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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The Concept of the "Triune Brain"

In the 1960s, American neuroscientist Paul MacLean formulated the 'Triune Brain' model, which is based on the division of the human brain into three distinct regions. MacLean's model suggests the human brain is organized into a hierarchy, which itself is based on an evolutionary view of brain development. The three regions are as follows: Re...

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One Size Fits All? Definitely Not in Task-Oriented Design for Mobile & Ubiquitous UX

In the 1980s and ‘90s, our technology-loving civilization rode the wave of Personal Computing – one computer per person. As computers became smaller and less expensive to produce, every worker—or indeed, every person—could have one at his/her disposal. With the rapid rise of Ubiquitous and Mobile computing, the situation had certainly changed by...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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The Use of Story and Emotions in Gamification

Gamification projects can benefit from storytelling features; these features can help arouse emotional connections with players. They can enhance the player experience and improve the longevity and fun factor of the gamified features. Let’s take a closer look at how that might work, even if you don’t feel that you are a natural story teller. An ...

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Making Use of the Crowd – Social Proof and the User Experience

Social proof (sometimes referred to as informational social influence) is a psychological concept. It refers to the tendency of human beings to follow the actions of others when making decisions and placing weight on those actions to assume “the correct decision”. It’s a concept that can be used in product design for the Internet and mobile web ...

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Using Mobile Apps – The One Thumb, One Eyeball Test for Good Mobile Design

Mobile designs need to take into account the way that users work with a mobile phone. That means understanding that distractions can come into play when the smartphone is in use and also ensuring that you make the input process as simple as possible to counteract their impact. Luke Wroblewski suggests the “one thumb, one eyeball” test as an effi...

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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

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...

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• 1 month ago

Ideas for Conducting UX Research with Children

One of the most challenging realms to conduct user research with is when you have to conduct research with children. There are, obviously, stringent ethical and legal protocols to be kept to if you work with children but it’s not just the moral aspect of this world. Children are not miniature adults and the way we develop and design research wil...

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When Should I Conduct Usability Testing for a Product?

Usability testing is an essential part of product development. A common question from those new to the field is “when should we test?” The answer is simple; you test before a redesign, you test during the redesign and then you test afterwards too. Here’s why: Usability Testing Before a RedesignThis might sound silly because you know you’re goin...

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How to Select the Best Idea by the end of an Ideation Session

Once an ideation session has finished, it’s time to collect, categorise, refine and narrow down the best idea, solution, or strategy. Here are the best selection methods. It’s Post-it voting, the Four Categories method, the Bingo Selection method and the Idea Affinity Diagram. The Six Thinking Hats and the Now Wow How Matrix will help you apply ...

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Introduction to the Essential Ideation Techniques which are the Heart of Design Thinking

Ideation is at the heart of the Design Thinking process. There are literally hundreds of ideation techniques, for example brainstorming, sketching, SCAMPER, and prototyping. Some techniques are merely renamed or slightly adapted versions of more foundational techniques. Here you’ll get an overview of the best techniques as well as when and why t...

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Stop Yourself from Becoming Content Fried and Free Your Mind to be Productive

Content fried is the point we reach when we subject ourselves to too much data. It commonly affects content curators but it can affect any of us. The “always on” Internet may be a blessing much of the time but it can also be a curse. The term “content fried” was defined Beth Kanter, who is a trainer, researcher, speaker and motivator. Content ...

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Rapid Prototyping, Faking It Until You Make it in a UX Driven World

The idea of “faking it, until you make it” is not new but it has a unique UX twist. The ability to develop and test prototypes at rapid rates of iteration lets you “fake” new products, get user feedback and make improvements without ever “making the product” until you have things just right. This can be a very valuable way of making a small budg...

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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

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

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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• 1 month ago

How to Design Gesture Interactions for Virtual and Augmented Reality

Gesture interactions have become an easy and convenient form of interaction on touch devices largely because we have developed conventions for how gestures should be performed. In virtual and augmented reality, gestures are also a very natural way to interact with digital artifacts and menus, but we don’t have as clear conventions for how to des...

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