The Future Of UCD: Conducting Remote User Research Successfully
In times of constant technological advancements, high competition, and fast development cycles, time is getting short for extensive user research. Most companies today lack both time and resources for comprehensive in-person user testing. Which used to be the state of the art, is now getting out of style. (more…)
Wireframes: A Good Communication Tool, a Poor Design Tool
Wireframes are not a design tool Where does design happen? Before a wireframe can be created, a group of people needs to get together and talk things out. Later on, a wireframe might be created, usually by a single person working in isolation, sometimes long after the initial conversation has occurred. The sketches have been sketched, the ideas have been brainstormed. (more…)
Why Make a Customer Journey Map
Short answer: It is a holistic, end to end customer experience with context to each phase. But wait! There’s more…
- It helps guide and prioritize decisions/actions to be taken by viewing areas of opportunity and impact
- Is defined by data / measurable metrics, to help inform impact
- Allows for benchmark studies and identification of opportunity gaps
Principles of User Interface Design
"To design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit; it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse." - Paul Rand (more…)
Seven Tips For Writing Usability Task Scenarios
The core idea behind usability testing is having real people trying to accomplish real tasks on software, websites, cell phones or hardware. Identifying what users are trying to do is a key first step. Once you know what tasks you want to test, you'll want to create realistic task scenarios for participants to attempt. (more…)
How To Design For A Cross-Cultural User Experience (part 1/2)
Our culture defines our values and our behaviour – not only in our everyday lives, but also on the Web. What catches our attention, what makes us trust a website, how we search for information, what we consider relevant, what triggers our actions, and how we perceive a website – at the end of the day, it all depends on our cultural background. (more…)
User Experience as a Multi Channel Customer Journey
A few years ago, in the “desktop-centric” world of digital design, User Experience Designers focused on the user “visit” to a single digital destination, NOT a multi channel customer journey in which they may encounter several digital touch-points. To be fair to the UX Designers of that era, it probably wasn’t an issue of shortsightedness that led them to limit their focus to the desktop. (more…)
Guidelines For The Development Of Accessible Mobile Interfaces (PDF)
In a project funded by the Swedish Internet Fund, Funka has developed guidelines for the development of accessible mobile interfaces. The guidelines are free to use for everyone and we appreciate your comments in the content! (more…)
The usability error you don’t know you’re making
Most weeks you'll find me carrying out usability reviews for clients. Sometimes these are usability inspections and sometimes these are usability tests, but there's a usability error I come across in virtually every system I examine. What makes this problem doubly unusual is that when I raise the problem with the design team they have a complete blind spot about the issue — sometimes even denying that the problem exists. (more…)
Learning to See
A designer who is able to find the functional essence of a product will also likely find it in the visual aspects — they are usually interconnected, sometimes almost inevitably so. Don’t count on an inevitable visual beauty when it comes to products with a heavy engineering aspect, like computers, web sites, or industrial complexes. (more…)
Killed at Launch: A complete disregard for UX leads to drastic action
Furthermore, the shopping cart had to hold product orders form multiple vendors. The ordering system had to process orders and notify multiple vendors for product shipment. The website vendor's answer was to use the free and open source CMS Joomla an add-on module called the IXXO Multivendor Shopping Cart designed for guru-level IT personnel, not the casual user. (more…)
The Elements of a Design Pattern
Design teams are discovering that a well-built design pattern library makes the user interface development process substantially easier. A quality library means team members have the information they need at their fingertips. Choosing usable components that work smoothly for users becomes the developer's path of least resistance. (more…)
Enterprise UI Design Patterns – Part I
I was contracted to a large company to create a UX pattern library. The part of the company that I worked in produced customised websites for a number of the organisation’s clients. Until recently, each project was designed and built on an individual basis which led to difficulties when making changes along with slower design and development. (more…)
Developing a UI Design PatternLibrary
Designing good user interfaces is difficult, and thus software development organizations need effective and usable design tools to support design work. In this thesis a tool, a user interface design pattern library which captures knowledge of good UI design and shares it effectively in reusable format to the development organization, was developed for a Finnish middle-sized IT organization called eCraft. (more…)
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