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...
There was a clear connection between following the usability guidelines and having a design that supports user success. In fact, the correlation between guidelines compliance and success rate is very strong at R 2 = .61, indicating that the guidelines account for 61% of the variability in
Personas are my jam. I teach a full-day training course on them: what they are, why they work, how to create them, and how to use them to do great work. I love teaching this course because personas are one of the most abstract components in the very analytical discipline that is UX. I love
Don't be quick to assume anything based on customer appearance or demographics, because assumptions offend, and people tend not to be WYSIWYG. Hungry people are often irritable, but when satisfied, they can transform into your happiest customers. People who are used to bad service may arrive with
Cybersecurity in IoT: Achieving Digital Security in an Age of Surveillance
One of the obvious but unique aspects of IoT is that all of its devices broadcast their information through the internet. Even two devices sitting directly next to one another will communicate across millions of miles of internet infrastructure. Since these devices broadcast through cloud services
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
Is Bitcoin Accelerating Our Global Warming?
The Bitcoin is by far the most popular cryptocurrency in the world. Cryptocurrencies were primarily designed to facilitate faster and more secure financial transactions over the web. They were meant to make the world a better place. However, there are worrying studies that show that the rise of
3 Design Considerations for Effective Mobile-App Permission Requests
There are slight differences in how these requests are presented across mobile operating systems. As you can see from the example above, in iOS the user is asked for access to the microphone, whereas in Android the user is asked for permission to record audio. Moreover, in iOS, the modal dialog
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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
The Most Hated Online Advertising Techniques
In 2004, we wrote about the most hated advertising techniques based on research conducted by Christian Rohrer and John Boyd. Online advertising has changed significantly since then, giving us plenty of new formats to test and new questions to ask. With that, we decided to run a study to determine
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
Defeated By a Dialog Box
The lesson from this case study is not how to design a better "Save As" dialog. Depending on the circumstances, you could use any of the four designs I listed, or perhaps even design a fifth that works better for your particular type of data. It's easy enough to find out what's best for your users
Sliders, Knobs, and Matrices: Balancing Exploration and Precision
Adobe Lightroom uses multiple types of input controls for numeric parameters, including sliders and virtual knobs. Although they all represent continuous numeric data, each type of input control reflects some important, additional information about the data being modified: the Angle control uses a
It’s Time to Take Advantage of Amazing Web Week Savings
Admin Columns helps you to manage your content faster and better. It’s one of those plugins you didn’t know you were missing until you’ve started used it. It gives you perfect insight into your content and can drastically reduce the time you need to find, sort, filter, export, and
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A Look Back at the 2018 WP Engine Summit
To conclude the Summit, we heard from WP Engine leaders who offered a look into the WP Engine roadmap. This included a look at newly released products, like our Global Edge Security offering in partnership with Cloudflare, as well as a deep-dive into our recent acquisition of StudioPress. To wrap
WP Engine CEO Heather Brunner Named as 2019 Great Place to Work For All Leadership Award Honoree
The results clearly showed companies that welcome ideas from all employees have better growth prospects than those with a less-inclusive approach to innovation. In fact, businesses that successfully create an “Innovation By All” culture see revenue growth that is 5.5x greater than others, as
Basic Patterns for Mobile Navigation
However, on mobile devices, both navigation and search come at a price: they occupy screen space and grab users’ attention, both of which are at an even higher premium on mobile than on desktop. If the screen space is really scarce, a search box or navigation links at the top of the page can
Using Prioritization Matrices to Inform UX Decisions
While the process is the primary purpose of a prioritization exercise, the artifact that comes out of it is equally beneficial. The chart represents a shared visual representation of collaborative ranking and indicates a democratic process, rather than the opinions of any one individual. It is a
Which UX Deliverables Are Most Commonly Created and Shared?
Only 25% of our respondents found pixel-perfect visual mockups to be a useful tool to communicate ideas to their managerial audiences. Considering how frequently we hear from UX professionals that they feel pressure to present high-fidelity visual designs to their stakeholder audiences, it’s
The Evolution of Healthcare Data: 5 Little Known Facts
Recognizing the importance of EHR to improve the healthcare system, the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) was introduced in 2009 to encourage organizations to adopt electronic records. It was also implemented to improve patient security and boost HIPAA’s
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
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
5 Ways Blockchain Startups Can Appeal to Enterprises
The core value of blockchain is the ability to identify high-value problems and solve them by bringing together the right parties. In that same vein, blockchain-based startups shouldn’t hesitate to consider what areas of their operations can be handled by new types of service providers who can
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Enterprise Community Event and C2C Event Platform Bevy Raises $6.4 Million
The details of the business and other operations, such as the speakers, ticketing and signage – all take a high level of implementation coordination. Hence the support from the HQ at Startup Grind. Every single detail creates an obstacle to be fixed. The ticketing isn’t working. Help! The
Images of Fitbit next smartwatch reveal heart-rate improvements
Fitbit is on schedule, as its boss James Park keeps reminding us, to launch its next smartwatch by the end of the year. We don’t know what the smartwatch will be called, though Blaze 2 seems likely, but thanks to leaks we know its design and some of the hardware improvements. Images obtained by
Design Thinking 101 | Design Thinking 101
Design Thinking 101
The packaged and accessible nature of design thinking makes it scalable. Organizations previously unable to shift their way of thinking now have a guide that can be comprehended regardless of expertise, mitigating the range of design talent while increasing the probability of success. This
Effective Use of Style Sheets
Cascading style sheets (CSS) are an elegantly designed extension to the Web and one of the greatest hopes for recapturing the Web's ideal of separation of presentation and content. The Web is the ultimate cross-platform system, and your content will be presented on such a huge variety of devices
Website Response Times
In a recent study for our work on Brand as Experience (now a full-day training course on branding and UX), we asked users what they thought about various websites they had used in the past. So, their responses were based not on immediate use (as in normal usability studies), but on whatever past
