UX/UI

Best Resources

User Experience Basics - the What & Why on Usability.gov

User Interface Design Basics - the What & Why on Usability.gov

UX is not UI - the true heart of the battle between UX and those who only want UI – or don’t know the difference.

UX Magazine - UX Magazine is a free community resource exploring all facets of experience design.

User Experience Magazine - User Experience magazine publishes a wide range of articles dealing with the broad field of usability and the user experience.

Our Users Deserve a Better Experience - The First 5 Principles of UX

How to create an amazing mobile design (infographic) - Some of the most respectable experts on mobile design in the world gave their real, actionable strategies and examples that will help you achieve your design goals right away.

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UX/UI Articles (ordered by date)

• Instilling Confidence in Online Shoppers: I Bought a Sofa Online and Good UX Sealed the Deal (06-28-17)
  A stellar user experience focused on users’ question and needs can persuade shoppers to make big-ticket purchases online.
• The Top UX Mistakes In Ecommerce Apps (06-26-17)
  When it comes to eCommerce apps, it’s important to understand the various UX mistakes that are made. When you know more about the mistakes, you can learn more about what you should be doing to fix them. A set of UX design tips and techniques can be implemented so you have a better app to offer to your target customer. It will help with the sales funnel and ultimately getting customers to stay engaged.
• UX Design Thinking From A Senior Citizen’s Perspective (06-26-17)
  Attracting senior citizens as part of your user-base was once deemed as being the last Internet frontier. However, this elusive scenario has since become reality as we have witnessed a constant increase in the number of senior citizen users who are more often logging on, signing up, and subscribing. In the United States alone, Statista recorded that in 2016, 64% of senior citizens (65+ years of age) were online – that is up 4% from 2013.
• Connecting With Users: Incorporating Humor In Web Design (06-20-17)
  Joan is applying for a small loan on all-online-loanzzz.com. She’s becoming frustrated with the number of financial-disclosure forms she has to fill out. She’s thinking about visiting her local bank to ask for a loan instead.
• How Empathy & Personalized Interfaces Can Help You Build Better UX (06-19-17)
  Web design trends can pivot on a dime, but some design concepts have proven their efficacy and timelessness. Two of these concepts, personalization and intuitiveness, are integral parts of modern web design and are vital to crafting amazing user experiences.
• Essential Color Tools for UX Designers (06-18-17)
  Color is one of the most powerful tools in the designer’s toolkit. At the same time, color is a tricky concept to master — with an infinite number of possible color combinations out there, it can be hard to decide what colors to use on your site or app. To make things easier, I’ve created a list of the best tools for choosing color palettes.
• 10 Basic Principles of Visual Design (06-09-17)
  Yesterday I was listening to a podcast and heard someone who was about to ask a question saying something along the lines of "..long time fan, first time caller…" and for some reason that got me thinking about Medium. I've been consuming content here for a long time but have never contributed myself with my 2 cents. Today is the day this changes.
• The Psychology Principles Every UI/UX Designer Needs to Know (06-08-17)
  Psychology plays a big part in a user’s experience with an application. By understanding how our designs are perceived, we can make adjustments so that the apps we create are more effective in achieving the goals of the user.
• Best Practices for Website Header Design (06-02-17)
  Everyone knows: there is not the second chance to make the first impression. In the sphere of digital products, this eternal truth works in terms of high competition and incredible diversity. No doubt, some zones of the webpage or mobile screen are particularly important and effective in this aspect. Today we are going to discuss one of them in deeper focus: the header of the website.
• Designing for Different Screens and Devices: 7 Steps to Creating A Great UX (06-01-17)
  From a smartwatch with micro screens to the widest TV-screens, content should be developed to be viewed and interacted with across a range of screen sizes. But designing for different devices is more that just resizing content to display on different screens. It involves a lot of complexity: designers need to maximize the user experience for each device so users believe that the app was actually designed for their devices instead of being simply stretched to fit the screen.
• Understanding the Potential of Adaptive User Interfaces (05-30-17)
  Interfaces are one of the most crucial aspects of modern design. Users depend on intuitive, responsive interfaces to access content and services on the internet, and interface trends have evolved dramatically in recent years.
• How much customization is enough in UX? A case study (05-30-17)
  Freedom is one of the very few notions that are such as essential values of the Western culture that we hardly ever question them. Generally speaking, we declare to value it most and we don’t want to our freedom to be reduced. The topic is well explored by both modern social studies, greatest minds of the contemporary, disco music and even the way we speak every day to each other.
• Design principle: Error & Forgiveness (05-27-17)
  Making errors is an integral part of the way we humans live. We trip over when we are learning to walk and we press the wrong buttons when we use new UI. This fact is very unlikely to change soon.
• Storyframes before wireframes: starting designs in the text editor (05-26-17)
  Browsing through a well-crafted interface is like reading a great story (or flipping through a great comic book). As designers, why are we not incorporating screenwriting techniques more often into our process?
• Just Keep Scrolling! How To Design Lengthy, Lengthy Pages (05-25-17)
  Websites with long or infinite scrolling are becoming more and more common lately, and it’s no mere trend or coincidence. The technique of long scrolling allows users to traverse chunks of content without any interruption or additional interaction — information simply appear as the user scrolls down the page.
• Big Pictures on Small Screens: Remove, Resize or Reorganize (05-21-17)
  When using large-screen images on smaller screens, remove images that don’t add information. Then, pay close attention to cropping, scaling and placement.
• The Ultimate UX Design of: the Sign-Up Form (05-18-17)
  A typical sign-up form contains a couple of form fields (it seems like the most popular number nowadays is 3: e-mail, password and a peculiar “repeat password”) and a button. Is there anything to design in this minimalistic structure? Isn’t it too simple to focus on?
• Empathy’s Role in Experience Design (05-18-17 )
  Empathy is nearing played-out-buzzword status: overused and overhyped and caricatured to the point where any real nuance or subtlety is hard to come by. Use of the word empathy these days is almost as likely to generate a round of eyerolls as it is to inspire compassion. Has it joined the ranks of ideas like “disruption” and “innovation”? Perhaps.
• Design principle: Organizing information (05-14-17)
  It is essential for our designs to show well organized information, so the user can understand easily what is shown. It is a key to providing good UX. Among many ways of showing data, one has stood the test of time and proves to be efficient even today. It is called “Five Hat Racks”.
• The Real Effects Of Bad Web Design (05-03-17)
  Web designers often talk about the importance of a good, user-friendly web presence, yet businesses still struggle to justify the expense of a web redesign and optimisation.
• 52 Research Terms you need to know as a UX Designer (04-24-17)
  Having written the article 53 Tech Terms You Need to Know as a UX Designer it made sense to add research terms into the mix. I’ve put together an A-Z list of research words with explanations in plain English.
• 3 Things Math Class Taught You About UX (04-24-17)
  Few UX designers would consider themselves mathematicians. From my experience, most of them despise the subject. And why would not they? Their passion concerns art, design, the realm of conscious creativity — the apparent antithesis of the cold objectivity of numbers or data.
• How to give better design feedback (04-20-17)
  Creativity is all about collaboration. It’s just the truth: awesome things happen when people work together. And that’s exactly why design feedback is so important. You’ve got to know to know the lingo and find the best ways to communicate your vision to the artistically-inclined mind of your designer.
• Long Term Memory: Touchscreen Interaction (04-20-17)
  As we have new experiences and learn new things, we store away information for recall at a later date. Information is first stored in our short-term memory for easy access and is then consolidated and stored in our long-term memory. It is used to store our knowledge, compare new information with old information, and keep track of the order in which things happen. Because of this, when a new product is introduced on the market, if it is designed in such a way that allows people to relate it to the way we use another product, it has a greater chance of being accepted.
• UX Wireframing: Bedrock of Interface Usability (04-19-17)
  In 4th BC Plato said: “The beginning is the most important part of the work”. Almost 24 centuries since then his words are still up-to-date in our realias. Buildings require a stable foundation to stand and give shelter for long as well as any project needs to be well-planned from the very beginning to avoid problems at the further stages.
• The eCommerce UX Mistakes That Drive Us Nuts (04-17-17)
  You’ve spent countless hours tweaking your CSS, testing your responsive breakpoints, and checking site speed. You know the site like the back of your hand. Your eCommerce site is beautifully designed, but is it user-friendly?
• Typography can make or break your design: a process for choosing type (04-11-17)
  One of the most important skills you can learn as a designer is how to choose type. This is because text is one of the primary ways designers can communicate with users. Typography can make or break a design.
• Color Theory for Web Designers – How to Choose the Right Color Scheme for Your Website (03-30-17)
  You have decided to create a website. One of the first questions that you will face sounds like “What colors should I choose to make it professional and at the same time visually appealing?” This is not surprising because color is the first things that attract your visitors’ attention, that’s why a color scheme is considered to be the foremost thing every designer should know.
• The Rules of UX Club (03-27-17)
  I’m worried about User Experience. Not about any user experience in particular, but about the word itself. I’m worried it’s beginning to lose its meaning.
• Everything Is Part Of The User Experience (03-27-17)
  A “typical” user experience process follows a general rule of thumb: discovery, research, conceptual design (this is where wireframes are designed), and detailed design.
• How to Apply Design Thinking to Elevate Your Everyday Life (03-24-17)
  Everybody has ideas for how they want to live their life. But our dreams, goals, and aspirations can get overshadowed by day-to-day tasks and meetings, and we find ourselves doing whatever pops up next in our inboxes. Time can pass by pretty quickly, and if we don’t take a step back to make sure we are living a life with meaning and intention, we could look back one day realizing that we haven’t been living our lives the way we had imagined.
• User Research. Empathy Is the Best UX Policy. (03-23-17)
  Starting any project, which is not their personal presentation but a product for users, designers should be deeply aware: they work primarily not for self-expression, not for showing their creativity to the world, not for creating something revolutionary new that will make the world go round in opposite direction. They work to solve users’ problems, satisfy their wishes and achieve business goals.
• Intro Guide to UX Reviews for Web Designers (03-22-17)
  A great UX review can do wonders for any website. By looking over the entire design you can learn what’s working, what’s not, and maybe find solutions that can increase the UX and ultimately increase revenues.
• UX Trends That Will Make You Re-think Your Marketing Strategy (03-17-17)
  In this digital-first world, a good user experience has become a user magnet. Check out how brands create powerful UX magnets to grab the attention of their users. The beaten to death techniques and approaches are no longer applicable in the world where the users have the reign.
• A Conversational Interface In A Contact Form … Why? (03-15-17)
  As time goes by, everyone is trying to make their web experience as meaningful, compelling, and human as possible. Conversational interfaces allow the user to transcend the traditional UI by talking to the system in much the same way as they would with a real person, giving it a human touch.
• How To Spark A UX Revolution (03-14-17)
  It feels like everywhere I turn somebody is saying that user experience is the next frontier in business, that we have moved beyond the age of features to creating outstanding experiences.
• Is Your Creative Vision Shortchanging UX? (03-08-17)
  When approaching a design challenge, it is easy to get caught up in the aesthetics. After all, for the skilled designer, selecting a unique font, minimizing clutter, and generally showing off good taste and artistic ability are part of the fun. Putting that personal spin on a project is part of what makes it worthwhile.
• What To Answer Before Designing Anything (02-21-17)
  We can talk about Design Thinking: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test for the uninformed. However, design is more framework and less process. It’s more guideposts, so you have a pretty good idea of where you are going, and adjust when it happens in asynchronous order.
• UX Thoughts on Using Video as a Background (02-20-17)
  Using videos as background – a design trend that emerged a couple of years ago – continues to be the subject of much debate among designers.
• Collect user feedback or die (02-20-17)
  Conversational or Chat Based UX is a new and exciting trend that gives you insight into what your customer is thinking and what they are looking for. Yet we see plenty of applications that build walls to keep away all kinds of user feedback.
• Your Users Might Not be as Tech-Savvy as You Think (02-16-17)
  Thanks to their specialist skillsets and proximity to a given project, UX Designers are set apart from the majority of their target audience. As Jakob Nielsen explains, “one of usability’s most hard-earned lessons is that you are not the user. This is why it’s a disaster to guess at the users’ needs.” However, there’s another fundamental ability that can be damaging to assume of your user: Computer literacy.
• 5 techniques for fine-tuning UX with color (02-14-17)
  Color is one of the key elements in any design system. On websites or in apps, color can be used in a variety of ways: sometimes color can be used to create a focal point through contrast or through limiting the color to a selected spot; color can also help establish hierarchy and therefore influence where a user looks.
• The Research-Backed Impact of Not Using UX Patterns (02-06-17)
