Design techniques. Storytelling is a natural form of expression. We’ve all been telling stories from a very young age. In the design process, personas become the tool we use to tell our users’ stories. And with good personas in place, usage scenarios can become the micro-stories that drive your design decisions.
Design techniques. By Barnabas Nagy Published: May 7, 2012 “Words are not always sufficient to describe things accurately. ” It is all too easy to create UX deliverables that are not visually pleasing.
Design techniques. As a UX Designer you’ve committed your career to helping people. You challenge the status quo everyday…but are you challenging it enough? How about with your deliverables? Your customers are people, too! Are your common deliverables – personas, sitemaps, user-flows and wireframes – really usable or are they just getting in the way? It’s no secret to us: user experience designers speak their own language.
Design techniques. This guest post is written by our friend Tristan Weevers. In 2004 and in 2005, Neville Stanton wrote two books with 200 methods and tools for Human Factors. In 2010, Chauncey Wilson added another 100 specific for user-centred design (UCD). In addition to books like these, people started to collect methods online.
Design techniques. We tend to carefully create our HTML and CSS, and meticulously place every pixel to our designs. We plan exactly where our content should be placed on a particular site. Among many other decisions we need to make, we always keep in mind to craft a great experience for all our users. But how do we know what our users really want? One way is to understand the motivations that drive users in general.
Design techniques. Telling visionary stories takes more than great tech, it takes imagination, warmth and a devotion to showing a world made better by your inventions. News of Google's Project Glass lit up web chatter of the design and tech community. On the one hand it was a provocative leap forward, Google stepping boldly toward hardware that is category defining, and on the other showing a vision of the future that is largely uninspiring.
Design techniques. It has never been easy to demonstrate the value of interaction design, but the ubiquity of video as communication tool has helped a lot. Video is a great way to reach online audiences: It is easily accessed on YouTube and Vimeo, and it is expected to be short and to the point. With little investment, design firms can capture high-quality video with any number of relatively low-cost cameras, and use powerful editing tools to tell our stories.
Design techniques. The Speech Bubble User Flow by Barnabas, is a hybrid representation that combines a sitemap, persona and user flow all into one. The idea starts off by overlaying simple and short comments made by a persona in the form speech bubbles on top of a structured sitemap. More so, the speech bubbles are ordered chronologically and so flow through one by one.
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.
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. Bet you didn’t know this: Cars in rush-hour traffic exhibit the same basic behaviors as a spring. As the cars get closer to each other, they slow down. After coming to near stop, the cars start to get farther apart and speed up. The cycle repeats, just like a spring expanding and contracting.
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.
Design techniques. Experience maps have become more prominent over the past few years, largely because companies are realizing the interconnectedness of the cross-channel experience. It's becoming increasingly useful to gain insight in order to orchestrate service touchpoints over time and space. But I still see a dearth of quality references. When someone asks me for examples, the only good one I can reference is nForm's published nearly two years ago.
Design techniques. An experience map is a holistic view of all of the touchpoints or interactions people have with a brand.
Design techniques. By Joel Flom Published: September 7, 2011 “How did I manage to reach the conclusion that customer journey maps are not only a worthy and effective tool, but also a crucial element on large, enterprise user experience (UX) projects? Because I saw them have a significant impact on a recent project…. ” Until recently, I never saw the value in customer journey maps.
Design techniques. There are many tools in the UX professional's toolkit. It's always interesting to know the popular and neglected methods. The recent UPA biennial survey asked members which UX methods they use in addition to their salaries and I've summarized some results here. I've grouped the responses into larger categories so they're more digestible, but clearly many methods can fall into different groups.
Design techniques. [ Transcript Available ] Combining storytelling with research data can help you craft realistic scenarios to guide your design process. Getting to know the specific needs of your users allows you to address any potential problems they may have. As a consultant, Kim Goodwin uses her experience and expertise in working with teams to develop effective scenarios.
Design techniques. Here is an interesting example of a highly abstracted wireframe, labelled as a WireMolecule. Both the position and size of the represented elements within this example no longer represent what the interface will really look like. Instead, the focus has been shifted to showing relationships between elements as denoted by their proximity to each other.
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