You can’t afford to skip testing, because even a simple round of testing could make or break your product. Investment in user testing is just about the only way to consistently generate a rich stream of data on user behavior. Testing provides the inspiration, guidance and validation that product teams need in order to design great products. That’s why the most effective teams make testing a habit. In this article, Nick Babich will show you some tips that can be applied to different types of testing.
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Middle Eastern countries require design that is suitable to their language standards, making a serious adaptation process very important. Given that most languages spoken in the Middle East are written and read from right to left, developers often face a range of problems when creating products in those languages. In this article, Robert Dodis & Yvette Mosiichuk will show you some tips which if you follow closely, you should be able to navigate the challenging waters of RTL development and deliver a functional, user-friendly result.
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Using customer journey mapping to map your campaigns can not only turn out to be a huge timesaver, but a well of insights, too. In this article, Yuri Vedenin shares his experience with CJM and how UXPressia was able to achieve a 40% open rate in their email campaign.
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UX designers use a lot of different research techniques, such as interviews and workshops. They summarize research findings into user stories and user flows and communicate their thinking and solutions to the teams. But somewhere in all of this, there are real people for whom the products are being designed for.
In order to create better products, designers must understand what’s going on in the user’s world. And that’s where storyboards come in. In this article, Nick Babich will focus on storyboards as a means to explore solutions to UX issues, as well as to communicate these issues and solutions to others.
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The visual interface is an obvious place to begin digging into accessibility. In this article, Tom Graham & André Gonçalves will discuss some of the most common visual impairments, focusing on color-blindness to explain how you can make small changes to your workflow and products to ensure you’re not alienating users.
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Our ears are the second-most important sensors we have, and in some situations, voice conversation is a very effective communication channel. But relying just on verbal communication is not enough. For example, would you buy a shoe without seeing it first? Of course not. As long as visual image-processing remains people’s main information source, and we are able to process complex information faster visually, the GUI is here to stay. On the other hand, more traditional GUI patterns cannot survive in their current form either. So, instead of radical predictions, David Pasztor suggests another idea: User interfaces will adapt to our sensors even more.
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When soliciting and listening to user feedback, you will inevitably run into bias on both sides of the coin: Biases will influence the people providing feedback, and your own biases will influence the way you receive that feedback. Bias is universal, but so too are the methods you can take to avoid it. By simply understanding what each bias is and by breaking down the ways that it appears during the feedback process, you can put measures in place to overcome misleading preconceptions and gather the most impartial feedback possible. In this article, Hunter Jensen will take a closer look at four of the most common types of cognitive biases that pop up when collecting and interpreting UX feedback — and how you can nip these biases in the bud, before they skew your production process.
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We’ve been closely working with Maya on this article, and we’re happy to see the final result now being published on 18F. We highly encourage more teams to share the lessons they learned when building design systems or pattern libraries, and we’re always happy to support them in writing, editing and shaping that article. This post is a re-post of Maya’s final article. In this article, Maya will shed some light on how to built tools to leverage industry-standard best practices and produce a design system with reusable components.
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Designers need to create the most usable and attractive websites possible, and well applied minimalist principles can help designers make attractive and effective websites with fewer elements. Minimalist websites simplify interfaces by removing unnecessary elements and paring down content that does not support user tasks. In this article, Nick Babich will discuss some examples of minimalism in web design, things to consider when designing minimalist interfaces, and explain why sometimes “less is more”.
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UX professionals need to communicate design ideas and research findings to a range of audiences. They use deliverables for that purpose. Don’t be surprised by the number of deliverables Nick Babich mentions in this article. Rest assured, each project is different and a UX designer wouldn’t need to produce all of them for each project. Remember that there is no one-size-fits-all deliverable that will be equally effective for all projects. Each deliverable becomes an effective communication tool in the right context and with the right audience.
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