(359) Scientists: What advice can neuroscientists give to UI/UX designers. 7 Actions that Earn User Trust. Control of personal information in the digital space, and particularly on mobile devices, presents a unique design challenge. Most people aren’t aware that their personal data is being collected and shared. Many don’t take the time to validate their expectations and most never read privacy policies. People become aware of these issues only when something happens that doesn’t meet their expectations, like seeing their friend’s picture in a Facebook ad or banner ads that match a recent purchase. And when people do become aware and their expectations are violated, trust in the brand is eroded. People want transparency and control, but they want it on their terms.
They don’t want to have their activities interrupted, but they do want to set controls on what is being collected and how it is used. The Goal The goal of the Digital Trust Initiative is to create awareness of privacy issues while not getting in the way of the experience. The 6 Design Principles What do users care about? 1. 2. 3. 4. How Companies Can Prevent User Backlash After a Redesign. By anthony on 10/17/13 at 2:08 pm Have you ever visited a website you loved and found that everything on the user interface has changed? When a company wants to improve their website experience for their users, they redesign the interface. However, sometimes those good intentions end up backfiring, and users get upset with the new changes.
User backlashes often happen with site redesigns because companies don’t test their interface before they redesign it. Most recently, it happened to Yahoo Mail, and many users are expressing their annoyance and disapproval with the new interface. Yahoo might have made their interface better in some areas, but there are many areas of the old design that didn’t need changing. For example, Yahoo decided to remove tabs from their email interface, but that was a key feature that made many users choose Yahoo Mail over Gmail. Since most companies don’t seem to have an idea of what a proper redesign process is, here’s a graphic that should help:
Creating Successful Product Flows — Design + Startups. This is the second article in a three-part series on building products for critical mass. Part I discusses why every startup needs a story and can be found here. A product’s story is a short explanation for why it exists and how it achieves its goals in concrete terms. Passive vs. active usage Before you began creating a product flow, it’s important to understand the difference between passive and active product usage. Passive usage refers to when a user is consuming information from a product, such as a user browsing his or her Facebook newsfeed. Active usage is when someone is contributing information to a product, such as posting a status update or writing a wall comment. Every product has both active and passive usages, but the latter accounts for the majority of time spent on the Internet.
Instagram: It’s a fast, beautiful and fun way to share your photos with friends and family. Twitter: Find out what’s happening, right now, with the people and organizations you care about. Refactoring GitHub's Design by Ian Storm Taylor. Reducing an interface until only the absolutely necessary elements remain is one of the most satisfying tasks in design. First you notice duplication between two elements. Then you derive a new visual abstraction that handles both cases. And finally you combine the elements into a single, simpler version. Those skills are critical for a visual designer to master. It’s the same satisfying feeling you get when refactoring code.
I’m serious! If we change the “code” references, you’d assume Mr. By continuously improving the design of [an interface], we make it easier and easier to work with. Joshua Kerievsky, Refactoring to Patterns. GitHub’s newest redesign is a perfect example of visual refactoring. The new design still has all of the features of the old one—the external API if you will—but it’s been completely reorganized to emphasize the commonly used features. Doing the same thing in lots of different ways. That’s a lot of different ways to visualize the same idea.
Excessive visual noise. GoodUI. UX Spotlight: Behind the scenes of Tumblr’s design process. New York City noise blares right outside Tumblr’s office in the Flat Iron District in Manhattan. Once inside, the headquarters hum with a quiet intensity. I am surrounded by four dogs that employees have brought to the workspace today. Apparently, there are even more dogs lurking somewhere behind the perpendicular rows of desks. What makes the whole thing even spookier is that these dogs don’t bark or growl. I’m here to see Tumblr’s Creative Director Peter Vidani who is going to pull the curtain back on the design process and user experience at Tumblr. Back in May, Yahoo announced it was acquiring Tumblr for $1.1 billion. The Creative team, with just nine employees, is small compared to the 85-member engineering team. It all starts with paper sketches There's one tool that starts most ideas for many design professionals: the paper sketch.
