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.
In an intranet design, the HR representative sketches a section page with 90% of the above-fold space dedicated to the benefits of the open-enrollment period. When explaining her design, she says that this year there will be no print mailings to employees, and that people already get so many
Hidden navigation, such as the hamburger menu, is one of the many patterns inspired by mobile designs. Screen space is a precious commodity on mobile. To meet the challenge of prioritizing content while still making navigation (and other chrome) accessible, designers commonly rely on hiding the
Our tasks did not direct participants to use the navigation, search, page links, or any other interface features. Rather, people could use whatever they wanted in the interface to do the task. We assumed that if navigation is visible and seems helpful to users, they will click it; if not, they will
Blockchain’s Mainstream Debut Awaits Dev Ecosystem Evolution
Given that networks like EOS and Ethereum are ground zero for blockchain progress making it easy and inexpensive for developers to create things on these blockchains is paramount. This is a notion that’s been embraced by the blockchain community more in recent years. Major projects now focus the
Cryptocurrency Fraud Is the Exception, Not the Rule
Meanwhile, the case between Maksim Zaslavskiy and the SEC dealt with an alleged ICO scam. About 1,000 people invested in Zaslavskiy’s project, but it became apparent that neither a token nor a digital asset was issued to investors, and no real blockchain technology was playing a role in his
Blockchain Metrics Will Add Transparency to Investing and Better Inform Investors
The same can be said for traditional finance as many millennials are extremely skeptical of financial institutions for a variety of valid reasons. Retail investors’ confidence in these markets could rise when blockchain-based financial aggregated data is made available to them, and the regained
Intranet Design After a Merger or Acquisition
Personnel-related features and content, and terminology and brand-related content are most sensitive post merger. For example, the brand team may dictate that the acquired company’s brand names not be mentioned at all on the external website. However, that need not be the case on the intranet
asked a model for conducting ux workshops and exercises the
The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think
One of usability’s most hard-earned lessons is that you are not the user. This is why it’s a disaster to guess at the users’ needs. Since designers are so different from the majority of the target audience, it’s not just irrelevant what you like or what you think is easy to use — it’s
4 Noteworthy Intranet Design Trends in 2019
The intranet team invested in targeted communication about the design and how it would help employees by presenting its research and approach at departmental Town Hall events (which included all employees within a department or division) and by playing a promotional video to generate excitement
Date-Input Form Fields: UX Design Guidelines
Formatting a date-entry field may seem like a minor detail; however, even small interactions can draw a process to a standstill if implemented improperly. Poorly designed date input leads to distressed or annoyed users — risking the abandonment of the form altogether. Even worse, if the user
Why Personas Fail
A failed persona effort is often the largest barrier to future success. Those who have seen them fall by the wayside without having any meaningful impact on a project often write them off as a silly waste of time for the rest of eternity. You will have to work hard to convince these skeptics that
Closeness of Actions and Objects in GUI Design
That mainstream corporate websites make blatant usability mistakes is understandable because most members of their teams aren't grounded in graduate degrees in human-computer interaction. (That's why I have recently added foundational courses, such as The Human Mind, to my usability conference
Empathy Mapping: The First Step in Design Thinking
Our users are complex humans. It is natural (and extremely beneficial) to see juxtaposition between quadrants. You will also encounter inconsistencies — for example, seemingly positive actions but negative quotes or emotions coming from the same user. This is when empathy maps become treasure
activity a model for conducting ux workshops and exercises by
Informational Articles Must Ask For the Order
The Iams kitten food page contained a clear link to Feeding Tips for Growing Kittens , which was highly attractive: all of our test users clicked it. The article was also very interesting and informative: all users scrolled through four screens of text. At the bottom of this fairly large page
Web Research: Believe the Data
Unfortunately, there is still too little publicly available research on Web usability. Some proprietary research exists and I am gratified by the growth in the number of companies that are running their own studies. But we also need published results since many of the findings do generalize. For
A First Look at WordCamp US .
In less than two weeks, members from the WordPress community around the world will head to Nashville, Tennessee for WordCamp US. This is the second consecutive year that the event has been held in Music City and WordPress community has evolved significantly since 2017. The most anticipated topic of
WP Engine CEO Heather Brunner Named DivInc Executive of the Year
Heather’s leadership at WP Engine has been instrumental in helping the company build an enduring, predictable business, particularly after a key investment from Silver Lake last January, as well as the recent acquisition of StudioPress. Heather also heads a diverse leadership team and has
StudioPress Theme Spotlight: Daily Dish Pro
As we continue to showcase a sample of the amazing StudioPress themes now available to WP Engine customers, we’re shifting our focus to food with this new StudioPress Theme: Daily Dish Pro, which is designed to make your content just as appetizing as the best meal at your favorite four-star
A 60-Second Trailer of the 60-Day Report on Cybersecurity
She explained that the original design of the Internet was driven more by considerations of interoperability rather than security, and as a result we are now faced with almost insurmountable issues. Some examples include online criminals who steal our information, mass bandits who have the ability
How To Secure Your IoT Devices And Why Should You Do It
Since 2015, when the IoT devices started to become more and more popular, the technology has been a controversial subject. Recently, the FBI released a statement through which they warned people in the entire world that these devices can be as dangerous as they are useful. Of course, we had the CIA
Why There’s a Bright Future in a Cyber Security Careers
If you’re searching for your next career a great place to look is for a job in cyber security. Why? Because the demand for cyber security experts is going up, up, up. Keeping digital assets secure is a vital skillset. As our world grows ever more dependent on the Internet and digital
A 60-Second Trailer of the 60-Day Report on Cybersecurity
She explained that the original design of the Internet was driven more by considerations of interoperability rather than security, and as a result we are now faced with almost insurmountable issues. Some examples include online criminals who steal our information, mass bandits who have the ability
formulate a model for conducting ux workshops and exercises
Elements to Help You Develop Emotional Intelligence
You took some time off work to get some extra chores done around your home. You need a break and decide that a 15-minute break is what you want to take. During your break you became lost in your thoughts and you’re in a quasi-hypnotic state. You glance over at the clock only to notice that it
A 60-Second Trailer of the 60-Day Report on Cybersecurity
She explained that the original design of the Internet was driven more by considerations of interoperability rather than security, and as a result we are now faced with almost insurmountable issues. Some examples include online criminals who steal our information, mass bandits who have the ability
A Model for Conducting UX Workshops and Exercises | The Fold Manifesto: Why the Page Fold Still Matters
The Fold Manifesto: Why the Page Fold Still Matters
A second set of data comes from Google’s analysis of display advertising (PDF) across a huge number of websites. The study looked at how “viewable” an advertisement was, with viewability defined as 50% of the ad’s pixels being on-screen for one second. Advertisements just above the fold had
Homepage Real Estate Allocation
Using these major categories to map a site's use of space above the fold is a revealing exercise. You can do this yourself: Grab a screenshot of your homepage and superimpose semi-transparent colored boxes on top of each design element, using color-coding for each important screen space category
Site Map Usability, 1st study
I have often predicted that Internet Explorer version 8 will be the first decent Web browser. One feature request for version 8 is better navigation support by offering a visualization feature that would pull the site map out of the website and make it a standardized browser element. Unfortunately
