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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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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Displaying onboarding screens to first-time users has become a common practice in mobile apps. Given that these are often the first set of screens with which users interact, they also set the users’ expectations of the app. Therefore, it is essential that those involved in creating the product take the time to evaluate whether onboarding is necessary for the app and, if so, to determine the best way to implement it. In this article, Germaine Satia will provide some good tips on how to approach onboarding, some common implementations, alternative techniques, as well as resources to help you provide the best experience for users.
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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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Knowing how groups influence people can help you to move from being a common designer to a strategic influencer of your target audience with relative ease, and social influence, particularly social identity theory, provides key concepts for you to address through UX design. You can influence people by thoughtfully incorporating social identity concepts into your design. In this article, Victor Yocco will focus on how concepts related to social identity theory can help UX professionals to more effectively incorporate social influence in their work.
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Responsive web design is great, but it’s not a silver bullet. In this article, Maximiliano Firtman will cover the relationship between the mobile web and responsive design, starting with how to apply responsive design intelligently, why responsive design should not be your website’s goal, and ending with the performance issues of the technique to help us understand the problem. According to Guy Podjarny’s research, 72% of responsive websites deliver the same number of bytes regardless of screen size, even on slow mobile network connections. Not all users will wait for your website to load. With just a basic understanding of the problem, you can minimize this loss.
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