  Most people are creatures of habit. We love doing the same thing, the same way, day in and day out. Research tells us that we’re hard-wired for predictability, and that we’re not really all that spontaneous anyway. Familiarity is a rewarding feeling that’s chalk full of satisfaction, safety and security.
• The UX Audit: A Beginner’s Guide (02-06-17)
  Imagine you run an eCommerce website. You know that visitors find you in search engines and that they interact with your homepage. They even get started on your checkout process. But at some point, they do not convert. And you do not know why. It might be time to update the information hierarchy. Or the user flows. But how do you know what needs rejigging and what does not?
• To Use Or Not To Use: Touch Gesture Controls For Mobile Interfaces (02-13-17)
  Many criticize gestural controls as being unintuitive and unnecessary. Despite this, widespread adoption is underway already, and the UI design world is burning the candle at both ends to develop solutions that are instinctively tactile. The challenges here are those of novelty.
• Boost your UX with text chunking (02-06-17)
  The majority of the content that website visitors come across on the web is written content, copy or text that either informs or sells something. Other parts of content include images, videos and graphics. How web designers arrange all of this content has a massive impact on how visitors read and retain all of this information.
• The Future of Magazine-Style Blog Layouts: Trends & Design Ideas (01-30-17)
  All major trade & specialty magazines have built a web presence online. Many still release print editions but the Internet is a much cheaper medium to publish content.
• Sidebar vs. No Sidebar: The Pros & Cons For Different Layouts (01-18-17)
  Websites have featured sidebars dating back to the mid 90s. Early websites were primitive but usable, and here we are over two decades later with many tremendous advancements in web design. Yet sidebars are still a common staple on every site, from blogs to small businesses and ecommerce shops.
• More Than Just Pretty: How Imagery Drives User Experience (01-18-17)
  As the saying goes, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Human beings are highly visual creatures who are able to process visual information almost instantly; 90 percent of all information that we perceive and that gets transmitted to our brains is visual.
• 10 Font Pairing Tools For Better Legibility (01-16-17)
  When it comes to online content, we want to make sure it is valuable, based on facts and helpful. But one important “detail” is sometimes neglected and it is legibility. Do designers check if websites are comfortable to read? Do they consider font pairings?
• Improve UX by Understanding What Compels Human Behavior (01-16-17)
  When assessing the effectiveness of a website’s design, we often look at numbers. After all, numbers don’t lie. We track bounce rates, engagement rates, or spikes or dips in organic traffic, and then derive conclusions based on observable trends.
• Are All Trends Worth It? Top 5 Most Common UX Mistakes That Designers Make (01-13-17)
  As web designers, we are constantly trying to create a great user experience and help users achieve their goals. In our daily work, we are using all kinds of common patterns and trends. In my experience, I have seen how those patterns and trends can easily steer both clients and designers/developers in the wrong direction.
• FAQ: Tips and tools for getting started in user experience design (aka UX) (01-12-17)
  As an interaction designer on the Material Design team at Google, I often receive emails and questions from people who are trying to transition to UX or who simply want to learn more about the ins and outs of the industry.
• User Feedback in UX (01-12-17)
  Think about that reassuring vibration that occurs after you flip your iPhone’s ringer switch to “off” – so you know the action you intended took place successfully. What about the infamous intercept voice: “If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and try again.” when you’ve left a phone line hanging or dialed an incorrect number?
• UX Design Process: Is There Really One? (01-11-17)
  A UX design process is something that everyone has in the UX industry, but something that everyone does differently. While the majority may maintain the same flow and general process, it is the principles that are executed within the process that are done so differently.
• Let the Action Buttons in the Dialog Box Scream its Outcome (01-07-17)
  We use Dialog boxes in our apps to inform the user about a situation and require acknowledgment. The naive action button pairs to use in the dialogs would be OK/Cancel and Yes/No. But can we do it better?
• UI Tips for Beautiful Minimalist Websites (12-23-16)
  When employed correctly, the goal of minimalist web design should be to present content and features in a simple, direct way by providing as little distraction from the core content as possible.
• Learning from Lego: A Step Forward in Modular Web Design (12-22-16)
  With hundreds of frameworks and UI kits, we are now assembling all kinds of content blocks to make web pages. However, such modularity and versatility hasn’t been achieved on the web element level yet. Learning from Lego, we can push modular web design one step forward.
• 11 brutal truths about creativity that no one wants to talk about (12-19-16)
  Humanity has revered creativity throughout time, from the ancient Greeks to modern-day painters, poets, and web designers. It’s one of those ineffable things that’s extremely hard to define but you absolutely know it when you see it. It’s also the driving force for so many of us, to the point where we’ve created an entire category of worker that just called “creative.”
• Mistakes Developers Make When Learning Design (12-16-16)
  The blank Photoshop document glows in front of you. You’ve been trying to design a website for an hour but it’s going nowhere. You feel defeated. You were in this same predicament last month when you couldn’t design a website for a project at work. As a developer, you just feel out of your element pushing pixels around.
• Best Practices for Imagery (12-16-16)
  As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. It takes users just a few seconds to evaluate a new site or app, good designer knows that and try to convey complex stories and ideas visually. This makes images a critical component for connecting with users and converting them into dedicated users.
• Improving The UX Of Names With Vocalizer.js (12-30-16)
  We have all encountered names that are difficult to pronounce. Having a challenging name myself, I get different pronunciations of my first name, Atif, all the time. In order to solve my own naming problem, I built a Javascript plugin called Vocalizer. In this article, I will introduce what Vocalizer is and a few different ways to use it.
• The Mobile Design Elements That You Have to A/B Test (12-23-16)
  UX is at the intersection of product and design. If UI designers are fixated on the look and feel of an app, while product managers are focused on its functionality and usability, then UX designers fall somewhere in between.
• Forms Need Validation (12-18-16)
  Inline validation is a method to check the validity of an input and give feedback before submission. It significantly enhances the usability and user experience of forms. This article explains inline form validation and error handling design techniques.
• The Different Ways That Visual Design Can Impact UX (12-8-16)
  When custom label printer Consolidated Labels redesigned its website, their end goal was to increase customer conversions. Yet they liked their site, and didn’t see the need to make many changes. In the end, they changed only one thing on their homepage: adding call-to-action with a bright-green button.
• Corporate Vs. Design Agency: Perks And Pitfalls For UX Designers (11-29-16)
  The more companies understand the power of a great user experience design and its impact on customer loyalty, the more they are willing to have it embedded in their culture. With so much emphasis on the user today, there are plenty of career opportunities for UX professionals. An extremely diverse cohort of companies and teams are looking to seize top UX talent.
• 5 Ways Whitespace Can Impact Your UX (11-28-16)
  Contrary to its name, whitespace isn’t necessarily white. The term simply refers to the ‘negative’ or empty space between elements of a design or page layout – consider it the opposite of content. I know what you’re thinking, this sounds like a pointless design feature; but empty space can actually be the difference between a good UX and an outstanding one.
• Scrolling in Web Design: How Much Is Too Much? (11-23-16)
  Scrolling may seem like a very basic feature of a website, and essentially, it is. However, despite its basic functionality, the scrolling on your website can either work to users’ benefit or drive them bonkers, pushing them to your competitors’ sites.
• The Wireframe Perfectionist’s Guide (11-22-16)
  When I was a developer, I often had a hundred questions when building websites from wireframes that I had received. Some of those questions were, "How will this design scale when I shrink the browser window?" and, "What happens when this shape is filled out incorrectly?" and even, "What are the options in this sorting filter, and what do they do?"
• I totally forgot about print style sheets (11-15-16)
  Aaron Gustafson recently sent a tweet to Indiegogo in which he pointed out that their order details pages aren’t usable when printed. When I saw this tweet it struck me, because I realized that it has been a long time since I have optimized a page for print or even spared a thought on checking.
• Mobile Design Best Practices (11-14-16)
  Apps are now a mainstream, trusted way to deliver content and services. But in a crowded market, how does a mobile app become useful, relevant, and valued so it delights and retains users?
• Unbox the Web! (11-13-16)
  Rendering visual borders around each component of a website or app does a disservice to user experience. In most cases the styling isn’t needed, or less of it is needed to afford action.
• Tips and Tricks for Creating Better Design Style Guides (11-09-16)
  Let’s face it—web standards have evolved considerably. If you are looking to build a successful website, you may find yourself hiring a team rather than a single person, and you may work with them extensively to support your evolving vision.
• UX For Social Good (11-07-16)
  Some careers are entirely focused on helping people. Think about teachers, police, nurses, doctors, firefighters, social workers and the like. Others are not directly aimed at helping people but indirectly do so nonetheless. User experience design falls into this category. Learning and practicing good user experience requires a degree of empathy with your users and understanding exactly how you can solve their problems.
• The Golden Rules Of Bottom Navigation Design (11-02-16)
  Design is more than just good looks – something all designers should know. Design also covers how users engage with a product. Whether it’s a site or app, it’s more like a conversation. Navigation is a conversation. It doesn’t matter how good your site or app is if users can’t find their way around.
• The Hamburger Menu: a Tasty or Bland Design Trend? (11-01-16)
  The UI design landscape is always changing with new trends and technologies. In a past article we covered responsive navigation trends but in this post I want to focus specifically on one controversial trend: the hamburger menu.
• How To Design Text To Keep Visitors Engaged On Your Website (10-27-16)
  Digital typography is made for content consumption. The color, size, placement, and space surrounding text usually correlates with the content style. But in web design you have to consider how these text elements fit into the page so that they’re also easy to consume. In the past we’ve shared awesome font resources to help design pristine typographic layouts.
• What Qualifications Do You Need to Be a UX Designer? (10-25-16)
  UX designer is a pretty hot job title right now, and one which is set to become even more popular. CNN ranked it fourteenth in their top 100 jobs list, stating that the number of UX design positions is likely to rise by 18% over the next ten years.
• Why Formatted Data Fields Always Need Input Masks (10-18-16)
  In the world of forms, there are two types of data input found on text fields. There’s data input that has no format (characters only). Then there’s data input that has a format (characters and symbols). You should not treat both types of data input the same.
• Hyperlink Usability: Guidelines For Usable Links (10-10-16)
  Hyperlinks. Interacting with them is perhaps the most frequent action done by users every time they go online. A 2010 Nielsen report estimated that the average user visits 2,646 different web pages per day, each of which may have up to 100 hyperlinks on them. That is 88 webpages a day, and almost 900 links seen, if not clicked.
• Design Patterns For Pairing Typography Styles On The Web (10-05-16)
  Websites can go from good to great just from an improved font profile. The generic choices like Helvetica and Arial have been used so often that most visitors are immune to these bland typeface pairings.
• How to Practice Mindfulness in UX (10-03-16)
  UX professionals balance on the edge of art and science, blending analytical skills and knowledge of user behavior with the ability to generate fresh concepts and translate them into original design solutions. When a designer takes on a new project, there can be loads of data to sift through, politics between end-user needs and client expectations to navigate, and draining meetings to attend. This process can be challenging and stressful, which is actually counterproductive to maintaining our creative powers. When we find ourselves creatively depleted, or worse, doubting our competence and the value of our work, no one wins.
• Why UX Designers should embrace data (10-01-16)
  As a UX Designer specialized in e-commerce and optimization, using data is crucial to my work. Not using data seems silly to me. Why would you design something using only your own (limited) experience and gut feeling if you can use data of thousands of sessions of the site or app you are working on? This is my plea to all UX Designers out there: please use data. I will give you four reasons why you shouldn’t design without it.
• Everything You Need to Know About UX Sketching (09-28-16)
  For designers, the feeling is all too familiar. However, like any complicated problem with no clear solution, a smart process can make all the differences. This is where UX sketching comes in.
• Why the Footer Is the New Site Map (09-27-16)
  Years ago it was common practice to place a link to your sitemap in the footer navigation. Those days are over because the footer itself has become the new site map.
• How to stop designing things that won’t get built (09-27-16)
  After sitting down and whiteboarding things out with your product manager and a few engineers, you can’t wait to start cranking away on a new design. You spend hours designing and tweaking and wholeheartedly believing “Users will love this!” And then your designs never make it anywhere.
• Choosing the Right Prototyping Tool (09-22-16)
  When it comes to creating prototypes, so many tools and methods are out there that choosing one is no easy task. Which one is the best? Spoiler alert: There is no “best” because it all depends on what you need at the moment! Here I’ll share some insight into what to consider when you need to pick up a prototyping solution.
• Mobile Form Usability (09-15-16)
  Mobile users who use your app or site have a particular goal. Often the one thing that is standing between the user and his goal is a form. In fact, forms are often considered to be the final step of the journey to the completion of goals. That’s why it’s so important that users complete forms as quick as possible and without any confusion.
