Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and Design - Balancing Risk to Gain Reward

The idea of the minimum viable product (MVP) has been around for some time. The term itself was coined by Frank Robinson but was made popular by two influential names in product design – Steve Blank, a serial-entrepreneur and academic, and Eric Ries, the pioneer of the Lean Startup movement.What is an MVP?The simplest definition is that an MVP m...

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Best Practices for Qualitative User Research

No matter how big or small your user research project is, if you are going to do user research, you want to make sure that you are doing it right. You don’t want to waste your time doing research that does not truly represent your users’ opinions and behaviors. That is a waste of both your and your research participants’ time, and it’s bad for b...

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• 1 month ago

Less is (Also) More in Virtual and Augmented Reality Design

One of the most exciting things about designing virtual and augmented reality experiences is all the things you’re able to do as a designer. You can take advantage of all of the user’s senses in design, you can create first-person stories, and you can overlay reality with any virtual object you can come up with. To a large extent, only your imag...

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• 1 month ago

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...

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• 1 month ago

What’s the point of doing UX?

From a business perspective, differentiation is one of the primary reasons for investing in UX. If your products and services stand out from those of your competitors, they’re much more likely to be a market success – and having the most compelling and relevant user experiences is a great way to stand out! In this video, we will take you through...

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• 1 month ago

Unmoderated Remote Usability Testing (URUT) - Every Step You Take, We Won’t Be Watching You

Unmoderated Remote Usability Testing (URUT) is a technique designed to help you overcome the downsides of moderated usability testing. While moderated usability testing is undeniably useful it suffers from the fact that it’s time consuming, it takes a lot of effort to recruit participants, the costs (due to all that time input) are usually too h...

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• 1 month ago

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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• 1 month ago

How to improve your UX designs with Task Analysis

One of the most important steps in the Design Thinking process that is often employed as standard practice in UX design is to define the users’ problems. This means being able to clearly identify and articulate problems in the user experience so that you can later begin the process of ideating (i.e., generating great ideas on how to solve them)....

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• 1 month ago

Three Tips for Creating a Better UX Portfolio

We think that whoever, decided that UX designers should need a portfolio, should have their head read. UX design is not graphic design and the creation of a UX portfolio does not mean that would-be clients or employers are going to be wowed by the visual aspect of the content. However, despite this – for good or ill the UX portfolio is here to s...

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• 1 month ago

The Myths of Mobile Design and Why It Matters

When it comes to any school of thought surrounding a new concept – there comes a point when there is a body of “accepted knowledge”. That body of knowledge then becomes sacrosanct and instead of being treated as a guide to inform our work – it becomes practical dogma. It is worth challenging such myths and seeking to explore beneath the surface ...

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• 1 month ago

Usability: A part of the User Experience

This subject may seem incredibly “big” for a single article, but it’s about the specific nature of usability that we often overlook or confuse. With this appreciation, you’ll be able to design more effectively, and your website’s usership will be able to grow, too. Usability replaced the outmoded label “user friendly” in the early 1990s. “Usabi...

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• 1 month ago

Information Overload, Why it Matters and How to Combat It

Designers often need to convey information to the users of their designs. Specialists in information visualization design in particular find themselves presenting data over and over again to their users. However, it’s important when developing your designs that you don’t create “information overload” – that is presenting so much data that you le...

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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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• 1 month ago

Design Thinking: Getting Started with Empathy

Empathy is an important element in Design Thinking and Human-Centred Design. What is empathy exactly? Why is empathy so important to designing solutions that actually work for people? Here, we’ll not only look at what empathy means, but will also look at how it helps design thinkers create solutions that work and, conversely, how a lack of empat...

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• 1 month ago

5 Inspiring Freelance Designers’ Websites and Portfolios

We’ve found five great inspirational websites for freelancer designers – these can provide insight into how to construct your own website and online portfolios. However, please don’t copy them but rather seek to emulate things that you think work well. RadiumCosmin Daniel Capitanu of Romania runs Radium, and he’s a freelance designer and archit...

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• 1 month ago

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

How to Create Design Plans for Virtual and Augmented Reality Experiences

Whenever you design something new – be it an interface, service or a product– you should start with a plan for what you want the user’s experience to be like. Having a clear goal for what you want the user to feel and achieve during the interaction will help guide you through the myriad of different decisions you need to make during the design p...

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• 1 month ago

Design Thinking: Get Started with Prototyping

Prototyping is an integral part of Design Thinking and User Experience design in general because it allows us to test our ideas quickly and improve on them in an equally timely fashion. The Institute of Design at Stanford (d.school) encourages a “bias towards action”, where building and testing is valued over thinking and meeting. However, why i...

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• 1 month ago

Getting into the Mobile App User’s Mind – User Research for Mobile Applications

It’s well understood that user research is what makes for the best user experiences but what are the right user research techniques for mobile apps? While, there is no doubt that any classic UX research technique may be turned to mobile app user research – there are some techniques which have already been demonstrated to show proven value. Maste...

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• 1 month ago

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