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8 Must-see UX Diagrams

If you’re new to the field of user experience design, welcome! There’s plenty to see and do around here. And although many brilliant contributors have come before us, there’s actually not too much to catch up on—if you know where to look. Because pictures are worth so much, illustrated diagrams have served a critical role in our community. Our community is filled with thought leaders, those among us that conjure up entirely new ways to look at difficult design problems. In this post, I’ll share eight diagrams essential to the understanding of user experience design. The diagrams The UX Honeycomb Despite its age (2004!) Finally, one of the freshest takes on illustrating user-centered design comes from Pascal Raabe, a multi-disciplinary designer hailing from the United Kingdom. More to Share? These eight diagrams are only those that I find most useful; what are yours?

UX & Design Resources - Shaun's Blog Shaun's Blog Ask me anything Dec 3, 2012 UX & Design Resources A colleague asked me today for some resources for learning UX and CSS things, which caused me to compile this list. If you have any great resources to add, please let me know! Reference CSS Course at Code School HTML5 and CSS3 at Code School CSS Tricks - Lots of useful tricks here. Dive into HTML5 - The example code here is very readable. Utilities A great icon font Balsamiq - A brilliant mockup tool. Golden Ratio Calculator Colour Scheme Generator - Give it a colour and it gives you a whole complementary colour scheme. Background Generator - Works with CSS3 gradients and textured backgrounds. Subtle Patterns - This is great for background images. Design Guidelines Android Design - Lots of handy best practices here that don’t just apply to mobile development. Apple iOS Human Interface Guidelines - Long, but worth reading. Bootstrap - Their example code is great. About

User Experience Diagrams A collection of diagrams about user experience fundamentals. Last updated June 2011. The Elements of User Experience (PDF) Conceptual model of the considerations involved in designing successful user experiences for Web sites. User Experience Cycle (PDF) The user experience is not one simple action -it is an interconnected cycle of attempting to satisfy hopes, dreams, needs, and desires. User Experience Honeycomb A tool for advancing the conversation beyond usability and helping people understand the many facets that can impact the quality of user experience. Designing the User Experience This poster illustrates the path to more usable products. The Fundamentals of Experience Design The model covers the basic UX stuff like moving from a focus on tasks to a focus on activities, as well as more theoretical discussions like activity centered design vs user centered design. User-Centered Design Process (PDF) The User Experience Cosmos (PDF) A Cartesian representation of our field.

La Cantine OWNI et Silicon Sentier, en partenariat avec Squid Solutions, af83média, le social media club France et la Netscouade vous invitent à une journée de rencontre dédiée aux nouveaux outils du journalisme, une première en France. L’occasion de pratiquer ces nouvelles formes de journalisme, dans le cadre d’une battle d’applications entre équipes de professionnels mêlant designers, développeurs et journalistes, et de réfléchir à ce sujet, dans le cadre de tables rondes et d’échanges informels toute la journée. OWNI et Silicon Sentier, en partenariat avec Squid Solutions, af83média, le social média club France et la Netscouade organisent une journée de rencontre et de collaboration (battle) entre équipes de journalistes, développeurs-programmeurs et designers : La journée sera organisée comme suit : Avec la participation des équipes d’OWNI, la Netscouade, Umaps, Rue89, streetpress etc. Proposez votre équipe ! M. M. - à 18 heures 30 : présentation des applications préparés par les équipes.

Imagination and logic of user experience design - Inspiroidu 4 Rules of User Interface Design Vaadin ( is an open source web application framework having a server-side architecture which constructs user interface of web applications as RIA (rich internet applications), using Java code only. For developing Vaadin applications, you only use Java code, like Java Swing. This Java code is then converted to GWT (Google Web Toolkit) components (which are HTML and Javascript based) for browser side, and AJAX code sections are generated for some actions to support RIA concept. Server side validation is also performed for all actions. An example source code is shown below: import com.vaadin.ui public class HelloWorld extends com.vaadin.Application { public void init() { Window main = new Window("Hello window"); setMainWindow(main); main.addComponent(new Label("Hello World!")) And the result is: Vaadin supports so many UI components and these can be extended with new GWT components if required, and CSS themes can be applied to results. Vaadin is very well documented.

Broadcast Yourself. UX is not UI | Hello Erik // UX User Experience Designer // Portfolio // Erik Flowers // Salt Lake City, UT “UX is the intangible design of a strategy that brings us to a solution.” UX has become a neologism. When something has “good UX” it is an implied meaning of having the core components of UX (research, maybe a persona, IA, interaction, interface, etc etc…). It’s not really necessary or desirable to tack the word design onto the end anymore. It’s a distraction and leads people down a parallel but misguided path… the path to thinking that UX = User Interface Design. I was inspired to write this post after viewing Elisabeth Hubert’s (@lishubert) presentation at the Future of Web Design 2012 conference in Prague. The interface is not the solution. That’s the true heart of the battle between UX and those who only want UI – or don’t know the difference. How UX people see UX UX is an acronym for “user experience.” Many UX designers have started to re-label themselves as UX Architects, UX Engineers, or UX Strategists. So what does UX actually mean? What we want them to see What they typically see

Make Your Mockup in Markup We aren’t designing copies of web pages, we’re designing web pages. Andy Clarke, via Quotes on Design The old way I used to think the best place to design a website was in an image editor. Does this process sound familiar? That process is whack, yo! Recently, thanks in large part to the influence of design hero Dan Cederholm, I’ve come to the conclusion that a website’s design should begin where it’s going to live: in the browser. Die Photoshop, die Some of you may be wondering, “what’s so bad about using Photoshop for the bulk of my design?” The application Adobe Photoshop CS4 has unexpectedly ruined your day. Photoshop’s propensity to crash at crucial moments is a running joke in the industry, as is its barely usable interface. Text rendered in Photoshop (left) versus Safari (right). Crashing and text rendering issues suck, but we’ve learned to live with them. A necessary evil? Get started by getting naked Content precedes design. In the beginning, don’t even think about style. RGBA? Yikes!