• How to pretend you’re a great designer (09-07-16)
  Don’t know how to justify your excessive use of animations, clever copy, or generic cute illustrations? Just throw the word “delight” in the mix! Talk about how you understand the user’s psychology–how you’re creating an experience people will love. Who cares if your solution is not functional, expensive to build, or if there’s no data to back up your intuition. Remind everyone that you’re building a lasting and emotional connection with the user.
• Face-Off Design: UX/UI Patterns And Branding (08-31-16)
  During the last few years, we have been witnessing a tremendous shift in the ways brands interact with their customers. The top-down communication style they used to have in the past changed to a continuous dialogue with consumers. The modern concept of branding is more than ever intertwined with experience design.
• Creativity Under The Microscope: Running A UI Design Critique (08-15-16)
  Criticism is easy. It seems like everybody has an opinion, but, as the author Harlan Ellison points out, "You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion." To become informed, though, requires exploration. Design critiques are an important part of any product exploration.
• Designing a User-Friendly Homepage Carousel (08-13-16)
  Carousels, image rotators, sliders, featured content modules, whatever you want to call them — they’re everywhere on the web. Carousels are hugely popular on e-commerce sites, especially on the homepage.
• The Ultimate UX Research Cheatsheet For Mobile Apps (08-12-16)
  Mobile is rapidly changing with new techniques for native apps and responsive websites. Designers have to keep up with these changes and follow trends that work to give users the best interaction possible. This all comes down to user experience and user engagement, two emerging areas that are becoming intertwined with interface design.
• What is UX design really? (08-11-16)
  One of the most common misconceptions people have is that User Experience Design is all about usability. It’s easy to see why – usability means that a product is both usable and useful.
• Tips for Creating a Truly Functional Mobile Experience (08-10-16)
  The need for a website to be mobile-friendly is undeniable. Mobile has already overtaken desktop in the number of users, and Google has made no bones about the fact that it awards brownie points for sites that are mobile friendly. For business owners hoping to make the most of their online presence, it is a matter of necessity to make their websites mobile-friendly.
• How To Measure Customer Experience (08-09-16)
  When was the last time you received an email asking for feedback? Or perhaps instead, the last time you were given a receipt with a “quick feedback request online”? Now ask yourself, when was the last time you truly took the time to fill out that survey?
• Developers “Own” The Code, So Shouldn’t Designers “Own” The Experience? (08-09-16)
  We’ve all been there. You spent months gathering business requirements, working out complex user journeys, crafting precision interface elements and testing them on a representative sample of users, only to see a final product that bears little resemblance to the desired experience.
• How to Avoid UX Gaps In Your Product (08-08-16)
  The first key to avoiding UX debt is to understand where it comes from, which helps you spot trouble and guard against it.
• UX Strategy – It Is All About The Experience (08-04-16)
  “Battle” is too strong a word. “Distraction”, may be better. I am referring to Customer Experience (CX) vs. User Experience (UX). And now that upstart, Customer Success has to come along.
• Analytics Software Needs a Serious UX Makeover (08-?-16)
  Analytics has become an increasingly competitive market, and it’s no wonder why. This type of platform is a goldmine for important insights that businesses can leverage to make better strategic decisions, which makes purchasing this type of software a critical investment.
• What the hell is “Rapid Prototyping”? (07-21-16)
  No seriously, I have no idea what it means. This term “rapid prototyping” has been bouncing around the UX community for some time and it was making me angry so I looked it up. It’s actually a term from our friends in the manufacturing community.
• Mood Boards In UX Design: Ignite Passion In Your Users (07-18-16)
  You know that feeling you get – the one that creeps up on you like rain in Summer, making you shudder from emotion? It happens when you get blindsided by something powerful, something meaningful, perhaps something from your past. It is entirely out of your control.
• 5 Simple UX Exercises That Will Change How Decision Makers Think (07-18-16)
  Say you’re a digital business owner or marketing executive and you want to know more about the UX field. You’ve already done your fair share of reading up on UX news and design trends, and you ask your UX staff or consultants frequently about how their workflow fits into your overall business plan. You may have even tried your hand at offering feedback to your UX staff on how you think the ultimate product or mockups should look and feel.
• How to Design a Walkthrough That Users Will Read (07-18-16)
  If a new app is a new product, then the walkthrough is the instruction manual. A walkthrough appears when new users open an app for the first time. They get a brief overview of the app’s features before they start using it. This is necessary so that new users can use the app without confusion.
• Considerations for Styling a Modal (07-18-16)
  A modal. A small box that pops up to tell you something important. How hard can it be? Wellllll. Medium hard, I'd say. There's quite a few considerations and a few tricky things to get just right. Let us count the ways.
• The Four Dimensions of Tone of Voice (07-17-16)
  A website’s tone of voice communicates how an organization feels about its message. The tone of any piece of content can be analyzed along 4 dimensions: humor, formality, respectfulness, and enthusiasm.
• Amazon vs Walmart : Whose search UX is more usable? (07-17-16)
  At its most basic, the role of the search engine results is to present items matching a given query. However, behind this simple brief, resides a layer of depth and complexity. There are lot more thinking and experimenting involved in making the search process worthy and engaging for the users. And all the more when we are talking about an industry such as the e-commerce industry.
• Don't You Just Hate When... (07-15-16)
  “Life’s not fair.” Your mother told you this. Actually, everyone’s mother told them this. And, as usual, Mom was right. Sometimes, despite our best efforts and intentions, things just go wrong. The key to succeeding is hidden in the corollary to this lesson: after each inevitable fall, pick yourself up, figure out why you tripped, and keep moving forward.
• 6 assumptions that will kill your mobile app design (07-14-16)
  User interactions have evolved so rapidly during the last few years that designers can barely keep up—making it tempting to use interaction design techniques from other media (or even legacy app design) when we build mobile applications.
• Mobile UX Design: Key Principles (07-12-16)
  The most important thing to keep in mind when designing a mobile app is to make sure it is both useful and intuitive. If the app is not useful, it has no practical value for user and no one has any reason to use it. If app is useful but requires a lot of time and effort, people won’t bother learning how to use it.
• Ten Requirements For Making Home Page Carousels Work For End Users (If Needed) (07-06-16)
  Are home page carousels actually helpful to users? Or are they simply popular because they are an easy tool for solving internal discussions in large organizations about who gets to put their banner on the home page?
• A Guide to Color and Conversion Rates (07-05-16)
  Color is one of the most powerful tools in the designer’s toolkit. It should be no surprise that different colors evoke different emotions and draw users attention. But if you ever tried to design a new project, you know how difficult is to decide on a color scheme that works well for it.
• Motion in UX Design (07-01-16)
  Motion in the world of design is used to describe spatial relationships, functionality, and intention with beauty and fluidity. Motion might sound like a big concept, but when used effectively it is subtle and natural. Thoughtful motion in design can enhance the user’s experience over traditional design elements.
• Mobile eCommerce: How to Design UX Search (06-28-16)
  You can’t sell a product that your customers can’t find. Search is a fundamental mobile activity and a critical element of building a profitable app or site. Users expect smooth in-app experiences when finding and learning about products and they typically make very quick judgments about app’s value based on the quality of one or two sets of search results.
• Explaining UX Design To Your Team (06-28-16)
  Unlike other roles in a startup or middle-sized tech company, the role of the UX designer is still unclear to many. Such is the newness of the field that you might very well be the first UX designer employed by your new firm.
• Why a Clock Widget Is Easier for Picking Time (06-28-16)
  Scheduling events and meetings are tasks that require time input on a form. But picking a time isn’t an easy task. Users have to scroll through a long list in a select menu. Research has shown that users often abandon forms with select menus.
• UX Testing For The Masses: Keep It Simple And Cost Effective (06-25-16)
  User experience design (UXD or UED) is the process of enhancing user satisfaction by improving the usability, accessibility, and pleasure provided in the interaction between the user and the product.
• How to Design Your Website for Better User Experience (06-22-16)
  According to the Statistic Brain Research Institute, in 2015, the attention span of humans averaged 8.25 seconds, down from 12 seconds in 2000. For website designers, this study is significant, in the sense that eight seconds is all you initially have to make site visitors understand your value proposition and convince them to stay on your site. More than that, and the chances of them being distracted skyrockets.
• Improving UX For Color-Blind Users (06-21-16)
  According to Colour Blind Awareness 4.5% of the population are color-blind. If your audience is mostly male this increases to 8%. Designing for color-blind people can be easily forgotten because most designers aren’t color-blind. In this article I provide 13 tips to improve the experience for color-blind people – something which can often benefit people with normal vision too.
• Why UX Designers Should Ditch the Sidebar in 2016 (06-20-16)
  The UX industry needs to shape up. How many sidebars must we create before we collectively realize how badly we need to ditch them. In an industry where the exchange of information is so crucial, it comes as no surprise that the sidebar has flourished. At its core, the sidebar is merely a collection of links – a hub, if you will, where additional information can be found.
• Accessibility is everyone’s job: a role-based model for teams (06-16-16)
  In order for projects to be truly accessible, the whole team needs to collaborate. But, who does what? In this post, Mark helps us unpack how each role can contribute to making something that works for everyone.
• The Art Of Meaningful UX Design (06-15-16)
  Marketeers, Consumer Product developers & Sales Communities would agree that getting your customers’ captive attention and being able to influence their behavior, or decision making is probably the hardest thing to achieve in today’s world. Experts in Content Marketing or Sales Communication have highlighted the importance of ‘engaging your customers effectively’ to move them along a ‘conversion funnel’.
• The Developer's UX Checklist (06-13-16)
  The increasing use of technology and enterprise digital transformation efforts have created a need for more IT professionals.
• Mobile UX Design: What Not To Do (06-12-16)
  Why do we install apps in the first place? To make our lives convenient. But when an app fails to fulfill this requirement, then it’s for certain that users will go elsewhere. Your app’s success is contingent on a combination of factors, but the overall mobile user experience tops them all. Great UX is what separates successful apps from unsuccessful ones.
• 6 UX Design Trends To Follow In 2016 (06-08-16)
  Last year, we have experienced a great revolution in the domain of UX design. As we had stated back then, the most significant trends in UX design are here to stay and are assumed to be followed this year as well.
• Why Users Abandon Forms with Select Menus (06-06-16)
  Form abandonment is like someone agreeing to meet up with you but then canceling last minute. Users who are interested in what a site offers have no trouble starting a form. But when it comes to completing it, they’ll have many reasons not to.
• Vagueness in Design (06-06-16)
  Within UX, successful communication of content through a navigation scheme is a proverbial challenge for designers. The words we choose, despite our best intentions, may fail for a variety of reasons, what philosophers call infelicities.
• The Current State Of Authentication: We Have A Password Problem (06-06-16)
  We have a lot of passwords to remember, and it’s becoming a problem. Authentication is clearly important, but there are many ways to reliably authenticate users – not just passwords. Passwords are written off as inconvenient and unavoidable, but even if true a few years ago, that’s not true today. Due to a combination of sensors, encryption and seasoned technology users, authentication is taking on new (and exciting) forms.
• Infinite Scrolling Best Practices (06-05-16)
  Infinite scrolling, sometimes called endless scrolling, is a technique that allowing users to scroll through a massive chunk of content with no finishing-line in sight. This technique simply keeps refreshing a page when you scroll down it.
• 7 Tips To Improve Mobile UX (06-03-16)
  There are a lot of elements that go into successful UX design, but here are 7 simple tips to improve mobile UX design to get you started.
• Hearing Voices: Utilizing Voice of the Customer Techniques to Create a Better Digital Product (05-31-16)
  What if companies sat down and had a conversation with their customers? What if companies actually listened and acted upon what they heard?
• Don’t Always Follow the Hype: Steer Clear of These Web Design Pitfalls (05-30-16)
  Like most cultural products, web design has its own zeitgeist. Every year sees a new crop of popular design components and features. Attitudes and trends change rapidly, especially with the fast pace of new technological developments. To stay relevant, web designers need to tune into innovations in web design, especially those that connect with current cultural and commercial moments. Some successes can’t be predicted, so it’s interesting to see how content discovery has evolved.
• Pillars of Engaging and Successful Mobile UX (05-27-16)
  A mobile phone is an intensely personal device and possession. We use them to make calls, send messages and share content that we like, all very intimate actions that are also highly user-centric. Naturally, mobile users expect a personalized browsing experience as well.
• Practical Tips for Taking Design Inspiration without Copying (05-26-16)
