There are myriad ways to integrate user-centered thinking into the creative process of UX design, and personas are one of the most effective ways to empathize with and analyze users. This final part of the series will explain an effective method of creating a persona. There is no one right way to develop one, but the method Shlomo Goltz will share here is based on processes developed, field-tested and refined over the years at the interaction design agency Cooper. This process follows a logical order that begins with knowing nothing about users and ends with a refined perspective of users that can be shared with others.
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Personas have been in use since the mid-’90s and since then have gained widespread awareness within the design community. Once Shlomo Goltz understood why personas were valuable and how they could be put into action, he started using them in his own work, and then his process became more efficient and fun, while the fruits of his labor became more impactful and useful to others. Personas will supercharge your work and help you take your designs to the next level.
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Interface designers use affordances all the time. They have to. Unlike physical objects, web and mobile interfaces must gain all of their affordance through design. For most designers, this is intuitive and instinctive, based on the thousands of design patterns we see every day. But have you ever thought about the qualities that make an object afford clicking, sliding, pulling or pushing? By deeply understanding how affordance works, you’ll better master interface or product design. Better affordance can have a dramatic impact on conversion rates, registration rates and the user actions that matter most to the website, app or product you’re designing for. This is why “affordance” is the most underrated word in web design.
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Some of us were born with this feeling of what feels and looks right. But other people also have a gift of aesthetic feeling, a gift to recognize beauty. Ordinary users, then, just like designers, recognize beauty and know what’s right and not right. This is not where the problem of handing over creative control arises. The problem is that they don’t know the principles that designers do. But there is a way. We can guide users simply by limiting their creative control, which also makes for a simpler tool.
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The best mobile web applications are the ones that excel at handling mobile processors, network connectivity, bandwidth, latency and touchscreen keyboards. In this article, Nick Gauthier will look at how to identify the tasks your users want to accomplish on a mobile device, memorize your users’ situation, presume that their actions will succeed, and also how to predict your users’ next actions, and prepare accordingly. The mobile web is a harsh environment, but by simply focusing on what matters, you will find a clear path to a superior experience.
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Paul Boag would argue that the single most precious commodity in Western society is time. People hate to have their time wasted, especially online. We spend so much of our time online these days, and every interaction demands a slice of our time. One minor inconvenience on a website might not be much, but, accumulated, it is death by a thousand cuts. On each project ask two questions: “Am I saving myself time at the expense of the user?” and “How can I save the user time here?”.
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Lately we’ve seen a rapid shift in software and app interface design, from 3-D and skeuomorphic to flat and minimal. Let’s take a moment to consider how we got here and what influence it’s having on interface design as a whole. Minimal design’s widespread resurgence is refreshing to witness. It is by no means the right solution for everything, but when applied thoughtfully and appropriately, it makes for a highly usable and enjoyable digital experience.
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There he goes, the web designer, stepping up to the counter of an empty McDonald’s at 3 o’clock in the morning. He is scanning the overhead menu, putting a cheeseburger in his mental shopping basket. “Cheezubahga, onegaishimasu,” we hear him say, “with an iced tea.”
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If there is a commonly reoccurring need for a particular solution, there is a great probability that someone has - by now - solved that need and has finished the legwork involved in researching and constructing something that resolves it.
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The main function of a good user interface is to provide users with an intuitive mapping between user’s intention and application’s function that manages to provide a solution to the given task. Basically, user interface describes the way people interact with a site and the way users can access its functions. In fact, usability is a biproduct of a good user interface and it determines how easily a user can perform all of the functions provided by the site. Usability is a crucial part of every design, especially on websites with a large amount of functions and users.
This article goes over crucial features of the user interfaces of social media and social networking sites. It discusses important features, techniques and concepts behind these designs and explains why they are important, with examples from top sites. These easy and general usability strategies can be applied almost anywhere and to almost any type of user interface.
You may want to take a look at the following related posts
* 12 Useful Techniques For Good User Interface Design
* 10 More Useful Techniques To Improve Your User Interface Designs
* 10 Useful Web Application Interface TechniquesRead more…
