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UX / UI Articles

You can use design skills to make a meaningful impact on your own career, your company and the people you help. Dive into the articles and videos that millions of other people love.

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The 5 Stages in the Design Thinking Process - Article hero image

The 5 Stages in the Design Thinking Process

Design thinking is a methodology that provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It’s extremely useful when used to tackle complex problems that are ill-defined or unknown—because it serves to understand the human needs involved, reframe the problem in human-centric ways, create numerou

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What is Design Thinking and Why Is It So Popular? - Article hero image

What is Design Thinking and Why Is It So Popular?

Design Thinking is not an exclusive property of designers—all great innovators in literature, art, music, science, engineering, and business have practiced it. So, why call it Design Thinking? What’s special about Design Thinking is that designers’ work processes can help us systematically extract,

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Personas – A Simple Introduction - Article hero image

Personas – A Simple Introduction

Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way. Creating personas will help you understand your users’ needs, experiences, behaviors and goals. Creating personas

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Bad Design vs. Good Design: 5 Examples We Can Learn From - Article hero image

Bad Design vs. Good Design: 5 Examples We Can Learn From

Looking at examples of bad design alongside counter-examples of good design is not only fun but also draws important lessons for designers. They highlight pitfalls for designers to avoid and let us understand how to translate design theories into solutions that work in the real world. Jared Spool, t

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What is Interaction Design? - Article hero image

What is Interaction Design?

Interaction design is an important component within the giant umbrella of user experience (UX) design. In this article, we’ll explain what interaction design is, some useful models of interaction design, as well as briefly describe what an interaction designer usually does.A simple and useful unders

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Apple’s Product Development Process – Inside the World’s Greatest Design Organization - Article hero image

Apple’s Product Development Process – Inside the World’s Greatest Design Organization

Apple’s Product Development Process may be one of the most successful design processes ever implemented. With a valuation that exceeds $2 trillion, there’s a lot that designers can learn from Apple and introduce into their own design environments.Apple is a notoriously secretive business. In Steve J

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Stage 2 in the Design Thinking Process: Define the Problem and Interpret the Results - Article hero image

Stage 2 in the Design Thinking Process: Define the Problem and Interpret the Results

An integral part of the Design Thinking process is the definition of a meaningful and actionable problem statement, which the design thinker will focus on solving. This is perhaps the most challenging part of the Design Thinking process, as the definition of a problem (also called a design challenge

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Latest UX / UI Design Articles

Combine AI skills with timeless skills in User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) design. Skills like empathy, user-centered design, and creative problem-solving are deeply human, and no technology can replace them.

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Structure First: The Inverted Pyramid and Visual Organization - Article hero image

Structure First: The Inverted Pyramid and Visual Organization

This clip examines two principles that work hand in hand to make web content readable: the inverted pyramid approach to information order and the use of visual structure to help users scan efficiently. William Hudson, UX Strategist and Founder of Syntagm Ltd, describes the theoretical basis and prac

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What Is Card Sorting? - Article hero image

What Is Card Sorting?

In this video, William Hudson, UX Strategist and Founder of Syntagm Ltd, introduces card sorting: what it is, where it comes from, and the broad range of problems it can help solve.Card sorting is a research technique in which participants organize a set of items into groups that make sense to them,

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Design Accessible Navigation for Keyboards and Screen Readers - Article hero image

Design Accessible Navigation for Keyboards and Screen Readers

Accessibility is often treated as a finishing touch, but for navigation, it belongs at the foundation. Menus are how users reach everything else on a site, so a menu that works only with a mouse quietly shuts out anyone who depends on a keyboard, a screen reader, or another form of assistive technol

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The Scent of Information: Give Users the Confidence to Click - Article hero image

The Scent of Information: Give Users the Confidence to Click

William Hudson, UX Strategist and Founder of Syntagm Ltd, introduces the scent of information as a model for understanding how users navigate toward their goals, and sets out the principles for writing navigation links that strengthen that scent.Information Foraging and the Scent of InformationThe s

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4 UI Design Tips Every Designer Needs to Know - Article hero image

4 UI Design Tips Every Designer Needs to Know

User interface (UI) design can make or break any digital product. A user often won’t even notice when they interact with a great UI. They feel the visual appeal and simply trust it. On the contrary, a bad UI design can prevent the user from interacting with a product intuitively or at all and lead t

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How to Design Use Cases in UX - Article hero image

How to Design Use Cases in UX

Imagine a new mobile app or an e-commerce site gets launched; it looks great, sure, and it should be a hit because it at least looks like it’s got what it takes, but—drumroll—it tanks in the marketplace, all because people find it hard to complete even the simplest tasks. That’s rough, but—behind th

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How to Become a Product Manager: Best Career Advice - Article hero image

How to Become a Product Manager: Best Career Advice

Pick any product and you’ll find that product management is vital to how successful it is—and product managers are who make sure that a product’s life cycle runs smoothly, and it means they know how to align strategy, vision, and user needs. Product managers split into multiple roles that have got u

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The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd Ed.

Free textbooks written by more than 100 leading designers, bestselling authors, and Ivy League professors. We have assembled our textbooks in a gigantic encyclopedia, whose 4,000+ pages cover the design of interactive products and services such as websites, household objects, smartphones, computer software, aircraft cockpits, and what have you. Name an item of design interest, and you'll probably find it discussed inside.

Book's cover image: The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd Ed.
First Chapter
Don Norman

Highly recommend the Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction […] the breadth and the depth of the invited contributions are quite impressive […] all with highly qualified authorities as authors.

– Don Norman

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IxDF Research Bibliography for Academia

If you're a researcher in academia, we've compiled a comprehensive bibliography on human-centered technology for you, comprising 138,678 authors in more than 127,278 publications.

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39% of Today's Skills Will Change by 2030

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