  Designers of all kinds rely on inspiration for their work in order to achieve their best results. Inspiration can come from just about anywhere, but for web designers who are online virtually all day it frequently comes from gallery sites, design blogs, or just websites that you come across in other ways. The amount of inspiration of this kind that is available can be a huge help when you are struggling with a project of your own, but one challenge that designers face is how to put that inspiration into practice while still creating something unique and of quality.
• Should all content be responsive? (05-26-16)
  In this screencast, Derek walks us through a couple of examples where traditional approaches to responsive content may actually hamper people from achieving their goals online. He proposes some alternative approaches that keep user experience top of mind.
• Designing for Content-Heavy Websites (05-25-16)
  Even though minimal website design is the trend right now, it is not always possible to summarize our information into succinct blurbs that fit nicely on the page. Some websites need robust content to convey value to their site’s visitors – but that does not mean they have to sacrifice style.
• UX Maturity: Where Does Your Company Fit? (05-24-16)
  If you have an understanding of UX and its importance to long-term business success, that’s great… but what if your CEO or upper management doesn’t feel the same way?
• Privacy Laws and Bad UX (05-24-16)
  Cookie notifications: those small boxes asking users to acknowledge that a site has cookies – those data packets that allow people to be identified and tracked. The notifications are widely reviled by designers, and users find them annoying, aggravating, or at best, easy to ignore. But they come from a good place – the very best intentions!
• Designing A Dementia-Friendly Website (05-17-16)
  Some well-established web design basics: minimize the number of choices that someone has to make; create self-explanatory navigation tools; help people get to what they’re looking for as quickly as possible.
• Web Design Checklist: Common Problems and How To Solve Them (05-13-16)
  Regardless of what type of website you’re developing (a blog, a portfolio site, an e-commerce site, etc.), the success of the site will hinge on being able to communicate effectively with visitors and readers. On the subject of communication, there are a number of potential website communication issues that need to be considered with this web design checklist.
• The Fundamental Concepts of Good UX (05-13-16)
  User Experience is an increasingly expansive discipline but the key concepts remain largely the same. These are some of the main things that contribute to the UX of your site and the things you need to consider when implementing a UX strategy.
• 8 Super Common Mistakes That Beginner Designers Make (05-12-16)
  Beginner web designers and developers frequently look at their creations and say things like “this kind of stinks, but I don’t know why!” or “this looks like the zombified version of a good design…”. Even if you have read a design theory book or two, it can be tough to create an entire seamless design at first. Heck, it can even be tough to create even one coherent section of a seamless design.
• Creating bulletproof headings (05-12-16)
  With some changes to the W3C guidelines on the horizon, Julie walks us through some best practices for headings, one of the web’s most humble-yet-powerful elements.
• Complete Beginner’s Guide to UX Research (05-10-16)
  In an industry devoted to the people who use our products, services, and applications, research is paramount. We ask questions. We take notes. We learn everything we can about the target audience, and then iteratively test our work throughout the design process.
• Never Show A Design You Haven’t Tested On Users (05-10-16)
  It isn’t hard to find a UX designer to nag you about testing your designs with actual users. The problem is, we’re not very good at explaining why you should do user testing (or how to find the time). We say it like it’s some accepted, self-explanatory truth that deep down, any decent human knows is the right thing to do. Like “be a good person” or “be kind to animals.” Of course, if it was that self-evident, there would be a lot more user testing in this world.
• Applying UX Principles to Create a Culture of Innovation (05-10-16)
  While corporate leaders may envy the innovative, adaptable cultures of startups, it can be difficult to instill a startup mentality across a large organization. Internal roadblocks like legacy systems, siloed employees and outdated corporate values can easily derail a cultural shift, no matter how badly your organization needs change.
• Improving Persona Usability For Goal-Oriented UX (05-09-16)
  A user persona is a powerful UX research tool critical to the UX design process. It provides immeasurable value by giving the UX designer rich insight into the mind of the representative user.
• The 23-Point UX Design Checklist (05-01-16)
  During the design process, some flaws in your product will go unnoticed. Those little (or sometimes big) things can do a lot to hurt the experience that the user has while using your software. We put together a list of points for you to check before the design is signed off.
• Website Forms Usability: Top 10 Recommendations (05-01-16)
  Follow these well-established — but frequently ignored — guidelines to ensure users can successfully complete your website forms.
• Responsive Website Testing: Resources for Testing Sites (04-28-16)
  Testing is a critical part of the responsive web design process. The purpose of using a responsive layout is to make the website useful on any type of device, but without extensive testing it’s not possible to know for sure how the site is behaving in different situations. Fortunately, there are a number of different tools and resources available that can help you to test your responsive designs. In this article we’ll take a look at some helpful tools that you may want to try for yourself.
• Analyzing the Effectiveness of Hamburger Menus in Web Design (04-25-16)
  Odds are you’ve seen the “hamburger menu” in the top corner of many of today’s mobile websites. It’s three lines stacked together to roughly form the shape of a hamburger. It was created as a website design feature to incorporate a site menu without taking up too much room.
• Best Practices for Accordion Menu in Web Design (04-19-16)
  The word “accordion” typically conjures a mental image of your favorite polka band. However that’s not what we are talking about when referring to accordion menu. Although polka music can offer a rip-snorting good time, the term is associated with something different in the realm of web design. User interface accordions might refer to menus, widgets, or content areas which expand like the musical instrument. These interfaces have grown a lot more popular in recent years with the expansion of JavaScript and more prominently jQuery.
• How Letterspacing Can Make All Caps Easier to Read (04-19-16)
  All caps text is like a spice, you don’t want to overuse it. A little can go a long way when you use it on content and menu headings to show contrast from regular body text. But when your headings contain more than a few words, users need to make an effort to read them. This is because all caps text is easy to spot, but hard to read.
• 6 Principles for Timeless Web Design (04-19-16)
  How do you stay relevant when your audience always changes? Just like fashion, film, and food, web design and UI are subject to an ever-changing set of standards and expectations. While you might sometimes want to cater to the crowd, having the know-how to create something that does the job and does it well is always good to have in your repertoire. Knowledge is power after all, and we all could use the power to craft a timeless web design.
• Embracing the Evolution Toward the Experience of Things (04-15-16)
  In the Experience of Things, everything that we use and interact with in our daily lives is starting to build a computing mesh around us.
• Less Is Still More: The Importance Of The Minimalist Approach To Web Design (04-13-16)
  Minimalism has been an increasingly popular trend in the web design world. Designers may be tempted by bolder, feature-rich design because it might seem like the best way to engage user attention. Research, however, suggests that this is not the case. In fact, the same research suggests that visual complexity affects a user’s perception of the site within 50 milliseconds of exposure. Understanding this fact about first impressions can guide you to making the most of that time.
• A Stronger Visual Cue for Text Fields (04-12-16)
  All clickable user interface elements need visual cues that signify clickability. Without cues, users won’t know to interact with them. Most buttons and links use color, location, and shape for a strong visual cue. But the only visual cue most text fields have is a 1-pixel border.
• The Best Enterprise UX Is the One You Never See (04-11-16)
  Whether developing software in the ecommerce, biotech, storage, or security industries, there are five philosophies that shape an approach to enterprise UX.
• Responsibility In Design (04-06-16)
  Until recently, the term design was short for industrial design, sophisticated furniture, and fancy cars. Previous generations experienced the world where thoughtful design was a distinctive quality of luxurious items, a world where those well-designed items were exclusively available to the elite.
• A Simple Web Developer’s Guide To Color (04-05-16)
  I’ve never been a fan of color theory. I think it’s because I’ve always been a bit hopeless at it. I’d love to be able to sit there, color wheel in hand, and pick out complementary, split-complementary and triad color schemes, impressing all of my friends, family and clients in the process.
• The 11 minute guide to a bulletproof UX strategy (04-04-16)
  The heart of great UX strategy lies in thorough research. Unfortunately, UX research is usually a mess. If you’re an outsider, you’re still getting to know everyone involved in the project at the same time you’re navigating which research activities to take on. If you’re an insider, it can be the same story.
• 9 Golden Rules that Every Web Designer Must Follow (04-04-16)
  The first rule is to not confuse your users. They are the most important part in your process. You should try to keep your call to actions and words similar from one page to the next. Users don’t have to wonder if some words, actions or situations mean what they should mean.
• 10 Type Rules for an Excellent User Experience (03-31-16)
  When it comes to websites and apps, good typography is more than just a pretty typeface. Letting has to be highly readable – and scannable – while providing a solid visual connection to the content.
• Why Fonts Matter To Your Brand (03-30-16)
  Without realizing it, we’re constantly being bombarded by advertising. Shop fronts, billboards, magazines and online ads are everywhere we look. With our modern world being so ad-drenched, how does a new company break through?
• How Does Culture Impact UX Design? (03-30-16)
  Over 3 billion people have access to the internet. This positive trend in global connectivity means that it’s becoming increasingly common for companies to design global web experiences. To do so effectively though, UX designers need to go beyond designing for seamless use and accessibility; they need to create a cross-cultural user experience.
• When Online Behavior Becomes Second Nature (03-30-16)
  LinkedIn’s messaging center recently shook up the function of the return key, causing users to make errors and feel apprehensive about future usage of the chat feature.
• 7 Errors to Avoid when Building a Landing Page (03-29-16)
  The landing page is the first things that users see. It is the path that allows further contact between the site owner and the visitor. In the best case scenario, it will allows marketers to collect the potential customers’ personal data.
• Design for Real Life (03-29-16)
  You’ve seen the fallout when digital products aren’t designed for real people. You understand the importance of compassion. And you’ve learned how to talk with users to uncover their deepest feelings and needs. But even with the best intentions, it’s still easy for thoughtful design teams to get lost along the way.
• UI/UX Design Glossary: Steps to Usability (03-29-16)
  Practice shows that structured data is a great way to work optimization and that is one of the reasons why old good stuff like phone directories, dictionaries, vocabularies and glossaries, databases and sets of formulas are still applicable and convenient for everyday use. Order and organization make it easy and fast to find everything needed. So, today we decided to make a step to this sort of optimization providing the first set of definitions for some basic terms in the field of UI/UX design.
• How payment structure affects user behavior (aka timing is everything) (03-28-16)
  Carefully designing for how and when your customers pay for your product yields enormous benefits to their conversion and retention. That sounds useful, right?
• Tips for Creating Beautiful and Engaging UI (03-28-16)
  When it comes to UI design, there’s a lot in the name: The most obvious component of such a design is the user. A UI designer’s Number 1 priority is to understand what a user expects from an interface and to anticipate how the user will use it.
• Front-End Style-Guides: Definition, Requirements, Component Checklist (03-27-16)
  Front-end style-guides help efficient design and testing, and enforce UI consistency. We present 8 style-guide requirements and 25 common components.
• Privacy Guidelines For Designing Personalization (03-25-16)
  For interaction designers, it’s becoming common to encounter privacy concerns as part of the design process. Rich online experiences often require the personalization of services, involving the use of people’s information.
• The Differing Roles of the UX Designer (03-23-16)
  Due to the newness of the field and the relative ignorance still surrounding the term “UX Designer,” different companies expect vastly different things from the same job.
• What Everyone Ought to Know About User Experience Design (03-22-16)
  Your audience is the most important aspect of your digital marketing campaign. A trend you’ll see continue to rise in 2016 and beyond is designing a user experience. As you’re designing a website or mobile app for your brand, ask yourself if your users will have a memorable experience and whether your message will leave an impact.
• The Ultimate Guide To Creating User-centered Content (03-21-16)
  After Google rolled out its Panda update, Hummingbird, and most recently the RankBrain AI learning machine, it became obvious to content creators and SEOs that Google is driving towards user-centered content.
• Usability Testing Of Mobile Applications: A Step-By-Step Guide (03-21-16)
  The mobile market is huge and growing at a very fast rate. With an estimated 4.5 billion subscribers worldwide, it is forecasted that the number of mobile phones will surpass the world population.
• UX is Not Design (03-17-16)
  The effectiveness of a site is dependent on one key factor: user experience. But what does designing a user experience actually mean? The ‘design’ in ‘UX design’ doesn’t refer to visual aesthetics. The increase in job titles that have both ‘UX’ and ‘UI’ in them is lending to the confusion that UX and UI are the same thing, and that UX is solely about the process of designing a user interface.
• When words are not enough (03-15-16)
  The frequently-raised objection when it comes to quality research, UX research included, is that the conclusions are drawn based on the participants’ declarations. However, there exist some methods which allow one to grasp the real behaviors of participants, and they can be easily implemented into the research scenario.
• The ROI of UX: convert the skeptics with this infographic (03-11-16)
  Greater focus on UX is still held back by the belief that it doesn't hold value for the bottom line. So our friends at UserTesting.com helped us bust that myth.
