User Experience articles

Designing for emotion in and of itself is not a problem. Websites are bound to elicit an emotional reaction from visitors, even if it’s as simple as them feeling at ease because of the soft, pastel color palette you’ve designed the site with. I don’t want to outright villainize emotional design. Unless there is some form of unethical manipulation at play, designing for your visitors’ emotions can actually provide them with a more positive...

To understand why user onboarding is such an indispensable tool, we need to empathize with the people using our products; we all come from different backgrounds and cultures, we make different assumptions, and we see the world differently. User onboarding helps mitigate these differences by making your product’s learning curve less steep. However, companies often make unfortunate mistakes that hinder user experience and cause frustration....

It’s no secret that the senior population is growing. By 2030, people over the age of 65 are predicted to make up 20.6% of the population of the US.  Around the world, people are living longer and remaining more active in the later years of their lives. What’s more, despite what you might have heard in the past, seniors aren’t as wary of the internet as they used to be. In 2019, the Pew Research institute revealed that 73% of people over the...

Users come to your website with certain expectations already in their mind; they’ve seen thousands of other websites before and it’s only natural that they’ve adopted certain habits. Instead of trying to change these patterns, it’s much better to incorporate them into your design. To learn more, let’s have a closer look at a psychological concept known as mental models.  What Are Mental Models? Before we move on to examples,...

If a free trial model is executed well, it can become your new secret weapon for lowering your CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) and increasing conversion rates. However, that level of success doesn’t come without its fair share of challenges. What if you lose money? How do you avoid freeloaders? Which free trial model should you choose?  If you’re looking to dive deeper into the free trial models that have swept across the SaaS industry,...

The web has made it all too easy for consumers to look up anything and everything they’re interested in or have questions about. “Pet stores near me.” “Best web hosting 2020.” “Tom Brady net worth.” And it’s with this easy access to data that consumers have grown pickier about who they do business with. Because if they can get answers to all the other questions in their lives, why can’t they find out everything there is to know...

Videos aren’t inherently accessible. Even if the content comes from an outside source — like a videographer or a YouTube channel — you’re still responsible for ensuring that every visitor on your website can fully access it. Video can serve many purposes for a website: Home page videos featuring company founders or illustrated walk-throughs of a solution can serve as a unique welcome to the site; Product videos give customers a better...

If we look at this from a design perspective, there’s definitely something about the way the user experiences are designed that makes them more attractive than other movie or TV viewing options. Especially Netflix. Today, I want to put the spotlight on Netflix and give you 3 lessons you can take away from the platform’s design and features. 1. Make Onboarding Painless Obviously, Netflix is a household name, so it doesn’t need to mince...

One of the most powerful tools we have in web design is consumer and industry data. It’s like a gauge that tells us whether we’re still heading in the right direction or it’s time to change course and adopt a new strategy or approach. Unless you’re combing the web for the latest news and reports in the areas of design, marketing, and SEO, it’s easy to miss this pertinent data. So, in this roundup, I’m going to take care of that for you....

And let’s be honest: perfection is a high bar to reach for any development team, especially when building applications that enterprises rely on for day-to-day operations. But it is worth aiming for perfect UX for enterprise apps every single time. Why? Because research shows every $1 invested in UX brings a return of $100, and 90 percent of users have quit using an application because of poor performance. (Other issues harming app retention...

Imagine the public excitement when, in 1951, William Edmund Hick (“Hickey” to his friends?!) and Ray (with an “a”) Hyman published research about people’s responses to a bunch of flashing lights. I’m sure no-one could imagine how important this work would be for the information age since, of course, at that time, a bank of flashing lights was pretty much the height of technological sophistication. More accurately known as the...

It’s always good to have a set of guidelines to follow when designing a website — especially if you have little to no user data to go on. Over the years, we’ve been introduced to tons of these guidelines and design trends; some of which have fallen out of favor while others have persisted over the years. One of those web design guidelines that’s persisted is the F-pattern. But is it still relevant today, what with mobile-first design practices?...

Unless you’ve been hiding under a tinfoil hat for the last few years, you probably know that UX and UI are not the same thing because “UX is more ergonomic”, or some such nonsense. But what about the unified part? Normally speaking, I’ve got very little patience for hipster acronyms and nit-picking, but actually it turns out there’s more to this than fake specs and chai latte. Imagine you’re standing outside two different coffee...

Once in a while, every professional comes across a challenge so great, so ridiculous, that they just can’t help themselves. They just have to go for it. It’s like the story of David and Goliath… if David was just bored and Goliath wasn’t threatening his entire nation. As for me, I’m about to argue for putting sounds on a website, and discuss how to do it right. Yeah, I know… I’m one of the “Never Ever Autoplay Sounds on Your Site”...