Using the word “click” on your links takes the user’s attention away from your interface and on to their mouse. Users know what a link is and how to use a mouse. It’s unnecessary to call attention to the mechanics when clicking a link. Doing so diminishes their experience of your interface because it momentarily takes their focus away from it. (more…)
Usability testing. Some people love it, some hate it, many don’t get it. Personally, I think they are the best thing anyone can do to learn from their users. In the same time, they are emotionally exhausting for moderators. Here are 6 usability testing videos I love. Four serious ones, two not so much. (more…)
Clear, Rise and Solar are three examples of a trend of “gesture driven” apps with a flat UI. These are novelty apps for people lusting for the very latest in app design. Besides using a more flat UI style, which is a topic for a different discussion, all apps contain non-standard interactions. This means users don’t know how to use them beforehand, and all start with a multi-step UI walkthrough before you get to use the app. (more…)
What if instead of designing explicit interfaces we aimed instead at eliminating them altogether? If instead of adding a screen we found ways to remove it? Wouldn’t the best user interface be the one that requires nothing of the user? No UI, proposed here on the Journal by Cooper’s Golden Krishna, is interesting, provocative, and deeply flawed. (more…)
Wireframing is important. I don’t think I need to labour the point about this, Its something most designer folk involve themselves with at the start of the design process. If you don’t, you really should. Most of the effort in wireframing is gathering together the outline of what will be on each page and where it will sit within a page hierarchy, we create a blueprint for our website when we wireframe. (more…)
Designing software based on a checklist of screens can blind designers to the overall customer experience. To understand any individual screen, you must understand the chain of events that led to a user going there… and you can can map this out. The customer flow above shows how a user eventually arrives at a settings screen. (more…)
Last May I was given the great privilege to write a sidebar in Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone‘s fabulous new book, Designing Social Interfaces. The topic I was asked to write about is “onboarding” — designing welcoming experiences for new users by easing them in. (more…)
As Donald Norman said in 1990, “The real problem with the interface is that it is an interface. Interfaces get in the way. I don’t want to focus my energies on an interface. I want to focus on the job…I don’t want to think of myself as using a computer, I want to think of myself as doing my job.” (more…)
When a visitor lands on your marketing page, what should they see? For nearly all web applications it’s the same: testimonials, a feature list, screenshots. Marketing sites usually explain just enough to entice people to sign up. But what if there were a different way? (more…)
In this edition of Ask UXmatters, our experts discuss emerging trends in user experience. As 2012 ends, it’s a good time to consider what the future of user experience might bring—in terms of both cultural shifts that impact UX professionals and UX design trends. (more…)
We all know basic tenets of user-centered design. We recognize different research methods, the prototyping stage, as well as the process of documenting techniques in our rich methodological environment. The question you probably often ask yourself, though, is how it all works in practice? (more…)
Each client has the ability to design their website as they see fit, but we have an unbalanced ratio of designers to clients. I do not have the luxury in my day-to-day work of spending months working through a design process as part of a client’s implementation. However, this scenario of limited time hardly strikes me as rare among my design peers. (more…)
In this excerpt from The Web Designer's Roadmap, Giovanni DiFeterici discusses the role wireframing plays in design, and how to create a wireframe that suits your own needs. Once all the planning for a site is done and the initial thoughts have been hashed out, we must start putting together concrete ideas for design and structure. (more…)
In this article, I share a bunch of tips and practical advice on how to write and use your own surveys for design research. I’m an audience researcher – I’m not a designer or developer. I’ve spent much of the last thirteen years working with audience data both in creative agencies and on the client-side. (more…)
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