UX Daily: The world's largest free online resource on UX Design
Latest UX articles
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...
Design Thinking: Get a Quick Overview of the History
To understand almost anything, we need at least some appreciation of its roots and origins, and how it came to be as it is. Design Thinking emerged from an exploration of theory and practice, in a range of disciplines and sciences, as a means of addressing the human, the technological and strategic innovation needs of our time. Let us take a loo...
The Anatomy of a Smartphone – Things for Designers to Consider for Mobile Development
If you’re going to design for mobile, then it’s a good idea to have a grasp of what makes up the modern smartphone in terms of hardware and software. You can then start to think about the possibilities these offer when creating user experiences. The better you know the device, the more you can exploit its capabilities within your products.Author...
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...
IDF seeks a Sales Associate to help change global design education
The Interaction Design Foundation is the world's most prestigious community and course platform for User Experience (UX) designers. We've spent the last 15 years building our community and e-learning platform from scratch – based on organic growth – without any sales or marketing function! But now we’re ready to grow our community to serve the w...
Probably the Best Front-End Developer Job in the World
IDF seeks a Senior Front-End Developer to shape the future of design educationThe Interaction Design Foundation is the world's most prestigious community and course platform for user experience designers. We are a nonprofit organization with a mission to reduce the cost of design education around the world, and we do so by providing high-quality...
IDF seeks a Digital Marketing Specialist to help change global design education
The Interaction Design Foundation (IDF) is the world's most prestigious community and online course platform for User Experience (UX) designers. We've spent the last 15 years building our foundation from scratch – this has been largely based on organic growth, and has only recently been increased through marketing activities. We’re now ready to ...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
Design Patterns for Fluid Navigation – How to Use Inline Linking
When you’re designing a website for an online newspaper, your users will probably want to read some background information relating to a new government policy, a new whistle-blower, or any other word or phrase they don’t have all of the information on yet. When you’re designing something completely different, such as a complex online tax return ...
5 Stages in the Design Thinking Process
Design Thinking is a design methodology that provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It’s extremely useful in tackling complex problems that are ill-defined or unknown, by understanding the human needs involved, by re-framing the problem in human-centric ways, by creating many ideas in brainstorming sessions, and by adopting a ha...
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...
Serial Position Effect: How to Create Better User Interfaces
Learn about the limits of your user’s short-term memory by understanding how the serial position effect works and how you can manipulate it in the context of user experience design. Many of the most successful designs out there, produced by highly successful companies like Apple, Electronic Arts, and Nike, reflect an understanding of the serial ...
Natural User Interfaces – What are they and how do you design user interfaces that feel natural?
User interfaces that you interact with using modalities such as touch, gestures or voice are often referred to as Natural User Interfaces (NUI). We consider them interfaces that we find so easy to use that they feel natural. However, what does it mean for an interface to be natural? Also, how do you design NUI interfaces? Here, we’re going to ex...
Positive Emotional Responses
Positive emotional experiences are specific to the individual. However, we share many characteristics, which, to a certain extent, make things a little easier for designers. If we had to alter a design according to every single person who uses it, the budget would be extinguished within a matter of weeks and, as the saying goes, you can't please...
Navigating the Maze of Mobile Apps – Design for Mobile App Search
In the digital age, people have come to rely on search as one of, if not THE, foremost tools for navigation in applications and online. Integrating search into mobile applications can be straightforward and users will thank you for it. The mobile user experience relies just as much on effective search as the desktop one.Thanks to the efficiency ...
Help Users Skim Contents with Titled Sections
Text-heavy websites, such as those of all the major newspapers that have embraced the web as an essential medium for the future, know the importance of using titled sections to reel the readers in. There’s a perfect art to the craft, and it stems from an exact science concerning how human beings process information. So, learn from The New York T...
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 ...
Service Blueprints - Communicating the Design of Services
Service blueprints were first described by Lynn Shostack, a banking executive, back in 1982 in the Harvard Business Review. They’ve become popularized over the last few years as service design has grown as a profession. In addition to being useful in service design they are often used by operational management to gauge the efficiency of work wit...
