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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...
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 ...
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...
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-...
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...
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...
5 UX Common Problems and How to Get Them Sorted
We’ll be looking at a lot of UX issues here on the UX Daily over the coming months and more importantly we’ll be looking at how to fix them too. We start today with 5 bugbears that really ought to be incredibly easy to eliminate.I Don’t Like SpidersSeriously, I hate spiders. I am an arachnophobe extraordinaire. They freak me out. I don’t want to...
Social Computing 101: The Basics
There’s no denying that as a species, we are incredibly social beings. We are at our best when in groups that we feel comfortable with and at our worst when we see those around us as “different” in some way. We talk, we smile, we touch, and we are remarkably aware of how the people around us feel thanks to these actions. It is perhaps then u...
Schemas: Designing According to Users' Expectations
In everything we do, we are bound by our previous experiences. We make judgements on the basis of our interactions and experiences with the world. Someone catching ball positions themselves according to the environmental information and their understanding of how objects behave under certain conditions. For example, if it is windy, the catcher m...
UX Research Communication – Video Communication
Today, let's take a look at a method that allows you to reach the people who simply won’t read anything and to capture the attention of people in a very interesting way.Video CommunicationThe good news about using video in projects is that it no longer requires a huge investment in equipment. You can get a decent video camera and microphone setu...
Where Does User Experience Fit at the Strategic Level in our Business?
If there’s a management buzzword of the moment; it’s strategy. I actually had an interview once where a clueless director asked; “yes, but what strategy is that?” over and over again. I’d mapped out the strategy but it had become very clear through the course of the conversation that the director had no idea what “strategy” meant and had confuse...
Four Different Perspectives on User Personas
There are a plethora of awesome tools that you can use in UX design projects but by far the most popular and one of the most useful is the user persona. In her work, Personas, Lene Nielsen describes four perspectives that your user personas can take to ensure that they add the most value to your UX design project. Let’s have a look at each of th...
A Brief Introduction to Context Aware Computing
It’s often all too easy to forget that computing is a relatively new discipline. Computers are such an incredibly powerful part of our lives now that they are taken nearly for granted. Technology is with us from the moment we wake up (our alarm clock), when we go out the door (keycard systems etc.), on the way to work (engines are often computer...
Open User Innovation in Design- Why It Happens
Did you know that some of the most dramatic design shifts are brought about by users of products? In fact, in many instances, such as open source software, users are often able to bring about huge levels of change and are willing and freely able to share this with the larger community.It was almost 30 years ago when two different research groups...
Creating Brand or Product Awareness and the User Experience
The user experience for your customers often doesn’t start when they arrive at your web page or when they first open your shiny application on their smartphone or tablet; it starts the very first time they encounter your brand. The “awareness” phase as marketers call it. This is the moment when a potential customer is aware of you and hasn’t yet...
Using UX Skills to Drive Organizational Change
The UX designer is often focused on the world outside of their company and that’s, ideally, how it should be. Yet, all too often organizations are frustrating places to work. The company culture impedes us rather than supports us. The projects we work on are badly defined. The objectives we’re given are intangible and vague rather than attainabl...
Digital Product Launches – Minimum Viable Products and UX
Developing digital products is expensive. Launching your first digital product is fraught with worries and tension. If you’re sinking your life savings into your product when is the right time to launch? And what should you consider to try and maximize the UX and thus the potential returns on your investment?The Minimum Viable ProductThe best wa...
Ethics and the User Experience – Ethics and the Individual
On a rating scale of 1-10 how ethical do you think you are? 1 is completely unethical, and 10 is 100% ethical. This is an important question because research shows that most of believe we act ethically all the time but in reality most of us let our standards slip at some point or another. In fact we quite regularly act unethically but believe th...
What Does an Ethnographer Do?
Hey! Wait a minute! This is a UX forum; what has ethnography got to do with design at all? That’s a fair question and if you give us just a few seconds we’ll walk you through that too. Ethnography is a funny discipline and one that many of us simply don’t get that much insight into during our academic and business careers; yet it is a very usefu...
It’s 5 More Awesome UX Practices that Will Help Your Project Deliver Great UX
Welcome back to some great UX tips and tricks to get your project's UX practices on key!Pre-Made Palettes RockAuthor/Copyright holder: Amber Case. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-NC 2.0Of course you’re going to want to customize the look and feel of your website. One of the easiest ways to do that is to change the colours. We’d encourage ever...
