Using customer journey mapping to map your campaigns can not only turn out to be a huge timesaver, but a well of insights, too. In this article, Yuri Vedenin shares his experience with CJM and how UXPressia was able to achieve a 40% open rate in their email campaign.
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UX designers use a lot of different research techniques, such as interviews and workshops. They summarize research findings into user stories and user flows and communicate their thinking and solutions to the teams. But somewhere in all of this, there are real people for whom the products are being designed for.
In order to create better products, designers must understand what’s going on in the user’s world. And that’s where storyboards come in. In this article, Nick Babich will focus on storyboards as a means to explore solutions to UX issues, as well as to communicate these issues and solutions to others.
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The visual interface is an obvious place to begin digging into accessibility. In this article, Tom Graham & André Gonçalves will discuss some of the most common visual impairments, focusing on color-blindness to explain how you can make small changes to your workflow and products to ensure you’re not alienating users.
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Our ears are the second-most important sensors we have, and in some situations, voice conversation is a very effective communication channel. But relying just on verbal communication is not enough. For example, would you buy a shoe without seeing it first? Of course not. As long as visual image-processing remains people’s main information source, and we are able to process complex information faster visually, the GUI is here to stay. On the other hand, more traditional GUI patterns cannot survive in their current form either. So, instead of radical predictions, David Pasztor suggests another idea: User interfaces will adapt to our sensors even more.
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When soliciting and listening to user feedback, you will inevitably run into bias on both sides of the coin: Biases will influence the people providing feedback, and your own biases will influence the way you receive that feedback. Bias is universal, but so too are the methods you can take to avoid it. By simply understanding what each bias is and by breaking down the ways that it appears during the feedback process, you can put measures in place to overcome misleading preconceptions and gather the most impartial feedback possible. In this article, Hunter Jensen will take a closer look at four of the most common types of cognitive biases that pop up when collecting and interpreting UX feedback — and how you can nip these biases in the bud, before they skew your production process.
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We’ve been closely working with Maya on this article, and we’re happy to see the final result now being published on 18F. We highly encourage more teams to share the lessons they learned when building design systems or pattern libraries, and we’re always happy to support them in writing, editing and shaping that article. This post is a re-post of Maya’s final article. In this article, Maya will shed some light on how to built tools to leverage industry-standard best practices and produce a design system with reusable components.
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Designers need to create the most usable and attractive websites possible, and well applied minimalist principles can help designers make attractive and effective websites with fewer elements. Minimalist websites simplify interfaces by removing unnecessary elements and paring down content that does not support user tasks. In this article, Nick Babich will discuss some examples of minimalism in web design, things to consider when designing minimalist interfaces, and explain why sometimes “less is more”.
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UX professionals need to communicate design ideas and research findings to a range of audiences. They use deliverables for that purpose. Don’t be surprised by the number of deliverables Nick Babich mentions in this article. Rest assured, each project is different and a UX designer wouldn’t need to produce all of them for each project. Remember that there is no one-size-fits-all deliverable that will be equally effective for all projects. Each deliverable becomes an effective communication tool in the right context and with the right audience.
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Karim Maaloul decided to start a series of short WebGL experiments on Codepen, and he has finally found the time to compile them all together on a single website named “Moments of Happiness”. In this article, Karim has detailed the solution used to make a running cycle. On his Codepen page, all of these experiments are available, with the code at your disposal. Feel free to play around and make your own interactive toys. As you’ll see, all of the experiments share one principle: The behavior of each character responds programmatically to user input. No precalculated animation — every movement is defined at runtime.
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Few design elements are more fun to play with than color. Color effects can be dramatic, impressive and even serene. It can draw attention, set a mood, and influence the user’s emotion, perception and actions. When it comes to the web and mobile app design, this is definitely a time of vibrant colors. You the designer really get to experiment when using color effects. Whether you are a fan of bright, bold hues or prefer a more minimalist black and white, the one thing to remember is that there are no wrong colors. What matters most is how you use them. In this article, Nick Babich will summarize a few popular techniques of using vibrant colors in web and mobile design.
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