It is a common misconception that design thinking is new. Design has been practiced for ages: monuments, bridges, automobiles, subway systems are all end-products of design processes. Throughout history, good designers have applied a human-centric creative process to build meaningful and effective solutions.
In the early 1900’s husband and wife designers Charles and Ray Eames practiced “learning by doing,” exploring a range of needs and constraints before designing their Eames chairs, which continue to be in production even now, seventy years later. 1960’s dressmaker Jean Muir was well known for her “common sense” approach to clothing design, placing as much emphasis on how her clothes felt...
In complex applications, it is easy to overwhelm users with a tremendous number of options, commands, tools, and controls. Showing a large number of tools all at once is visually overwhelming, and evaluating all the available actions places far too much cognitive load on users. Split buttons reduce
A compelling story is nothing without hard facts to back up the narrative. Use insights from qualitative or quantitative testing to help craft your narrative and minimize doubt and gray area. When questions arise from your audience, you can back up your answers with this data. For example, if in
Take Uber for example. While the experience is hugely popular and generally pain free, there is room for enhancement — especially for large groups travelling together. Currently, a group must problem-solve in order to figure out how many “ubers” to call and and how many passengers can fit in
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’
Shaping Healthcare Ecosystem with Blockchain
Blockchain has become a hot topic of discussion these days as it has made its way into a number of industries. From finance to infrastructure, blockchain or distributed ledger has found interoperability in every sphere of work. Healthcare is another realm that has found a widespread implementation
Can the blockchain and IoT solve international freight’s issues?
Since then — I ended up winning the Shanghai Blockchain Hackathon with this concept — we have been working more deliberately on how to combine IoT and blockchain and create a new platform for international trade. We also won the Technology Challenge of the Emirates National Bank of
Tabs, Used Right
Simplest GUI widgets are the building blocks for most functionality on the web, but it's rare to find sites that use all the dialog controls correctly. Even something as simple as radio buttons and checkboxes are incorrectly used half the time. And let's not even get started on drop-down menus
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Best Application Designs
Although it seems obvious that domain-specific applications need field studies, most design projects in the past typically did without them. When we analyzed the first decade of Intranet Design Annual winners, we found that field studies were used by only 10% of the winners from 2001–2003 and
Indicators, Validations, and Notifications: Pick the Correct Communication Option
Allmodern.com used an action-required notification to communicate that a product was saved as a favorite. For a user that is saving a lot of items to their favorites, this can be a bothersome and intrusive way of providing feedback. This may be better communicated by showing a passive nonmodal
Modes in User Interfaces: When They Help and When They Hurt Users
Modes are useful for managing a large number of features that would all benefit from using the same input control. If either the total number of input controls is limited, such as on physical devices with a limited number of buttons, or if several actions are best signaled by the same input (e.g
6 Ways Ecommerce Sites Can Compete With Amazon
Many items on Amazon have poorly written product names making it difficult for browsers to understand what an item is at a glance. The same user who was browsing daily deals said. “I’ll typically browse on Groupon instead. I don’t really like to browse on Amazon because I have a hard time
10 Heuristics for User Interface Design: Article by Jakob Nielsen
Visibility of system status The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time. (Read full article on visibility of system status.) Match between system and the real world The system should speak the users' language, with words
StudioPress Theme Spotlight: Academy Pro Theme
Academy Pro will help you showcase your authority as an educator and content creator. For site owners who might not be as technically inclined, Academy Pro is a great option to easily customize your website. Even if you are curious about enabling a certain feature of creation, as a StudioPress
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WP Engine Raises $30K for Central Texas Food Bank
WP Engine employees are rarely hungry. Our office kitchens are fully stocked with cereal and snacks, and lunch is catered Monday through Thursday, every week, for the entire team. Unlike the 46,000 people who rely on Central Texas Food Bank for food assistance every week, our employees don’t have
A Look Back at the WP Engine London Summit .
At the end of September, we held our 2018 WP Engine Summit in Austin, Texas. Last week, agencies, brands, and digital innovators from EMEA came together in London for the WP Engine EU Summit. Attendees discussed the future of digital experiences, Gen Z’s perception of the Internet, and the
UX Stories Communicate Designs
The structure and components of user-experience stories are not far removed from fairy tales, classical theater, or box-office films. According to Aristotle, successful drama is composed of six primary elements: plot, character, thought, diction, music, and spectacle. These elements remain
Long-Term Exposure to Flat Design: How the Trend Slowly Makes Users Less Efficient
Please don’t think that because your younger users can adapt to poorly designed interfaces you’ve got a blank check to design careless, signifier-free interfaces. When users aren’t sure where they can click, they lose that sense of empowerment that is so critical to a positive experience
Using Prioritization Matrices to Inform UX Decisions
The term “prioritization matrix” is used in the design thinking community to refer to a variety of prioritization techniques and representations, that, technically, do not all qualify as matrices in the mathematical sense. For the sake of consistency, we use the same term although sometimes our
5 Itchy Reasons Why You’re Blowing Your Advertising Budget
SEO is also great for providing insights into your customer base. Factors like how they search, how they browse, the language they use, the technology the company utilizes, and the region in which they live can all be discovered via effective planning. 4. You’re angling for instant gratification
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
Cybersecurity in IoT: Achieving Digital Security in an Age of Surveillance
Unfortunately, all of these connected devices and the troves of data that they transmit through the internet are fodder for government surveillance. As Shay Hershkovitz eloquently wrote in Wired, “There is little doubt that the web is the greatest gift that any intelligence agency could have
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
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How to File an International Trademark When You’re Ready to Take Your Business Global
In another example, Parker Pens reportedly made a mistake in the translation of the advertising slogan “It won’t leak in your product and embarrass you.” Someone on the translation team apparently thought the Spanish word embarazar meant “embarrass.” The slogan ended up saying
How to Get Away From a Growth Mindset and Start to Scale
Clean data changes everything. Move integral datasets to the forefront so they’re highly visible. Hint: You can train your software to use metadata to sort all of your data, ensuring the most frequently used and most important datasets remain top of mind. Also, store the most important data in
Design Thinking 101 | UX Research Cheat Sheet
UX Research Cheat Sheet
When deciding where to start or what to focus on first, use some of these top UX methods. Some methods may be more appropriate than others, depending on time constraints, system maturity, type of product or service, and the current top concerns. It’s a good idea to use different or alternating
Because of the heroic efforts of the developers and designers who stepped in to fix Healthcare.gov, the website is in much better shape in 2017 (although not all of our guidelines have been followed and some new problems have been introduced). Kudos to the "rebel alliance" of digital-government
Carousel Usability: Designing an Effective UI for Websites with Content Overload
Today’s multi-image carousels replace the static, single “hero images” that used to be plastered all over the web. But in some cases the mature UI alternative may be a better fit than its youthful, energetic descendant. One reason for this is the designer’s attitude. Knowing there are
