Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two highly regarded academics in the field of economics are responsible for much of what we know about heuristics. In psychology, a heuristic is simply a fancy word meaning mental shortcut. We have so many decisions to make on a daily basis; there is no way we could think about all of the pros and cons of each option. Our minds would be overloaded and we would stop functioning. People frequently use heuristics to make decisions; you should use them to your advantage in your design. Here, we’ll discuss four common heuristics that researchers have identified, with examples of how to address them in digital design.
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Animation on the web has the potential to revolutionize our small bright box. We can go even further than traditional animation because we can accept user feedback and input. With these tools we can throw away the soul-destroying, bleak, dark engagements that govern things like airline ticket purchases. We can bake animation into the core of our user experience process to create dazzling, exciting, and engaging work that pushes boundaries and collectively elevates the medium of the web. We can help people by unfolding scenes like a choose-your-own-adventure that can feel fluid, interesting, and intuitive!
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Unless your project is structured beautifully, certain animations are a pain to tweak. Just let the client know what your intentions are for the animations, and let the tweaking and finetuning happen in the code of the final product. Until then, you are simply painting a functional and visual picture for the client and developers, giving them a clear view of your vision. Web design transitions and animations are great to prototype in After Effects. In this article, Matt Reamer will be scratching the surface of how to fit After Effects into your UX Workflow, and he’ll share details, advice, experience and links that you could use as influence and thought starters in your next project.
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In this article, Colleen Roller will show us that defaults are powerful because they provide a way for users to passively decide, thereby easing the difficulty and effort associated with decision-making. Also, that providing a default option is not always appropriate. Sometimes, it’s better for users to make an explicit choice — especially when they are more likely to follow through with a decision and be more committed to taking action on it. It’s imperative to understand that the design matters. UX design professionals have a responsibility to understand how design itself influences — and sometimes even drives — user perception and behavior and, therefore, decision outcomes. The decisions we make as designers matter.
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When it comes to providing pleasure or delight in our websites and apps, animations contribute a lot. But always remember that they must be functional first. In this article, Amit Daliot shows us video examples that show functional animation. The following rules map well to every animation Amit encountered so far. They helped him to assess animations that he saw in interfaces, and they are a strong set of guiding principles in deciding how to add animations to a wireframe design.
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No matter your status or situation, whether director or loner, you are in a position to lead, to raise the bar in a place where it consistently sits lower than you think it should. As an in-house UX professional, Robert Hoekman Jr has formed and run UX teams for multiple companies. As a consultant, he has worked with dozens of clients on hundreds of projects. In this article, he will share what he learned about how to get what you want. Most of these things can be applied whether you’re inside of a company or consulting for one, whether you’re a fledgling designer or a veteran leader.
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Given the importance of filtering, Christian Holst and the entire team at the Baymard Institute spent the nine months researching how users browse, filter and evaluate products in e-commerce product lists. At the core of this research was a large-scale usability study testing 19 leading e-commerce websites with real end users, following the think-aloud protocol. In this article Christian will take a closer look at some of the research findings related to the users’ filtering experience. He’ll walk through each of some filtering insights, showing you the usability test findings, examining the benchmark data and presenting best practice examples for creating a good e-commerce filtering experience.
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While you might have created the best content in the world, you don’t get to choose how users access it. That’s why it’s important to make sure your content works beautifully on every platform and device. While there’s no magic bullet to make sure your content is publishable and useful on every device, you can change the way you think about, plan for and create content so that it can go anywhere it needs to go. In this article, Kerry Crawford will cover some of the things you can do to make your content more flexible and accessible.
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Successful web accessibility is about anticipating the different needs of all sorts of people, understanding your fellow web users and the different ways they consume information. Armed with this understanding, accessibility becomes a cold, hard technical challenge. How do assistive technologies present a web application to make it accessible for their users? Where do they get the information they need? One of the keys is a technology known as the accessibility API.
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Claire Carlson had the opportunity to conduct in-home user interviews in São Paulo on behalf of a Brazilian real estate company called Zap Imóveis. This project provided her with invaluable insider knowledge on how to best conduct in-home user interviews in Brazil and, more broadly, how to conduct field research in foreign countries using the same underlying principles. This article presents her tips for foreigners planning to conduct in-home user interviews in Brazil, including parallels with research in India, China, and Spain.
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