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!
If I told you that you were an addict, you would most likely object. You aren’t a drinker, you quit smoking when your sweet baby boy was born and you haven’t done anything else in your life. Addiction is a complex topic in psychology and can occur in many forms. Often, it is assumed it means only to compulsively engage in drug and alcohol abuse, but the fact is that behavioral addiction can occur with all the negative consequences in a person’s life as well. It can include staying glued to YouTube instead of working, constantly checking email, shamelessly answering WhatsApp while meeting with friends, thus multitasking and dividing attention incessantly. Thanks to the new technology, most of the Western world displays serious behavioral addiction, so much so that last year, an editorial in The American Journal of Psychiatry raised the prospect of adding “Internet addiction” to the DSM.
We all love material design. The well-designed structure, the consistent visuals and the freakishly well-documented guideline. And yes, the guidelines are easy to use on mobile but parts of it fail on desktop applications.
To be honest, reading books is a constant struggle for me. I can’t count how many I have left half-read in the past years. It is even harder when I try reading non-fiction literature. However, I’m aware of the fact that this is one of the best ways to get in-depth knowledge about my profession, so from time to time I force myself to read a book. In this post, I collected those UX books that somehow managed to grab my attention, and which I can truly advise reading.
Every once in a while you should step out of the day-to-day treadmill of product development, take a deep breath, and look at the bigger picture. Today we introduce the UX Strategy Canvas which will help you do just that. You can get your team together, review your fresh user insights and your numbers, brainstorm on the next steps, and update your strategy. Depending on your product and market, you should do this every 2-4 months.
In this article I’d like to discuss a few examples about how you can use visual devices to help drive user behaviour. If we’re talking about visual design, you might think it only refers to how things look, but it’s goes much deeper than that. Visuality and good visual hints can add a lot to the understanding of how a digital product works and behaves. Over the course of these few paragraphs I’d like to emphasise the importance of good visual cues. ☝️
We are living in the era of distractive design and technology. We have many annoying electronic devices competing for our constant attention. As Mark Weiser said: “The scarcest resource in the 21st Century will not be technology, it will be attention.”
So how to compete on the digital market for this very scarce resource? This is what Calm Technology can help you with.
My clients often tell me that they want to build the Death Star of their product. Unwittingly, it always reminds me how easily rebels blew it up. Three times, to be accurate. A soundly designed user experience can really make your product a planet killer, but using the force to abuse emotions with a dark pattern easily blows up that strongly coveted ultimate weapon of yours.
Putting science fiction aside for a second, UX designers’ aim is to enhance customer satisfaction and increase loyalty with their solid understanding of human psychology to build a real win-win situation for both users and businesses. And while deception has existed since the world was born, for a long time we believed designers’ sole purpose is – or at least should be – to make something good greater.
Taking advantage of human haste, inattention or desire, boosting frustration, the sense of lack or the fear of missing out is the dark side of UX and the definition of Dark Patterns.
A good product roadmap is a very simple list of high-level goals you want to achieve in the next 3-6 months. This roadmap will guide your UX team (and everyone else) in the right direction. You also need to plan the next steps you take, which means planning the design sprints. Last, but not least, you have to define how designers and developers will work together. In this article I will share how to do all these things.
In the Western world everyone is talking about (and via) messaging apps and chatbots. They are going big all around the globe and Africa is not an exception: 78% of Kenyan smartphone users said that they use their devices for chatting and social networking.
The question is given: why don’t we utilize the technological improvements to make these already existing solutions better, smarter and more efficient. We at UXstudio started thinking about how a chatbot could help with those day-to-day tasks.
Within moments of meeting you, people decide all sorts of things about you, from intelligence to trustworthiness. Experts say it takes just three seconds for someone to determine whether they like you or not. When it comes to the digital world, decisions are made in a very similar way during user onboarding. Google has recently confirmed in their own research that users form opinions about a website in 50 milliseconds. Silicon Valley analyst Andrew Chen attests that 77 percent of users never use the app again 72 hours after the onboarding. So like it or not, if your app isn’t a knockout on the first impression, it’s probably going to be deleted or forgotten. But there is a way to enhance your app’s ‘first introduction’ and help your users discover your product’s benefits, functions, and usage – you just have to design a delightful onboarding experience. But how?
A few weeks ago I heard about a UX researcher who died because he got lost in the labyrinth of UX research tools. 🙂 Of course it’s not true, but you can easily get lost and puzzled when you start looking at all the infinite options that have become available lately. That’s why I decided to compile the most common UX research tools for you and hopefully, you will be able find the proper ones for your needs.
Bringing your team together can be a struggle from a distance. It’s a challenge for even experienced team leaders & product owners. From our experience, we have collected 7+3 points which will help you manage and bring your remote team together.
When you’re designing a digital product for a long project, two questions probably come to mind when planning it: “How long will it last?” and “Is it scalable?”
The super fast advance of technology has (of course) a huge impact on the answer. What is conventional and up to date today, tomorrow is obsolete. You don’t see an app, website or even an operating system to have exactly the same UI or even user experience for more than a year or two.
However, there are interface patterns that remain untouched (… well, slightly).
So lets see how you can make sure that new features can be added to a project without redesigning everything. How do you keep any new updates from ruining the whole navigation system and user experience?
Many designers still use Photoshop for literally everything. However, the market is full of increasingly better tools that focus on particular solutions. So I decided to compile a list of the most common tools that a UX designer should know about. In this list, you can find prototyping, UI and collaboration tools. Many of them will be familiar to you, but I hope you will find some interesting ones for specific tasks. My recommendation is to choose the appropriate tools for the task and don’t restrict yourself to one product. This list might also prove useful for comparing them with each other. So here comes our list of UX design tools.
Customer journey mapping needs to be more than just an eyecandy in your product design process. These journeys are ideal when you have to think about complex issues. The output, the infographics are always something to gloat with in front of your colleagues and clients. But sometimes – just sometimes – it’s a little bit overwhelming and not actionable enough. Let’s take a tiny example: I have 8×8 brackets in my journey. What should I do? I can’t take all of these into consideration! Touchpoints are a great place to start but you can also boost these taking newer research into consideration.