• Sweat the Small Stuff: The importance of page-level content and your style guide (03-09-16)
  Thinking about essential issues in content design and adhering to a style guide helps ensure your content is both correct and consistent.
• Tools And Resources For A More Meaningful Web Typography (03-08-16)
  It’s the small details that make a project shine. Solid typography, well-crafted with attention and care is one of them. A harmonious visual rhythm, typographic subtleties like soft caps, margin outdents or the correct use of hyphens and dashes — there are a lot of things that add up to it.
• Mouse Tracking Is The Only Valid Data Visualisation Tool For UX Designers (03-07-16)
  Chewing through a large dataset of numbers is like eating stale cereal – boringly unpleasant. Yet, when evaluating the User Experience of websites or web apps we do not only focus on numbers, since there is other data and insights that usually needs analysis.
• Probability: A UX Designer’s Second-Best Friend (03-07-16)
  In UX design, applying a solid sense of probability often determines whether we come out ahead or behind.
• Hierarchy of Trust: The 5 Experiential Levels of Commitment (03-06-16)
  Sites must meet users' basic trust needs before they demand that visitors enter information or engage with them. There are 5 distinct levels of user commitment, each with their own design requirements for users to give a website what it wants from them.
• Common arguments for ignoring UX (and how to destroy them) (03-03-16)
  Many designers know the value of UX, but are often constrained by time, budget or plain skepticism of its benefits by their stakeholders. Here’s how we respond.
• Getting (Dis)Connected: Shallow Interaction Design For Deeper Human Experiences (03-03-16)
  Our objects are becoming increasingly connected. My watch is connected to my phone, which is connected to the speaker in my living room, which I can also connect (or not) to the speaker in my bedroom. When I go out to dinner with friends, we have to make a concerted effort to keep our handheld and wearable devices silenced or otherwise placed “in the background” of our social experience, so that we can focus on each other.
• Infinite Scrolling, Pagination Or “Load More” Buttons? Usability Findings In eCommerce (03-01-16)
  What is the best UX pattern to display products on an e-commerce website: pagination, a “Load more” button or infinite scrolling? At Baymard Institute, we’ve conducted several year-long large-scale usability studies of more than 50+ leading e-commerce websites. We tested (among other things) these three design patterns for loading products, both on desktop and mobile.
• Four Things Great Designers Care About (02-29-16)
  Whether you’re a seasoned professional or a new graduate, all great designers care about four main things.
• 5 Ways User Experience Design Can Increase Website Conversion and Sales (02-29-16)
  What does a 3-year-old and your website visitors have in common? When a 3-year-old doesn’t get what he wants, he goes sit at the corner and sulk. When your visitors don’t get what they are looking for, they click away and never come back again.
• Smart UX: Use Cases (02-29-16)
  Triggers. Actors. Flow. Complexity. These are words that come to mind when we hear someone say “use case“. Use cases are, of course, an irreplaceable and necessary facet of the software development lifecycle (SDLC).
• 5 first steps to launching a career in UX (02-27-16)
  So, you want to get started in UX. Excellent. Welcome, we need all the talent we can get. But before you learn the ins and outs of the UX design process, how does a complete beginner get started? After all, UX is all things to all people and you’ll have to become an expert in human research, prototyping, visual design and front-end code, right? And those are just the hard skills.
• 10 Most Common Web Design Mistakes Small Businesses Make (02-24-16)
  A unique and compelling website isn’t an option anymore. Having a poor site causes businesses to lose customers, and that is money out the door. Unfortunately, this occurs with an alarming frequency. Many small business owners design their own websites to save money and have more control over the project.
• Why is Vertical Rhythm an Important Typography Practice? (02-24-16)
  You probably heard of the term Vertical Rhythm if you researched a little about typography on the web. It’s one of the most important practices when working with typography. I’ve used Vertical Rhythm on all my sites ever since I read about it.
• 5 UX Fundamentals of iOS 9 (02-24-16)
  By adding a host of updates to iOS 9, Apple is taking great strides in making its devices easier to use.
• Why Circular Profile Pictures Accentuate Faces (02-23-16)
  What shape are your app’s profile pictures? Chances are they’re square. A square isn’t the best shape to use because it makes it hard to visually process faces. A circular profile picture works better because it accentuates faces.
• 10 Reasons Why Your Design Skills May Seem Lame (02-22-16)
  The design field is pretty crowded. If this is your “calling,” then you have to accept that you are in competition with a lot of creatives that may know more than you. You have to accept that you will have to take all of that creativity you have and translate it into products that others love. And you have to accept that you will need to constantly practice your craft, learn from others, and adopt a path of continual self-education.
• The UX Spiral Drives Consumerization of Everything (02-22-16)
  In the UX spiral, improvements in UX in the B2B and B2C spheres continue to bounce off each other, ratcheting up people's expectations of what makes an application good.
• Customer Experience Is the Future of Design (02-19-16)
  Adopting practices that elevate the customer experience will undoubtedly produce a return on investment and provide a steady foundation for your brand.
• Our first ever UX survey results – here’s what you told us (02-18-16)
  Not only were we flooded with responses, we uncovered 5 major insights about where the design industry is headed, and what businesses want to know about UX.
• How to Increase Website Engagement With a Story (02-18-16)
  What every website will have in common is the broad mission – website engagement. You want people to click the links, expand all the menus, and look through the tabs. At the same time, every website is different: the organization might be a commercial business or a non-profit organization. It might be intended for processing customer transactions or attracting new leads.
• 5 Simple Questions to Ask When Looking for User Feedback (02-17-16)
  You can’t make the first impression twice, right? Of course, and that’s one of the reasons why you put so much time and effort working on a website’s design. You want people to like the website and stay on it as long as possible. But design is a complicated issue, and many goals must be aligned to result in what you would call a successful website.
• Succeeding as a New Leader in Customer Experience (02-17-16)
  Guiding your organization to achieve an experience-first mindset means understanding your context, building connections, and communicating your intention.
• Smart UX: High­-Fidelity Wireframes (02-15-16)
  As a UX designer, you’ve grown accustomed to your daily routine: a bit of research here, some interaction design there. And if crafting wireframes on a daily basis has started to take it’s toll on you, try this for a change of pace…
• Are Your Personas Outdated? Know When It’s Right To Revise (02-14-16)
  Up-to-date personas result in a better UX design process. Data from 156 companies provide a baseline to understand how often to revise personas. Knowing when and how frequently to make updates will help you craft personas that are both accurate and effective.
• UI Animation – An Ideal Tool for Immersive UX (02-12-16)
  Used in the right context and settings, animations can add meaning to a user interface and offer immersive interactivity as well.
• Interaction Design: The Final Ingredient to a Perfect Website (02-12-16)
  If you have a website for your company or are trying to promote your personal brand through social media, odds are you know a couple things about the Internet. One, you’re probably aware that a lot of people use the internet, to the tune of 168 million DVDs’ worth of information exchanged online on a…
• Supporting the keyboard for mobile (02-11-16)
  Keyboard support means you have the freedom to use your hardware in the way that is most efficient and effective for you, which is really the whole point of inclusive design. But how do we get to keyboard accessibility for touch interfaces?
• A Growth Hacker’s Perspective on UX (02-11-16)
  Over the course of the last few months I’ve been working as a growth hacker for Usabilla. And working in a company that’s crazy about UX design has taught me a lot. Most of all, it’s taught me the importance of UX in a company’s growth strategy.
• Delight Your Users – A Definitive Guide to User Testing (02-10-16)
  Uncover the value of usability tests, learn how to perform one and how to create a usability workshop with your own team—Enjoy!
• Don’t Take That Tone With Me (02-09-16)
  Take user emotion into account when writing, and your content becomes more nuanced and empathetic. You can then provide a user experience that’s admirably human.
• Usability Testing of Icons (02-07-16)
  To ensure that people understand the meaning and purpose of icons, conduct multiple types of tests at various stages of the product-development cycle.
• eCommerce UX Mistakes That Drive Us Nuts and Crush Customer Confidence (02-04-16)
  You’ve spent countless hours tweaking your CSS, testing your responsive breakpoints, and checking site speed. You know the site like the back of your hand. Your eCommerce site is beautifully designed, but is it user-friendly?
• You Need Both Parts of the Digital Brain Working Together (02-03-16)
  Two separate entities are normally involved in creating a digital product. Traditionally these two entities, creative digital agencies and developers, create a product in a four-step, serial fashion.
• 8 habits of veteran UX designers (02-03-16)
  One of the fables that floats around UX teams is that of the US space program and its quest for a pen that could be used in anti-gravity.
• The Price Of Not Using UX Patterns (02-02-16)
  When users are accustomed to using a pattern, even a minor change in that pattern can be very expensive in performance terms.
• Best Practices for Content Planning in UX Design (01-28-16)
  Which came first, the content or the design? This contemporary take on the “chicken and egg” casualty dilemma represents a common frustration among content and design teams when it comes to building a new experience. Both depend on each other, but where do you begin?
• How to Design Delightful UX Through the Power of Delay (01-27-16)
  Ever wondered how your business' payment structure might affect your customer's experience? Discover how you can use the power of delay to power your UX.
• Connecting Your Tools with the User Experience (01-27-16)
  The role of the designer requires a critical lens toward decision-making and the appropriate use of technology to solve problems.
• Usability Of Beacon Technology At Conferences (01-27-16)
  Beacon technology is a unique and modern tool in the world of marketing. A beacon is a small device that connects with a mobile app, determines a user’s location on a micro¬-local scale, and delivers content to the user, based on this location. Delivering content using beacons is still in the very early stages, as it has not yet hit the mainstream media.
• The Design Principles of Simplicity (01-26-16)
  We live surrounded by millennials that are growing up with extensive access to mobile devices and laptops. It is a common thought that millennials are not brand loyal. Nonsense! In…
• Guidelines For Designing And Building A Multilingual Website (01-25-16)
  In an increasingly connected world, multilingual websites are becoming more common. In fact, savvy companies are finding they can distinguish themselves quite a bit by appealing to a diverse group of readers. However, there’s currently no easy way to create multilingual sites.
• Combining UX Design And Psychology To Change User Behavior (01-25-16)
  Have you ever wondered why your users do not interact with your product the way you hope? Persuading people to perform a particular action, like signing up or buying a product, is a challenge in most industries, especially when you want that action to be performed repeatedly.
• Blog Design: What Should Be Above the Fold? (01-22-16)
  When designing any type of website, you need to keep in mind what visitors will see immediately upon arriving at the site. Whatever is visible without scrolling down is said to be “above the fold.”
• Designing For Explicit Choice (01-21-16)
  Of all the things that have been known to keep me awake at night, one of the repeat offenders is thinking of times when I’ve said the totally wrong thing to a person. That embarrassment of putting my foot in my mouth or just rubbing someone the wrong way tends to linger long past the initial moment.
• Good Interaction Design = Good UX (01-20-16)
  UX is no longer just a concern resigned to technical teams; it’s now a focus that transcends departments as more and more businesses are realizing the importance that good UX has on the success of their websites, products and services.
• How Good UX Can Make Your Users Safer (01-20-16)
  Until the safe Web comes, we must be increasingly savvy in how we shape secure experiences—let's dive into the struggle and share insights to make it better.
• The Anatomy of a Minimalistic Web Design (01-19-16)
  Many of us have an appreciation for an attractive, yet simple, design. And since this is the case, I’ve taken a look at what makes minimalistic designs successful and I’d like to share my thoughts here. I know that not everyone likes these types of designs, so your opinions of what is good design may will differ from mine.
• Group User Testing: The Power of Focus (01-18-16)
  Ever wonder why the navigation (URL) bar on your smartphone’s browser is located at the top of the screen, rather than at the bottom, where your thumb can easily reach it?
• Hi-Fi Prototyping : Design Is Our Muse, Code Is Our Medium (01-15-16)
  Prototyping facilitates rapid iteration and fail-fast (and learn-fast) experimentation, and helps the whole product team push technical limits.
• Single Page Websites – Benefits and Drawbacks? (01-14-16)
  Websites are changing from year to year and web design now is quite different now. In the past, designers used to create complex websites with a lot of content and pages even for a single product or particular service.
• Labeling Form Elements (01-12-16)
  One context in which providing the correct labels for elements can be crucial is in HTML forms. Because users are interacting with forms more directly unlike with some UI elements, it is important that each form widget - input, textarea, select etc. - is correctly labeled.
• Using Proto-content for a Better User Experience (01-12-16)
  Content first is all well and good, but how do you get the content for a design prototype? Author Rob Mills, from Gather Content, walks us through a number of great ways to create, borrow, and make do without proto-content.
• Who Moved My (Virtual) Cheese? : The Power of Understanding Mental Models When Designing Websites (01-11-16)
  Human beings are creatures of habit, and once we have a model for how a certain space should look in our head, finding that model flipped on its head can disorient us.
• 9 Ways to Gauge Your Visitors’ Experience (01-11-16)
