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Design thinking is a methodology that provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It’s extremely useful when used to tackle complex problems that are ill-defined or unknown—because it serves to understand the human needs involved, reframe the problem in human-centric ways, create numerou
Design Thinking is not an exclusive property of designers—all great innovators in literature, art, music, science, engineering, and business have practiced it. So, why call it Design Thinking? What’s special about Design Thinking is that designers’ work processes can help us systematically extract,
Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way. Creating personas will help you understand your users’ needs, experiences, behaviors and goals. Creating personas
Looking at examples of bad design alongside counter-examples of good design is not only fun but also draws important lessons for designers. They highlight pitfalls for designers to avoid and let us understand how to translate design theories into solutions that work in the real world. Jared Spool, t
Interaction design is an important component within the giant umbrella of user experience (UX) design. In this article, we’ll explain what interaction design is, some useful models of interaction design, as well as briefly describe what an interaction designer usually does.A simple and useful unders
Apple’s Product Development Process may be one of the most successful design processes ever implemented. With a valuation that exceeds $2 trillion, there’s a lot that designers can learn from Apple and introduce into their own design environments.Apple is a notoriously secretive business. In Steve J
An integral part of the Design Thinking process is the definition of a meaningful and actionable problem statement, which the design thinker will focus on solving. This is perhaps the most challenging part of the Design Thinking process, as the definition of a problem (also called a design challenge
You don’t want to spend your whole life redesigning the wheel, do you? No, neither do we. If you are looking for a design that solves a problem that has been solved with a different application before, then the template for your wheel is probably already out there. This lets you save time and make a
AI is murdering jobs in all industries right now. Protect yourself with skills in user experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) Design: They are made of the very fabric of being human, such as empathy and intuition. AI can never replace that. These skills are timeless and will stay with you forever.
The categorical data depicts the success and failure rate of the low-fidelity wireframe above. There is not a large enough difference between the two to determine if the designs were successful.There is an element of error involved in measuring anything. So, when we want to compare measurements, how
Web fonts bring digital content to life. They enhance readability, set the tone, and ensure consistency across various platforms—all vital ingredients. When you understand web fonts and their impact, it can help you with effective website creation—and greatly so. We’ll provide a comprehensive overvi
Finding the right participants is crucial for gathering user research. We usually need to do research with participants having a particular set of needs or experience. In this short video, you will find out about the basic need for screening and how we make sure that we have suitably qualified parti
The level of participant engagement is an important part of the user research results. Our results are dependent on proper engagement with our participants. In this video we look at some of the issues around participant recruitment and hear practical examples that arose in a large online study.[[vid
Quantitative research methods fit into the project lifecycle at different stages of the process.In this video, we see where different quantitative research methods fit into a typical project lifecycle. Bear in mind that even with an iterative process such as Agile, the short cycles still address dif
In the past, designers often reported to marketing managers and were neither expected nor allowed to make business decisions. When traditionally-structured companies transition to a design-driven mindset, there can be friction between the marketing and design teams. Let’s take a closer look at this
User research is indispensable—and without it, well... UX design is guesswork. When you’re a user researcher, you know this well—but it can be hard to communicate your work in a way that grabs the viewer and holds their attention. And that’s what a portfolio is all about—grabbing the attention of yo
Service blueprint tools are vital for effective customer experience design—and for designers to make experiences that are exceptional. Here, we’ll discuss why these tools are so important. What’s more, we’ll explore templates and practical resources to create high-quality, efficient service blueprin
Skills in design are not just for designers. They're for everyone. In any job, any industry.
You can benefit from the key principles of User Experience (UX), Customer Experience (CX) and User Interface (UI) Design in most jobs and most companies.
That's because UX, CX and UI Design help people reach their goals and meet their needs. Your design skills can help increase sales, keep customers loyal and turn them into powerful advocates of your company.
User Experience (UX) Design is all about creating meaningful and valuable experiences for other people.
You'll create products and services that people love to use, increase business success and profits, and make the world a better place by solving real-world problems.
