User experience, especially today, is not a siloed practice. To collect knowledge, generate new ideas, and ideate on design solutions, it’s best to bring people together. This job often falls on UX and occurs in the form of workshops for ideation, prioritization of ideas, affinity diagramming, or creating empathy maps and numerous other design artifacts. All these team activities are usually facilitated by UX professionals.
The facilitator’s responsibility is to make sure that the time spent in activities or exercises is as productive as possible for participants — clients, stakeholders and other team members —and generates the insights needed to move your project forward.
Similarly, a Hulu user was not sure whether the medical dramas that he saw on the homepage were popular shows enjoyed by a lot of people or personalized content based on past behavior in his account (he mentioned that his mother sometimes watched those shows on his account when she came to visit
While the lack of visual clutter might be aesthetically pleasing and create a more emotional response with the user (such as the feeling of control over the potentially harrowing task of writing a novel), the deeper usability issues might detract from the façade of a beautiful product. Clean and
The percentage of Ph.D. holders might be higher among New York Times readers than among the general population, but statistically speaking, the probability that any given individual reading the New York Times holds a Ph.D. is still low. After all there are only 3.6 million Ph.D. holders in the
A 60-Second Trailer of the 60-Day Report on Cybersecurity
Melissa Hathaway came across our radar recently when President Obama tasked the former Bush administration aide with leading a 60-day review of Bush’s Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative; a largely classified, purported $30 billion, multi phase plan to address cybersecurity issues
9 Blockchains Transforming the Way We Pay, Play, and Work
Look past digital currencies’ nosebleed pricing volatility, and you’ll discover a robust, decentralized, secure database. Brands and technologists are quickly figuring out how to put this powerful ledger to good use. Here are several real-world examples that demonstrate cryptos’
Optimizing Business Decisions With Blockchain Technology
But when the size of the organization and team becomes big, decision making becomes complex and erratic. This explains why the majority of big corporations spend an enormous amount of money in hiring third-party management consulting firms for strategic advice and implementation. Even with these
The Impact of Tone of Voice on Users' Brand Perception (Nielsen Norman Group UX research)
In this scenario, Zeta’s friendliness without an attempt at humor seemed to reassure users during a potentially stressful situation. One participant in the qualitative study compared the difference between Zeta and Epsilon to the difference between a doctor and a nurse. She described Epsilon as
a model for conducting ux workshops and exercises
The Impact of Interaction Design on Brand Perception
Of these three, visual design often receives the most attention from digital-product teams interested in conveying the right brand attributes. That’s not necessarily due to a lack of appreciation for the other two facets. It’s just often easier to speculate how a specific color scheme or logo
Empathy Mapping: The First Step in Design Thinking
In this step, the team moves through the stickies on the board collaboratively and clusters similar notes that belong to the same quadrant. Name your clusters with themes that represent each group (for example, “validation from others” or “research”). Repeat themes in each quadrant if
Placeholders in Form Fields Are Harmful
In this pattern, labels are placed within the form field as placeholders until the field becomes active and the user moves the input focus into the field. At that point, the placeholder label moves to the top of the field. As a result, the floating label (also known as an adaptive placeholder) is
Assessing the Usability of a User Interface Standard
Despite the mainly positive attitudes towards the standard, there were also negative points mentioned during the interviews. Even though 67% of the developers felt that the standard made it easier for them to design screens and develop the associated software, 20% disagreed with that statement. As
Top 10 Application-Design Mistakes of 2008
He was the only user to test this site because he encountered it during a task in which users could choose a site to visit (usually from a search listing). In this case, the user eventually overcame the confusion and proceeded to enter his measurements. If we had tested more users, a small
Cognitive Maps, Mind Maps, and Concept Maps: Definitions
The idea of cognitive map originates from the work of the psychologist Edward Tolman, who is famous for his studies of how rats learned to navigate mazes. In psychology, it has a strong spatial connotation — cognitive maps usually refer to the representation of a space (e.g., a maze) in the
a model for conducting ux workshops and exercises
Journey Mapping: 9 Frequently Asked Questions
The list of tools that professionals use to create journey maps is always growing. Classic tools like Microsoft PowerPoint or Visio ensure that most team members will have access to them; however, they lack live collaboration and risk that team members will not have the latest version of the
The New Ecommerce User Experience: Changes in Users’ Expectations
As online retail continues to progress, competition with powerhouse platforms like Amazon, Alibaba, and Walmart is becoming a major factor in how all other retailers conduct business and advance in ecommerce. These large sites offer consumers one-stop shopping, unmatched selections, low prices
How to Recover Abandoned Shopping Carts for WooCommerce Stores
Many of those abandoned carts are probably lost for good because you don’t have any contact information from the shopper to try to win them back to checkout. But for a percentage of the carts, your shopper will have gotten far enough along in the process that you’ll have an email address (or
Bringing Array Themes into the WP Engine Family
Sifting through the thousands of themes in existence today is a daunting task, and finding the right one for your website is just part of the challenge. No one wants to trust their portfolio, online magazine, or e-commerce site to just any formulaic theme. Making sure it’s well designed, well
Naughty or Nice: Check Your Ecommerce Site Twice! .