I think therefore IA (Livia Labate) » UX People Widget Library for Axure Thanks to the lovely Peter Morville and Jeff Callender, the UX People stencils (from the butterfly book), are now available as an Axure Widget Library. Now you have everything you need to incorporate better, more humanized flow diagrams into your prototypes: Jeff was nice enough to send me the source images so I created the widget library for us dynamic prototyping fans. To use it, download the UX People Widget Library for Axure file (3.2 MB), run Axure RP, then, on the Widget pane (located on the left side of the screen) click “Load Library….”. Just drag any UX person into your prototype and you’re done. Related and of interest:

UX Crash Course: 31 Fundamentals My New Year’s Resolution for 2014 was to get more people started in User Experience (UX) Design. I posted one lesson every day in January, and hundreds of thousands of people came to learn! Below you will find links to all 31 daily lessons. Basic UX Principles: How to get started The following list isn’t everything you can learn in UX. It’s a quick overview, so you can go from zero-to-hero as quickly as possible. Introduction & Key Ideas #01 — What is UX? #02 — User Goals & Business Goals #03 — The 5 Main Ingredients of UX How to Understand Users #04 — What is User Research? #05 — How to Ask People Questions #06 — Creating User Profiles #07 — Designing for Devices #08 — Design Patterns Information Architecture #09 — What is Information Architecture? #10 — User Stories & Types of Information Architecture #11 — What is a Wireframe? Visual Design Principles #12 — Visual Weight, Contrast & Depth #13 — Colour #14 — Repetition & Pattern-Breaking #15 — Line Tension & Edge Tension #16 — Alignment & Proximity

How much cash is there in a free mobile app? Can you fund app development by giving it away and just taking advertising revenue. The early indications are that you can but it is early days and the statistics don't quite add up... It's a truism that there is no such thing as a free lunch but it seems that there are free apps. With Apple's recent launch of iAds you can expect the number of free apps in the App Store to grow. At the moment it looks as though ad supported apps might be working. Two versions of the app were made available - a paid-for and a free, ad-supported version and it was the latter that brought in more revenue. Other developers are claiming lower rates of payment at around $10 per 1000 ads, which is still higher than the average for on-line advertising.However for another take on the situation consider the statistics offered by another developer Giles Chanot. What is clear is that something very strange going on with iAds and whether or not it is sustainable is not clear. Related items iOS 4 Apple's honey trap

Rapportive Leverage Sales Navigator insights anytime you send an email. View rich LinkedIn profile data for your contacts directly in Gmail, and use that knowledge when you reach out next. This Chrome extension is available in two flavors, “Lite” for free LinkedIn members and “Premium” for LinkedIn Sales Navigator subscribers. Sales Navigator Lite for Gmail will let you See rich LinkedIn profile data for your contacts directly in your Gmail, and use that knowledge when you reach out next Mention icebreakers, including shared connections, experiences, and interests, to build rapport with your contacts Hover over any email address anywhere in your message to quickly view their profile to stay informed on who’s who With a Sales Navigator subscription, this extension will unlock additional premium features: Save contacts as leads in your Sales Navigator account Use TeamLink to see if prospects are connected to your colleagues and get a warm introduction

5 Killer Ways to Streamline your Coding Efficiency I recently read a forum thread about designers and developers, and the hourly rates they charge. One commenter made a great point, saying that you can start to charge more per hour, if you are more efficient, and faster at producing quality work, as long as quality is not compromised for speed. Apart from practice, how can you actually speed up your coding you may be thinking. 1. The first of these is having snippets at your finger tips. There are pretty much 3 ways snippets can be organised, and used. The second way is to have your own local database of useful snippets at your fingertips, instead of them being out there online, and everyone else’s being there too. 2. The third and possibly best way to make use of your snippets is via a text expander. This article, and screen cast by Jeffrey Way gives you a visual view of the power a text expander puts at your finger tips, and is well worth a read. Editor’s Note: I highly suggest you to use Phrase Express instead of Texter. 3. 4. 5.

Single input login form | A Way Back While designing login page for Intel, I had an opportunity to think about reducing login inputs with intentions of making things simple. Though the login form is already simple with just few inputs, I was thinking if they can be further reduced. I believe, yes. One input box for both username and password? I believe a single input accepting both username and password can work. It saves space of an extra input fieldIt might save little bit of time (may not be so in the beginning :) ) At first it might be confusing for users to enter both username and password in one input box separated just by a space (character). Discussion with Web Form Design Master I even dared to ask Web form design Master – Luke Wroblewski – about my idea: Me(@awayback): Single input Login form: Enter your username and password (separated by a space) and press enter/return to Sign In. Luke Wroblewski (@lukew): @awayback potential advantage is… Replacing one character (tab) for another (space)? Let’s do it Wrong Password

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