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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• 3 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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• 3 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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• 3 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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• 3 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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• 3 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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• 3 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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• 3 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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• 3 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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• 3 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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• 3 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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• 3 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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• 3 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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• 3 years ago

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...

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• 3 years ago

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...

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• 3 years ago

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...

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• 3 years ago

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...

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• 3 years ago

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...

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• 3 years ago

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...

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• 3 years ago

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...

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• 3 years ago