Designing User Interfaces For Business Web Applications Advertisement Business Web application design is too often neglected. I see a lot of applications that don’t meet the needs of either businesses or users and thus contribute to a loss of profit and poor user experience. It even happens that designers are not involved in the process of creating applications at all, putting all of the responsibility on the shoulders of developers. This is a tough task for developers, who may have plenty of back-end and front-end development experience but limited knowledge of design. This results in unsatisfied customers, frustrated users and failed projects. So, we will cover the basics of user interface design for business Web applications. Websites vs. Confusing Web applications and websites is easy, as is confusing user interface design and website design. A website is a collection of pages consisting mostly of static content, images and video, with limited interactive functionality (i.e. except for the contact form and search functionality). Sketching
Explaining Personas used in UX Design – Part 2 « Melbourne, as in the city. Out of the entire UX toolkit, personas are the tool that I find myself having to explain and justify the most. Everyone that I’ve introduced them to recently, as part of the overall UX process, seems to have a negative association with them that is usually based upon some Marketing driven personas that they’ve been exposed to previously and have seen little value in. So in this 2-part piece, here’s how I explain the how they are created and differences in how they are used. Creating UX Personas using research-based insights Done properly personas are created after conducting qualitative research with the target users of a product. The real world details and quotes from participants are used to flesh out the ‘personality’ of the personas, thereby ensuring that they represent real world experiences rather than fictional internal expectations of what the target audience does. Here’s the steps involved in creating them: 1. 2. Behavioural variables identified in post-it notes. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
UX, It's Time to Define CXO What is a Chief Experience Officer (CXO)? We’ve been singing its praises when the title started cropping up in boardrooms. “Thank the gods, UX has finally made C-level!” There were riots in the streets, free sharpies were given out on every city block, and colored pencils rained from the sky... Okay, obviously none of that happened. However, we were all elated to know that experience was finally being represented at an executive level. But now that the CXO title has been around for a few years, I ask you: what does the CXO really do and how have things changed for us? I think that this role needs some serious examination. Let’s start by looking at how CXO is defined today. corporate leadership in UX strategy software and hardware design management creative reviews and concept development intellectual property positioning and protection Even this seems a little bit sketchy, but we’re progressing. So, let’s define it for ourselves! First, let’s think about the intended output.
Designing With Audio: What Is Sound Good For? Advertisement Our world is getting louder. Consider all the beeps and bops from your smartphone that alert you that something is happening, and all the feedback from your appliances when your toast is ready or your oven is heated, and when Siri responds to a question you’ve posed. Today our technology is expressing itself with sound, and, as interaction designers, we need to consider how to deliberately design with audio to create harmony rather than cacophony. In this article, we’ll explore some of the uses of audio, where we might find it and when it is useful. Audio is a form of feedback that can be used either in combination with other forms, such as haptics, visual displays and LEDs, or on its own. For every action of the user, a good experience will include feedback that the action has been registered; for example, pressing a number key on a mobile phone would play a sound and show the number being pressed. Audio is not always warranted. Where We Find Audio (Image credit: Fey Ilyas)
Why ‘Ok’ Buttons in Dialog Boxes Work Best on the Right by anthony on 05/25/11 at 11:30 pm Designers often question where to place their ‘Ok’ and ‘Cancel’ buttons on dialog boxes. The ‘Ok’ button is the primary button that completes the task action. The ‘Cancel’ button is the secondary button that takes users back to their original screen without completing the action. Based on their functions, what is the best order to place them? Platform Consistency Is Not Good Enough Many have referred to following platform conventions as the answer. “Consistency” is a popular word used among designers. What if a certain design convention is harmful to users? There are certain platform design conventions that are widely used today because they work for users. Button Placement Matters One could argue that making your action buttons prominent by giving it more visual weight and a clear and distinct label is more important than its placement. To only focus on one design aspect and not the others is an act of a careless designer. Less visual fixations Conclusion
Hand Gestures Dramatically Improve Learning Kids asked to physically gesture at math problems are nearly three times more likely than non-gesturers to remember what they've learned. In the journal Cognition, a University of Rochester scientist suggests it's possible to help children learn difficult concepts by providing gestures as an additional and potent avenue for taking in information. "We've known for a while that we use gestures to add information to a conversation even when we're not entirely clear how that information relates to what we're saying," says Susan Wagner Cook, lead author and postdoctoral fellow at the University. It turned out to have a more dramatic effect than Cook expected. Cook used a variation on a classic gesturing experiment. However, even when children discard that final integer, they will often point to it momentarily as they explain how they attacked the problem. Cook divided 84 third and fourth graders into three groups. After three weeks, the children were given regular in-school math tests.
