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.
This is a relatively old usability problem for ecommerce websites — we reported on it in in a previous round of ecommerce user research, and we warned publicly about this design flaw as one of the top-3 bad new ecommerce design trends in 2014. I guess we warned in vain, because the same problem
In our appliance-company example, numerous backstage actions occur: A warehouse employee inputs and updates inventory numbers into the point-of-sale software; a shipping employee checks the unit’s condition and quality; a chat assistant contacts the factory to confirm lead times; employees
Another primary principle of preventing users from making errors is to acknowledge that they will make mistakes and slips from time to time, and provide a safety net that makes these errors less costly. Nearly everyone has experienced the utterly horrifying moment of realizing that you just
A Tale of Two Bubbles: Why Cryptocurrency Isn’t the Next Dot-Com
Economic bubbles aren’t new. From the tulip bubble of the 1630s, to the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, to the big-tech mania we’re seeing today, overvaluations happen — but not all bubbles pose the same risks or offer the same rewards. Every few years, it seems we’re warned
4 Ways to Enter the Blockchain Industry
The Internet combined with the decentralized framework of Blockchain now allows anyone in the world to start a business. Anyone — anywhere — will be able to execute transactions securely. Before the Internet, this kind of powerful encryption was inaccessible to many small business
Developers Set to Use Bear Market as an Opportunity to Accelerate Ethereum Upgrades
The overriding feeling that permeated the various meetings at the Prague conference was that this is not a time for inactivity, and Ethereum essentially needs to accelerate out of this tailspin. According to many developers, the best way to do that is to build on its early success in the field of
Eartracking: A New UX-Research Method
Eartracking is not a highly sensitive technique: it can only capture environment stimuli that receive a high level of interest. Thus, a phenomenon like banner blindness, which we have documented through our eyetracking studies, would not be something that we’d expect to capture with eartracking
a model for conducting ux workshops and exercises
'About Us' Information on Corporate Websites - User Research Findings
For example, one user said, “I would do a Google search for the company name to learn more about them. I’d target sites that do company reviews and give info about the company, as well as its competitors. Google would give me that site along with others. It’s validation for what they’re
The Four Dimensions of Tone of Voice
Decide what combination of dimensions makes sense best for your company and think about strategies to implement this tone of voice. When you’re defining your tone for a whole site or a specific piece of content, start with these four high-level dimensions first. For example, first decide if a
Top 10 Application-Design Mistakes of 2008
The opposite problem — having something that looks like a GUI control when it isn't one — can reduce usability even more. We often see text and headlines that look like links (by being colored or underlined, for example) but aren't clickable. When users click these look-alikes and nothing
Teenager’s UX: Designing for Teens
Teens are wired. Technology is so integrated with teenagers’ lives that creating useful and usable websites and apps for them is more critical than ever. To succeed in a world where the next best thing is a click away and text message interruptions are the rule, not the exception, website and app
Best Application Designs
In addition to static help text, super-tooltips usually contain dynamic status information about the object that users are pointing to. This lets users see the information in the context of a larger overview screen, instead of having to click through to a separate screen with detailed object
Status Trackers and Progress Updates: 16 Design Guidelines
Ensure all your users have the information needed to use the status tracker from the start. Often, users will need to enter information such as an order or a reference number in order to get access to the tracker. Make sure that (1) people know that information will later be needed when you first
a model for conducting ux workshops and exercises
UX Research Cheat Sheet
User-experience research methods are great at producing data and insights, while ongoing activities help get the right things done. Alongside R&D, ongoing UX activities can make everyone’s efforts more effective and valuable. At every stage in the design process, different UX methods can keep
The State of Ecommerce Search
We no longer recommend supporting complex-search operators, because few users know or use them these days. And they shouldn’t have to know them — the search engine should be smart enough to return good results without forcing people to use unnatural language. Perhaps the one exception here is
How to Recover Abandoned Shopping Carts for WooCommerce Stores
Imagine this: You’ve spent months getting your new eCommerce shop up and running. You set up WooCommerce, installed a bunch of plugins, found a perfect theme, dotted all your i’s and crossed all your t’s on tax compliance, logistics, and customer service. You roll out your beautiful new shop
Join WP Engine in Web Week 2018
If you’re currently using a different platform to power your website, WP Engine’s platform offers a plethora of benefits to improve your agility, maximize your performance, provide insightful intelligence, and incorporate top-notch integrations. Our platform will help you create scalable
10 Must-Have Features for a WordPress Website in 2018 .
I’m always surprised with how many websites I see come across WP Care Market that aren’t utilizing Google Analytics. I never blame the website owner as the website owner seems to also discover they don’t have GA when we run our website reviews! Don’t let that happen to you and secure
6 Emerging Cyber Threats to Lookout for in 2019
2018 showed us an accelerated growth in cyber threat activities. Data breaches, attacks using malicious software and insider threats were among the most familiar forms of attack. Many well-known organizations suffered from these cybersecurity disasters and compromised data of millions of users
The Key IoT Security Questions You Need To Ask
Another question to ask is how you will prevent unsolicited inbound connections from wreaking havoc on your devices? Make sure that only devices are allowed to initiate connections and not the IoT hub. And speaking of the IoT hub: make sure that the one you’re using has the capability of
Dear Senior Citizens – You Folks are the Easy Target of Hackers
Mostly, seniors are self-sufficient, but with age, they need a bit of help; so many seniors entirely rely on their younger generations to help them with their finances, legal affairs, housing, taxes, and other issues. In that case, it’s helpful or sometimes necessary for caretakers to access a
Top Outsourcing Destinations in Latin America for 2019
The Puerto Rican government is exploring investments and partnerships for 5G networks and IoT technologies that will enable smart cities on the island. Though many tech companies, such as Google, HP, Microsoft, and Tesla have already established software development or manufacturing facilities in
a model for conducting ux workshops and exercises
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 File an International Trademark When You’re Ready to Take Your Business Global
A trademark is a national right that requires registration in each country that you seek protection for your brand. Even if you have a registered US trademark, no international trademark protection exists for your registration. That means that even if you are using your brand name for business, if
A Model for Conducting UX Workshops and Exercises | The Same Link Twice on the Same Page: Do Duplicates Help or Hurt?
The Same Link Twice on the Same Page: Do Duplicates Help or Hurt?
It’s true that duplicating a link can increase overall traffic to a destination, but that’s simply because you are promoting that item more heavily than others and giving it more screen space. Don’t lose sight of the bigger picture by focusing only on one metric: the extra traffic from one
Minimize the Need for Customer Service to Improve the Omnichannel UX
In a relatively small number of cases, users simply preferred to complete tasks by working one-on-one with a representative, because they felt that the task was too complex for the digital channels available to them. (This is an example of a limitation imposed by the communication channel’s
What exactly is the reason for each of these requirements? For example, “It must be different than your past 6 passwords”: Is this instruction necessary here, when users are first creating a password? We typically only see this in Intranet password-change instructions. And what about the
