Customer Journey Maps - Walking a Mile in Your Customer’s Shoes

Perhaps the biggest buzzword in customer relationship management is “engagement”. Engagement is a funny thing, in that it is not measured in likes, clicks, or even purchases. It’s a measure of how much customers feel they are in a relationship with a product, business or brand. It focuses on harmony and how your business, product or brand become...

• 266 shares
• 2 weeks ago

How to Calculate the Return on Investment of a Design Education

One of the biggest challenges facing designers is how to begin and how to further their design education. Do you go for the university degree or book-learning or e-learning or pay for classroom learning? While we all have some natural preference for one (or more) of these learning methods, one thing we really need to consider is the return on in...

• 279 shares
• 2 weeks ago

The Basics of Recruiting Users for Usability Testing

Recruiting the right participants is crucial if your user research is to get your design anywhere. Your research participants must be able to represent your target group or end users; otherwise, your results will not translate into something you can use. The level of difficulty you will face when recruiting participants depends on your criteria....

• 282 shares
• 2 weeks ago

Learn to Create Accessible Websites with the Principles of Universal Design

“Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning and focused effort.” — Paul J. Meyer, premier international authority on goal setting, motivation, time management, and personal and professional development Accessibility is not the first item we consider when we start designing a w...

• 345 shares
• 2 weeks ago

Build a common language by referring to design movements

Let’s check out a couple of words that are vital to us. Without them or their functions, life would be a nightmare. It would take ages to get anything done! Thankfully, we have categorization and labeling to help us understand our world and communicate with others.Labels and categories are great, time-saving building blocks. As user experience d...

• 228 shares
• 2 weeks ago

5 Ideas to Help Bring Lean #UX into Your Research

Lean UX can be a tricky beast to get to grips with at first. For those used to working in more traditional UX environments it can be very challenging to move to an environment where the focus is on making decisions rather than producing deliverables.That means there’s a change in the way that the UX design team works. The idea is simply to chann...

• 196 shares
• 2 weeks ago

How to use Design Thinking to build the Perfect Portfolio

All the UX training in the world would be for nothing if you couldn’t get a job as a UX professional and fulfill your dream. Hiring for UX positions is difficult – recruiters need to assess many applicants’ skills, experience and attitudes towards their work. Contrary to being measured by traditional text-based résumés, UX candidates are typical...

• 256 shares
• 2 weeks ago

A Simple Introduction to Lean UX

Lean UX is an incredibly useful technique when working on projects where the Agile development method is used. Traditional UX techniques often don’t work when development is conducted in rapid bursts – there’s not enough time to deliver UX in the same way. Fundamentally Lean UX and other forms of UX all have the same goal in mind; delivering a g...

• 127 shares
• 2 weeks ago

User Stories: As a [UX Designer] I want to [embrace Agile] so that [I can make my projects user-centered]

Let’s examine a tool so simple yet so powerful that once you’ve learned about it, you will apply it in all your projects. It is a great design method that enhances collaboration among all stakeholders. Users’ Needs are a core part of Agile: the User Stories There are so many articles about UX and Agile. Lots of them are rants about how Agile i...

• 507 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...

• 445 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...

• 247 shares
• 3 weeks ago

How to Design Voice User Interfaces

If you are new to designing voice user interfaces, you may quickly find yourself unsure of how to create great user experiences. The way users interact with voice user interfaces is very different from how they interact with graphical ones. Not surprisingly, users' expectations for voice user interfaces are that the interaction will be more like...

• 170 shares
• 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...

• 211 shares
• 3 weeks ago

Empathy Map – Why and How to Use It

Did you know that users are more likely to choose, buy and use products that meet their needs as opposed to products that just meet their wants? An Empathy map will help you understand your user’s needs while you develop a deeper understanding of the persons you are designing for. There are many techniques you can use to develop this kind of emp...

• 166 shares
• 3 weeks ago

Design Scenarios - Communicating the Small Steps in the User Experience

Design scenarios are useful tools for communicating ideas about user actions. Mapping design scenarios also has the added benefit that it helps formalize ideas and to take creative approaches to those ideas. Most importantly of all, it will ensure that your designs are firmly rooted on terra firma and taking a “what our users want/need” approach...

• 303 shares
• 3 weeks ago

Bad Design vs. Good Design: 5 Examples We can Learn From

Looking at examples of bad design alongside counter-examples of good design is not only fun but also draws important lessons for designers. They highlight pitfalls for designers to avoid and let us understand how to translate design theories into solutions that work in the real world. Jared Spool, the American writer, researcher and usability ex...

• 234 shares
• 3 weeks ago

How to Change Your Career from Graphic Design to UX Design

If there’s an occupation that is 100% linked with the public’s idea of what design is all about, it’s graphic design. From the familiar golden arches of the McDonald’s brand to the typography and colors of movie posters, graphic designers create some of the most iconic and ubiquitous designs around us. So why would a graphic designer like you wa...

• 267 shares
• 3 weeks ago

Recalling Color Theory Keywords: a way to refresh your memories!

Choosing the best combination of colors for an interactive design layout is not, as it may appear, a guessing game. Knowing which ones to use will save you time (and headaches). Getting it right will also keep your users connected.Since the early days of art and design, the use of color has followed many rules and guidelines, which are collectiv...

• 334 shares
• 3 weeks ago

User Interface Design Guidelines: 10 Rules of Thumb

Learn to design with your user’s needs and expectations in mind by applying Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich’s Ten User Interface Guidelines. These heuristics have been reflected in many of the products designed by some of the most successful companies in the world such as Apple, Google, and Adobe. Further evidence of how their design teams incorpo...

• 293 shares
• 3 weeks ago

Customer Touchpoints - The Point of Interaction Between Brands, Businesses, Products and Customers

There are as many different definitions for the word “touchpoint” in customer experience design and marketing as there are flavors on the average restaurant menu. Why? Because these disciplines have been evolving rapidly over the last decades and terminology has become fluid rather than static. To make matters more complicated – the term “touchp...

• 416 shares
• 3 weeks ago