  One of the most important factors in the success of a website is the visitors’ opinions and experiences. A site that is liked by visitors will typically be successful, while those that aren’t liked by visitors will struggle.
• Internet of Things (IoT): The UX Challenges (01-11-16)
  Do you like fantasy movies? If you don’t, it’s about time to start watching them, because what we have seen in sci-fi and fantasy films in the last decade is getting real with every new technology advancement. Everyday things around us are becoming smarter, sometimes even smarter than ourselves. And when you think about it in perspective it is actually more...
• 10 Reasons Why Web Projects Fail (01-06-16)
  Nowadays every project uses some sort of CMS. Instead of painting a canvas in the old days of HTML, the requirement is to build software applications that need to follow more traditional development approaches. If the project is coded improperly,…
• 4 clues your design neglects the user (01-06-16)
  I’ll explain the most common frustrations from UX designers I heard throughout my interviews and how we can bring users back to the forefront in our design process. Here are the four clues that your design is neglecting the user, along with suggested solutions.
• Improve Your Customer’s Experience With Experience Mapping (01-06-16)
  A unique process to identify customer pain points, so you can know where to focus your design and marketing efforts.
• Millennials as Digital Natives: Myths and Realities (01-03-16)
  Millennials have high expectations about user interfaces and are confident in their skills, but they’re error prone and their tendency to multitask reduces their task efficiency.
• Common Reasons a Website is Unsuccessful (01-01-16)
  If you are planning or building a new website, you are obviously hoping for some type of success. Of course, success can mean any number of things, and each website’s success should be determined by the needs and desires of its owners and creators. Some websites exist strictly to provide information to visitors.
• Soft Skills for UX Designers (12-30-15)
  Being an effective designer means more than just creating great designs for the user. You need to learn to create the right design for your users and your team. Over time the effective designer learns to evaluate their work not by the quality of their design, but by the impact of what actually ships. That’s what makes the effective designer valuable, because a great design that sits on the shelf doesn’t solve real problems.
• Even The Best User Experience Is A Failure Without Good Customer Experience (12-30-15)
  Although user experience and customer experience are absolutely different notions, they have never been closer. The difference between them lies in the fact that customer experience is actually a sum of all the experiences that a person has from interacting with your brand, team, website, app, etc.
• Tick-Tock: How the UX of Wait Experiences Can Positively Impact Users (12-28-15)
  Waiting is inevitable, but it's possible to create a delightful wait experience that has your users feeling like the best things come to those who... wait.
• 4 Reasons Why You Should Invest in UX (12-23-15)
  Most companies know they should be investing in UX but many are still unsure why. What’s the real value of UX, and how can you justify the need from a business perspective? We’ve listed 4 of the main reasons why spending time, money and effort on UX now is actually good for long-term success. Which of these would be most important to your business?
• 5 Common Challenges Faced By UI Designers (12-16-15)
  Everyone else can split hair all they want, and they may be right. Perhaps I’m generalizing. But UI design is no different than web design, at least not in the Design-Utopia of my dreams. The UI ‘niche’ (which used to be strictly software/electronic products domain) has extended way beyond those confines.
• 5 UX best practices for a stunning website (12-15-15)
  Our sense of vision is the strongest pathway to deliver a memorable experience. As such, whether you’re a web or UX designer, you must master visual storytelling if you want to connect emotionally with users.
• Why Passphrases Are More User-Friendly Than Passwords (12-15-15)
  A user’s account on a website is like a house. The password is the key, and logging in is like walking through the front door. When a user can’t remember their password, it’s like losing their keys. When a user’s account is hacked, it’s like their house is getting broken into.
• UX Design: UI/UX Designers Need to Have an Inquisitive Mind (12-11-15)
  Mike Locke talks about the mindset a UI/UX Designer needs to have each day. Always be thinking about the end-user.
• Top 20 User Experience Blogs and Resources of 2015 (12-09-15)
  Great designers are great students. We learn from our peers, from our mentors, and from all the resources available to us today. It’s a great time to be a user experience designer.
• 7 Factors that Separate Good Websites from Bad Websites (12-06-15)
  Most of us naturally form opinions about the websites we visit. Some of them we love so much that we come back several times a week, and others leave us with a bad experience that causes us to never return.
• What Makes Someone Leave Your Website? (12-06-15)
  Part of having a successful website is attracting visitors. Keeping those visitors on your site, however, is another topic altogether.
• 11 Leading Tools for Free Website Analytics (12-06-15)
  Every website owner or marketer needs to know what is going on with their website and visitors to know how to improve their results. Website analytics tools can provide data and show trends that will help you to know what to do to see the results improve over time.
• Adobe Says Responsive UX is Evolving (12-04-15)
  Responsive design is something that is always up for discussion, it affects the design process from concept to creation.
• Best Practices for Responsive UX (12-03-15)
  Responsive design is here to stay, with the huge diversity of devices and screen sizes only set to increase. Google favourably indexes mobile-friendly design, so there are more reasons than ever to take on this approach. In a 2014 study it was estimated that only 15% of sites were fully responsive.
• How to Do a UX Review (12-03-15)
  A UX review is where an expert goes through a website looking for usability and experience problems and makes recommendations on how to fix them.
• UX Design IS NOT Rocket Science! (HCI Degree Not Required) (12-03-15)
  Mike Locke rants about how UX Design is not rocket science and how you don’t need a degree in Human Factors or Human Computer Interaction (HCI) to be a good UX Designer.
• 10 Realities of Designing Websites for Clients (12-01-15)
  As a designer, working for clients is much different than designing a site for yourself. There are obviously pros and cons, but here are ten things that I have found to be true.
• The Future of Motion in UX Design (12-01-15)
  Design is coming to life in ways never seen before. That’s according to Kharis O’Connell, the CEO and founder of HUMAN, a Vancouver-based product and design studio focused on emerging platforms. Much of the company’s work is rooted in wearable technologies, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), where motion plays a crucial role in how we interact with technology. In fact, it will change it forever.
• A Guide To Simple And Painless Mobile User Testing (12-01-15)
  The incredible growth of mobile and the proliferation of mobile devices has made the UX designer’s job more challenging and interesting. It also means that user-testing mobile apps and websites is an essential component of the UX toolkit.
• 5 Steps to a More Engaging Website (12-01-15)
  The internet has become a very interactive environment for users. Websites need to be specifically built in a way that captures the attention of visitors and keeps them coming back, or they will quickly leave to go somewhere else.
• 10 UX Tips For Your Next Website Redesign (11-30-15)
  You know a user experience (UX) design is successful when you can’t tell there’s a user experience. When a website’s design is so fluid and intuitive that visitors can easily find the information they need without frustration, it’s a success.
• UX Design: Task Analysis (11-30-15)
  In this video Mike describes what “Task Analysis” is as it relates to UX Design. It's an important step in UX Design not many people talk about.
• 5 Skills That Boost Your Design Career (11-29-15)
  While I have never been a web designer, over the years I have commissioned a good deal of web design and worked very closely with hundreds of designers. In most cases the designers had excellent artistic abilities and many had years of experience.
• 21 Factors that Influence the First Impression of Your Website’s Visitors (11-29-15)
  When a new visitor comes to your website for the first time an initial impression will be formed pretty quickly. A good first impression will drastically increase the chances of that visitor returning again, and a bad first impression will be difficult to overcome.
• The Latest Statistics Proving the Validity of UX Design (11-27-15)
  User Experience (UX) is not a new concept, it has been a working part of some of the greatest and most successful design, especially when it comes to digital design. Weather it be mobile apps, websites, software or anything involving a user’s interaction, the experience should always be taken in mind.
• How Your Work Environment Can Influence Your Designs (11-26-15)
  Sometimes, as web and digital designers, we can get trapped in our little world of computers and software, attempting to work out the solution to our clients’ design problems, but failing to make any real breakthroughs.
• UX Factors That Affect Your Website’s SEO Rankings (11-25-15)
  When starting a website or blog, the user experience needs to be in the forefront of our minds. We can tweak code and employ algorithms until we’re blue in the face, but ultimately our search engine rankings reflect how well we provide our readers with a quality experience across all aspects of the site.
• Frameworks (11-24-15)
  Over the past few years, we’ve been learning how to adapt our layouts to the infinite canvas of the web. Our sites can be viewed on any size screen, at any time, and responsive design is one approach that lets us accommodate the web’s variable shape.
• Rolling Out Responsive (11-24-15)
  I wish I could tell you there was one true path to rolling out a responsive redesign successfully. But from talking to dozens of organizations, it’s clear that the process by which large organizations go responsive varies widely. Many different approaches will work—but you need to understand the benefits and risks of each approach.
• Designing to Save Time on Maintenance (11-22-15)
  If you’ve ever tried to redesign a website (especially one that was designed by someone other than yourself) you know how frustrating it can be. Even performing routine maintenance can be difficult if you don’t spend a lot of time on the site and you’re not familiar with the structure.
• Methods for Improving UX with Motion Design (11-22-15)
  Animation in apps has taken on a new and improved meaning. Unlike the flashy, confusing website animations of the old days, new animation is clean, smooth, and easy to navigate.
• How To Write Inspiring Job Descriptions For UX (11-17-15)
  To attract motivated designers and user researchers, keep your eye on the why. What’s the why? It’s the underlying purpose that brings you and your employees together. Why the why? Because if you focus only on what you need, then you run the risk of filtering down merely to an adequate match for the list of skills needed for defined tasks; however, if you lead with why a candidate would want to work with you each day, then you might just attract the best fit for executing your company’s mission.
• Designing with Great UI Style Guidelines in Mind (11-17-15)
  Committing to a UI style guide is one of the best ways to preserve great design. Some of the best brands maintain a great website and consistency after multiple updates through an impeccable UI style guide. Learn by example what a good UI style guide looks like from some of the best digital brands in the world. Below are some of the important standards to keep in mind and learn to work with when following an Interface-design style guide.
• Seven Things Your Business Website Must Have (11-16-15)
  Some free website hosting services, such as geocities and tripod, will provide you with a free domain name that is an extension of their domain. Any business that hopes to have a professional internet presence should purchase its own domain name. They can be purchased from GoDaddy.com for less than $20 per year.
• Legibility, Readability, and Comprehension: Making Users Read Your Words (11-15-15)
  Users won’t read web content unless the text is clear, the words and sentences are simple, and the information is easy to understand. You can test all of this.
• Importance & Value of Prototyping in UI/UX Design (11-13-15)
  In this video Mike talks about the importance and value of prototyping and why you should list it as a skill on your resume.
• Web Design Trends and Predictions for 2016 (11-13-15)
  Well, it is this time of the year when web designers are starting to ponder about what is going to be trendy and prevailing in web design in the year to come. Every year, the design industry is changing and this change is usually triggered by technological advances and human interaction.
• The difference between customer experience and user experience (11-12-15)
  The customer, the user — isn’t that the same person? Physically they are the same person, but humans aren’t made up of just one attribute. Our brains function in two ways, often at the same time. The left side of our brain handles language, analysis and figures. It likes things rational and in sequence. The right side of our brains handles creativity, imagination, relationships, and emotions. It’s the side of the brain that helps us form strong emotional attachments to people, animals and even things.
• How We Hold Our Gadgets (11-03-15)
  Where do hands and fingers fall on the device? This question is the linchpin for every form factor this book examines, and the answer tells you how to design your layout for comfort and efficiency. Since we hold phones, phablets, tablets, and laptops very differently, it’s no surprise that each of these touchscreen variations has its own UI needs.
• From Pages to Patterns: An Exercise for Everyone (11-03-15)
  When people think in terms of pages, it might seem natural for component design and page design to occur in tandem. But this can undermine a team’s ability to name components and build a shared vocabulary.
• 9 responsive design mistakes you don’t want to make (10-28-15)
  As explained in UX Design Trends 2015 & 2016, responsive Web design has become the industry’s recommend approach for supporting multiple screen sizes and devices. But not all responsive sites are created equally.
• How To Read a Client E-mail (10-27-15)
  Q: I still get anxious whenever I get an e-mail from a client. Especially an e-mail with feedback in it. And the weird thing is — I’m the one who asked for the feedback! But when I open one of those e-mails, all I see is a giant wall of changes I need to make. So I avoid opening it. What can I do?
• 5 Ways UX Matters in Everyday Life (10-25-15)
  While user experience sometimes takes a backseat to other concerns when it comes to getting a product to market, it should be at the forefront if you want to give your customers a great brand experience. Researchers estimate that by 2020, user experience will overtake price and product as the determining factor in purchasing decisions.
• Object-Oriented UX (10-20-15)
