RESOURCES – Persuasive Tech.
9 Essential Resources for User Interface Designers. The Web Design Usability Series is supported by join.me, an easy way to instantly share your screen with anyone. join.me lets you collaborate on-the-fly, put your heads together super-fast and even just show off. Designing a great user interface can be a challenge, even for the most seasoned designer. Countless factors need to be taken into consideration and the difference between a good UI and a great one often boils down to paying close attention to the smallest details. SEE ALSO: 7 Best Practices for Improving Your Website’s Usability When undertaking such an important and often complex task, it’s helpful to have some handy resources for both education and inspiration. We’ve put together a list of some of our favorites below. Design Inspiration Let’s start off by taking a look at three great galleries for UI design inspiration. 1. 2.
UI Patterns showcases user interface design patterns - com-only recurring trends and best practices in UI design for a variety of elements. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Lean ways to test your new business idea. I’ll be honest, I’m a bit late to the party. I’ve only just completed Eric Ries book, ‘The Lean Startup’, that was published to much acclaim last year. I put off reading it, believing it would be another generic how-to-start-a-high-tech-business book. I already have a bookshelf full of these kinds of book, most of them unread beyond the initial chapter. But now I’ve read it I think that it should be obligatory reading for any UX person. What I like about the book is that it puts UX at the very heart of new product design — and does so in language that will make managers sit up and take notice. Here’s my version of the digested read. Designing new products or services is risky because there are so many uncertainties. Sound familiar?
UX practitioners have a lot to contribute to this way of working but I wanted particularly to focus on the item I’ve numbered 4 in the list above: iterative design and testing. These techniques have three things in common. The three methods I want to discuss are:
Mobile UX. Psychology. The Flexibility of the Four Stages of Competence. By Jared M. Spool Originally published: Nov 16, 2011 Lost for decades, an old model has re-emerged to help how we look at today's design challenges. In the 70s, psychologist Noel Burch suggested a model for how we master skills and relationships, calling it the "conscious competence learning model. " It fell into obscurity for decades, only to resurface as a powerful perspective for experience designers. The four-stage model is intriguingly simple, describing a person's path from ignorance to mastery: Stage 1: Unconscious Incompetence This is where our person starts.
Stage 2: Conscious Incompetence Our person has now realized there is much more to what they are trying to do than they realized, and they don't really know what they thought they knew. Stage 3: Conscious Competence Here our person has overcome what they didn't know and started the path of learning. Stage 4: Unconscious Competence Applying the Model To Our Knowledge of Our Users Applying the Model To Our Users' Objectives.
The Value of Customer Journey Maps: A UX Designer’s Personal Journey. Effective Customer Journey Maps So what makes an effective customer journey map? What made me a believer? The best practices that follow can greatly improve your chances of delivering effective journey maps. Based on Real Research Journey maps succeed when they’re based on ethnographic research and contextual inquiry that allows researchers to experience a day in the life of a customer. Our research team was able to perceive the emotions of users and, thus, could convey more than just anecdotal quotations. Based on Behavior To breathe life into journey maps, you must base your personas on actual customer behavior and clearly communicate the core tasks that customers perform.
Before our project with Boeing began, Boeing already had a set of detailed personas in place, which were based on job roles such as Crew Chief or Structural Engineer. Not Always the Optimal Experience Sell Service Design Without Selling Service Design Display Customer Journey Maps Using Physical Media The Results Conclusion. 5 Ways to Be Persuasive in Your UX Work. By Michael Hawley Published: November 1, 2011 “To be successful as a UX professional, you need to know how to be persuasive.”
In your work as a UX professional, do you ever find that you need to convince people that the team should follow a user-centered design process? Do you need to convince stakeholders they should do user research? Do you try to get user experience thinking inserted earlier in the project lifecycle? Perhaps you need to sell yourself or your company? Being good at persuading people is particularly important in our profession, for a variety of reasons. Recognizing the importance of persuasive skills, I was very intrigued when a speaker at a recent conference recommended the book 27 Powers of Persuasion by Chris St. 1.
“Persuading others is much easier if they like you.” In the literature, this is a common theme: persuading others is much easier if they like you. First, start with the basics of etiquette. I had this experience with a CEO I was working with on a project. Eye Candy vs. Bare-Bones in UI Design. The general public seems to be kind of shallow when it comes to user interfaces. They think "prettier = better. " A couple of gradients here, some fancy translucent buttons and there you go: an interface that's just overflowing with awesomeness. Fact is though, fancier graphics do not equal a better interface. Most UI/UX professionals agree that graphics should be kept firmly in check or they'll take over the entire application, sacrificing usability over eye candy.
