During the initial design process for your product, answers will come from brainstorming on the product and from execution at the highest level, with all necessary stakeholders (along with their egos). In this article, Chris Bank explains why defining your product matters and how to prepare and conduct creative exercises for kickoff meetings during the initial phase of product development.
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Translation isn’t everything. Of course, for the user it’s all about the content: Is the content relevant and understandable and in line with the user’s cultural context? If you’ve decided to localize your website, then you are thinking seriously about expanding into other markets. This is great for a business of any size. Still, keep in mind that localization is not as simple as straight translation. There are many parts of the equation to consider. If you forget one part, the rest won’t add up.
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In this article, Matt Reamer will introduce you to the human-centered design process. He’ll tell a personal story in which he built a challenged family member a device to help them communicate more efficient and effortlessly and he’ll share lessons he learned from the failures and successes along the way. He hopes that this will inspire or at least get you thinking about how you can push your skills to help the people around you, as well as shed some light on some basic principles of user experience design that are too often overlooked.
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In this article, Alon Even will go over the importance of using visual mobile analytics to measure the user experience from day one, as well as provide examples and other insights, so that you can optimize your onboarding experience and increase your app’s retention rate. He will provide you with knowledge that you can apply to your own mobile app exploits, whether you are a developer or a mobile app publisher. While there is no magic bullet for creating a perfect onboarding experience, remaining focused and committed to monitoring your onboarding experience will get you further than any other strategy.
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The way you frame communication, or how you say something, could be extremely effective at persuading people to start using your product. In this article, Victor Yocco will cover how to effectively frame a message, and how to test it before implementation. Design teams need to give deeper thought to how they are conveying their message, not just what they are saying. Outlined above is a process for creating and testing a message, which will help you communicate clearly and effectively with users. Your messages will resonate with them.
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For many of us, the idea of doing formal user testing, is a formidable challenge. There are many reasons why: you don’t have enough lead time; you can’t find enough participants, or the right type of participant; you can’t convince your boss to spend the money. User testing is the best way to improve your designs. If you rely on anecdotal data, or your own experience, you can’t design a great solution to your user’s problems. User testing is vital. But how do you make the case for it and actually do it?
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A diagnostic can be done during design and development to ensure that the mobile website or app adheres to best practices and guidelines. It also serves as a great starting point for a redesign to identify particular opportunities for improvement. In this article, Lyndon Cerejo will describe a process you can follow to evaluate a mobile UX, be it for an app or a website accessed on a mobile device. Alongside the explanation of each step, you’ll illustrate the step using the United States Postal Service as an unwitting real-world example.
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An abandonment means that a customer has visited a website, browsed around, added one or more products to their cart and then left without completing their purchase. Reducing the number of abandoned carts would lead to higher store revenue. The question then becomes how can we, as designers and developers, help convert “warm leads” into paying customers for our clients? Designers and developers are in a powerful position to help their clients increase their revenue, and being armed with tactics such as the ones outlined in this article will hopefully enable them to offer a wider range of services.
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If you browse your favorite website and close your eyes slightly so that your vision is a bit clouded by your eyelashes. Can you still see and use the website? Are you able to read the labels, fields, buttons, navigation and small footer text? Can you imagine how someone who sees differently would read and use it?
In this article, Cathy O’ Connor shares one aspect of design accessibility: making sure that the look and feel (the visual design of the content) are sufficiently inclusive of differently sighted users.
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In this article, Patrick Rudolph provides many hints, code snippets and lessons learned on how to build great hybrid mobile apps. He’ll briefly introduce hybrid mobile app development, including its benefits and drawbacks. Then, Patrick will share lessons he has learned from over two years of developing Hojoki and CatchApp, both of which run natively on major mobile platforms and were built with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Finally, you’ll review the most prominent tools to wrap code in a native app.
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