5 Proven UX Strategies Whether dealing with large corporations, game developers, small businesses or a sole proprietor, most business goals tend to amount to the same needs. User experience is an area that touches almost every single business problem. While every project comes with its own unique situations, there are a few tried-and-true user experience techniques that just work well and always produce results. Focus on key experiences A major tendency of designers and clients alike is to think too much about particular elements and focus on smaller details. First Impressions – The starting point of a memory is often potent and vivid as it marks a transition between the user’s simulation or expectation of the experience and the reality.Peaks or “Wow” moments – These are points of specific unique experiences and points that are consistently delightful to the user. It is easy to get caught up in designing pieces of the puzzle that do not net much return. Set Expectations Words are cheap and users know that.
Design - Color Use color primarily for emphasis. Choose colors that fit with your brand and provide good contrast between visual components. Note that red and green may be indistinguishable to color-blind users. Blue is the standard accent color in Android's color palette. Each color has a corresponding darker shade that can be used as a complement when needed. Download the swatches Bootstrap, from Twitter Need reasons to love Bootstrap? Look no further. By nerds, for nerds. Built at Twitter by @mdo and @fat, Bootstrap utilizes LESS CSS, is compiled via Node, and is managed through GitHub to help nerds do awesome stuff on the web. Made for everyone. Bootstrap was made to not only look and behave great in the latest desktop browsers (as well as IE7!)
4 Elements That Make A Good User Experience Into Something Great In the main, entries to this year’s Interaction Awards were good. The apps, the websites, the interfaces, and the games were slick and sleek. For the most part, they checked the design boxes we have all come to expect. Sure, some seemed to have beamed in from the early days of Netscape, but overall, buttons, pushed, sent you somewhere you thought you might go. Screens, swiped, loaded the information you expected to see. So far so good, right? As it happens, some clues about the future of the discipline lay among the category winners in the awards program (of which I was a juror). Building Platforms Best in Show went to "Loop Loop," a musical application for Sifteo, which neatly turns the 1.5" blocks into a tiny interactive music sequencer. Moving Beyond the Screen The People’s Choice award went to "Interaction Cubes" by Fundação Oswaldo Cruz/Museu da Vida, from Rio de Janeiro. Seamlessly Integrating Data Empowering the User
Story-centered design: Hacking your brain to think like a user When I first started designing interactive products, it was a struggle. Small projects were fine. But when the interactions got more complex, I noticed that tools, team communication, and even my own thinking started breaking down. I see many startups facing these same problems today. So I wanted to share some of the ways that I’ve changed my design process over the years to handle the complexity of large products. I used to design screens Back in college, we were mostly designing posters, book covers, homepages, and lots of other single-screens. When I moved to San Francisco and started designing apps, I kept working the same way: I designed a screen, or maybe a set of screens, and showed that set to the team. Screen-centered design doesn’t work for apps Once you’re dealing with an app that has a dozen screens and hundreds of states, you can’t hold the whole product in your head like a poster. We were thinking of the product as a set of screens. Story-centered design
Can User Experience Be Beautiful? An Analysis Of Navigation In Portfolio Websites Advertisement When users land on your website, they typically read the content available. Then, the next thing that they will do is to try and familiarize themselves with your website. Most of the time this involves looking for navigation. In this article, I’ll be analyzing the navigation elements of a particular category of websites, i.e. portfolios. These themes will be explored through a brief analysis of eight portfolio websites, carefully selected by the Smashing Team and, well, scrutinized by me! Dawid Wadach My first impression of Dawid Wadach’s website was “Whoa! The apparent absence of navigation is the first noticeable thing on wadach.com2. It was only after stopping to read what I was randomly and rapidly uncovering with my mouse that I actually noticed that the hidden parts contained the portfolio of websites designed by Wadach. Hovering over the white area uncovers some of the projects undertaken by Wadach. The main navigation menu on Dawid Wadach’s website. Conclusion Chris Wang
The Anatomy of an Experience Map Experience maps have become more prominent over the past few years, largely because companies are realizing the interconnectedness of the cross-channel experience. It’s becoming increasingly useful to gain insight in order to orchestrate service touchpoints over time and space. But I still see a dearth of quality references. I’m often asked what defines a good experience map. But it’s not just about the illustration of the journey (that would simply be a journey map). Rail Europe experience map. The experience map highlighted above was part of an overall initiative for Rail Europe, Inc., a US distributor that offers North American travelers a single place to book rail tickets and passes throughout Europe, instead of going to numerous websites. I almost always apply five critical components that make an experience map useful. Second, it’s clearly a means to something actionable—ideally something to design around—and not an end in and of itself. First Steps The Lens The Journey Model
Stop Designing Pages And Start Designing Flows - Smashing UX Design Advertisement For designers, it’s easy to jump right into the design phase of a website before giving the user experience the consideration it deserves. Too often, we prematurely turn our focus to page design and information architecture, when we should focus on the user flows that need to be supported by our designs. It’s time to make the user flows a bigger priority in our design process. Design flows that are tied to clear objectives allow us to create a positive user experience and a valuable one for the business we’re working for. In this article, we’ll show you how spending more time up front designing user flows leads to better results for both the user and business. Start With The User When starting a new Web design project, we’re often handed a design brief, branding standards, high-level project goals, as well as feature and functionality requirements. Two examples of popular user flows for e-commerce and subscription websites. Map User Flows Into Conversion Funnels Display Media
12 Creative Design Elements Inspiring the Next Generation of UX It's been a long time since I've written about design here at Moz, but I spent my morning in a great meeting with Derric, and was inspired by a lot of his ideas and what we reviewed to revisit some of the emerging trends and outlier creatives that are opening our eyes to what's possible. Below, you'll find some truly exceptional, unique elements of creative layout and artistry, as well as simple tweaks to best practices that are pushing the field forward. Hopefully, a few will inspire your design directions, too! #1 - Products Floating on the Background Here's a good-looking page from Hugh & Crye Shirts, showcasing one of their garments: Not bad, right? But watch what happens when the product is lifted out of the photo context and floated onto the background (courtesy of designer Chris Svetlik): Pretty remarkable, right? Here's another example of the same principle at work from Makr Carry Goods, creators of some beautiful bags: #2 - Typography IS the Design #4 - The Vertical Storyteller