Interaction design is an important component within the giant umbrella of user experience (UX) design. In this article, we’ll explain what interaction design is, some useful models of interaction design, as well as briefly describe what an interaction designer usually does.A simple and useful unders
Apple’s Product Development Process may be one of the most successful design processes ever implemented. With a valuation that exceeds $2 trillion, there’s a lot that designers can learn from Apple and introduce into their own design environments.Apple is a notoriously secretive business. In Steve J
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
If there’s an occupation that is 100% linked with the public’s idea of what design is all about, it’s graphic design. From the familiar golden arches of the McDonald’s brand to the typography and colors of movie posters, graphic designers create some of the most iconic and ubiquitous designs around
Now that we’ve seen some grids at work in the Rule of Thirds article, let’s examine them a little more deeply. As a concept that deals so fundamentally with the fabric and background of our work as designers, it’s easy to overlook the power of grids and think more about the elements we want to creat
Service design is all about taking a service and making it meet the user’s and customer’s needs for that service. It can be used to improve an existing service or to create a new service from scratch. In order to adapt to service design, a UX designer will need to understand the basic principles of
Lean UX is an incredibly useful technique when working on projects where the Agile development method is used. Traditional UX techniques often don’t work when development is conducted in rapid bursts – there’s not enough time to deliver UX in the same way. Fundamentally Lean UX and other forms of UX
Let’s pay a virtual visit to a famous industrial designer’s workshop. By examining the principles of his winning approach, we can incorporate vital elements into our designs in the “less is more” age.As user experience practitioners, most of us have worked with Nielsen and Molich’s 10 heuristics or
Ever wondered how companies like Apple and Google dominate their fields?
Part of the answer lies in a powerful 5-stage work process called Design Thinking. But it's not just for tech giants. Design Thinking can empower people just like you in most industries and jobs, from business to engineering to marketing. Design Thinking is a solution-oriented approach to solve real-world problems and create better, customer interactions, products, services, and experiences.
Design Thinking is not an exclusive property of designers—all great innovators in literature, art, music, science, engineering, and business have practiced it. So, why call it Design Thinking? What’s special about Design Thinking is that designers’ work processes can help us systematically extract,
Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way. Creating personas will help you understand your users’ needs, experiences, behaviors and goals. Creating personas
An integral part of the Design Thinking process is the definition of a meaningful and actionable problem statement, which the design thinker will focus on solving. This is perhaps the most challenging part of the Design Thinking process, as the definition of a problem (also called a design challenge
Ideation is the process where you generate ideas and solutions through sessions such as Sketching, Prototyping, Brainstorming, Cheatstorming, Brainwriting, Worst Possible Idea, and a wealth of other ideation techniques. Ideation is also the third stage in the Design Thinking process. Although many p
Here’s an interesting fact you may—or may not—know: users are more likely to choose, buy, and use products that meet their needs than products that just meet their wants. And an Empathy map will help you understand your user’s needs while you develop a deeper understanding of the persons you’re desi
Affinity diagrams are a great method to use when you want to make sense of a large volume of mixed information and data—facts, ethnographic research, ideas from brainstorms, user opinions, user needs, insights and design issues, just to name a few! Affinity diagrams require you to cluster informatio
One of the best ways to gain insights in a Design Thinking process is to carry out some form of prototyping. This method involves producing an early, inexpensive, and scaled down version of the product in order to reveal any problems with the current design. Prototyping offers designers the opportun
We need to appreciate the roots and origins of a concept to truly understand it—we need to know how it came to be. Let’s take a look at how design thinking emerged from an exploration of theory and practice to become one of the most effective ways to address the human, technological and strategic in
Did you ever use a website or app that felt so easy to use that it was almost like magic? On the other hand, have you been frustrated when you couldn't figure out how to use an app or your new microwave oven?
The difference between these experiences lies in the art of User Interface (UI) design. UI design is about creating intuitive, user-friendly experiences. The principles of UI design can empower you to create amazing customer interactions even if you don't design user interfaces yourself.
You don’t want to spend your whole life redesigning the wheel, do you? No, neither do we. If you are looking for a design that solves a problem that has been solved with a different application before, then the template for your wheel is probably already out there. This lets you save time and make a
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
Learn to design with your user’s needs and expectations in mind by applying Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich’s Ten User Interface Guidelines. These heuristics have been reflected in many of the products designed by some of the most successful companies in the world such as Apple, Google, and Adobe. Fur
Let’s look at three subjects that, at first glance, may strike you as being incredibly basic and self-explanatory. However, although they may seem like they should need no introduction, we should study them. By understanding these concepts, you’ll be able to apply them more effectively to captivate
Now that we’ve seen some grids at work in the Rule of Thirds article, let’s examine them a little more deeply. As a concept that deals so fundamentally with the fabric and background of our work as designers, it’s easy to overlook the power of grids and think more about the elements we want to creat
Now, we’re going to look at a subject that comes directly from mathematics and that we can also find all around us – the golden ratio. Don’t worry; we’re not going back into the classroom for long. We will examine what this concept is and exactly how much it is a fundamental part of making designs p
Wireframes help you quickly ideate and test your ideas. While paper wireframes are the fastest to create, digital wireframes look more polished and presentable. If you are looking for a pocket-friendly wireframing tool, look no further.Whether you prefer browser-based apps or offline desktop tools,
Learn to design with consistency and standards in mind and understand the reasons why they’re important to incorporate them into your work. Derived from Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich’s Ten User Interface (UI) Guidelines, ‘Consistency and Standards’ are evident in many of the widely-used produc
Usability is all about human behavior: it recognizes that people are emotional, have limited attention spans, and usually choose the easiest and most appealing path to meet their needs. It's no wonder that Apple's products are so successful.
