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

5 Classic Designs Which Revolutionized Their Fields

It’s nice to take a few minutes every now and again and appreciate just what a difference design can make to our lives. We’ve picked 5 classic designs which revolutionized the world around us. What do you think? Are there other designs you’d like to include on this list? Or have we got something really wrong in your opinion? Let us know on our F...

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• 3 years ago

Ecological Perception Theory and Industrial Design

What is Ecological Perception Theory? In simple terms; it’s the theory of how our environment changes the way that we act. Once we know that, we can then see how important this concept must be to design and in particular to industrial design. Barker and Ecological Perception Theory Barker’s work was completed during the late 1960s. Barker theo...

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• 3 years ago

UX Consistency: Summary and a Final Tip

This is the final instalment of our series designed to help you get more consistency from your UX projects. Today, we’ll quickly summarize what we’ve learned and then look at one last critical piece of advice that should help your projects become more consistent than ever before (at least if you’re not already doing it).SummaryWe began the week ...

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• 3 years ago

UX Consistency: Test and Measure

Today, we’re looking at what we do once we’ve agreed on a solution and are moving it forward to development:Test and MeasureThe best way to see if an idea delivers on its promise is to test. There are many ways to test ideas but two methods are particularly useful in UX projects; testing the concept and usability testing. Now with a bit of luck,...

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• 3 years ago

Problems Associated with Integrating Agile Methods in UCD

In 2003, Jakob Nielsen recommended that "development projects should spend 10% of their budget on usability". Although many countries are now making tentative steps out of the recession, the effect on tech budgets has put an even greater squeeze on the availability of funds for heavyweight usability testing. This has, no doubt, given considerabl...

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• 3 years ago

Voxels, the Future of Computer Game Design?

Computer games are all about the user experience. If they suck, they’re dead in the water and with hundreds of millions now required to product a big-budget production; that’s no small loss to weather. However, one of the commonest complaints regarding games may be easier to fix than it has been in the past. The issue of not enough realistic con...

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• 3 years ago

5 Handy Photo Editing Apps for Android

It’s absolutely incredible how powerful the smartphone’s camera has become. The iPhone6 and Samsung Galaxy S5, for example, both have cameras that would put the average point and click to shame. When cameras are this good – even professional photographers are tempted to make their phone the core of their business – you need to be able to edit an...

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• 3 years ago

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’...

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• 3 years ago

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 ...

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• 3 years ago

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...

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• 3 years ago

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...

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• 3 years ago

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...

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• 3 years ago

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...

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• 3 years ago

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...

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• 3 years ago

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 ...

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• 3 years ago

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...

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• 3 years ago

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 ...

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• 3 years ago

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...

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• 3 years ago

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...

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• 3 years ago