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UX Consistency: Solution Creation and Comparison
Welcome back to the fifth part of our series on creating more consistent results from UX projects. The previous parts of the series can all be found under the UX Daily tab on our website. Today, we’re looking at what we do after we’ve ranked our ideas, agreed on principles for design, storyboarded our ideas and told a story based on them and we’...
What Happens When a Business Objective Opposes User Experience?
We’re big advocates for user experience design. There’s no good reason for companies not to involve their users in designing better products. However, there’s sometimes a clash between what a company wants to achieve and what its’ users want. What happens then?First Things FirstIt is important to remember that our first priority as UX designers ...
UX Consistency: Storyboarding those Ideas
Welcome back to our series on delivering more consistent results from UX Projects. If you missed the first two parts of the series, they can be found under the UX Daily tab on our website. Today we’re going to look at a method to help take the ideas that you found most valuable and give them a little test run before you take them further.Storybo...
UX Report Writing
Let’s take a look at one of the key communication skills you’ll need for your next research project – report writing.Writing Reports for UX ResearchIt is unlikely that for most reports that you’ll find a one-size fits all format that keeps everyone in the stakeholder group happy. You may find that you need to do three reports for every report yo...
The UX of the Online Shopping Cart – What Causes Cart Abandonment?
There is perhaps no bigger source of frustration for the e-retailer than cart abandonment. It says that the UX of their site/app was perfect right up until the point that the user had to get their money out and then something went wrong. Let’s take a look at the main causes of shopping cart abandonment and how to head them off at the pass:The nu...
A Free Wireframing Book and 5 Great Wireframing Tutorials
We do our best to keep an eye out for new material for our community. One of the areas of significant interest to that community is wireframing. The ability to test product iterations cheaply and on the fly is a central part of quality UX design processes. So this week we thought we’d take a walk through some of the best wireframing resources ou...
UX Consistency: Data Driven
Today, we’re going to look at generating data to support our decision making process. It is easier to make an informed decision when it’s based on real data rather than our own instincts.User InterviewsAs with all UX projects; the best data we can get to inform the user experience is data from real users. The user interview is a simple and compe...
What is...Branding?
When you were at school, in all likelihood your mum/mom/mother (delete as necessary) probably stitched your name into all parts of your uniform and sports kit. While they were probably itchy and annoying, they helped you keep track of your stuff by distinguishing them from everybody else's clothes. Personalising your things in this way, allowed ...
Using LinkedIn to Attract Design Clients
LinkedIn can be an awesome tool for the freelance designer to win over new clients. The biggest benefit of connecting with prospects on LinkedIn is that they have the opportunity to review what’s public about you before engaging in a conversation. In essence, you’re removing the “cold” from “cold calling”. But to win work on LinkedIn you need to...
UX Consistency: Ranking Ideas and Agreeing on Principles for the Design
This week, we’re looking at a process to deliver more consistent results from UX design projects. Yesterday, we looked at the reason that many traditional methods don’t deliver consistent results. Today, we’re looking at the first step in the process: ranking ideas and agreeing on the principles to be used in the design project.Collate and Rank ...
5 great Data visualisation tools
Data has been said to be the new world’s currency and the web can be seen as the exchange where this currency is traded. In our everyday lives we have thousands if not millions of pieces of data thrown at us every day. As designers we need to sit down and work out how we are going to communicate this data to our clients or the general public, ma...
Content Marketing UX Fails to Avoid
Content marketing can be a huge boost to the overall user experience of your products or sites but bad content marketing can drive viewers away. There are some simple guidelines to boost the UX of content marketing and the sales that result from it:Quality Really MattersYou may have read that you can outsource your content for pennies to develop...
UX Consistency: A Process for Driving UX Projects that Produce Results
As most UX designers will know; it can be hard to get to a consistent decision making process that delivers consistently great user experiences. On any given project you’ll have dozens, hundreds or even thousands of ideas to deal with.Author/Copyright holder: Pimthida. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0Sitting down in a meeting and thr...
The Key Principles of Contextual Design
Contextual design is a reflection of the idea that no design exists in a vacuum. That one technology or perhaps system will interact in a much larger context; one of its environment and that that environment will not necessarily remain static (unchanging). Thus contextual design places a design in “context” and seeks to maximize its usefulness.T...
Can User Evangelism Go Astray in Companies?
Yes, User Experience is a vital part of delivering what people want and that means better products and more profits. So user evangelism, the role of pushing a focus on users, can be very beneficial in an organization but what happens when things go wrong? When a Verbal Commitment Has No Backupisn’t a verbal commitment. Pretty much everyone toda...
The ROI of UX – Some Basic Metrics
User experience is important; we know that as UX professionals but how do we communicate the benefits to the people who pay for our services? The easiest way is to develop metrics that can provide indications that our work is offering benefits to the organization we work for. So what kinds of metrics might we want to use? This week, we’ll be loo...
The Use of Language and the User Experience
Language is often something that we take for granted. We make assumptions about the way people communicate and fall back on our own preferred communication styles naturally. Yet, the use of language is important when it comes to user experience and our own styles may not make the grade for our users.A Rule of Thumb – Plain English is BestA rule ...
The 5 Main Characteristics of Interaction Design
The very first book that went into our design library was a Brief Introduction to Interaction Design by Jonas Lowgren. In that book he defines interaction design as “shaping digital things for people’s use” and then he goes on to show the 5 main characteristics of interaction design. We’ll revisit those ideas, briefly here, if you’d like to read...
5 Skills Necessary to Get the Most Out of Your User Testing Sessions
User testing requires a number of different skills. Before the testing even begins you need to identify and recruit an appropriate sample of test users that accurately represent your eventual audience or market. You will need to establish a set of tasks that get to the heart of the issues you want to investigate. And you will need to prepare the...
Five Tips for a Better Freelance Design Financial Life
If you’ve just started freelancing then you may not be prepared for all the things you need to handle now compared to just doing your job in your last paid employment. To make your freelance life easier – you can take some very concrete actions early in the day to get better results:You Need an AccountantThe most important asset to most business...