  In June 2012, while working at CNN.com, I was tasked with designing the user experience of election night. The next five months of my life would be dedicated to that single night—but success to me had nothing to do with who won. I was concerned with findability, data visualization, a shape-shifting canvas, and how the hell mouse-over flyouts were going to work on an iPhone.
• What is the secret to UX? (10-19-15)
  One of the questions that I get asked is “What is your thinking during the UX process” or how do you translate User Profiles into tangible things such as “Screens.”
• Adobe Project Comet, a Possible Replacement for Adobe Fireworks (10-16-15)
  In this video Mike shares his opinion on the new Adobe UX Designer app called “Project Comet”. Is it a replacement for Adobe Fireworks?
• Interaction Design Mistakes That Drive Us Nuts (10-14-15)
  Interaction design can separate the quality sites from the rest of the crowd – if done well. If, however, there are glaring errors in the designs, it will only serve to irritate and frustrate the very people you’re trying to impress.
• Good User Experience Design is Good for Business (10-13-15)
  A business can offer the very best product or service, however if its website is poorly designed, a large number of potential customers will be lost. As more and more businesses are investing in good user experience design it is now becoming a user expectation.
• Why UX design patterns work and how to use them (10-13-15)
  The web's been around for more than 20 years, giving us ample time to discover user experience problems — in fact, to discover "user experience" at all — and invent solutions.
• How to determine when customer feedback is actionable (10-13-15)
  One of the riskiest assumptions for any new product or feature is that customers actually want it. Although product leaders can propose numerous ‘lean’ methodologies to experiment inexpensively with new concepts before fully engineering them, anything short of launching a product or feature and monitoring its performance over time in the market is, by definition, not 100% accurate. That leaves us with a dangerously wide spectrum of user research strategies, and an even wider range of opinions for determining when customer feedback is actionable.
• Psychology Of Color To Improve Site Conversion (10-05-15)
  Studying the psychology of color is crucial for maximizing your site’s web design. Using the right colors can help put your customers in the frame of mind that compels them to take action. Color has the power to improve conversions by grabbing customers’ attention and triggering the right emotions for sales.
• Why Great UX is Everybody’s Business (09-24-15)
  When you or I have a problem, it’s pretty easy for us to imagine a solution. And that solution is filtered through our experiences and responsibilities. So if I’m a Business Analyst, for example, I may look to my statistical research for answers.
• Privacy is UX (09-22-15)
  Government snooping. Identity theft. Sale of personal data. Privacy is out there in a big way. But it’s not in here, meaning on most product development teams.
• Hello, My Name is <Error> (09-08-15)
  Whenever I had to take standardized tests in high school, I would get anxious over the easiest part: filling out my name.
• The Difference Between UX and UI Design (08-17-15)
  How many times have we heard the statement that ‘web design is dead?’ While catchy, it stems from the fact that the profession that what was once referred to as ‘web design’ nowadays doesn’t consist of a single skill (design) but actually encompasses a number of skills...
• Personalization: The Pillar of the Mobile User Experience (07-21-15)
  Giving users content tailored to their interests, needs, and location is the key to making the most of mobile technology.
• The 4 Essential UX Documents Every Designer Needs (07-08-15)
  When it comes to UX documentation, wireframes and prototypes are certainly among the most important. But that’s just the beginning. We’ve actually found four other documents to be extremely practical for everyday design.
• UX: a Process or a Task? (05-26-15)
  For some, UX is associated with process, rather than a specific job or activity. The “UX process” is the steps taken by a design team in order to create… something. For others, UX is a job, or a responsibility that feeds into many jobs, or perhaps it’s just a fancy word for “design.”
• Design user research explained for everyone (05-26-15)
  The most relevant source of inspiration and considerations when designing things are people. This inspiration can be deeper than understanding what people do, why they do it and what they say they need; it is ultimately about understanding what they truly value.
• Designing For Explicit Choice (05-25-15)
  If you’re a UX designer, you’ve probably designed a lot of forms and web (or app) pages in which the user needs to choose between options. And as a designer, you’re likely familiar with best practices for designing forms. Certainly, much has been written and discussed about this topic. So, you probably know all about how best to label and position form fields and so on for optimal usability.
• If You Do Nothing Else: DIY UX Research Tips (05-24-15)
  Dear small, scrappy start-ups and companies with no budget to hire a UX researcher: when you conduct UX research in-house, if nothing else, consider these tips to get the quality feedback you urgently need.
• The 10 Commandments of Good Form Design on the Web (05-22-15)
  From font sizes to information clarity, Johan takes us through 10 Do’s and Dont’s that every designer should take note of when creating an input form.
• The Value of UX Research in Product Development (05-15-15)
  When we talk about user experience, we quite often end up discussing UX Design. Some may even refer to UX and UX Design as a same thing, which they are not. Today I would like to draw your attention to the “pre-story” of amazing and usable design — user experience research.
• 9 Pieces of UX Advice I Stole From People Smarter Than Me (05-14-15)
  Like all people, I like to think I have good taste. But if I do, it’s only because I’ve been ruthless about one thing: stealing secrets and strategies from people a lot smarter than me.
• Design Principles: Compositional Flow And Rhythm (04-29-15)
  When someone lands on a page of your site what do you want that person to do? Where do you want them to look? What information do you want your visitors to notice and in what order?
• How To Become A UX Leader (04-23-15)
  Let’s say you run a UX team. Better yet, let’s say you don’t. Let’s say you just want to do great work. You’re a consultant. You’re a newbie. You’re an intern. Your position is irrelevant. So is your title. What’s important here is that you want great UX to happen. You want it consistently. You want it now. You want it all the time.
• Ten Guidelines to Improve the Usability and Accessibility of Your Site (03-16-15)
  Despite their differences, usability and accessibility sometimes go hand-in-hand. The World Wide Web Consortium defines accessibility as an “equivalent user experience for people with disabilities, including people with age-related impairments”, while usability is ...
• ‘View Full Site’ Must Die (03-11-15)
  Three words. Three harmless words. Sitting there at the bottom of the mobile site’s page. “View Full Site” When these words first started appearing, they made perfect sense. It was a great CYA design maneuver. If our mobile-optimized design missed something our user needed, these three words came to the rescue. But now, it could be doing more harm than good.
• Mystical guidelines for creating great user experiences (03-03-15)
  The Jewish Torah teaches that the Creator created our world through ten utterances–for example, “let there be light.” The Jewish mystical tradition explains that these utterances correspond with ten stages in the process of creation. Every creative process in the world ultimately follows this progression, because it is really a part of the continual unfolding of the world itself, in which we are co-creators.
• Stopping the Infighting About Digital Standards (03-03-15)
  I grew up in Columbia, Maryland, a planned community (see Figure 5.1). And as with the word “governance,” people tend to react to the phrase “planned community” in a not-so-positive way. “Planned” sounds dull and uncreative to people: cookie-cutter homes, on cookie-cutter lots, on cookie-cutter streets—“Little Houses Made of Ticky Tacky,” to invoke Malvina Reynolds’ well-known song. And Columbia was all about that: a city built quickly based on a template. There were street naming conventions, standard model homes, standardized lot sizes, and a standard “village” configuration complete with strategically placed shopping and swimming pools.
• How to Give Better Product Feedback (03-02-15)
  The goal of giving product feedback should be to better serve our users by improving our product. Thus: The best feedback is the one most likely to create empathy and elicit product change.
• Design Principles: Dominance, Focal Points And Hierarchy (02-27-15)
  Has a client ever asked you to make the logo bigger? Maybe they asked that just after you completed their request to make a heading bigger. The new heading stands out, but now the logo is too small in comparison and isn’t getting noticed. The clients wants to make the logo bigger.
• 5 Design Tips to Prevent Shopping Cart Abandonment (02-03-15)
  Every eCommerce website experiences users who add products to their cart without making a purchase. UX designers need to work with web developers to prevent shopping cart abandonment. Here are a few design tips that’ll help lead users all the way through the checkout process.
• The Experience Makes the Product, Not the Features (01-27-15)
  Your app's customers aren't won over by features. They're won over by the product experience.
• Showing Passwords on Log-In Screens (01-22-15)
  Passwords have long been riddled with usability issues. Because of overly complex security requirements (a minimum number of characters, some punctuation, the birthdate of at least one French king) and difficult to use input fields, password entry often results in frustrated customers and lost business.
• How Button Color Contrast Guides Users to Action (12-23-14)
  Have you ever clicked a wrong button by accident? Users make wrong decisions on modal windows when they’re not guided in the right direction. Many modals prompt users to act without making the different actions clear.
• Form Usability: Getting 'Address Line 2' Right (11-04-14)While ‘Address Line 2’ may seem like an insignificant aspect of an e-commerce design or overall form design, we have observed this form field to be the cause of bewilderment and uncertainty for users during both our checkout usability and mobile e-commerce research studies.
• 6 principles of visual hierarchy for designers (06-09-14)First there were stone tablets, papyrus scrolls and paper. Then came computer screens and electronic tablets. As the technology to display a page evolves, it remains the designer’s job to arrange the content clearly. But what’s the best way?
• Placeholders in Form Fields Are Harmful (05-11-14)
  Placeholder text within a form field makes it difficult for people to remember what information belongs in a field, and to check for and fix errors. It also poses additional burdens for users with visual and cognitive impairments.
• Why Users Aren’t Clicking Your Home Page Carousel (04-29-14)
  A website study found that out of 3 million home page visits only about 1% clicked a carousel slide. How could a large, graphical element on the home page get such few clicks? The reason most carousels do poorly might surprise you.
• 6 Mobile Checkout Usability Considerations (10-01-13)
  Here’s a simple test: pick up a standard business card. Judge its size. What you’re seeing is roughly the same size as the frame your mobile users have available to view your entire mobile site.
• Principles for Successful Button Design (02-13-13)
  There are a thousand ways to design and create buttons today and you only need to spend a small amount of time looking through work on dribbble to get a sense of them. A great deal of these examples are exactly the same, but occasionally there are the odd few that feel like they've had a little more care and attention in their making.
• Defining And Applying Personas to UX Design (07-02-12)
  Personas have long been integrated with UX documentation. They help us create fictional users, representative of our real users, which we can reference throughout our creative process to inform and validate our design and UX.
• Visual Weight of Primary and Secondary Action Buttons (07-07-11)
  When a user interface prompts users to take action, they’ll usually see two buttons. One button is primary to the user’s task and the other is secondary. To make this distinction clear, you have to use visual weight. Visual weight is how users compare button priority. The button with the strongest visual weight will get the most attention. Therefore, it’s important that primary actions on your interface have the strongest visual weight, and that secondary actions have the weakest visual weight.
• Six Things User Experience Designers Forget When They Criticize Websites (05-29-11)
  It’s easy to criticize the user experience of an application or website, because we’re all end users. But sometimes we use it once, while many have to use it day after day as a part of their job.
• Designing Style Guidelines For Brands And Websites (07-21-10)
  A website is never done. Everyone has worked on a project that changed so much after it launched that they no longer wanted it in their portfolio. One way to help those who take over your projects is to produce a style guide.
• Common causes of churn – and how to kill them with UX (undated)
  Regardless of what vertical you’re in, customers purchase your software because they feel it will solve their problems. When someone cancels their subscription to your software, however, something has changed. Somewhere, somehow your product has failed to provide the value that customer was looking for.
• Punching out: how UX can increase your customer’s loyalty (undated)
  Life is made of experiences, so practicing good UX influences your customer's behavior. This week, we apply UX design to something we all love: free coffee.
• The Elements of Trustworthy UI Design (undated)
  It falls on the individual site or app to prove its credibility through the product design and design of marketing assets (like landing pages). Designers just can’t expect the users to trust them with blind faith.
• What Is a Prototype: A Guide to Functional UX (undated)
  Prototypes are one of the most important steps in the design process, yet still confusing for some designers and project teams.
• Simplifying UX Design Through Storytelling (undated)
  Visualizing data comes up more and more in my work as a UX Designer. Data can be visually striking, but it needs a language and story to follow in order to be effective.
• The 12 Realistic Principles of Agile UX (undated)
  Lean ensures we’re building the right product and Agile helps ensure we build the product right.
• Turning Stubborn Stakeholders Into UX Allies in 3 Easy Steps (undated)
  Learn how to turn even the most combative stakeholder into an ally. UX Designer Sarah Doody shares a few practical tips.
• 8 Effective Web Design Principles You Should Know (undated)
  The design of your website is more important for conversions than you think. You can implement any conversion boosting tactic in the world, but if it looks like crap, it won’t do you much good.
• Lead Your UX Team With a Measure of Success (undated)
  A strange irony about digital design is that ultimately it’s neither about the digits nor the design. It’s about communication between people, like helping users to use a tool, explaining a product’s benefits, educating curious readers about a topic or expounding upon one’s opinion.

