The Importance Of Wireframes In Web Design And 9 Tools To Create Wireframes
Designing wireframes the right way the first time costs no more than doing it the wrong way. Creating a paper prototype adds no cost either; simply print out the wireframe diagrams for the pages a visitor will use to complete the tasks most closely related to achieving his goals and meeting the site's business objectives. (more…)
How To Sell Your UX Design Solution To Clients
How do you convince clients to trust you with their valuable and much-loved product? In my experience, the best way to sell work to clients is to apply user-centered design not only to the work we produce, but also to the clients who commission that work. (more…)
Carousel Interaction Stats
Carousels. That gem of a web feature that clients love, and many developers hate. One thing is certain, they are the darling of HigherEd. In fact, they’re loved so much, I’ve been assigned many times to retroactively add them to sites that have already been live for years. This led me ask how much are users really interacting with the carousels. (more…)
Trends in interactive design 2013
Prophets Agency presents "ID13": the trends in Interactive Design for 2013. Third year in a row, after the ID11 and ID12 trends. Written and designed by our Design Director Petra Sell. Starting at the emerging trends in 2012 moving to what is happening in interaction design in 2013. (more…)
Sketching And Prototyping
Sketching enables you to brainstorm, explore multiple ideas, define flows, communicate with team members all why being quick and cheap. Prototyping enables you to get out of the building quicker, talk to users, validate assumptions, ensure expectations are meeting stakeholder needs, while spending as little time as possible worrying about polish. (more…)
Effectively Planning UX Design Projects
Planning user experience (UX) projects is a balancing act of getting the right amount of user input within the constraints of your project. The trick is to work out the best use of your time. How can you get the most UX goodness for your client’s budget? This article explains how to choose the right mix of tools for the task at hand. (more…)
6 Mind-Blowing Things I Learned about UX in 2012
The UX community is extremely generous when it comes to sharing useful and meaningful information related to the field. Whether its tips on how to tackle your first survey to case studies, podcasts, interviews, UX cartoons and more, there is a plethora of information at your fingertips and a community of professionals willing to share. (more…)
Tips on Prototyping for Usability Testing
Don’t let prototyping drive your design. The best prototyping tools are not necessarily the best design tools. It certainly saves time if you can design and prototype at the same time, but the last thing you should have to focus on when designing are the limitations of a prototyping tool. (more…)
Responsive Navigation: Optimizing for Touch Across Devices
Designing towards touch really forces us to simplify and decide what's most important- what needs to stay on the screen. If we go through that exercise we ultimately end up with software that's easier to understand and as a result more often used. Both good things. (more…)
If you see a UI walkthrough, they blew it
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…)
Designing Sequences Not Stills
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…)
Onboarding: A Sidebar in “Designing Social Interfaces”
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…)
Trends in User Experience: The Emergence of UX Strategy
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…)
The Designer Will Make It Pretty
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…)