Ideation. There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.
Navigation. When most designers design websites, they don’t pay much attention to links. As long as the link works and takes users to the right page, everything is fine. However, a great user experience goes further than that. There are certain links that should open in new browser tabs, and ones that should open in the same browser tab.
Mobile design. New can be very scary. It’s easy to get comfortable with what we know, only to have everything turned topsy-turvy when we encounter major changes. The world of mobile design is new, and therefore, scary for many. The comforts of designing for the desktop disappear when we have to deal with these portable, tiny devices.
Mobile design. The business practice of brainstorming has been around with us so long that it seems like unadorned common sense: If you want a rash of new ideas, you get a group of people in a room, have them shout things out, and make sure not to criticize, because that sort of self-censoring is sure to kill the flow of new thoughts. It wasn’t always so: This entire process was invented by Alex Osborn, one of the founders of BBDO, in the 1940's.
Forms. Despite being nearly ubiquitous online, username and password login screens are wrought with usability and security issues. Here's a small sample of how bad things are. The average person has between 7 and 25 accounts that they log into every day. (source)People report authenticating about 15 times in a typical work day on average.
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Terminology. Jargon. It's an occupational hazard. Which is why we couldn't help but chuckle when we read this Harvard Business Review article on the subject. The article got us thinking, what are the buzzwords in our field that simply don't make much sense to us? The one term that kept coming to mind was "User Experience Design.
Design techniques. OK, we’re only at number 19 so far, there’s still a way to go. Still, what’s there so far suggests it’ll be an amazing series. As the site doesn’t make it easy to see all of the methods so far, here’s a list of what’s there to date: Concept Interviews: Users write down statement to do with the use of a product, and rank them.
Mobile design. When designers create applications for smartphones, they often hark back to principles inherited from desktop software. After all, they’re all computers, right? Android UX Design Chief Matias Duarte thinks it’s time to jettison that idea. The technology available in the average smartphone today is vastly more powerful than the desktop computer of 30 years ago, when those standards were first created.
Cases. Given that we love everything UX and design related, it must come as no surprise we are big fan of Smashing Magazine. Their choice of subjects is always spot on, and their articles show an impressive amount of attention to detail. They recently had their site redesigned, and the result is a beautiful, spacious site, designed from the typography out. I took a closer look at the new design and I’d like to discuss some of the findings with you.
User research. By Paul Bryan Published: January 23, 2012 In my new column, UX Strategy, I’ll explore the growing field of user experience strategy, which combines business strategy with user experience design to build a rationale and a road map for guiding an organization’s UX efforts.
E-commerce. We’ve all heard the gloomy prognostications: The Internet is rendering traditional retail obsolete. Thanks to increasingly sophisticated e-com, from price-slashing powerhouses like Amazon to startups that mimic the social aspects of shopping (Svpply, for one), consumers have little incentive to waltz into a brick-and-mortar store--and companies have little incentive to keep paying those astronomical rents.
Information design. There’s definitely an advantage to having your users understand data and messages through a picture versus reading a series of sentences. Information visualization, when done right, can have a greater impact. In many ways, data visualization will take a message and make it more succinct. A good visualization can simplify the most complicated data, and often provide an interactive component with the user that a string of words can’t accomplish.
Design strategy. By Jim Nieters Published: January 23, 2012 “An interaction model is a design model that binds an application together in a way that supports the conceptual models of its target users. ” In March of 2011, I joined HP to lead the User Experience and Front-End Development organization for Consumer Travel. My goal? To design products that transform the future of travel.
Wireframes. Had to whip up an OmniGraffle stencil for jQuery Mobile. I submitted it to Graffletopia, but it isn’t live yet. You can download it here in the meantime. Just put in the user name > Library > Application Support > OmniGraffle > Stencils folder and unzip.
Cases. Remember when you were five and you first learned how to make a shadow puppet of a dog by holding your palm in front of a flashlight and waggling your pinky finger? Making anything more complicated than that takes a lot of effort.
E-commerce. In our recent Retail multichannel customer experience report, we found that nearly all of the brands we researched performed poorly in their communications with the customer after a purchase has been made and the product has been delivered. It was the lowest scoring guideline in the report with an average of 1. 5 points out of 5.
Navigation. The benefit of using a faceted sidebar navigation on your website is that you aren’t vertically constrained by space. You can list as many links in the sidebar as you need. However, this known benefit also has an unknown downside. Listing too many links in your sidebar can lead to faceted overload.
Design strategy. Sometimes, it’s easy to brand what we do as the “science of the obvious. ” Here we are, doing all this research, and come up with something that is painfully obvious. The latest of the obviously obvious findings we’ve come up with? That teams who don’t have a shared understanding of their design rarely succeed at producing a great product. See? It’s obvious.
Speed. You build sites for mobile devices, right? Then you might've noticed the one pesky issue with responsive sites is the loading speed, especially when there's a slow cell connection. What you may not know is that there is a likely culprit for at least part of your problem — the ever-present social media buttons. On small devices, such as mobile phones, bandwidth and latency are at a premium.
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Usability testing. User research. It’s right there in the name. A user is someone who actually uses your service. Equally valid is the idea of a “target user” – someone who doesn’t yet use your service, but has a genuine need that it would fulfil.
Usability testing. There was a time when we spoke of usability testing it meant expensive labs and one-way mirrors. Not anymore. There are three core ways of running usability tests. Each has their advantages and disadvantages.
Interviews. Donald Norman is one of the world’s most influential designers and writers about design. We are big fans, and really proud that Anneke could talk to him about his books, the future of designing for the web, emotional design, the balance between design as an art-form and as a form of marketing, and much more. 'Emotional Design' by Donald Norman - a must read.
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User research. Yeah, but this study will delay our launch date; Yeah, but we already know what the problems are; Yeah, but aren’t our designers suppose to know what people need? They are the experts; Yeah, but we can’t learn much from only five participants; Yeah, but we just want to launch and see if it sticks.
Prototyping. ProtoShare has recently gone live with the next version of their online prototyping app. The latest version of the tool takes design conversation to the next level by introducing topics. For one, topics are conversation placeholders which can be pinned to a page. More importantly however, topics can also be subscribed / unsubscribed from by various team members.
Design techniques. Not too long ago, product designers had a lot more control. As designers, we knew exactly which device and software our target users would use to consume information and interact with our product. We knew the specific interactions that users would use and how they would experience our product. So it was easy to rely on traditional task analysis and customer profiling to figure out how an interface should work.
Design techniques. For designers, it’s easy to jump right into the design phase of a website before giving the user experience the consideration it deserves. Too often, we prematurely turn our focus to page design and information architecture, when we should focus on the user flows that need to be supported by our designs. It’s time to make the user flows a bigger priority in our design process.
User behavior. As I sat in my local co-working space, shoulder-deep in a design problem on my MacBook Air, I could hear him. He was on the phone, offering screen-by-screen design recommendations to his client for the project they were working on.