Should we then abandon eye candy altogether? Ban all gradients and icons and go with a bare-bones version of the application? Going bare-bones would focus the user purely on the task or goal the application is designed to do. Either approach, when designed without care, will yield the same result: decreased usability. Attracting attention by having a pretty front-end is important, as it makes the user want to use the product. Note: by "first experience" I don't mean the very first time you ever laid eyes on the application. Eric Stromberg — How to Make an Impact During the First Month of Your Startup Job. A lot has been written on the process of joining a startup, and I’ve written a bit on the topic.
Less is written about what to do once you join. Truth is, that’s when the fun starts, and it’s important to optimize your experience from day one. There are a few things I wish someone had told me before I started, so hopefully the tips below will help you get up the learning curve faster during the initial phase of your startup job: 1. Find new projects - This was one of the biggest differences I observed moving from finance to a startup. In finance, you are a good employee if you execute flawlessly what your manager tells you. My friends tell me stories about how they’ll do nothing from 10 am to 7 pm, until their boss drops something in their laps on his way out the door, and they work on it until 3 am so that it’s on their boss’ desk the next morning. 2. New employee: "Hey, have you guys ever thought about adding rainbows to the confirmation page? Manager: "That’s an interesting idea. 3.
» Storyboarding & UX – part 1: an introduction Johnny Holland. The fields of user experience and service design typically use storyboarding to sell design solutions. They do this by casting personas in stories, showing the benefits of those solutions. They often look quite polished and professional, and can be daunting to some in these fields to pick up a pencil and try it for themselves.
But not only can you draw these scenario storyboards yourself to sell your solutions, you can also use them as a powerful method for devising those solutions in the first place.Storyboards are part of the intriguing world of sequential art, where images are arrayed together to visualise anything from a film to a television commercial, from a video game to a new building. They’re an effective communication device, bringing a vision to life in a way that anyone can grasp and engage with, before investing in producing the real thing.
In three articles I will introduce you to the world of storyboarding: Introducing storyboarding… Yet another UX silver bullet? » Storyboarding & UX – part 2: creating your own Johnny Holland. When thinking about storyboarding, most people fixate on their ability — or perceived inability — to draw. What is far more important is working out the point you wish to make with your storyboard, and the actual story that will carry that point from your storyboard across the room and into the hearts and minds of your audience. In this article explores the value of establishing a reason for the storyboard first, and then how you can create a storyboard using the thinking you’re already using and the skills you already have.
Get your story straight During a recent move, I discovered a whole book filled to the brim with comics that I had drawn during my primary school years. They were typical fare: myself and my schoolmates cast as a band of affable brigands, lurching from one side of the galaxy to the other having all sorts of unlikely and – let’s be honest – highly illogical adventures. Establish if a storyboard is the best way to tell your story What’s your point? Roll camera End well. » Storyboarding & UX – part 3: storyboarding as a workshop activity Johnny Holland. The previous article in this series described a step-by-step technique for drawing storyboards to help us as designers understand the issues we try to solve, and to communicate existing issues and potential solutions to others. When it comes to research techniques, the great news is that storyboarding can also help others articulate their own issues and ideas. It’s to this purpose we now turn. The importance of doing as well as talking One of the great truths about user experience design is to observe what people do, rather than only listen to what they say.
Thankfully, there’s a whole host of various activities we can do with workshop participants to reveal user requirements and behaviours, beyond talking and listening. When to use storyboarding as a workshop activity At Digital Eskimo, we have had great success with using storyboarding as an activity in workshops. Storyboarding is useful in the following specific instances: A practical guide to storyboarding as a workshop activity. In Defense of Eye Candy. We’ve all seen arguments in the design community that dismiss the role of beauty in visual interfaces, insisting that good designers base their choices strictly on matters of branding or basic design principles.
Lost in these discussions is an understanding of the powerful role aesthetics play in shaping how we come to know, feel, and respond. Consider how designers “skin” an information architect’s wireframes. Or how the term “eye candy” suggests that visual design is inessential. Our language constrains visual design to mere styling and separates aesthetics and usability, as if they are distinct considerations.
Yet, if we shift the conversation away from graphical elements and instead focus on aesthetics, or “the science of how things are known via the senses,” we learn that this distinction between how something looks and how it works is somewhat artificial. Why aesthetics? Aesthetics and cognition#section2 Cognition is “the process of knowing.” Here, aesthetics communicates function.