Design critiques are an important part of any product exploration. A good design critique is meant to explore the design, find where it is working and where it could be improved. If done well, design critiques allow everyone on the team to feel as if they have been heard and allow clients to give valuable feedback. In an agile environment, you will often have coders, project managers, product managers and people from other disciplines sitting in to give feedback, and you need to know how to quickly get them up to speed on the expectations if you want to get anywhere fast.
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Designers love to get the big picture right, but if the details aren’t handled properly, the solution will fail. That’s why well-designed microinteractions make experiences feel crafted. As Charles Eames once said, “The details are not the details. They make the design.” Every element of the design matters. Details make your app stand out from the competition because they can be either practical and forgettable or impressive, useful and unforgettable.
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Andy Budd is a firm believer in cross-functional pairing and thinks that some of the best usability solutions emanate from the tech team. However, at some point the experience needs to be owned, and it shouldn’t be owned by the last person to open the HTML file and “touch the truck”. If designers are happy for developers to “own the code”, why not show a similar amount of respect and let designers “own the experience”? After all, collaboration goes both ways. So if you don’t want designers to start “optimizing” your code on the live server, outside your version control processes, please stop doing the same to their design.
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Experience and the memory of experience are related but systematically different. Everyone has two selves, the experiencing self and the remembering self, but the remembering self does the learning, judging and deciding. Memory is a collection of snapshots that gives extra weight to the most intense moment and the final moment of an experience. In this article, Curt Arledge is going to provide some tips for designing for experiences that leave a lasting positive impression.
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Documentation easily gets misplaced, and we find ourselves hunting around for it. Even once we have our hands on it, locating the test details can be a challenge. Some gateways seem to love providing multiple PDF files, all mysteriously titled, with the test card details buried deep within one of them. Andy Carter has found himself working with a lot of different payment gateways over the years, from the more familiar ones like PayPal and Stripe to some lesser known ones. Here are the test card numbers for some of the major payment gateways and a few lesser known ones.
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Parents are less willing to let their children play outdoors without direct supervision. As a result, children spend most of their free time in organized sports, music and arts activities. This results in less time for unstructured play than in previous generations. Digital technology is often blamed for children not going outside. Yet studies have shown little difference in the outdoor time of children who follow the American Academy of Pediatrics media guidelines and those who do not. When done right, digital technology can help solve the unique challenge of motivating children to go from indoors to outdoors and then to connect with nature.
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With technology evolving and language recognition and processing improving, we are on a path that could make interaction with digital services more intuitive, more accessible and more efficient — through conversational interfaces. Conversational interfaces are still in their infancy. There are still hurdles to jump, and we need to explore what works and what doesn’t. However, this means that there are no beaten paths, yet. It’s a time for experimentation, a time to tinker with the concept and try out something new.
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Made for fast and fluid UX design, Adobe XD gives you everything in one neat bundle: it lets you sketch out ideas, create interactive prototypes, test and share them. To give you a head start when working with XD, Cosima Mielke has compiled 15 pro tips, including features that might not be obvious at first glance but that will make your prototyping workflow a lot smoother. Please note that a Windows version is in the works and due later in 2016, but for now Adobe XD is available for Mac OS X only.
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Considering that most carousel implementations lack many usability details, one can understand why strong wording is often used in discussions about carousels. But there are alternatives to a home page carousel that both perform well and are vastly easier to implement. In this article, Christian Holst will go over the 10 implementation details he’s found that are required to make home page carousels perform acceptably with end users. He’ll outline how and why mobile and desktop implementations should differ and, lastly, suggest a simpler, problem-free alternative to home page carousels.
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Many of your great ideas will fail early in the process. Finding out that the problem you’re trying to solve is simply not a problem that users are really bothered by is incredibly common. But with perseverance and iteration, you’ll eventually come up with a product idea that validates. The goal throughout the process of lean validation is to delay the expensive and time-consuming work of coding as late as possible in the process. It’s the best way to keep yourself focused, to minimize costs and to maximize your chance of a successful launch.
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