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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• 4 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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• 4 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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• 4 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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• 4 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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• 4 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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• 4 years ago

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...

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• 4 years ago

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...

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• 4 years ago

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...

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• 4 years ago

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...

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• 4 years ago

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 ...

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• 4 years ago

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...

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• 4 years ago

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...

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• 4 years ago

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...

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• 4 years ago

Gamification At Work: What is Gamification?

Gamification is among the latest tech industry buzzwords, but the core concept of using games and gaming strategy to engage users is not new at all.It is fast becoming  increasingly useful and valuable in social learning as it aids information retention and aids learning, it is the addition of various systems such as points, scoring, rules...

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• 4 years ago

The 7 Waves of Mobile Computing

Mobile computing is the cutting edge frontier of technology in society today. It’s perhaps worth considering the path we took to get where we are and to examine where we are going with mobile computing so that we can better design solutions for mobile computing. There have been 7 distinct phases or waves of mobile computing so far: Portability ...

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• 4 years ago

User Experience and the First Encounter with a Product

The most critical interaction with a product is the first one. First impressions last. My first experience with an Apple Computer was dreadful and I haven’t touched one since. I have become a lifelong Windows/Unix user instead. I know instinctively that Apple offers a great user experience; people keep telling me (often at rather unnecessary len...

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• 4 years ago

The Hick-Hyman Law: An Argument Against Complexity in User Interface Design

There is often a temptation to provide users with a number of options all at once, but research suggests that the number of possible selections can slow users down. This problem was identified by British Psychologists William Hick and Ray Hyman in 1951, after carrying out a series of experiments to assess cognitive information capacity.The Hick-...

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• 4 years ago

5 Apps that Make a Designer’s Life Easier

None of the apps in this round up are design specific. All of them could be used in any walk of life but just because they’re not design specific – it doesn’t mean that they can’t make a designer’s life easier. In fact, we think they make it much easier. We wish that some of these had been around when we started out careers… The 5 Apps that Make...

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• 4 years ago

Preparing Users for Usability Testing

Conducting usability tests can be made much easier when the users are properly prepared. This can be a daunting exercise when you first start conducting usability tests but fortunately; it’s not as challenging as it might seem. There are four simple tips that can help you get users in the right frame of mind to work with you on usability tests:B...

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• 4 years ago