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11 days ago
craft design vision
Crafting the Front-end
Much has been spoken and written recently about the virtues of craftsmanship in the context of web design and development. It seems that we as fabricators of the web are finally tiring of seeking out parallels between ourselves and architects, and are turning instead to the fabled specialist artisans.
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16 days ago
design fluid layout grid
There’s No Formula for Great Designs
Sometimes we’ll make decisions to improve function, other times because they make a design ‘feel’ right. You’ll know when you’ve made a right decision. You’ll feel it.
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18 days ago
analysis design empathy
Quiz: are you good at customer experience work?
The skills of empathy, analysis, and synthesis are essential in solving customer experience problems
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18 days ago
design salaries user experience
Salaries For UX Researchers, Designers, Managers And IAs
So for example, designers making around $105k per year are making more than are 75% of all designers. Information Architects making $50k are paid higher than 25% of all IAs.
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25 days ago
android design guidelines
Android Design
These design principles were developed by and for the Android User Experience Team to keep users’ best interests in mind. Consider them as you apply your own creativity and design thinking. Deviate with purpose.
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40 days ago
concept design user interface
12 of the Year’s Best Ideas in Interface Design
User interfaces, when done well, are the unsung hero of product design. They’re the difference between a printer whose buttons you can figure out without even reading the instructions and one you want to throw across the room.
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47 days ago
design tweaks user experience
6 Steps to Better UX Design
Everything you do, wear, drive, eat, and so forth are expressions of your character. If it is you that makes you unique, then let’s talk about the storefront that’s open 24/7 — your website — and see how it’s applicable to other designs as well.
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48 days ago
design features innovation optimization
Optimization vs innovation
You might have tried it before: as you incrementally tweak your web application with small changes, you can’t seem to convert your users any better. It seems as if you’ve hit a dead end. A large number of A/B tests and multivariate testing seem to have found the best working solution. Is the essence of my application just not good enough to convert better?
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49 days ago
design software user experiece
User Experience Beats Everything Else (Including Software)
So whenever I’m asked why we are focusing on hardware-based client frameworks, although we are a software company, I always tell people “because we don’t focus on software, we focus on user experience. And if hardware beats software any day of the week, user experience beats everything else (including software).
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49 days ago
customer experience design optimization
Figuring Out What Motivated Your Customers to Buy
Traditional marketing advice tells you to focus on benefits not features. I would go one further and figure out exactly what psychological motivators drove your customers to want your product, and focus your product/marketing on satisfying that.
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49 days ago
design storytelling user experience
The Importance of Storytelling to UX Design
As web sites and web applications become increasingly modular in their construction, Designers run the risk of creating applications that consist of an endless, near random, stack of modules. This situation is common to many ecommerce experiences.
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52 days ago
design user interface visual feedback
Feedback in Interface Design
Visual feedback is extremely important in User Interface Design. It tells the user what’s happening, or what’s going to happen next, and without it the user is left guessing or frustrated. In reality buttons, controls and objects react to our interaction, so this is how people expect things to work.
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52 days ago
accessibility design usability
Why good design matters to this blind geek
Accessibility has always been an essential element of how a well crafted website functions, but it is not and should never be considered in isolation. If accessibility ignores design, the design will fail to achieve its purpose. If design ignores accessibility and more so usability, the design will fail to achieve its purpose.
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52 days ago
concept design user experience
Design the Invisible to Tell Better Stories on the Web
For design to be meaningful we need to tell stories. We need to design the invisible, the cues, the messages and the extra detail hidden beneath the aesthetics. It’s all about the story.
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61 days ago
design interaction user experience
10 steps to an engaging interactive user experience
For people who aren’t well versed in the digital space, I often compare the work that I do as a UX designer to an architect. Like the architect who builds your home, my UX team builds a comprehensive blueprint, which outlines every single detail of the site’s features and functionality.
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62 days ago
design requirements user experience
Saving the task from the tool: Techniques for user experience requirements analysis
Put simply, most applications are developed to help users solve complex problems. The problem is complex enough; your application should not be a problem in itself.
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74 days ago
complexity design user experience
Complexity and User Experience
The best products don’t focus on features, they focus on clarity. Problems should be fixed through simple solutions, something you don’t have to configure, maintain, control. The perfect solution needs to be so simple and transparent you forget it’s even there.
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76 days ago
design user experience
A Crash Course in UX
User experience is comprised of a) content strategy, b) interaction design and c) visual design, all ruled by a process of user research…
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151 days ago
design testing
Test everything you got, regardless of its polish or fidelity
…Should it be clickable (really clickable, i.e., working code) or a mocked up experience created using Axure, Powerpoint, Fireworks or any other tool?
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153 days ago
design user experience user interface
Realism in UI Design
…Graphical user interfaces are full of symbols. Symbols need to be reduced to their essence. This helps avoid cluttering the user interface with meaningless distractions, and makes it easier for people to «read» the symbol and figure out the meaning of an interface element…
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154 days ago
content design hierarchy
Designing for Content: Creating a Message Hierarchy
…When we greet users with succinct messages—organized in a defined hierarchy—we pique their interest through immersive experiences that keep them learning…
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154 days ago
design personas
Personas as a site design tool
Carefully devising your personas involves embracing the nitty gritty. It’s true that personas should not be based on actual people, but represent a product’s archetypal users and their hypothetical behaviour and goals.
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154 days ago
debate design developers
Why is good UI design so hard for some Developers?
Some of us just have a hard time with the softer aspects of UI design (myself especially). Are “back-end coders” doomed to only design business logic and data layers? Is there something we can do to retrain our brain to be more effective at designing pleasing and useful presentation layers?…
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155 days ago
design software development user experience
The Integration of User Experience into Software Development
Ideally, UX professionals should be involved in the entire software development lifecycle…
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160 days ago
design rant user experience
UX is not a skill, it’s part of design.
User Experience, or ‘UX’ as it’s commonly shortened to, is how a person uses and experiences an interface. This is just part of design. Whether it’s designing a website, application or a physical product, the user experience should be the sole motivator for direction and decisions.
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274 days ago
design devices responsive
Responsive Web Design and Mobile Devices
…At first, responsive web design sounds like a lot of work. However, compared to creating a dedicated site for smartphones, and one for tablets, and one for desktops, simply altering the layout of a single site is much easier to implement and (just as importantly) maintain…
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277 days ago
about page design
9 Ideas for Crafting a Better ‘About’ Page
…In some cases the reader have more questions or inquires. By putting your contact info directly on the about page you make it dead simple for the reader to contact you…
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277 days ago
approach design
Design Is Not The Goal
…If I had to describe Web/interface design today I would say it looks like anything that Apple does — multiplied by ten. They have certainly given us some of the best examples of experiences and proven to be very profitable with them…
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284 days ago
design interaction workflow
Workflow Expectations: Presenting Steps at the Right Time
Actions at one step of an application impact subsequent steps. When users don’t understand this relationship, usability suffers.
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284 days ago
design interaction social
The Theory Behind Social Interaction Design
Via this article I would like to give you the big picture introduction to the theory behind social interaction design. Many of my articles on this topic are anchored in social theory but don’t make explicit reference to it, so I thought an overview might be in order…