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The Best UX Design Articles of February 2016

February 29, 2016 Design Technology

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.

Featured Image – by courtesy of N i c o l a / Microsoft Type Cover 2 – IMG_4252 (Some Rights Reserved)

The Best UX Design Articles of January 2016

January 31, 2016 Design Technology

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.

Cleaning Up My Calendar And The Chaos

January 28, 2016 General Technology

I signed up for a 1-hour webinar for creating a Business Model Canvas in November 2015 and I accepted a calendar (.iCal) invite for the event from my email account. It’s always convenient as a reminder with the event details now etched for eternity in my Calendar on Mac and Google. Soon after, the organizer wrote back saying there was a mistake from their side. The platform used to send the invites “wasn’t meeting the standards for a smooth broadcast”. I thought how serious could this be. My calendar displayed some unidentified entries, such as meeting invites from John Doe, also the host of this webinar, and I deleted them steadfastly. It was chaotic and I falsely thought that my tragedy has ended here.

I’m an infrequent Calendar user on Mac. But ever since this November incident, I started receiving a server connection error every time I would open it. I only realized today that this silly server mishap had rained a deluge of personal entries from John Doe’s calendar onto my calendar entries, right back up to 2011! Apart from the many recurring meetings, there was a court appearance for a traffic offense, some haircut schedules, details on flights, itineraries, and hotel stays, dinner meetings with executives, and more. Not to mention the calendar displayed time and place particulars as well. Much embarrassing as it was for me to know such intimate information from John’s personal schedule, he would be horrified to learn about this rather bizarre leak to more than 20 participants of this seminar!

I began a clean-up operation lasting about an hour, painstakingly glancing and deleting every single entry I could find until 2011 so far. Unfortunately, some of the deleted entries would have sent email notifications causing inconvenience to its participants but it doesn’t matter to me. My calendar was mutilated and my privacy has been wrecked and it led to unimaginable turmoil, thanks to some web platform broadcast which went awry. Now I only hope that John Doe doesn’t have a long-winded career and his entries don’t go far back in time. This incident has taught me an invaluable lesson, that convenience is sometimes costly.

The Difference Between URLs and URIs

January 26, 2016 Technology

I had, for decades, referred anything residing online as a ‘file’ and its address as a ‘URL’ to be accessed from the browser. However, I uncovered an interesting truth in my online research with a term called ‘URI’ or ‘Uniform Resource Identifier’:

One can classify URIs as locators (URLs), or as names (URNs), or as both. A Uniform Resource Name (URN) functions like a person’s name, while a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) resembles that person’s street address. In other words: the URN defines an item’s identity, while the URL provides a method for finding it.

The article further states that the term ‘URL’ has become or is becoming deprecated. Though it shows examples of a URI which it says, can also be called a URL, causing confusion. Furthermore, we don’t know the design implications of using the URI/URL terms intermittently, which usually takes a while before it enters popular tech lexicon. Considering this, and to avoid a confusing situation (or spark a debate in a meeting or chat), I would suggest using ‘URL’ for now.

Source: The Difference Between URLs and URIs

Grammarly

Here’s How You Can Check Your Language Now

January 22, 2016 General Technology

What could be apter than using an app to check your language? Just as the ubiquitous spell check became a formidable innovation in the Word doc era, verifying your language has become a necessity for bloggers, serious writers, and students today. Personally, I need to frame my thoughts correctly to sound better in English, and always looking to convey the right meaning but there’s little help to verify what I have written. So while I was watching YouTube an ad caught my attention, and I thought let’s give Grammarly a try. I installed the Mac app (v1.4.20) and here’s my take.

Apart from the concept, my full credit goes to the designer(s) and the developer(s) working behind the curtains on creating the minimalist user-interface. Once you open the app you just cannot resist starting to type a few sentences to test it out (mine ended up becoming a blog post). Though I wasn’t confident earlier on using this app, I was anxious to lose data while moving from the ‘Advanced Issues’ tab back to my writing, but it was seamless. Moreover, if you still fear being hunted down by the ‘grammar nazis’ there’s a handy Chrome extension available on the Web Store to help you check your language in emails, social media accounts, and other online docs. It was smooth going moving to and from my write-up on WordPress Blog using this extension while correcting the language in a separate window.

Grammarly has the potential to become the next Evernote for writers, especially useful for students if they open up their premium features to free subscribers, such as checking for plagiarism and improving their word choice which is important to make posts and articles concise and lucid. You can also export your write-up in .txt format though that isn’t a big deal when you can easily copy/paste into a text editor and continue editing. Overall it seems that the approach is to give a hassle free text-editing experience with bare minimum features, even excluding the routine print option for that matter. So for those who would love to check on their language quick and easy, get Grammarly today.