The Seven Simple Principles of Conversion Centred Design (CCD) and How to Use Them

Oli Gardner – the Creative Director of Unbounce (a landing page builder for marketers), is an advocate of CCD. He says that deploying CCD makes each page you create on a website a piece of “accountable content”. In that you can measure the impact, purpose and success of each page as that page plays a part in converting visitors into customers. D...

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• 1 month ago

How to Break Barriers to Market Entry

It’s a common mistake for businesses to seek brand new market places. After all, a lack of competition can only be a good thing, right? Unfortunately, there are two problems with this approach – a lack of an established market can be a strong indicator of a lack of demand for a product and secondly, an un-established market will often require hu...

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• 1 month ago

The Pareto Principle and Your User Experience Work

There are two things that are always in short supply on any project; time and money. The Pareto Principle can, in the long-term, help you save both. It can also help you make intelligent decisions based on your user research. Our story begins with a Management Consultant Joseph M Juran back in the 1940s. He noticed that there is a general rule ...

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• 1 month ago

Co-Cultures and Value Framing: Know your users

To improve the chances that your design will engage an audience, we must focus on how it can stand out. To do that, we need to know who our audience is. There’s no room for “everybody” when we’re targeting: far from it, so we split “cultural groups” into many divisions or co-cultures and aim at those instead. Once we know on whose devices our de...

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• 1 month ago

The Building Blocks of Visual Design

Visual design is about creating and making the general aesthetics of a product consistent. To create the aesthetic style of a website or app, we work with fundamental elements of visual design, arranging them according to principles of design. These elements and principles together form the building blocks of visual design, and a firm understand...

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• 1 month 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...

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• 1 month ago

Design Thinking: A Quick Overview

If you have just started embarking your journey through the Design Thinking process, things might seem a little overwhelming. This is why we have prepared a useful overview of the Design Thinking process, as well as some of the popular Design Thinking frameworks commonly used by global design firms and national design agencies. To begin, let’s ...

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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...

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• 1 month ago

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....

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• 1 month ago

Norman's Three Levels of Design

In the human mind there are numerous areas responsible for what we refer to as emotion; collectively, these regions comprise the emotional system. Don Norman proposes the emotional system consists of three different, yet interconnected levels, each of which influences our experience of the world in a particular way. The three levels are visceral...

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• 1 month ago

An Overview of The Factors of Success for New Product Development

Bringing a successful product to market is a team effort. While designers are responsible for usability, utility and the rest of the user experience there are many factors which contribute to the success or failure of new product development and many of these are outside of the designer’s direct control.The figure above shows the main factors wh...

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The Moment of Truth - Build Desirable Relationships with Users and Customers

In order to understand “the moment of truth”; it’s important to understand the customer lifecycle with a brand or product. There are many moments at which a customer (or potential customer or former customer) will interact with a brand. A moment of truth is simply any interaction during which a customer may form an impression of your brand or p...

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• 1 month ago

How to Develop an Empathic Approach in Design Thinking

Empathy requires us to put aside our learning, culture, knowledge, opinions, and worldview purposefully in order to understand other peoples’ experiences of things deeply and meaningfully. It requires a strong sense of imagination for us to be able to see through another person’s eyes. It requires humility so we can seek to abandon our preconcei...

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• 1 month ago

Do I Need a Degree to Work In User Experience?

This is a question that, in slightly different forms, gets asked a lot by those considering a UX design career. The question is a simple one but the answer..? Well, that’s a bit more complicated. A lot depends on you and your approach to life and your career. So let’s take a look at the benefits of a degree and the alternative paths you might pr...

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• 1 month ago

Don’t Make Me Think – Key Learning Points for UX Design for the Web

Don’t Make Me Think is the title of a book by the HCI and Usability engineer Steve Krug. It teaches UX designers how to deliver great user experiences in a very simple and accessible way. Since its release in the year 2000 it has become one of the defining texts in the industry and an invaluable guide to UX professionals around the world. Don’t...

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Principle of Consistency and Standards in User Interface Design

Learn to design with consistency and standards in mind and understand the reasons why they’re important to incorporate them into your work. Derived from Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich’s Ten User Interface (UI) Guidelines, ‘Consistency and Standards’ are evident in many of the widely-used products created by some of the most successful companies. ...

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• 1 month ago

Three Common Models of the Brain to Help You Develop Better User Experiences

There are many different conceptual models of the brain. It’s important to note that many of them lack any scientific basis – this does not, however, negate the fundamental importance of these models. They are not there to “prove” anything but rather to stimulate creative thought as to how designers (and others) may offer all round stimulation o...

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• 1 month ago

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 ...

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• 1 month ago

10 Great Ideas to Improve Your Productivity when You Work From Home

I love working from home. I love the fact that I can crawl out of bed 5 minutes before work and still be on time. It thrills me that there’s no dress code and if I want to work in my birthday suit, I can. In fact, the Interaction Design Foundation’s philosophy of “work where you want” has allowed us to bring together a team of incredible talents...

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• 1 month ago

Create Some Space – for Ideation Sessions and Design Thinking

The spaces we occupy deeply influence our experiences, our feelings, and our behaviours. Our state of health, psychology, productivity, mood, and creativity spaces influence us on many levels and also influence our interactions with each other. The spaces in which we journey through Design Thinking and Ideation sessions must be set up in such a ...

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• 1 month ago