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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• 4 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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• 4 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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• 4 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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• 4 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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• 4 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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• 4 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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• 4 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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• 4 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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• 4 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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• 4 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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• 4 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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• 4 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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• 4 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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• 4 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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• 4 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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• 4 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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• 4 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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• 4 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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• 4 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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• 4 years ago