CategoryUX

January 8, 2013 — If you’ve ever run a usability test before, you’ll know that it’s not as easy as it looks. In this article Damian Rees shares some of the lessons he has learned which should help you avoid your user test turning into a frustrating experience for you or the test participant. Read more…

December 19, 2012 — In this article, which focuses on smartphones, not tablets, we’ll look at design patterns and approaches used for mobile e-commerce functionality, including home pages, photo galleries, and more. All the examples are drawn from mobile websites that run in smartphone browsers. Read more…

December 10, 2012 — This article covers the fundamental concepts for utilizing smart device technologies and sensor data in order to understand context and introduce “adaptive thinking” into the UX professional’s toolset. The author demonstrates the importance of context when designing adaptive experiences and gives ideas on how to design adaptive systems. Read more…

December 4, 2012 — The difficulty faced by interaction designers and user experience designers is that they have to consider, balance and combine measurable and non-measurable dimensions of user experience to create the best possible product. Fitts’s Law tries to help user interface designers by giving them easily quantifiable, mathematically accurate values to base their design decisions on. Read more…

November 20, 2012 — Designers can do plenty of things to counteract the technical appearance of the Web. In this article, Sabina Idler discusses different aspects of freehand drawing and writing in Web design and how they can enhance the user experience of your website. Read more…

November 8, 2012 — In which kinds of sites/projects is it better to use an adaptive layout (fixed break points)? Find some popular questions asked by our readers (and answered by Christian Holst) around good practices in designing smart and usable experiences. Read more…

November 6, 2012 — Sometimes, UX practitioners need some time to work through big design issues that don’t fit neatly into an existing user story or an individual sprint. This article will explore one answer to these problems: design spikes. This give UX teams a framework to conduct big-picture design within the scrum process. Read more…

October 30, 2012 — Transitions and subtle motion-based animations are emerging as a new and compelling mobile design material, worthy of being learned and being used with efficiency and grace. Rachel Hinman shares the 12 basic principles of animation. Read more…

October 26, 2012 — While masking passwords is a good security practice, there’s a chance it could jeopardize the user experience of your sign-up form. In this article, Anthony T explores how to balance security and user experience. Read more…

October 18, 2012 — The purpose of this article is not to convince you to stop reading articles that help you learn the techniques of your craft. Its purpose is to make the case for a more balanced information diet, with which we all take the time to nourish the parts of our brain that give us much-needed context to understand and effectively use the techniques that we see in galleries and tutorials. Read more…