Dieter Rams: 10 Timeless Commandments for Good Design

Let’s pay a virtual visit to a famous industrial designer’s workshop. By examining the principles of his winning approach, we can incorporate vital elements into our designs in the “less is more” age. As user experience practitioners, most of us have worked with Nielsen and Molich’s 10 heuristics or rules of thumb and the Eight Golden Rules by ...

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• 2 weeks ago

How to Align UX with Product Management

The introduction of UX to a company’s workflow is often a straightforward process. There’s a common understanding that you will be delivering improvements to products that will enable better acceptance of those products in the market.However, the role of the product manager can often clash with the UX role. Why? Well… they really ought to be the...

• 185 shares
• 2 weeks ago

How to design great 404 Error Pages

Getting a 404 Error page is very similar to many real-life situations. What do we mean? Well, for example, if you are an “I-don’t-need-a-map” kind of person in an unknown place, you will most likely get lost. And while your frustration level rises to the level of Leonardo Di Caprio at The Oscars, imagine that someone approaches you and gently he...

• 169 shares
• 2 weeks ago

How to Visualize Your Qualitative User Research Results for Maximum Impact

When thinking about visualization of research results, many people will automatically have an image of a graph in mind. Do you have that image, too? You would be right in thinking that many research results benefit from a graph-like visualization, showing trends and anomalies. But this is mainly true for results from quantitative user research. ...

• 326 shares
• 2 weeks ago

Test Your Prototypes: How to Gather Feedback and Maximise Learning

Once you’ve built your prototypes based on the ideas you and your team generated, it’s time to gather feedback from the people on whom you are testing these. Optimising how you gather feedback — and, therefore, learn from your prototypes and users — is essential to help you save time and resources in the Prototype and Test stages of the Design T...

• 342 shares
• 2 weeks ago

How to Involve Stakeholders in Your User Research

If you want to do a user research project, it is important that you involve the relevant stakeholders in your planning. Your stakeholders can help ensure that the research you do is as relevant as possible for your project and that the people you need support from have an invested interest in your research. In-house and independent designers hav...

• 225 shares
• 2 weeks ago

Conducting Ethical User Research

In any type of research that involves human participants, it’s important to consider the ethics of the research project. That is also the case when you do user research. You are responsible for your participants’ wellbeing, for representing them honestly, and for keeping their personal information safe. That is a big responsibility, so it’s impo...

• 136 shares
• 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...

• 267 shares
• 3 weeks ago

Shneiderman’s Eight Golden Rules Will Help You Design Better Interfaces

Follow Ben Shneiderman’s 'Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design' if you want to design great, productive and frustration-free user interfaces. Apple, Google and Microsoft are among some of the highly successful companies whose well-designed products reflect Shneiderman’s rules. The characteristics derived from Shneiderman’s golden rules can be ...

• 368 shares
• 3 weeks ago

7 UX Deliverables: What will I be making as a UX designer?

What does a UX designer actually produce? Here, we will explore the concept of UX Deliverables, a term that describes the outputs of a UX design process during its various stages. The deliverables produced by UX designers vary according to their role in the design team and also depending on the methods and tools used by each role. We will provid...

• 235 shares
• 3 weeks ago

Visual Mapping – The Elements of Information Visualization

Information visualization requires mapping data in a visual or occasionally auditory format for the user of the visualization. This can be challenging because while some data has a spatial relationship built in (for example, temperatures in cities around a country) many data sets don’t have a traditional spatial relationship (for example, salari...

• 329 shares
• 3 weeks ago

Product-Service Hybrids – When Products and Services Become One

Mikal Hallstrup,, the Chief Visionary Officer of Designit says; “The world doesn’t necessarily need more products, it needs better solutions.” While a solution may commonly be a product or a service, it’s more likely to be a combination of the two in many instances today.The combination of a product and a service is a product-service hybrid. For...

• 326 shares
• 3 weeks ago

Heuristic Evaluation: How to Conduct a Heuristic Evaluation

Learn to conduct a heuristic evaluation on any given user interface design. This article will teach you how to generate and conduct your own heuristic evaluations so you can improve the usability, utility, and desirability of your designs. The best practice is to use established heuristics like Nielsen and Molich's 10 rules of thumb and Ben Shn...

• 269 shares
• 3 weeks ago

What is Interaction Design?

Interaction design is an important component within the giant umbrella of user experience (UX) design. In this article, we’ll explain what interaction design is, some useful models of interaction design, as well as briefly describe what an interaction designer usually does. A simple and useful understanding of interaction designInteraction de...

• 201 shares
• 3 weeks ago

5 Awesome TED Talks for Designers

We know, TED talks can sometimes feel a little… overblown. While there are loads of great talks; some of them go nowhere and don’t seem to add much to your life at all. To make things worse… there are a lot of TED talks and it’s hard to tell which are going to motivate you to do something new and interesting and which are going to bore the socks...

• 134 shares
• 3 weeks ago

How to Change Your Career from Web Design to UX Design

Changing careers isn’t as hard as it’s often made out to be, especially if you’ve got the right resources to help you make the change. For many web designers, now is the perfect time to make the switch into UX design. To start with, there’s the monetary boost that comes with the change in career. According to PayScale, web designers in the US ea...

• 250 shares
• 3 weeks ago

Apple’s Product Development Process – Inside the World’s Greatest Design Organization

Apple’s Product Development Process may be one of the most successful design processes ever implemented. With the company verging on becoming the world’s first $1 trillion business organization – there’s a lot that designers can learn from Apple and introduce into their own design environments.Apple is a notoriously secretive business. In Steve ...

• 377 shares
• 3 weeks ago

Web Fonts are Critical to the Online User Experience - Don’t Hurt Your Reader’s Eyes

Bill Gates said; “Content is King” and when it comes to the online user experience it is the 100% truth. Delivering a great user experience doesn’t just mean delivering great content – it also means providing that content in a usable and useful format that encourages reading and interaction rather than clicking out of the site because it’s unrea...

• 456 shares
• 3 weeks ago

Natural User Interfaces – What are they and how do you design user interfaces that feel natural?

User interfaces that you interact with using modalities such as touch, gestures or voice are often referred to as Natural User Interfaces (NUI). We consider them interfaces that we find so easy to use that they feel natural. However, what does it mean for an interface to be natural? Also, how do you design NUI interfaces? Here, we’re going to ex...

• 462 shares
• 3 weeks ago

User Goals and How They Influence Information Design Decisions

As an information designer, your main aim is to help people understand the world better. Whether they’re trying to make sense of national election sentiments or get a grip on tourism activities in a region, people need to understand the meaning and implications of facts and figures. These collections of words and numbers are raw data. Your duty ...

• 341 shares
• 3 weeks ago