Looking at examples of bad design alongside counter-examples of good design is not only fun but also draws important lessons for designers. They highlight pitfalls for designers to avoid and let us understand how to translate design theories into solutions that work in the real world. Jared Spool, t
Learn to design with your user’s needs and expectations in mind by applying Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich’s Ten User Interface Guidelines. These heuristics have been reflected in many of the products designed by some of the most successful companies in the world such as Apple, Google, and Adobe. Fur
User Experience (UX) is critical to the success or failure of a product in the market but what do we mean by UX? All too often UX is confused with usability which describes to some extent how easy a product is to use and it is true that UX as a discipline began with usability – however, UX has grown
It was Albert Einstein who said; “If you can’t explain it, you don’t understand it well enough.” Though it is often mis-reported as being; “If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it well enough.” What Einstein was driving at was a particular application of “keep it simple, s
This subject may seem incredibly “big” for a single article, but it’s about the specific nature of usability that we often overlook or confuse. With this appreciation, you’ll be able to design more effectively, and your website’s users will be able to grow, too.Usability replaced the outmoded label
Don’t Make Me Think is the title of a book by the HCI and Usability engineer Steve Krug. It teaches UX designers how to deliver great user experiences in a very simple and accessible way. Since its release in the year 2000 it has become one of the defining texts in the industry and an invaluable gui
Usability and user experience (UX) are not the same thing: the usability of a product is a crucial part that shapes its UX, and hence falls under the umbrella of UX. While many might think that usability is solely about the “ease of use” of a product, it actually involves a great deal more than that
The question of usability compared to desirability comes up a lot in UX design, and it’s important to distinguish the two. Why? Because usability is the base level of the user experience, it is difficult to create a worthwhile user experience without it. However, without desirability, it’s unlikely
Design goes way beyond creating attractive visuals and aesthetics.
When you possess design skills, you're equipped to transform businesses, make technology more user-friendly, and innovate customer experiences because you understand the relationship between humans and technology. This is what Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is all about.
The iterative design process is a simple concept. Once, through user research, you have identified a user need and have generated ideas to meet that need, you develop a prototype. Then you test the prototype to see whether it meets the need in the best possible way. Then you take what you learned fr
Mental models are important in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and interaction design because they provide information about how users perceive the world and interact with products or services. Let’s explore this concept more closely.Mental models indicate what a user expects to happen based on exp
Human Computer Interaction is the academic discipline that most of us think of as UI design. It focuses on the way that human beings and computers interact to ever increasing levels of both complexity and simplicity.It’s a Very New DisciplineIt’s perhaps easy to see that until the mid to late 1970s
After more than 40 years in the field, Human Computer Interaction (HCI) is already a well-established design discipline. Now, the pervasiveness of big data, new data collection and interaction techniques is giving rise to a new but related discipline: Human Data Interaction (HDI). This is likely to
In a digital world—for that’s what it pretty much is—what could be more natural than for every brand, company, and digital professional to want to make a mark? No surprise, then, that with 93% of all brand communication being visual, a great deal of that is all about digital design—so a digital desi
Have you ever wondered how your brain makes sense of the world? It's a fascinating process! If you want to design helpful products and services that people love, you must first understand how they think. A large part of human interaction relies on perception, our ability to see, hear and feel our su
Design plays a role that’s utterly crucial in our daily lives—it bridges functionality with aesthetics to meet user needs. In product development, it’s design that determines how user-friendly and appealing a product is. The field of human-computer interaction (HCI) is foundational to UX design. To
Cognitive maps in UX show how users think about a product or service. Designers use these visual representations so they can understand the user's mental model—something that helps them make intuitive designs that match the user's expectations and improve their overall experience.Think about the las
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