Building a product without using UX research methods is like getting into a Taxi and just saying, “Drive.”
As ever more interactions happen in the faceless platform of the world wide web, we meet with our users in real life increasingly rarely. Doing research with people from your audience can provide the best and most useful insights.
Although many people think the aim of a product design process is to create something cool and good-looking, this comprises just the tip of the iceberg.
Product design primarily wants to help us understand people’s pains, and create a product that will help them solve these problems. Thus we can create useful products.
Planning the exact steps which the users go through when they use a product also plays a crucial role. Make products easy to use – because otherwise, people will use them once or twice without becoming at all engaged.
Every product uses rewards, even if they are not designed for conscious use.
Rewards provide users positive feedback. These small points of happiness encourage people to step forward. If used properly, rewards can boost engagement and create a better product experience.
When misused, they can cause addiction and nervousness, which is why all product people should know how they work. Science has recently made new discoveries how the brain processes rewards.
Do like every great coach does, and get to know the tactics of the other team before getting into the match. Adjust tactics and figure out playing field positioning. Also, learn from others’ mistakes. For this reason, competitor analysis represents one of the most easily accessible methods to get a product on the right track.
Nowadays designers commonly do not create webpages or app screens, but focus on designing a design system instead. Thanks to Brad Frost, who introduced us to the Atomic Design methodology, we have started to change our workflow in that direction and it is pretty awesome!
A design system does much more than serve as a UI kit or a style guide. It contains all the necessary assets, rules, patterns, structures, flows and even the team values. These make it possible for many designers and developers to collaborate efficiently on the same product and keep the design consistent.
UX professionals are not lone fighters, but actually mediators between users, business managers and developers. A UX workshop can help you gather the team and brainstorm to make better decisions. Ensure everybody is on the same page by making them more involved in the product development process with these tools.
Most designers are obsessed with screens. They have features and screens piled up, but rarely see their apps with their users’ eyes. Familiar? Well, it’s time to start thinking in flows instead of screens. A user journey shows how your people reach their goals in your app. This article introduces the basics of creating a user journey with some tips and specific examples.
Of course, your goal is to get more and more users and engage them with your application. But how can the user experience of your product help? How can you measure if your users are engaged? And how can you find out why they are not?
Measuring design and utilizing data are essential steps towards creating a sustainable product. UX metrics are the solution. Let me show you how to use data to improve your product.
“Our product does not need any changes if we want to bring it to new markets because it will be successful anyway, just like at home,” said no smart product owner ever. They know that designing a good product is hard. Designing a good product for a new market is even harder. To know what to design for the target audience (or what to change on the existing design) requires knowing the target audience. Here we have collected some tips and tricks about international usability research. We also share specific examples and experiences gathered during one of our international design projects in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Read More »
When someone standing next to you on the bus shows your app to her friends and explains how amazing it is, you know you have achieved something great.
When you don’t have to explain what you do, but just say the name of your product, well, that’s a good sign, too.
In 2017, you have a better chance of building something extraordinary and helping millions of people than ever before in human history. You have all the tools. It’s out there. And it’s almost completely free.
There are several moments during a product design process when a team needs to make decisions because they have hundreds of ideas but no time to test them all. They can be really awkward because debates based on personal preferences and “I am the boss so I decide” can cause unnecessary conflicts within the team. Even with the good old “let’s vote” method, we can easily forget users’ needs. In addition, week-long discussions and decision procrastination can damage the product. So we have to be quick.
In this case study, you can follow a five-step guide to how we simplified complex design problems and made quick decisions to speed up the process.
For most of us, a bad user experience means only a bit of frustration or a waste of time. But in some cases, bad UX design can severely harm or even kill people. As we allow technology to infiltrate every field of our lives, bad UX design could become even more dangerous in the future. We don’t have to look that far into the future to find some dangerous UX mistakes…
I recently attended a speech given by Kevin Kelly, the founder and editor of Wired magazine, about how artificial intelligence and machine learning will bring a second Industrial Revolution. He said the actual path of a raindrop as it goes down the valley is unpredictable, but the general direction is inevitable. The coming of the cognitive revolution is inescapable, but we can’t expect artificial behavior to mimic the human one.
I’ll be honest, this started as a standard post about methods and case studies, but it turned out differently. If you came for a huge case study, you are in the wrong place, but I still hope you find something interesting here. These are just bits and pieces, little personal stories about how I got into field research.
Being agile is cool. You do it because, hey, everybody is agile now – or at least they seem to be. I guess you’ve got familiar with the fun procedures, read three articles, convinced your team members and BOOM! You’re doing it. Or, are you?
Since Slack started four years ago, it has quickly become the coolest and dearest workplace communication tool on the market. Somehow, their totally new tone and user experience just struck a chord with users, and the app has taken off like wildfire. In the last couple years, Slack has become much more than a communication tool, in large part because of its Slackbots. Are they really good for us?
It’s a UX mantra and also a mission statement to create useful and usable products. Thus, creating useful and usable content is also self-evident. But is it really? It’s also one of the fundamental statements that copy is part of user experience and the UX Designer is responsible for providing a copy suggestion that is reviewed, tested and iterated. As all skills, UX writing also needs to be practiced, so there’s a chance you are a UX Designer with a lucky combination of skill sets.
The recent appearance of the UX Writer position reflects the complex digital tendency beyond the user interface, drawing the importance of strategy behind content.
Probably the most common question about UX is how to start screen design and what principles should we care about? Designing screens starts with sketching. We at UX studio start with quick paper sketches, then build wireframes and clickable prototypes, test them, repair them, and finally get to the pixel perfect, colorful detailed design plans. In what follows we will show you the eight most important rules of thumb which one needs to take into account when designing screens. These are the basics for anyone who is working on designing a digital product.
Looking at the crazy yet charming diversity of old websites reminds me of typical scenarios of teenage years. The bittersweet era of exploration, the search for identity, trying to be different from everyone else, feeling determined and entitled, yet doing the same mistakes and looking just as clumsy and unsettled as everyone else at this age.
Approximately 60% of the world’s population can’t read this article. Why? Mainly, because they are too young to read or they don’t understand the language, or maybe they can’t read at all. How would you succeed in a world where you can’t understand anything of the written language? How would you interact with interfaces, for instance? You can try it out with these text-free interfaces!