Every year it can feel like the holidays sneak up on us. We assemble, we strategize, and we take the necessary precautions yet we frequently feel like we are scrambling. For ecommerce businesses, this time of year is crucial not only for generating revenue but for generating recurrent relationships
Is Business Headed for a Cognitive-First Future?
With decades-old pipelines, old technology, and dangerous terrain, the oil and gas industry is ripe for machine intervention. Its outsized impact on the environment underscores the importance of predicting failures before they happen. Updated sensors and data analysis can result in not only avoided
Internet of Warnings: How Smart Technology Can Threaten Your Business’s Security
How does the manufacturer manage the security of their devices? Device security is the responsibility of the individual company, and since there aren’t yet any laws protecting IoT security, most companies depend on self-regulation and self-reporting. What safeguards has the company put in place
29% of Internet Users Have Bought Things From Spam Email?? Say It Aint So!
The announcement of the study concludes with these funny lines, from Anstis again: “The other way to look at this situation is from a spammer’s perspective. There are approximately 250 million people out there who are interested in these kinds of products and have made purchases from
CSS conversion of my Radio weblog
I’ve done a re-design of my Radio weblog, using CSS. Look ma, no tables! Yes, it’s now a tableless design. I’m doing my bit for the web standards cause, although I haven’t yet achieved 100% XHTML validation. For my re-design I used a CSS Zen Garden design by Michael Landis
a model for conducting ux workshops and exercises
Despite What You Hear, You Don’t Need VC Funding
Once you’ve established your product, you’ve only just begun. Every customer you get has something to contribute toward improving what you’ve created. Welcome feedback, especially criticism, because it helps refine and improve your product, leading to happier existing customers and a smoother
8 Major Legal Risks Faced By Startups
Every business act falls under the purview of legal regulations. Businesses must know the licenses and permits they need to have in order to function without trouble. Non-compliance with regulations can have serious legal ramifications for an organization. It can lead to hefty monetary penalties
A Model for Conducting UX Workshops and Exercises | Iterative Design and Testing of Icon Usability
Iterative Design and Testing of Icon Usability
As you can see, all the versions of the color icon were essentially the same since the computer with a light bulb going on was easily recognized by all users as representing some combination of computers and bright ideas (the Sun solutions!). The light bulb did double duty as representing software
Tunnel Vision and Selective Attention
Westfield was reasonably compliant with guidelines for presenting a corporation's image on the Web in an "About Us" area, and the user had little trouble finding relevant information. Each event in the company's history was shown in a lightbox-style pop-up. Although this was perhaps an overly
Comparison Tables for Products, Services, and Features
To narrow down the number of alternatives to a manageable one, they usually use one hard criterion that outweighs any other considerations. For example, a user looking to buy a new car might filter out all the cars that are more expensive than that $20,000, even though some of them may be
