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UX Design

The Best UX Design Articles of May 2016

A catalogue of some of my favourite and insightful UX design articles published in May 2016.

How to Turn User Research into Usable Data
User research is an important component in a design process to collect valuable data. This article looks at various research methods and how to make the right choice.

Basic steps on how to remove complexity out of UI Design
Jin Su Park, Head of Design at ThisData speaks about removing the complexity in the designing of the user-interfaces.

The absolute minimum Android developers need to know about UX — Part 3 of 5
The title has the description of the article. Also, Part 1 covers ‘Visibility’ and Part 2 includes ‘Affordances/Signifiers’.

UX Maturity: Where Does Your Company Fit?
Usabilla offers a FREE ebook explaining the concepts, and the reason to invest in UX design. Go for it!

Designing for Content-Heavy Websites
It’s not easy to encapsulate content in a good minimalist UI. If you share that opinion as well, this article is for you.

A Guide To Building a Successful Startup Design Team
Jennifer Aldrich from InVision writes about working for a startup on UX roles and building a successful design team. You can follow her tweets (@jma245).

The Organization’s Design Research Maturity Model
Chris Avore shares his template of a model for measuring your organization’s design research maturity.

Privacy Laws and Bad UX
Alex Schmidt (UX strategist and researcher) speaks about why digital privacy matters with some examples, and how you should approach it.

Applying UX Design Methods to Organizational Design and Teamwork
UX designers are no longer limited to imagining or executing ideas but they are also engaging with all sorts of professionals in a co-creation process.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong? The Biggest Mistakes in Usability Testing
Although usability testing seems simple and routine there are several problems which may occur. Infragistics’ Principal User Experience Architect Jim Ross shares his experience in this insightful article.

The Design-Thinking Superpower You Might Suspect You Have
Designers can take the design-thinking approach on a range of projects, going beyond the UI, and help the organization’s internal processes to gain optimization.

Introducing the User-Centered Design Canvas
The UCD Canvas is a great way to capture user-research and business value all in one place. A downloadable PDF with some more information is also available on The Rectangles website.

 

Featured Image – by courtesy of Duane Storey / Computers (Some Rights Reserved)
UX

The Best UX Design Articles of April 2016

A catalogue of some of my favourite and insightful UX articles published in April 2016.

A Checklist For Planning A UX Benchmark Study
An insightful article on the basics of benchmarking the UX of a website, app, or product, to support the health of the user-experience of your product.

Design Sprints for Branding
A lesson in product development from Google Venture’s (GV) design sprints, and why it makes great sense for the branding of the product itself.

Less Is Still More: The Importance Of The Minimalist Approach To Web Design
This article explains the importance of minimalism on websites, and how visual complexity affects a user’s perception of the site in milliseconds. It’s a great piece for creating a good first impression for your visitors.

The Product Design of IoT
Joe Johnston (VP, Experience Innovation at Universal Mind) talks about devising a holistic user experience for ‘Internet of things’ products in this amazing article.

Apple, The Original Human
Daniel Eckler outlines Apple’s legendary philosophy of incorporating human and emotional aspects in its product design with examples.

What the Past Five Years Have Taught Me About UX Design, Part 1
A first in a series of articles, Bob Hotard (Senior User Experience Designer at AT&T Digital Design & User Experience), reflects upon the UX trends relevant in 2020.

Keeping Life Meaningful: Designing the Senior Residence Experience
This article focuses on designing a better experience at senior residences.

What I Learned From the World’s Greatest Product Designers
InVision’s co-founder and CEO, Clark Varberg, shares the views of product designers from innovative companies in this insightful article.

Moving to a UX-Critical Culture
Baruch Sachs (Senior Director, User Experience, Pegasystems) provides his views on building a robust UX culture within project teams.

Articulating Design Decisions
A sample chapter from Tom Greever’s book Articulating Design Decisions published by O’Reilly Media.

Create a UX Measurement Plan
An insightful article on developing a user experience measurement plan, to advance the maturity of your UX practice.

Merging User Experience and Systems Engineering
In pursuit of ensuring a collaborative structure, an expert panel discusses the process of merging UX into a large company that usually approaches projects from a systems-engineering point of view.

Good Learning Design: Five Unique Challenges and Their Solutions
This article unravels the potential of developing a good learning experience in MOOCs and other learning resources, through examples of best practices.

 

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UX, Mobile, iPad, Tablet, HCI

The Best UX Design Articles of March 2016

A catalogue of some of my favourite and insightful UX articles published in March 2016.

UX is Not Design
The ‘design’ in ‘UX Design’ is not related to visual aesthetics. This article reveals the true meaning of user-experience design.

How everything we design will in turn design us back
Entrepreneur and Creative Director, Jones Virtanen, writes on the interesting notion of ‘ontological design’, which says, everything that we design in this world, will in turn design us back.

Smart UX: Designing For The Future
A list of valuable future-oriented UX design questions for your next application or website design project.

How We Made Our Client’s Site Accessible by Law
Vince Sevilla presents a case-study about a California-based disability centre, and how his agency redesigned an “accessible” website.

Usability testing of Mobile Applications: A Step-By-Step Guide
Justin Mifsud, presents a structured view of testing mobile applications in this very insightful article.

7 Remarkably Simple Methods To Boost Checkout Conversion Rates
In this article, co-founder and CEO of Invest Consulting Khalid Saleh, speaks at length about ‘shopping cart abandonment’, and the checkout process conversion rates. And how to improve the analytics and the experience.

