Learn to design products and systems that make your user’s lives easier by relieving them of their cognitive load, the amount of effort being used in their working memory. As you design your user flows, minimizing the need for people to remember things as they navigate through your product or system
Searching for a particular piece of content online can be just as challenging as going to a supermarket and looking for a specific type of food coloring for a rainbow cake you’re planning to bake for your nephew’s birthday. Imagine the time it would save when you could narrow the search actions down
Now, our guess is that you’re quite an experienced computer user. Perhaps Linux is a bridge too far, but using Windows or Mac OS X will not have many secrets anymore. We can imagine you’re multitasking right now, reading this article, and keeping an eye on your incoming email at the same time. From
The dark side is quite resourceful in sneaking things past your attention, thereby ensuring your engagement in their commercial activities. To do this, they rely on our inherent laziness, which prevents us from reading every single piece of text on our way towards completing a task. Phrased carefull
Two information-processing systems determine the human emotional response: the affective and cognitive processing systems. The affective system operates outside of conscious thought and is reactive, in that a series of psychophysiological events are initiated automatically following the receipt of s
Language is much less neutral than what you often realize. The truth is that your choice for words does affect and/or is a reflection of how you see the world. This is why, as a user experience practitioner, you need to place special awareness on the connotations of the terms you pick.We do have tec
Online shops have the advantage of giving you access to all types of products or services, without the restrictions of your location or local shop’s assortment. The downside of online shopping can be that you drown in the vastness of available choices. What you need so as to make confident decisions
The times when telephone numbers were made up of five digits are long gone, and remembering your best friend’s number if she changes it has become almost impossible. And would you know your mom’s address by heart if she moved out of your childhood home a couple of years ago? Our world is super-conne
Skeuomorphism has been a very useful concept in design, then it became the most hated concept in design, and then it came back from the dead. Understanding skeuomorphism lets designers help users through learning curves and make decisions as to whether skeuomorphism still serves a purpose today.Skeu
Now we’re going to look at two powerful design principles that may, at first glance, seem too simple and second nature to us to warrant too much thought. However, we would be wise not to underestimate their capabilities and the benefits of their effects. Always keeping a firm appreciation for symmet
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 h
Smart products that adapt to aspects of the users’ activity, context or personality have become commonplace. With more and more products which act intelligently emerging in the market place, users often end up expecting to interact with them more like they would among themselves, as humans. In the f
Let’s examine a subject that has more to it than meets the eye. Applying a deeper appreciation of consistency to your designs will yield precious results, including keeping users happy.Consistency enables users to feel familiar with your website, your brand, etc. and to be reassured that it is your
Getting great interview results requires careful preparation. You need to be clear about the purpose of your research, decide whom to recruit, do all the practical preparations, and—finally—you need to design a great interview guide detailing the questions you want to ask. Here, you will learn how t
Ideation is easy to define. It’s the process by which you generate, develop and then communicate new ideas. Ideas can take many forms such as verbal, visual, concrete or abstract. The principle is simple to create a process by which you can innovate, develop and actualize new products. Ideation is c
When you’re in the beginning stages of your design project and you have just finished some highly informative interviews and observations in the context of your users, your head is full of impressions. You have a feeling for the different types of users who exist, and you have heard some similaritie
Design scenarios are useful tools for communicating ideas about user actions. Mapping design scenarios also has the added benefit that it helps formalize ideas and to take creative approaches to those ideas. Most importantly of all, it will ensure that your designs are firmly rooted on terra firma a
Honestly, how much do you enjoy reading research reports? And how engaging do you find them? Unsurprisingly, receiving a report with your insights into the target group may not get your clients to empathize with the potential users of their product or service optimally. Alternatively, you might cons
When User Experience (UX) improves the customer experience, it affects the company’s ROI (Return on Investment) because good UX investments enhance customer satisfaction. Satisfied customers are loyal; they trust a company’s products, and they want to come back for more, which is why satisfied custo
We know, TED talks can sometimes feel a little… overblown. While there are loads of great talks; some of them go nowhere and don’t seem to add much to your life at all. To make things worse… there are a lot of TED talks and it’s hard to tell which are going to motivate you to do something new and in
