All too often we forget that applications are built by real people with opinions, ideals and fears. When a whole company is formed around a single product that’s about to get relaunched, there’s a lot of tension — after all, these people rely on that product’s success for their own financial security. This is the story of redesigning the UX for a popular calendar tool on Android: Business Calendar. Günther Beyer & Nino Rapin are sharing this story because everyone’s standing on the shoulders of giants and this is their small contribution to better information design thinking. They hope they’ve learned enough in this project to make you a little smarter, so that you can make us smarter in turn. Thank you.
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A lab environment can never replicate the natural environment of the participant, and the mere presence of a research facilitator or moderator creates a dimension of artificiality that can thwart the research goals. How you moderate will have a significant impact on the quality of your research findings. The goal, of course, is to get realistic findings. An effective moderator understands how the nature and timing of questions can influence — and sometimes even drive — the outcome. A skillful moderator is adept at managing these potentially conflicting goals in order to ensure the integrity of the research and equally adept at ensuring that their findings appropriately inform their business partners’ decisions.
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In this second part, Yury Vetrov will show you how he made his “Bootstrap on steroids” more powerful. A framework like this has many benefits, but the main result is a transition from large redesigns every couple of years to constantly updated designs. We can spend more time evolving a product rather than doing endless design maintenance. Moreover, product designers stop thinking in screens and become less like “Photoshop/Sketch people”.
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What if you are about to start working on a new project which should apply the material design language introduced by Google last year? In this article, Sven Lennartz is here to have your back — with a little selection of handy goodies, icons, templates and tools to help you get off the ground faster. After reading this, you will have a few tools in your toolbox to approach that project head-on, without losing time, and focusing on crafting those websites that your users will love and keep returning to.
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Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two highly regarded academics in the field of economics are responsible for much of what we know about heuristics. In psychology, a heuristic is simply a fancy word meaning mental shortcut. We have so many decisions to make on a daily basis; there is no way we could think about all of the pros and cons of each option. Our minds would be overloaded and we would stop functioning. People frequently use heuristics to make decisions; you should use them to your advantage in your design. Here, we’ll discuss four common heuristics that researchers have identified, with examples of how to address them in digital design.
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Animation on the web has the potential to revolutionize our small bright box. We can go even further than traditional animation because we can accept user feedback and input. With these tools we can throw away the soul-destroying, bleak, dark engagements that govern things like airline ticket purchases. We can bake animation into the core of our user experience process to create dazzling, exciting, and engaging work that pushes boundaries and collectively elevates the medium of the web. We can help people by unfolding scenes like a choose-your-own-adventure that can feel fluid, interesting, and intuitive!
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Unless your project is structured beautifully, certain animations are a pain to tweak. Just let the client know what your intentions are for the animations, and let the tweaking and finetuning happen in the code of the final product. Until then, you are simply painting a functional and visual picture for the client and developers, giving them a clear view of your vision. Web design transitions and animations are great to prototype in After Effects. In this article, Matt Reamer will be scratching the surface of how to fit After Effects into your UX Workflow, and he’ll share details, advice, experience and links that you could use as influence and thought starters in your next project.
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In this article, Colleen Roller will show us that defaults are powerful because they provide a way for users to passively decide, thereby easing the difficulty and effort associated with decision-making. Also, that providing a default option is not always appropriate. Sometimes, it’s better for users to make an explicit choice — especially when they are more likely to follow through with a decision and be more committed to taking action on it. It’s imperative to understand that the design matters. UX design professionals have a responsibility to understand how design itself influences — and sometimes even drives — user perception and behavior and, therefore, decision outcomes. The decisions we make as designers matter.
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When it comes to providing pleasure or delight in our websites and apps, animations contribute a lot. But always remember that they must be functional first. In this article, Amit Daliot shows us video examples that show functional animation. The following rules map well to every animation Amit encountered so far. They helped him to assess animations that he saw in interfaces, and they are a strong set of guiding principles in deciding how to add animations to a wireframe design.
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No matter your status or situation, whether director or loner, you are in a position to lead, to raise the bar in a place where it consistently sits lower than you think it should. As an in-house UX professional, Robert Hoekman Jr has formed and run UX teams for multiple companies. As a consultant, he has worked with dozens of clients on hundreds of projects. In this article, he will share what he learned about how to get what you want. Most of these things can be applied whether you’re inside of a company or consulting for one, whether you’re a fledgling designer or a veteran leader.
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