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Customer Lifecycle Mapping - Getting to Grips with Customers
Customer experience is the key to running a successful business just as user experience is key to developing a successful product. Customer experience encompasses a larger range of interaction than user experience in that it not only takes into account UX but also the needs of those paying for the product or service (which may be very different ...
Google’s Material Design - Android Design Language
Material Design (originally referred to as and codenamed “Quantum Paper”) was developed by Google and is a design language used for Android devices. The idea, according to Matias Duarte Vice President of Design for Google, is to provide a design language which mimics the feel of pen and paper. Material design offers the user physical edges and s...
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...
User Experience and Customer Experience what’s the Difference?
At first glance the two terms appear to be identical don’t they? Our users are our customers and thus they’re the same thing. Except, of course, they’re not. So what’s the difference?What is User Experience (UX)? Author/Copyright holder: A-dit-ya. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY 2.0 The user experience is product (or service) specific. It ...
How to Get Users’ Agreement with the Opt-in/Opt-out Dance
The dark side is quite resourceful in sneaking things past your attention, thereby ensuring your engagement in their commercial activities. To do this, they rely on our inherent laziness, which prevents us from reading every single piece of text on our way towards completing a task. Phrased carefully to deceive you, the automatic opt-in design p...
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...
Aesthetics and form need to hold hands
This article examines two closely related ideas that are both about looks. Our design world revolves around nice images/form, but did you wonder why we’re allured to beauty? Let’s quickly ponder another question: why is a pretty post office different from a gorgeous art gallery? We’ll look at these two “sides” of this “coin”, namely Attractiven...
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...
Essential Design Thinking Videos and Methods
The following resources are recommended in order to assist you to better understand Design Thinking. These resources, videos, and tools should be explored so as to familiarise yourself with how Design Thinking is being taught and applied currently. The resources listed below are only a sample of a wide array of information available on the subje...
Make it Easy on the User: Designing for Discoverability within Mobile Apps
Discoverability sometimes also referred to as “learnability” is the ease at which users can find new features or functions with an app and learn to use the things that they find. While this has always been an important part of user experience design – it becomes even more important in the mobile design environment where limitations on screen rea...
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...
How Emotions Impact Cognition
Two information-processing systems determine the human emotional response: the affective and cognitive processing systems. The affective system operates outside of conscious thought and is reactive, in that a series of psychophysiological events are initiated automatically following the receipt of sensory information. In contrast, the cognitive ...
Adaptive vs. Responsive Design
The differences between responsive and adaptive design approaches spotlight important options for us as web and app designers. Choosing with insight can empower you to plan and execute your designs with better aim, purpose and results.With the pervasiveness and diversity of mobile devices, as designers we need to cater to the variety of screen s...
Map the Stakeholders
Having faced the problem statement and defined the challenge space, the challenge owner or initiator now needs to gather the troops. In more complex settings or larger organisations, drafting a stakeholder map, outlining people involved, affected, or influenced both internally and externally is a necessary first step. If you’re a project owner ...
Dressing Up Your UI with Colors That Fit
As designers, we have a powerful ally in color. It can let us work towards a number of different goals. You can use it to reinforce or highlight an idea, to provoke an emotional response from the user or to draw attention to a specific part of your website. This is, of course, in addition to making your website aesthetically pleasing to the eye....
Flat Design – An Introduction
With the dawn of personal computing skeuomorphic design became important to introduce users, unfamiliar with technology, to new concepts. Skeuomorphism takes a simple approach – it creates lifelike affordances in user interfaces (UI) that the user can relate to from their real lives. Thus when you delete a file – it goes in the trash can on scre...
8 terms to call your users – Which one fits your mind-set?
Language is much less neutral than what you often realize. The truth is that your choice for words does affect and/or is a reflection of how you see the world. This is why, as a user experience practitioner, you need to place special awareness on the connotations of the terms you pick.We do have techniques – such as card-sorting – that help us w...
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 ...
Three Ideation Methods to Enhance Your Innovative Thinking
“In a world where business is more interested in ‘best practice’ rather than different practice, is it any wonder that products and services, companies and organisations are all beginning to look the same?” the three authors rhetorically ask in ?What If!'s classic book on creativity and innovation, Sticky Wisdom. How to Start a Creative Revoluti...
Make Your UX Design Process Agile Using Google’s Methodology
In an age of tight resources and constrained finances companies are more reluctant than ever to commit to big design projects without a thorough understanding of their chances of success. Google has developed a methodology to make the design process fast and still offer valuable insight. Forget minimum viable products and focus on prototypes and...
