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...
It’s a very safe bet to assume that removing any question from a form will result in a higher completion rate for the form and thus a higher conversion rate for the associated action. In real life, there's a reason for every extra question on the form: somebody thinks that it would be
Are teens getting better or are websites getting better? Probably a bit of both. We observed many of the same bad user habits among teens in our last study as we saw in our first study, back in 2004. Thus, the improved performance obviously stems in part from improvements in website design. That
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
Why Blockchain and Remanufacturing are a Perfect Match
For example, an automotive remanufacturing blockchain could be built, parts could be posted for potential buyers to view, or buyers could post the type, quantity, and quality of parts they require. Payment options could then be automated via smart contracts when parts are shipped. Blockchain would
Is the Blockchain Role in Advertising Too Overrated?
Many blockchain advertising products are also built on Ethereum and so-called utility tokens that function within the system and are issued to participants when the desired action is verified. In such projects, utility tokens guarantee financial operations between supply and demand parties and
Businesses Broke Ground on Blockchain. What Can Civic Groups Learn?
Sweden seems to be modeling that same approach in its electoral application of blockchain. This past summer, the Swedish municipality of Zug put blockchain-based voting to the test. Although Swiss media hailed the experiment a success in terms of administration and voter privacy, Zug officials
Brand Is Experience in the Digital Age
Though interaction has always been important for forming customer impressions in service industries — customers would quit going to McDonalds if they were consistently treated rudely by staff no matter how highly they rate the fries — what’s new is that interaction and user experience have
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Why WSJ Mobile App Gets ** Customer Reviews
A second reason to give print subscribers free access? They're the most valuable customers: print advertising is more effective than online advertising because broadsheet layouts have a stronger impact. Thus, a newspaper should encourage readers to maintain their print subscriptions by treating
Brand Is Experience in the Digital Age
While “branding” products with an identifying mark (definition #1) has been around since people first began trading and selling goods, the use of brands to differentiate products — to truly attempt to influence consumers’ perceptions and choices within a market (definition #2) — is a
10 Best Application UIs
When it comes to modal dialog boxes, our winners have very distinct ideologies. At one extreme is Seating Management. As a real-time application monitoring a physical environment, Seating Management didn't set out to interrupt hostess work in any way. If a hostess wants to seat 5 guests at a table
Contextual Menus: Delivering Relevant Tools for Tasks
Having the right tools available in any given situation makes all the difference, especially when it comes to correctly and efficiently getting things done. Without the relevant tools, we waste time and are left feeling frustrated, lost, and confused. Just as bad: when there are too many tools
When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods
On the other end of this dimension, methods that focus mostly on behavior seek to understand "what people do" with the product or service in question. For example A/B testing presents changes to a site's design to random samples of site visitors, but attempts to hold all else constant, in order
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
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WP Engine All Hands Spring 2019: EMEA
Last week, WP Engine employees from our Limerick and London offices came together for the bi-annual All Hands event in Limerick. All Hands is a 2-day event where employees come to engage with, collaborate, and strategize with employees from other offices. This year’s theme was “Boldly
Introducing Gutenberg Optimized Themes
In addition to all of the above, the Genesis Framework will be further upgraded for Gutenberg with the release of version 2.8 in Q1 2019. 2.8 will include built-in features that allow you to easily and efficiently style and control Gutenberg blocks as well as auto-load demo content, which can arm
Basic Patterns for Mobile Navigation
Making navigation important and accessible is a challenge on mobile due to the limitations of the small screen and to the need of prioritizing the content over the UI elements. Different basic navigation patterns attempt to solve this challenge in different ways that all suffer from a variety of
Smart-TV Usability: Accessing Content is Key
Modern remote controls are cumbersome and nonstandard devices, inconsistent across the multiple pieces of consumer electronics in the modern home. With current smart TVs that display a set of onscreen choices, people need to use the remote’s four directional arrow buttons to position the cursor
Killing Off the Global Navigation: One Trend to Avoid | Nielsen Norman Group
The temptation to put navigation menus into a drop-down is understandable: it allows much more flexibility to adjust categories in the future, and also means you don't have to clutter up your design with a menu bar. Plus, it’s an easy solution if you want to use the same design across multiple
The Evolution of Healthcare Data: 5 Little Known Facts
With more hospitals using EHR, HITECH and HIPAA were revised and expanded in 2013. Fixes included increased protection and control for patients over their own data. Today, hospitals must adhere to strict data security guidelines or face non-compliance consequences. HIPAA audits look at about 180
A 60-Second Trailer of the 60-Day Report on Cybersecurity
Finally, Hathaway sees this as a unique opportunity for the United States to work with countries around the world, and with organizations on an extremely local level. “We cannot succeed if our government works in isolation,” she added. It requires “leading from the top” from
From Hype to Practical: What’s Next for AI?
There’s little reason why a high-volume, repetitive task like this should still be left to humans. As an industry, we’re making progress with heuristics, which generally do a better job than machine learning at exposing malicious domains today. But there is still room to improve as AI leverages
How to Fail Your Way to Success
It is probably worth seeing yourself as an “experimenter” in the business world. Consider that the enterprises you undertake or take on as a business are often experiments to see if your ideas are correct when faced with reality. In some ways the pioneers of electric cars and autonomous
design thinking 101
Coming to Terms – Why Terms of Use are Critical for Your Company
While this may seem like a nefarious or underhanded practice to take advantage of unwitting users, it is actually business critical for the software publisher to be able to prevent abuse of the software or service by malicious users, hackers, or even competitors. These terms also limit the
How Minnesota Became the Land of 10,000 Startups
Even old-school startups are joining the scene. On November 7 tech darling Salesforce brings its popular Growth Camp series to the Twin Cities. The free tech conference for small businesses and startups features local speakers, 1:1 tech tutorials, a keynote from acclaimed marketing evangelist
Design Thinking 101 | Horizontal Attention Leans Left
Horizontal Attention Leans Left
Should you deviate from convention, understand that it is a risk which may jeopardize the effectiveness and persuasiveness of your content. Users will look for information where they expect it to be in a conventional layout. If that content isn’t there, the consequential search they will embark
Horizontal Attention Leans Left
It’s also worth noting that if we limit our analysis of search-result viewing to the 0–1100px region (the width of the SERP’s main content) as opposed to 0–1920px (the width of the whole maximized browser window) and then divide up each type of screen into 4 equal regions (of 480px for the
Fancy Formatting, Fancy Words = Looks Like a Promotion = Ignored
The Internet manager in charge of this losing design might defend the work by pointing out that it complies with #4 of my top-10 guidelines for homepage design: Offer a clear starting point for the main tasks users will undertake when visiting the site. Clearly, something was done right, with a
