Prototyping: Learn Eight Common Methods and Best Practices

There can never be an exhaustive list of prototyping methods, since there is quite literally an endless number of ways you can build prototypes. What we can do, however, is provide a useful list of the eight most common prototyping methods, together with best practice tips that help you maximise your prototyping and testing sessions. By arming y...

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• 2 weeks ago

A Very Useful Work of Fiction – Mental Models in Design

Mental models play an important role in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and interaction design. They relate to the way that a user perceives the world around them and are based in belief as opposed to being a factual concept. However, if you can understand your users' mental models, you can simulate these models within your designs to make them...

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• 2 weeks ago

Visual Hierarchy: Organizing content to follow natural eye movement patterns

Let’s look at a topic that deals with, oddly enough, how we look at designs. Once you understand how the human eye processes these, you’ll find yourself better able to arrange your elements more effectively. Content in any digital page layout will follow a specific hierarchy. Headers appear above body text. Menus go at the top, bottom, left, or...

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• 2 weeks ago

The Grid System: Building a Solid Design Layout

Now that we’ve seen some grids at work in the Rule of Thirds article, let’s examine them a little more deeply. As a concept that deals so fundamentally with the fabric and background of our work as designers, it’s easy to overlook the power of grids and think more about the elements we want to create. Many traditional artists still paint their m...

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• 2 weeks ago

9 Free to Use Wireframing Tools

We all know that wireframing is a great way to test ideas in our UX projects but we also know that there are a ton of wireframing tools available to do it with. It can be hard to choose the right tool but one of the easiest ways to get an idea – is to get hands on with the tool and have a play with it. The wireframing tools in this article are ...

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• 2 weeks ago

Putting Some Emotion into Your Design – Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions

Emotional design is a big buzz word within the UX community. Designs which tap into the user’s emotions are considered to do more than just respond to their stated needs and provide a greater level of user experience. One way of understanding emotions is Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions – this may help you deliver better experiences to your users wh...

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• 2 weeks ago

Service Blueprints - Communicating the Design of Services

Service blueprints were first described by Lynn Shostack, a banking executive, back in 1982 in the Harvard Business Review. They’ve become popularized over the last few years as service design has grown as a profession. In addition to being useful in service design they are often used by operational management to gauge the efficiency of work wit...

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• 2 weeks ago

Positive Emotional Responses

“Humans display the intriguing characteristic of making and using objects. The things with which people interact are not simply tools for survival, or for making survival easier and more comfortable. Things embody goals, make skills manifest, and shape the identities of their users. Man is not only homo sapiens or homo ludens, he is also homo f...

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• 2 weeks ago

Emotion and Design

Factors specific to the things we use in our everyday lives influence how we feel when we are using them. It is, therefore, the role of designers to both understand how we are affected by the products they design, and how they can be developed to (on a small scale) improve the associated user experience, and (on a much grander scale) improve our...

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• 2 weeks ago

How to Prevent Negative Emotions in the User Experience of Your Product

Learn to prevent negative emotions in the user experience of your product. As a User Experience (UX) designer, you want users to enjoy using your product by eliminating negative experiences and inducing positive emotion in your users. This article will teach you how to prevent anger and frustration from your users as you design the optimal user ...

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• 2 weeks ago

How to Design an Information Visualization

Designing information visualizations offers you endless possibilities when it comes to end products and it would be impossible to provide step-by-step instructions for all these possibilities. However, it is fair to say that while the end products may vary dramatically – the process by which we reach the best possible end product is consistently...

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• 2 weeks ago

Let’s End the Year on a High: Get 25% off UX Courses for the Whole of 2019

The end of the year brings about a time of reflection, appreciation, and forward planning. You might review what you’ve achieved over the past 12 months… or think ahead to your goals for the upcoming year, for instance. Alternatively, your mind may be filled with excitement about the gifts you plan to give loved ones over the festive season! ...

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• 2 weeks ago

How to improve your UX designs with Task Analysis

One of the most important steps in the Design Thinking process that is often employed as standard practice in UX design is to define the users’ problems. This means being able to clearly identify and articulate problems in the user experience so that you can later begin the process of ideating (i.e., generating great ideas on how to solve them)....

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• 2 weeks ago

From Prototype to Product: Ensuring Your Solution is Feasible and Viable

The end goal of a Design Thinking work process is to create a solution that is desirable, feasible, and viable. This means that your product or solution should not only satisfy the needs of a user but be easy to implement and have a commercial model as well. During the bulk of your Design Thinking work process, desirability would be at the foref...

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• 3 weeks ago

20 People in UX that You Have to Follow on Twitter

If you’re stuck for where to get started in UX then one of the easiest things you can do is get active on social media. If you connect with the industry’s biggest names, you can learn a ton of new information, find out about job opportunities and network with many other UX designers at the same time. But where do you start? Well, we’re here for ...

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• 3 weeks ago

The Persona Template for Gamification

For any gamification project, you’ll need to do research on players in order to determine what they will require from the gamified system. The culmination of this research is the development of a player persona; this is similar to a user persona (which most UX researchers will be intimately familiar with), but it also examines some gamification-...

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• 3 weeks ago

Shadowing in User Research - Do You See What They See?

The idea of shadowing someone to see what they are doing is not new. It is a technique that is widely implemented in user research. The idea is simple; the researcher accompanies the user and observes how they use the product or service within their natural environment. Shadowing also takes place in other fields of business and in particular in...

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• 3 weeks ago

How to Advocate and Evangelize User Experience

It’s getting better and better but, still, how many times have you had to justify why user experience matters and what it actually means? To be prepared, as part of your UX toolbox, you should have a set of examples and visuals to ground your arguments. Case studies are great ways to exemplify the relevance of UX for product and service developm...

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• 3 weeks ago

Etch A Sketch: How to Use Sketching in User Experience Design

Have you ever wondered how you could convey your design decisions more effectively to your colleagues and users in a timely and cost-efficient manner? Have you found yourself stuck in a design, unable to see alternative approaches? Are you sure you are applying usability engineering to the right design or to the only design you have? You can rel...

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• 3 weeks ago

14 Barriers to Ideation – and How to Overcome Them

Would you like to facilitate successful ideation sessions? Or would you like to learn how to contribute to ideation processes in your team more effectively? In either case, you should know the ideation traps and how you can prevent yourself and your team from falling into them. You should give the following 14 important barriers to ideation your...

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• 3 weeks ago