3 years ago

How Do I Create a Sales Forecast for My New Design Business?

Many designers are businessmen/women in their own right. The freelance market for designers in all fields is huge and both new entrants to design and long-established pros often find that selling their products/services directly to a client is more appealing than working for someone else.One of the big things a new freelancer has to do, is to cr...

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• 3 years ago

Support Users by Being Consistently Consistent

The need for consistency is a principle of design common to all lists of user interface design guidelines (e.g. Shneiderman's 'Eight Golden Rules' and Nielsen and Molich's Ten UI Design Heuristics) for a reason; it underpins immersion. The ability to move freely through any display with little consideration given to the major questions (i.e. 'wh...

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• 3 years ago

4 Design Outcomes That Bring Out Emotions

The best products aren’t just used, they’re cared for and they’re loved and they bring out real emotions in their users. In the book Emotion and Website Design by Dianne Cyr (Professor in the Beedie School of Business at Simon Frazer University in Vancouver) you will find 4 outcomes that elicit emotions in users. (You can read all of Dianne’s bo...

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• 3 years ago

The Ethics of Sales Psychology

It’s quite amazing how many sales psychology tricks are employed online. The theory is simple; the online vendor wants to persuade the user to spend as much money as possible or at the very least to spend some money before they leave the website. A Typical Tactic Amazon offers free delivery right? Well… not entirely. Amazon offers free deliver...

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• 3 years ago

How to Deal with Difficult Design Clients

The freelance designer is often seen to have the best job in the world. That’s because other people see you start work from home or learn that you get a long weekend whenever you want one because you can change your work schedule to suit your needs. The bit that they miss is that you are also the only person who deals with your clients. The best...

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• 3 years ago

Free Apple Watch GUI, Hand Sketched Icons and Epic Outlines Font

Apple Watch GUI for SketchDesigncode.io has highly accurately reproduced apple’s new watch GUI in 100% vector for Sketch including all elements such as clocks, icons and watch devices that you may export and play around with however you wish. The kit lets you analyse various UI elements and use them for producing great apps as well as studying a...

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• 3 years ago

The Classic Types of Experience

It’s very easy to leap into the field of “User Experience” without ever taking so much as a minute to look at the word “experience”. It’s such a familiar word that we can struggle to articulate what it means even while we know exactly what it means to us.There are in fact several classic types of experience (though it can and should be argued th...

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• 3 years ago

A Brief History of the Origin of the Computer Icon

The humble icon has come a long way in a very short time. For those of us who have grown up in the modern age it may feel like this is a world that has never lacked for computer icons; they are ubiquitous. The reality is that the icon is a rather more recent invention with the first real icon based GUI only appearing for consumers in 1981! It i...

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• 3 years ago