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Latest UX articles
Embrace the Mental Models of Users by Implementing Tabs
Users of all ages will still remember the tabbed file folders people used to bring order into a vast amount of information and make it super simple to find what they were looking for. If you’re trying to design a good way to prevent your users from having to search for a needle in a haystack every time, the tabbed user interface is just what you...
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...
How to Create an Intuitive Design
“The main thing in our design is that we have to make things intuitively obvious,” the founder and former CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs, explained. We can easily agree that design should be intuitive. We can also easily agree that something is intuitive when we can use it without thinking about it. Making a design intuitive is much tougher. Solving t...
Increase Revenues by Prioritizing Advertisements
Ever had an annoying pop-up offering you embarrassing physical-ability enhancers that you simply had no use, or stomach, for? With the prioritizing advertisements design pattern, this problem belongs to the past. Large companies such as Google and Facebook are experts at showing the right advertisements to the right people. And while, at first g...
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...
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 ...
How to Price Your Freelance and B2B Work
Pricing freelance and business-to-business work (B2B, i.e., business that is conducted between companies, rather than between a company and individual consumers) can be very hard when you’re just getting started. Charge too little, and you’ll starve; charge too much, and you won’t get enough work. You can learn some very simple pricing strategie...
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
Abraham Maslow has provided one of the most prominent accounts of human motivation with the 'Hierarchy of Needs', representing his most well-known contribution to psychology. Maslow researched both 'exemplary people' from the past, such as Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt, and elite college students. Following these studies, Maslow produced...
How to Change Your Career from Web Design to UX Design
Changing careers isn’t as hard as it’s often made out to be, especially if you’ve got the right resources to help you make the change. For many web designers, now is the perfect time to make the switch into UX design. To start with, there’s the monetary boost that comes with the change in career. According to PayScale, web designers in the US ea...
If Your User Can’t Find You, You Won’t Have Any Users – Mobile Applications and Discoverability
Discoverability is not a new concept for web designers. In fact Search Engine Optimization and various forms of Search Engine Marketing arose from the need to make websites easy to discover by users. In the mobile application space this issue of discoverability is becoming ever more important – with nearly 700 apps a day being released on Apple’...
Design checklists: What type of designer are you?
What type of designer are you? Do you have a set of principles, checklists, or methods that guide your designs? Or do you prefer to start from scratch and analyze afterwards with a checklist? If you feel more comfortable looking forward, looking backwards– or if you’re a perfectionist who likes to do both – then this article will be useful to yo...
How to Achieve Critical Mass for a Product Launch
The concept of critical mass originates in physics; it refers to the volume of a nuclear product required to sustain a chain reaction in a nuclear explosion. However, critical mass in marketing requires a very different product – users – to ensure a “chain reaction” of sales.The idea of critical mass has been present in social sciences for a lon...
Probes for Context Mapping – how to Design and Use them
Whether you are designing a mobile app, a professional online platform or an interactive museum exhibition, it is essential to understand users and the context in which they will use your design. Traditional methods such as interviews and observations will help you to touch the surface of their lives. A deeper understanding of what your users fe...
Empathy – How to Improve Your Designs by Developing Empathy for Your Target Group
Empathy is the ability to understand and identify with another person’s context, emotions, goals and motivations. In order to design great experiences, successful design firms actively search for empathic insights into their target group. In a design context, empathy serves a distinct purpose: to inspire design decisions in the early stages of t...
Esteem: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
Esteem needs encompass confidence, strength, self-belief, personal and social acceptance, and respect from others. These needs are represented as one of the key stages in achieving contentedness or self-actualization. While esteem is an internal quality, we are affected by external factors, such as validation and approval from our peers. There a...
Learning Experience Design - The Most Valuable Lessons
This article, the one that you are reading, is part of a learning experience. Learning experiences aren’t a matter of classroom delivery – they are any interaction with a user/customer/individual in which the person is going to learn something (which we hope you will in this article). Products contain a vast array of potential learning experien...
Emotion
...emotions, encompassing both positive and negative emotional states, have the potential to benefit us. And not only can emotions have an enduring and positive effect on our psychophysiology, but they provide us with the impetus to choose and pursue different goal paths. This is of particular importance when an event or situation results in the...
5 Things Everyone Should Know About UX Work
The howls of frustration that we hear on many UX projects are often to do with how badly misunderstood the UX role is in business. Here are 5 things that everyone should know about UX work: 1. UX Research is EssentialThe first barrier to many a UX project is people in the company who think they already know the customer inside out. “We’ve done...
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...
Search for Items with Scrolling Lists, Archive Lists or List Inlays
Even if you’re not the to-do list maniac like some of us, lists are a great way to deliver content to your users. A list allows them to navigate quickly to the section of content that is most relevant to them, while maintaining an overview of the entire body of information that is accessible. It also helps them understand the logic of the conten...
