What Science Can Teach You about Designing Great Graphical User Interface Animations

When we create graphical user interfaces (GUIs) that mimic the physical world our users can easily understand and use them—simply by predicting how the GUI will behave based upon their (and our) common experiences in the physical world. One way to mimic the physical world is to use animations to show how objects change and move on the GUI. Here,...

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• 2 months ago

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...

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• 2 months ago

10 Principles of Accessibility

Do you want to get serious about accessibility, but finding it hard to know where to start? In this video, we’ll take you through 10 principles you can use to get started creating great accessible websites and interfaces right now. Among other things, you’ll learn how to create ALT text that makes sense (and why it’s important), why hamburger me...

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• 2 months ago

Understand the Social Needs for Accessibility in UX Design

As UX designers, we have a lot on our plates. The term “UX Unicorn” exists for a reason. We are responsible for our clients’ goals as well as our users’ needs. You might ask then, why should you think about Accessibility in your UX Design process? Imagine going into a design workshop and telling your client that you need more hours to make his...

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• 2 months ago

Accessibility: Usability for all

Let’s examine a topic we often take for granted to understand what it’s really about. Doing so, you’ll be able to proceed with a broader appreciation of how users engage your designs. The Overlooked, Misunderstood Nature of AccessibilityAuthor/Copyright holder: WhisperToMe. Copyright terms and licence: Public Domain A design is only useful if ...

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• 2 months ago

The Heart of the Matter, Information Architecture in the Mobile Age

Content is the key ingredient in so many user experiences. So how does it change when it comes to planning a mobile user experience? Should you rewrite your content for each platform or do you need a different strategy to make the most of your content on all platforms? Handling content on mobile doesn’t need to be a chore but it does take planni...

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• 2 months ago

Test Your Prototypes: How to Gather Feedback and Maximise Learning

Once you’ve built your prototypes based on the ideas you and your team generated, it’s time to gather feedback from the people on whom you are testing these. Optimising how you gather feedback — and, therefore, learn from your prototypes and users — is essential to help you save time and resources in the Prototype and Test stages of the Design T...

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• 2 months ago

How to Involve Stakeholders in Your User Research

If you want to do a user research project, it is important that you involve the relevant stakeholders in your planning. Your stakeholders can help ensure that the research you do is as relevant as possible for your project and that the people you need support from have an invested interest in your research. In-house and independent designers hav...

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• 2 months ago

Conducting Ethical User Research

In any type of research that involves human participants, it’s important to consider the ethics of the research project. That is also the case when you do user research. You are responsible for your participants’ wellbeing, for representing them honestly, and for keeping their personal information safe. That is a big responsibility, so it’s impo...

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• 2 months ago

How to Conduct User Interviews

User interviews can be a great way to extract information from users for user experience understanding, usability understanding and ideation. They are cheap and easy to conduct and can be readily conducted by anyone who can ask questions and record the answers. Author/Copyright holder: Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung. Copyright terms and licence: CC B...

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• 3 months ago

What is a UX portfolio, and What Should it Contain?

A big part of a UX Designer’s career is spent communicating his/her findings to other members in a UX team. But to make a career in UX design, one type of communication you will have to master is the ability to showcase your design skills to the people who are likely to hire you. To achieve this, UX designers develop portfolios – i.e., a collect...

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• 3 months ago

How to Empower UX teams to Boost Innovation and ROI

As a UX designer, you want to make sure that your team is doing everything possible to boost your organization’s innovation and the return on investment (ROI) of your work. After all, the better the ROI on your work, the more resources you will have to create awesome user experiences, which – again – will affect ROI and so on and so forth. But h...

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• 3 months 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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• 3 months 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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• 3 months ago

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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• 3 months 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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• 3 months 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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• 3 months 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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• 3 months 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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• 3 months 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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• 3 months ago