You might still wonder why it’s a good idea to spend your valuable time thinking about bad ideas? In this video, you’ll learn the three major reasons as to why it’s such a great idea to focus on bad ideas when you want to develop creative results and nurture a truly creative work environment fo
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
To be creative, you must ensure you’re in an environment which nurtures your creativity. This goes both for personal creativity and for teams that do creative ideation work. The people who surround you and the space where you work have a major influence on whether you feel relaxed and free to ideate
Working code now sits at the other end of a natural language prompt. AI is blurring the lines of your role, and that's a good thing. Master it now and expand what you can deliver: stronger deliverables that command higher freelance rates, or strategic contributions that make you indispensable to you
Have you ever struggled to explain something which you easily know how to do? Performing the action is so familiar, and yet so hard to put into words. Or perhaps you’ve experienced the opposite phenomenon: you sketch and write to make a design problem clear to yourself… and you end up with a cryst
Today’s world relies on technology more than ever. Think about it: we use apps to order food, websites to book travel and smart devices to control our homes—and how we interact with these technologies has become a massive part of our daily lives. And the winds of change keep blowing as yet more soph
When you’re having an inspired moment where a wealth of ideas come to you, how do you capture them before you forget them? Before you think “Well, that’s what the voice recorder on my phone is for!”—let’s go a little deeper and look at “how” in another way as well. In this video, you’ll learn how
Are you an architect, or do you have a degree in architecture, but you feel that architecture may not be the right career path for you? If you’re in search of a new direction, UX design may be the career for you. There are countless paths to get to UX design, and architecture to UX is one of the mos
At its core, UX design is about fulfilling user needs — whether by solving a problem or offering enjoyable experiences. Each deliverable you create contributes to these larger goals. The whole, however, is greater than the sum of the parts. In order to succeed as a UX designer, you’ll need more than
You haven't played Street Fighter in years. Someone hands you a controller and asks you to execute that combo you used to nail every time. You can't remember the button labels. You couldn'texplain the sequence if you tried. But your fingers? They remember. They execute the combo perfectly without co
You press jump. Mario soars through the air with perfect responsiveness, lands with a satisfying bounce, and you feel like you ARE Mario, not someone pushing buttons on a controller. That seamless connection between your input and the game world is physical presence, and when your players feel it, t
Think about the last time you played a game you loved. You weren't trying to "complete a task" or "finish efficiently." You were playing for the pure pleasure of it. That's the fundamental difference you'll learn as a game UX designer: Designing not for productivity, but for joy.Imagine telling a tr
UX design is a relatively new profession. You won’t find many 10-year-olds who respond “I want to be a UX designer” when asked what they want to be when they grow up. Fortunately, you don’t need to begin your professional career as a UX designer. The field of UX design is, funnily enough, like a che
Every game you've ever loved had a team who advocated for the player experience. Someone who noticed the tutorial was too early, the feedback came too late, or the menu was too deep. Someone who saw the game through your eyes. That work has a job title and a career path, and that person could be you
An hour into your design review, everybody's going in circles. The lead designer loves the new mechanic. The artist thinks it's flat. The producer keeps checking their phone. You've heard the word "fun" 17 times and you're no closer to a decision than when you started. The problem isn't the mechanic
The game Overcooked is a nightmare of cognitive overload. Orders pile up, timers run down, your teammate just threw a plate at you, and the kitchen is on fire. Every traditional usability standard would flag it as broken. But the cognitive overload is deliberate: the chaos is the game and the stress
You have this great big plan which guides you to reach your overall creative goal, and you have a to-do list that helps you structure today’s work…. But what should you do when you get stuck anyway? We've all been there: the blank sheet of paper, the blank screen, the day we have done nothing beca
You arrive home from grocery shopping with your mind full of tasks, arms loaded with bags, going through the motions of unlocking your door and putting everything away. Ten minutes later, you can't find your keys. They're in the refrigerator next to the milk because your working memory was so overlo
You designed a healer character: flowing robes, gentle colors, a staff with a glowing crystal. During your first playtest, three players immediately identify her as the damage dealer. "The staff looks powerful," one explains. This is exactly why you test, to identify the mismatches between your inte
"Players have goldfish attention spans now," your creative director says. "Add more popups, more notifications, and more UI alerts to keep them engaged." You do. Players quit within 10 minutes, overwhelmed. The problem? You believed a myth. Attention is limited and your design just overloaded it.Bra