From these sketches, Peter and his team will build prototypes in Photoshop that will go on to become working prototypes. Ingredients for automatically great design — Designing Startups. The goal is to have a product that’s well designed, but getting there can be tricky. There’s a huge gap between wanting to be good at design, and actually being able to do it.
I’ve seen a number of companies make this jump, and have noticed there are a few ingredients that have to be in place before great design happens automatically. Talent — You need the right skills in house to do the actual work. That means you’ll likely need people who know visual design, interaction design, user research, copywriting, front-end development, and more. In most cases, you need more than a unicorn designer. You need a design team. Data — Design does not happen in a vacuum. Culture – When entire teams understand how design works, the designers in that organization can be incredibly effective. Process – Design is real, serious, challenging work – every bit as demanding as engineering. It’s tempting to just focus on the immediate design challenge in front of you. The Greatest Secrets of UX Revealed! I’m a big fan of Penn and Teller, and have been for many years.
I saw them live for the first time last month and was blown away by their performance. What I really love about Penn and Teller is that they often “pull back the curtain” and reveal how they do their magic. Other magicians produce an air of mysticism and pretense around their craft, but Penn and Teller will have none of that. They know they are playing tricks, fooling the audience, and by letting everyone in on what they are doing they debunk mysticism while also (hopefully) teaching you something. Their attitude towards their work inspired me to write an article that hopefully “pulls back the curtain” on some of user experience design’s “greatest mysteries.” Much like Penn and Teller’s mocking of “artists” like Criss Angel, I have met quite a few pretentious design types in UX who think way too much of themselves and what they do.
To that end, here are some of the key “secrets” of UX, revealed. We Aren’t All-Knowing Prophets.
Experience Maps Identify Inefficiencies and Opportunities. An experience map is a holistic view of all of the touchpoints or interactions people have with a brand. It enables you to determine a number of key factors: Frequency and duration of each touchpoint Levels of satisfaction with each touchpoint Points of failure or bad experiences Opportunities to innovate during the experience A foundation for determining the cost of each touchpoint Why Create an Experience Map? The map helps stakeholders empathize with their customers, putting them in their customers’ shoes. It visualizes the journey of what their customers go through. The map enables the business to determine where to focus resources.
Most of the impressions or experiences people have with brands are made up of multiple interactions. How to Create an Experience Map The first step is to segment the audience. Business travelers Families on vacation Determine the goals, pain points, and level of importance of each touchpoint for each group. Points to capture in the map. Principles of User Interface Design. Clarity is job #1 Clarity is the first and most important job of any interface. To be effective using an interface you've designed, people must be able to recognize what it is, care about why they would use it, understand what the interface is helping them interact with, predict what will happen when they use it, and then successfully interact with it. While there is room for mystery and delayed gratification in interfaces, there is no room for confusion.
Clarity inspires confidence and leads to further use. One hundred clear screens is preferable to a single cluttered one. Mobile prototyping: a new paradigm. Building The New Financial Times Web App: A Case Study. Rethinking Mobile Tutorials: Which Patterns Really Work? Pattern libraries are a great source of inspiration and education for designers. But common practice doesn’t always equal best practice.
In this post, we’ll look at why many common tutorial patterns are ineffective and how you can leverage game design principles to increase user engagement. After the release of the first edition of Mobile Design Pattern Gallery, Intuit asked me to speak with its mobile team. I spoke at a high level about the value of patterns across industries (fashion, architecture, software and others) and how they are a useful teaching tool. Read more... After Editorially: The Search For Alternative Collaborative Online Writing Tools I’m going to let you in on a little secret: the best writers, be it your favorite authors or those that write for Smashing Magazine, don’t do it alone. Read more... What You Need To Know About WordPress 3.9 Read more... Understanding CSS Timing Functions Read more... Read more... The Essentials of Web Design That Works.
