Mapping can help UX practitioners synthesize insight into one place and visualize the problem space. This video covers 3 maps that are often utilized during the discovery phase of a UX design project: ecosystem maps, experience maps, and process maps.
Roadmaps cover future work and vision, but this can be done at different scopes, from everything related to the product to only the UX activities and priorities, possibly narrowed to a sub-specialty of UX.
Dual career ladders are important in user experience. Don't force talented UX professionals to become managers if their growth path would instead benefit from focusing on UX craft.
Contextual inquiry is a UX research method where you shadow people as they do their job (or leisure tasks), allowing you to ask questions in context. This video provides advice on overcoming the main challenges with this method.
Our research with UX practitioners found 3 main areas of frustrations with service-blueprint projects. Here are recommendations for overcoming or alleviating these problems.
Jakob Nielsen's 10 general principles for interaction design. They are called "heuristics" because they are broad rules of thumb for UX and not specific usability guidelines.
Visualizing user attitudes and behaviors in an empathy map helps UX teams align on a deep understanding of end users. The mapping process also reveals any holes in existing user data.
Modern day UX research methods answer a wide range of questions. To know when to use which method, each of 20 methods is mapped across 3 dimensions and over time within a typical product-development process.
A website’s tone of voice communicates how an organization feels about its message. The tone of any piece of content can be analyzed along 4 dimensions: humor, formality, respectfulness, and enthusiasm.
Elaborate usability tests are a waste of resources. The best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford.
Empathy maps, customer journey maps, experience maps, and service blueprints depict different processes and have different goals, yet they all build common ground within an organization.
What is design thinking and why should you care? History and background plus a quick overview and visualization of 6 phases of the design thinking process. Approaching problem solving with a hands-on, user-centric mindset leads to innovation, and innovation can lead to differentiation and a competitive advantage.
Our UX-maturity model has 6 stages that cover processes, design, research, leadership support, and longevity of UX. Use our quiz to get an idea of your organization’s UX maturity.
User interviews have become a popular technique for getting user feedback, mainly because they are fast and easy. Use them to learn about users’ perceptions of your design, not about its usability.
Eyetracking research shows that people scan webpages and phone screens in various patterns, one of them being the shape of the letter F. Eleven years after discovering this pattern, we revisit what it means today.
User interface guidelines for when to use a checkbox control and when to use a radio button control. Twelve usability issues for checkboxes and radio buttons.
Improve design decisions by looking at the problem from multiple points of view: combine multiple types of data or data from several UX research methods.
What does it mean to be a "designer?" Let's broaden the definition, based on the purpose, not the discipline. (Keynote by our Chief Designer, Sarah Gibbons)
Edgar Anzaldua presents a 6-year case study of learning and applying ever-more subtle UX concepts and growing his influence. Always something new to learn, from junior to senior professional level.
It can be hard to calculate the return on investment (ROI) for user experience design improvements. But don't get bogged down in less-important details: often simple metrics can give a good-enough estimate to justify UX investments.
Video game design is a special case of user interface design, with some differences (especially in user goals) but also many similarities with more traditional UX design problems and methods.
No matter your screen size, some data tables will be too big for the screen. This problem is particularly common on mobile devices. Simple interaction techniques can help, but you may need to offer users more advanced features for information hiding and column reordering.
For each research or design method you employ, create a document that defines this method and can be used to educate other team members on UX activities.
Coming from a traditional content/writing background, Michelle Blake presents her case study of broadening her remit to a fuller range of user-experience issues and improved the design of her organization's website.
Fitts's Law describes how long time it takes to click a target, based on the distance to the target and its size. Use this information to make buttons and links faster to click.
Spreadsheet defaults don't generate the most meaningful visualizations of UX data. Modify charts to enhance Context, Clutter (less of it than spreadsheet software likes!), and Contrast.
Even people with limited drawing abilities can learn to sketch a wireframe if they learn a few common conventions used to represent various design elements.
Our UX-maturity model has 6 stages that cover processes, design, research, leadership support, and longevity of UX. Use our quiz to get an idea of your organization’s UX maturity.
Don’t report descriptive statistics like success rates and averages unless you ran a quantitative study. Reported numbers must be qualified with statistical information such as confidence intervals or statistical significance.
To support the user experience, colors need to be combined wisely so that they work together well, do not overwhelm, and communicate the same kind of information everywhere in the interface.
Wellcome Trust’s winning intranet, Trustnet, is the product of a user-centered design, a clear product vision, in-house development capabilities, and Agile development.
Feedback during design critiques can be filled with hypothetical scenarios and unactionable suggestions. The right facilitation techniques help stakeholders and team members stay on track while still feeling heard.
Qualitative usability studies have few users and variable protocol; numbers obtained from such studies are likely to poorly reflect the true behavior of your population due to large measurement errors.
Collaboratively create a UX roadmap in a workshop setting by guiding participants through activities that familiarize them with the project goals, context, and inputs and that identify key roadmap themes and priorities.
