Your career works like a bank account. Every project you finish and every skill you develop is a deposit. When you explain your work clearly, you’re investing in your own reputation. Each presentation pays dividends over time. Master presentation skills, and you’ll watch your career grow exponential
Maps are one of the oldest tools humans have used to find their way around the world. They help us understand the lay of the land, where we are, and where we need to go.Like a traditional map, journey maps also help us understand our customers’ world, where they are and where they want to go. They h
While friction in UX is typically something you want to minimize, adding friction can improve the user experience and contribute to good design in many situations. Researchers at UCL define positive friction as friction that “can disrupt mindless automatic interactions, prompting moments of reflecti
Users typically take just 50 milliseconds to assess the visual appeal of a website. The UI of your website has a massive impact on whether they choose to stay or depart, and it acts as the bridge between users and technology. Beyond visual appeal, its design and functionality often determine a platf
It can be a challenge—and not to mention call for careful planning on how to carry things out—to implement Virtual Reality (VR) experiences, but the rewards of a successful VR experience are massive. Not only will users get to enjoy an experience they’ll never forget but they’ll want to keep on comi
It's probably happened to you. You've found the door to a building you were looking for but are having trouble getting in—you've pulled when you should have pushed (or vice versa). Blame yourself; everyone else does! This is the opening scenario from Don Norman's Design of Everyday Things (DOET), wh
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
Do you have a psychology degree, or are you in the process of getting one? Then, user experience (UX) design might be the career choice that no one told you about. Many people believe that psychology graduates’ only choices are to become therapists, HR specialists or researchers. While these career
It might seem like it’d be a one-time journey if you’re going to step into the shoes of a UX designer and that once you’re “there,” you’re there as one—end of story. But it’s not like that; it’s very much a process, and an ongoing one at that. We hope this doesn’t blow your image of what it might lo
Apply What You Learned From UX Magic and Project 1 In this second IxDF-provided project, you will be flying solo to create a new UX design from scratch. Unlike the first MatchDog exercise, where you could leverage project-specific grammar, prioritization, semantic grid, UX flow and game theory samp
“Partnership is not a posture but a process—a continuous process that grows stronger each year as we devote ourselves to common tasks.”— John F. Kennedy, Address in the Assembly Hall at the Paulskirche in FrankfurtYou might be wondering, what is an Interaction Design Foundation (IxDF) Educational Pa
Design thinking can transform companies, organizations and even lives, but it will fall short if you approach it in a superficial manner or without a solid understanding. The term “design thinking” is almost everywhere, and when a word is repeated so often, it risks becoming a buzzword. However, if
Project BriefYou don’t need to review the MatchDog project brief anymore; you have pushed beyond it by completing your UX prototype with or without gamification. Now we enter the level of polishing and fine-tuning your portfolio piece or, in real life, the actual product.From the good graphic design
Eye tracking is—pretty much—just what it sounds like, and eye tracking technology measures and analyzes eye movements to show what captures visual attention when a person’s being measured this way, so read on about this technique—including what it can help with, its limitations, and more—as it’s a h
Login screens are the first point of contact between a user and an app or website—and they’re vital gateways to brands, whatever their products or services. That’s why it’s so important to create a better login screen—it, quite simply, sets the tone for the user's experience. An engaging, user-frien
There are many ways that game theory could be applied in the MatchDog supplemental project. We also recommend that you defer trying to introduce game theory while building the first iteration of your interactive prototype. Introducing game theory is both subtle and difficult. It is also not appropri
Not all teams build products in highly uncertain environments or try to create cutting-edge new features. Many incrementally improve existing products and try to do so in a way that doesn’t alienate large existing user bases. Neither of these tasks is particularly easy, and they often require very d
The most important tasks found in the upper-left quadrant of your prioritization matrix are those which most users will spend the majority of their time performing. At a minimum, these are the ones that need a full flow design to show how (and with what logic) the user will transition from screen to
Congratulations! You have finished the longest chapter in the book, which describes the full hierarchy of design pattern layers from simple components up to the master diagrams of UX Architecture alternatives. As noted in the book, the multi-level pattern framework is best taught from the bottom
You may well have seen the “Rule of Thirds” plenty of times at work in a photograph or image on a website and not even realized it; it’s a well-known (and well-applied!) photography technique that’s been making pictures more captivating for a long time—including making websites have more harmonious
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.