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
If you’re thinking about launching a startup company for your products or services this year; it might be a good idea to take a step back and consider why so many businesses fail in the first 3 years of their lives (it’s estimated that 90% of businesses don’t make it to the end of their first year o
Advertising is a commercial necessity for any number of application providers and website owners. Yet, the User Experience of such advertising is often terrible. Done badly, online advertising can drive your users away in droves. We can’t offer the formula for the perfect advert (because then we wou
The new UX function has to do more than just deliver UX research and design work; it also has to convince the rest of the business that it brings value to the current product development process. Given that UX is such a broad sphere, it can take a long time to educate every person around you on all
A lot of UX work is focused on letting users know when something has gone wrong. There’s a strong, and in our view - positive, movement for better error messages, better help text, etc. But there’s also a requirement for the opposite; a hearty back on the back when a user gets something right.Showin
The Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 b.c.e.) classified properties of items and concepts in the known universe. One of his most fundamental discoveries was the composition of persuasive speaking. Although Aristotle identified the “three appeals” that make it up 23 centuries ago, when the known u
In much of the world, particularly the developed world, there’s a growing ageing population. The days of a family consisting of 2.4 children are over. As people have more resources, they tend to have fewer children. Then there’s the fact that medical care is constantly improving too. Bloomberg estim
So much emphasis is placed on the basic principles of 'good' design, like visibility, findability, good conceptual models, clear affordances, and learnability that we sometimes forget about the pleasure users might get out of using our products. Sure, a minimalist user interface can help users zone
Take a look at a product in your room; a computer, a watch, a mobile phone, speakers, anything. Now think to yourself 'how does it work?'. Unless you have investigated the inner workings of this thing previously, it is difficult to answer the question simply by looking at it from the outside. One ap
Reinventing the wheel sucks. Yet, all too often that’s exactly what UX designers do. They move from project to project and start from scratch each time. Yet, it doesn’t have to be like that.Software developers don’t do it. They build blocks of code for functionality, components, which allow them to
Persuasion occurs internally. You can persuade someone who trusts you by appealing with a convincing argument, backed up with solid facts, accessing emotions. However, nobody can hope to persuade anybody with 100% guaranteed success: you can only design for persuasion. Ultimately, that audience memb
First Time User Experience, or FTUE for short, is a particular area of research and consideration. Every person that uses a product will have had to start somewhere. Even if they have experience using a similar product, each product will present new challenges, styles, layouts, methods of interactio