Concept Design Tools. The web professional's online magazine of choice. In: Articles By Victor Lombardi Published on September 30, 2008 Designers of digital products and services like ourselves can dramatically improve our work by generating more concepts early in our projects. In this article, I’ll try to make concept design easier to learn by illustrating three simple tools for generating concepts. A Missing Stage in Our Design Process Concept design is an early phase of the design process that explores far-ranging design ideas which are plausible but which often set aside immediate technical and situational constraints in order to generate new options.
Concept design is an early phase of the design process that explores far-ranging design ideas which are plausible but which often set aside immediate technical and situational constraints in order to generate new options. In digital design, Cooper’s Parking Angel and emosive from the Designs Which Create Design workshop are examples of design concepts.
Effectively Planning UX Design Projects. Advertisement Planning user experience (UX) projects is a balancing act of getting the right amount of user input within the constraints of your project. The trick is to work out the best use of your time. How can you get the most UX goodness for your client’s budget? This article explains how to choose the right mix of tools for the task at hand. Getting Started With UX Planning The planning phase is all about understanding what you have been asked to do and working out the best combination of activities that will give you the outcome you need, within the time, budgetary and resource constraints of the project. The planning of projects may take place when you are writing a proposal to do work that is yet to start as well as at the beginning of a “live” project.
In many ways the planning of UX projects can become a design challenge in its own right. The beauty of UX projects is that there is always something you can do to add value regardless of the budget. Choosing UX Tools & Techniques. Applications of usability principles on a social network | creative briefing. In October 2008 I joined a great group of guys over at Daily Challenge to lend some creative firepower to an already blazing group of talented young individuals. At that point, Daily Challenge was merely weeks into its first public beta release of its new socially-conscious-driven social network and sported an undesirable user interface that was begging for some creative attention. But that didn’t matter – as with any new age development team working on a new social media product, the goal was not to release a perfectly designed or developed site, but rather to get an idea out into the market quickly and start listening to the feedback.
Fast forward 5 months and Daily Challenge releases its 2.0 website – the product of many long days and nights of usability sessions, focus groups, research, self-reflections, yoga desk calendars, and lots and lots and lots of attentive listening. And that’s what this post is about (in case you were wondering where I was going with all of this…). 1. 2. 3. Better User Experience With Storytelling – Part One - Smashing Magazine. Advertisement Stories have defined our world. They have been with us since the dawn of communication, from cave walls to the tall tales recounted around fires. They have continued to evolve with their purpose remaining the same; To entertain, to share common experiences, to teach, and to pass on traditions.
Today we communicate a bit differently. Our information is fragmented across various mass-media channels and delivered through ever-changing technology. Image credit: guldfisken Using storytelling, however, we can pull these fragments together into a common thread. It Begins with a Story In 1977, a simple story set the film industry on its side. Image credit: Wired (Courtesy of Ballantine Books) The movie, if you haven’t guessed, was Star Wars. Star Wars wasn’t a new story though. Revealing the Design in Stories The creation of a story is often viewed as an almost magical or random process. The story arc is widely used in screenwriting and novels. The Power of Emotion Image credit: D. (ll) Best Practices for Web Quality.
Bill Gates On Microsoft: Damn, Our Usability Sucks. Todd Bishop has published a 2003 e-mail from Bill Gates to some Microsoft developers. It's basically Bill complaining about certain Windows features not working, and others being so convoluted that it's irrational to expect a rational person to go through this hell to get an update or a piece of free software.
Read Bill's entire e-mail here, it's worth it. The e-mail is fascinating for two reasons. First one is the fact that it's such a genuine complaint, although it's coming from Bill Gates. The other fascinating thing is that although this mail is dated 2003, things haven't changed one bit. Because of problems like this one, I've abandoned practically all of Microsoft's programs except Windows itself, using simple freeware alternatives for everything I can. How Google Unified Its Products With A Humble Index Card.