Microinteractions: The Secret of Great App Design
As a mobile app designer, you just can’t ignore the power of microinteractions for providing a delightful feedback. This article outlines the why, what and hows of dealing with microinteractions to design better apps.

How to Make Your Site Senior-Friendly
Declining eyesight and motor abilities create tremendous usability challenges when designing for senior persons. This is an insightful article which speaks about the sensitivity of building websites for seniors with key UX recommendations.

Five Best Practices for Becoming a Data-Driven Design Organization, Part 2
Michelle Bacigalupi (Experience Design Management & Strategy for WebEx Online at Cisco) lists a set of best practices for developing a data-driven design organization. You can also read Part 1 of the article as well.

Product Pages: UX Tips to Boost Conversions
As more products flood the shopping market, the competition to get stuff sold online will intensify. An article that broadly outlines the UX elements to make your product page stand out.

Best UI design principles to develop strong mobile apps
A comprehensive list of details that could make or break your mobile app.

Probability: A UX Designer’s Second-Best Friend
Probability is about making educated guesses about the future. Even without research, we all have an innate sense of probability, that makes us judge a bad idea from a good one. A very good article on the effects of using probability in UX design.

 

Featured Image – by courtesy of ebayink / Tablet use 2 (Some Rights Reserved)

UX, Keyboard, Computer

The Best UX Design Articles of February 2016

A catalogue of some of my favourite and insightful UX articles published in February 2016.

User-Centered Design Artifacts
An expert panel comprising UX professionals discuss artifacts a UX team should create during a design project to best enable the team to understand the design problem.

Mobile-First eCommerce: What Customers Expect and Value in Mobile Shopping Experiences
Senior Omni-Channel Commerce Consultant, Afshan Kirmani talks about best practices for increasing conversion rates for eCommerce mobile experiences.

Designers shouldn’t code. They should study business.
Designer Joshua Taylor weighs in with his opinion about how designers must focus on their craft, and the business.

The Three Views of (Information) Architecture
Information Architect, Dan Klyn speaks about designing a sitemap experience, by drawing an analogy with a real building architecture process.

3 Keys To Creating a Frictionless Experience
Elements in “anticipatory” design principles for creating a seamless experience. An article by Joe Johnston (you can’t miss the amazing hand drawings from @hellokevinwhite).

5 Steps To Conducting An Effective Expert Review
A write-up on the process for an effective expert review with examples and suggestions by Jeff Sauro.

What Assembling Ikea Furniture Taught Me About User Experience
BodeTree.com CEO and co-founder Chris Myers describes his experience with IKEA furniture and compares it with a traditional user-experience design process.

15 SEO Best Practices for Structuring URLs
A drill-down of the best practices to improve site structure and search engine ranking.

Beyond Usability: Designing with Persuasive Patterns
When products suffer from higher bounce rates, users miss out on the chance to experience what the product has to offer. Building persuasive user experiences is imperative. Anders Toxboe lists a set of persuasive patterns in this interesting article.

10 Most Common Web Design Mistakes Small Businesses Make
Tech blogger, Alan Smith presents his list of must-have design principles for small businesses who are struggling to make a compelling website.

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The Best UX Design Articles of January 2016

A catalogue of some of my favourite and insightful UX articles published in January 2016.

Usability Of Beacon Technology At Conferences
Codal’s Creative Strategist Jenna Erickson looks at the various factors involved in integrating beacon technology at conferences to deliver content on your mobile devices.

7 User Interface Guidelines For Designing Watch Apps
Neha Modgil shares her views on designing for this newest wearable device keeping the user needs into perspective. She’s the Global Design Head and Owner at Techved Consulting.

Guidelines For Designing And Building A Multilingual Website
In this insightful article, Alan Smith speaks about how multilingual websites have become common today and describes ways to meet the challenges.

The Crucial Role Deep Linking Should Play in Your Mobile App
Bobby Emamian expresses his concerns while describing the advantages of deep-linking processes for mobile apps.

Innovation with Intention: The Next Evolution for the Experience Designer
As consumers demand more value, meaning and positive experiences in their lives, organizations are looking for experience designers who want to lead the change through creative new approaches. Senior User Experience Strategist and Director of Experience Design at SiteMinder, Meg Barbic, shares feedback from her interactions at the UXSTRAT 2015 conference in Athens, Georgia.

UX Strategy: How to Devise Innovative Digital Products That People Want, Part 2
This is a sample chapter from the book UX Strategy: How to Devise Innovative Digital Products That People Want, by Jaime Levy, published by O’Reilly Media. It speaks about UX strategy as a way of thinking, and not a means of executing a plan. Part 1 of this article was published in December 2015. Jaime is a UX Consultant at JLR Interactive based in Los Angeles, CA.

UX Performance Metrics: How to Measure Change
How can we really tell if we’ve made anything better, less frustrating, cheaper, or hassle-free for the people we serve? In this insightful article, Dana Botka draws from her experience using some project case-studies, on measuring change on content design.

UX vs CX: Which is more important?
If you are still thinking about UX versus CX, this article by Netania Engelbrecht should help you get around the concepts easily. Netania is Content Marketing Specialist at Usabilla.

Using Proto-content for a Better User Experience
Content Strategist Robert Mills describes his ‘content-first’ approach through this insightful article.

How to Determine the Right Number of Participants for Usability Studies
Unlocking the fear of UX researchers on the number of participants to find the best possible outcome, authors Janet M. Six and Ritch Macefield uncover some research findings in this article to answer your question.