As much as we aim to design our mobile apps and websites for contextual use, testing their usability in context can be challenging. One approach to mobile testing is participatory design. A participatory design test session typically takes about an hour and has four parts. In this article, Marina Lin conducted this type of study while researching how visitors to Cars.com’s app use their mobile device while purchasing a car on a dealer’s lot.
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Dammed up inside our heads are creative waterfalls of fresh interactions, transitions, and animations. But how are we supposed to communicate them to our teams, our developers? How do we get them out of our heads? Through a game of charades? Not being able to “show” the interactions and animations that bring our designs to life is one of the common struggles plaguing our industry. Exacerbating the urgency of this challenge is the simple fact that we now design for screens that can be tapped, pinched, swiped, zoomed, and more.
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The last step of this series is to efficiently simplify the navigation experience — specifically, by carefully designing interaction with the navigation menu. When designing interaction with any type of navigation menu, we have to consider aspects sush as symbols, levels, target areas and functional context. It is possible to design these aspects in different ways. Designers often experiment with new techniques to create a more exciting navigation experience. However, most users just want to get to the content with as little fuss as possible. For those users, designing the aforementioned aspects to be as simple, predictable and comfortable as possible is important.
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Depending on how a user browses the Internet, modal windows can be downright confusing. Modals quickly shift visual focus from one part of a website or application to another area of content. This scenario is more common than it should be. And it’s fairly easy to solve, as long as you make your content accessible to all through sound usability practices. In this article, Scott O’Hara has set up a demo of an inaccessible modal window that appears on page load and that isn’t entirely semantic. First, interact with it using your mouse to see that it actually works. Then, try interacting with it using only your keyboard.
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In a previous article, Svetlin Denkov briefly mentioned another category of clickthrough prototypes: widget-based mockups that are designed on the target device and that expand on sketches by introducing user interface (UI) details and increased visual fidelity. These prototypes can be used to pitch ideas to clients, document interactions and even test usability. In this article, he will teach you how to use the iPad app Blueprint to put together such prototypes in the form of concept demos, which help to manage a client’s expectations when you are aligning your visions of a product.
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Aspiring to beauty in our designs is admirable. But it doesn’t guarantee usability, nor is it a product or marketing strategy. “Beautiful” says very little about the product. How many people, fed up with PowerPoint, cry out in frustration, “If only it were more beautiful”? No one has figured out how to describe their product effectively. For example, Write, a note-taking app, describes itself as “a beautiful home for all your notes,” which doesn’t say much about why one might want it. Macworld describes it as “Easy Markdown Writing for Dropbox Users.” That’s both concise and specific: If you like Markdown and use Dropbox, you’ll read more. It wasn’t always this way. Indeed, when Dave Feldman became a designer, he had the opposite problem.
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Technology companies are increasingly using the concept of the minimum viable product as way to iteratively learn about their customers and develop their product ideas. While the concepts they focus on are relatively easy to grasp, the many trade-offs considered and decisions made in execution are seldom easy and are often highly debated. This two-part series, looks into the product design process of Dropbox’s Carousel and the product team at UXPin shares our way of thinking about product design, whether you’re in a meeting, whiteboarding, sketching, writing down requirements, or wireframing and prototyping.
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Jon Bernbach is a user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) designer of mobile and web applications. In a way, like a teacher, he needs to present information in an easily understandable way to new visitors. He needs to consider how his students (end users) consume the information that he provides. So, reflection on his high-school experience serves a purpose (aside from painful fashion memories).
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The vast majority of practices from the world of manufacturing have come to influence how things are done when designing and building software products as well. Lean thinking is one of the latest approaches software development companies have adopted to maximize value and reduce wasted effort and resources by breaking down an objective into a series of experiments. Approaches like design thinking tend to be lean by nature. There is a huge opportunity, however, to take this notion even further and align design to the new ways digital products are being built and improved on. Let’s look first at the current approach towards design and how it has an impact on the product.
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On-site search is a key component of almost any e-commerce website. But unfortunately, search often doesn’t work very well. That’s why Baymard Institute has invested months conducting a large-scale usability study, testing the e-commerce search experience of 19 major e-commerce websites with real-world end users. In this article, Christian Holst will provide you insight on how to improve the search experience and success rate on your e-commerce website. He’ll round the article off with a general analysis of the current state of e-commerce search.
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