Don’t Put Hints Inside Text Boxes in Web Forms By Caroline Jarrett Published: March 21, 2010 This is my first Good Questions column for UXmatters. “Hint text is rarely effective as a way of helping users, but instead becomes a default input.” In January 2010, Janet Six’s column, Ask Matters, “Label Alignment in Long Forms,” included extensive discussion of one of the most frequently asked questions about forms design: where to put labels in relation to their fields. Don’t worry. The short version of my advice: Don’t do it! Read on, and I’ll explain. An Example of a Hint Inside a Text Box I live in the UK and travel by train approximately twice a month, so I often use the UK National Rail Plan your journey form. Figure 1—Part of the Plan your journey form on UK National Rail If I click slightly the wrong place within the From or to text box, the helpful hint doesn’t disappear, so I end up searching for Station name / codeLeighton Buzzard, which, of course, isn’t what I want at all. Where Did the Idea of Hint Text Come From? Reference
Drop-Down Usability: When You Should (and Shouldn't) Use Them - Articles Drop-down lists are great – when used correctly. If there’s anywhere between 7 and 15 options, a drop-down list is usually a really good fit. You can put a healthy amount of information in your form without cluttering the entire page, because the list’s options are hidden when you don’t need them. However, many sites are using drop-down lists with too many options (more than 15) or too few (less than 7), resulting in a poor user experience. Drop-down lists with too many options When drop-down lists grow larger than 15 options they become difficult to scan and navigate. A good example of this is a country-selector with more than 100 options! Like most e-commerce stores, Amazon force you to select your country from a massive drop-down list. As a user, you first have to figure out the sorting pattern – are the options listed alphabetically, or by some other logic? Drop-down lists with too few options On Yahoo! Share your thoughts in a comment.
The Secret to Designing an Intuitive UX Imagine that you’ve never seen an iPad, but I’ve just handed one to you and told you that you can read books on it. Before you turn on the iPad, before you use it, you have a model in your head of what reading a book on the iPad will be like. You have assumptions about what the book will look like on the screen, what things you will be able to do, and how you will do them—things like turning a page, or using a bookmark. What that mental model in your head looks and acts like depends on a lot of things If you’ve used an iPad before, your mental model of reading a book on an iPad will be different than that of someone who has never used one, or doesn’t even know what iPads are. Mental models have been around for a long time I’ve been talking about mental models (and their counterparts, conceptual models, which we’ll get to shortly) since the 1980s. Just how long? The first person to talk about mental models was K.J.W. So what is a mental model, then? What is a conceptual model? Okay, so what?
Pagination Gallery: Examples And Good Practices Advertisement Structure and hierarchy reduce complexity and improve readability. The more organized your articles or web-sites are, the easier it is for users to follow your arguments and get the message you are trying to deliver. On the Web this can be done in a variety of ways. In body copy headlines and enumerations are usually used to present the information as logically separated data chunks. Search engines almost always use pagination; newspapers tend to make use of it for navigation through the parts of rather large articles. In most cases pagination is better than traditional “previous – next” navigation as it offers visitors a more quick and convenient navigation through the site. Let’s take a look at the good practices of pagination design as well as some examples of when and how the pagination is usually implemented. Good Practices Of Pagination Design(7 Aspects according to Faruk Ates) Related References Mistake #1: Navigation Options Are Invisible A slider on Dirty.ru11 Gallery
Usability Testing: Top 8 Tips for Designing Usability Tests