Whenever someone requests, “Please explain in plain language,” we know a message has failed to latch. Created in the early 1990s by U.S. government employees who’d had enough of work jargon, the plain language movement would soon reach all industries. Choosing plain-language words in UX design takes
Most designers who go freelance, at least in the early stage of their careers, are going to end up doing business with a friend at some point or another. It’s a natural consequence of reaching out to your personal network for work. However, friends can be demanding taskmasters and it can be hard to
It is perfectly natural for designers to seek inspiration in other people’s work. It would be impossible for this not to be the case. However, there is a fine line to walk between being inspired by someone’s work and simply infringing their copyright.The Critical QuestionIf you are taken to court fo
Have you ever wondered why there are so many terrible but sometimes nice-to-look-at websites out there? We think it’s because so many design clients don’t buy websites but rather they buy graphic designs instead. The sign off process for many projects is simply a question of handing the client a lov
Yes, we know UX research is awesome but your boss won’t give you any budget to prove just how awesome. In fact, management has been pondering over a UX budget for so long now that you’re pretty certain that they will clone a mammoth before you get some cash from the top. You’re so desperate to show
Looking for some new techniques to introduce into your UX research? We’ve been thinking about methods that are slowly developing into more popular tools and have compiled a list of three techniques that might give your UX research a bit of added bite. The three techniques are the diary study, unass
Want to design your copy so that it improves the user experience? You’re not alone. So we’ve come up with a short list of tips that should help create more valuable copy on your website or in your application:Use LabelsAuthor/Copyright holder: oddharmonic. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-SA 2.0If
User research is adaptive. Like all fields, we plan the best way we can for our work, however it’s all subject to change when we hit the ground and execute that plan. User research, when conducted thoroughly generates a lot of data, and it’s important to think about that before you conduct your rese
I want to tell you about a common term in English and how you can escape it. No, I don’t mean escaping the term; I mean escaping what the term means. When you realize how familiar a situation that term describes, you will surely want to rescue yourself from it.According to Wikipedia, a rat race is a
If there’s an area of product development where products down right suck; it’s enterprise software projects. I’ve worked on many of them as a training lead and found myself sitting down to develop work instructions and processes that are ridiculously convoluted. That’s because the underlying softwar
It is easy to be tempted to look at the objective of your user research and pump out a solution that fits your best idea of how to achieve those objectives. That’s because experienced professionals can be quite good at that but then again they can also be very bad at it. It is better to take your ob
User needs are no different from our general needs. We want to buy things to eat, drink, keep us clothed, and that make us happy in ourselves; we want to develop skills and learn, to help us realise our potential; we want to connect with friends and family to feel loved and to smooth the rough edges
When it comes to user experience design a lot of effort is put into the engineer design of products, and yet more is expended in the graphical design of products. However, all too often the user experience design stops there – the written content of the product is left to whoever is handy to write i
In Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman (2003) provide a unified model of gaming, which attempts to encourage and foster innovation with new methods, strategies and concepts for understanding the fundamentals of gaming. According to Salen and Zimmerman, all games a
There’s a wealth of information to be found about user experience but there are some areas that aren’t as well addressed as they, perhaps, should be. We’ve though of 5 ideas that you may not have considered in your UX design process: When and Where MattersThere’s a big difference from using a shiny
In an age where user experience is vital it can be tempting to enable projects to become user-led. After all, if we want to please our users, why not let them specify the products that they want? Then we can create those products and be certain that they’ll sell right?Wrong. In many cases users are
There comes a time in user research when the research is done and the data from the project is banked and you need to work through it and ask meaningful questions before using that data in your design.Before you ask those questions it’s important to allocate enough time and space to consider the dat
It’s funny that social media has become such a huge part of our lives in such a short time but that we all too often forget its potential as a tool for UX research. We’ve got some very simple tips for turning Facebook, Twitter, etc. into UX research tools that won’t cost very much to implement.1. Li
It’s fair to say that without advertising there’d be very little variety in products and most products wouldn’t sell as much as they do now. The question is when does advertising become unethical and thus start to impinge on the user experience?The Blindingly ObviousAuthor/Copyright holder: Milos Mi
One of the most challenging things for a User Experience Manager is getting the rest of the organization to buy into your ideas. Many a UX project has run ashore on the rocks of organizational indifference. You can do all the research and all the design work you like; if the people you work with don
AI is replacing jobs everywhere, yet design jobs are booming with a projected 45% job growth. With design skills, you can create products and services people love. More love means more impact and greater salary potential.
At IxDF, we help you from your first course to your next job, all in one place.