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What is User Experience (UX)?

User Experience is the overall experience of a person using a product such as a website or computer application, especially in terms of how easy or pleasing it is to use.

The first requirement for an exemplary user experience is to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother. Next comes simplicity and elegance that produce products that are a joy to own, a joy to use. True user experience goes far beyond giving customers what they say they want, or providing checklist features. In order to achieve high-quality user experience in a company's offerings there must be a seamless merging of the services of multiple disciplines, including engineering, marketing, graphical and industrial design, and interface design.

It's important to distinguish the total user experience from the user interface (UI), even though the UI is obviously an extremely important part of the design. As an example, consider a website with movie reviews. Even if the UI for finding a film is perfect, the UX will be poor for a user who wants information about a small independent release if the underlying database only contains movies from the major studios.

We should also distinguish UX and usability: According to the definition of usability, it is a quality attribute of the UI, covering whether the system is easy to learn, efficient to use, pleasant, and so forth. Again, this is very important, and again total UX is an even broader concept. (Source: Nielsen Norman Group)

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What is User Interface (UI)?

In information technology, the user interface (UI) is everything designed into an information device with which a human being may interact -- including display screen, keyboard, mouse, light pen, the appearance of a desktop, illuminated characters, help messages, and how an application program or a Web site invites interaction and responds to it.