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.
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 »
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.
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.