User Experience articles

As sometimes happens, I was thinking the other day. In this case, I was doing my thinking after finishing a long video game: Far Cry 5. It occurred to me that video game creators are the masters of emotional payoff, when everything goes right. The world of that game is in itself rewarding and fun to run around in. It’s actually enough fun, that I’m more than willing to ignore how the game’s story was an unrewarding, steaming pile of sadness....

Most people are familiar with the concept of a persona—a fictional character that embodies the traits of your target audience. Marketers gather details from user research and generate a representation of their ideal client. When developing a website or smartphone app, designing for a persona helps identify how users will interact. Recently Bill Buxton took it one step further when he introduced the concept of a place-ona, a representation...

As humans, we tend to rely heavily on one piece of information when we make decisions. We often anchor on the first piece of information we are introduced to and judge all subsequently received information in relation to it. The first piece of information offered automatically becomes the anchor, from which subsequent judgements are made. Anchoring is the persuasive practice of creating a reference point around which we as designers want...

“I am consumer, hear me roar!” That’s a thing I actually wrote once, un-ironically, in a text conversation with a friend. I was looking for a product that would allow me to perform a particular task in a particular way. Unsatisfied with the options I’d found so far, I kept looking. My friend suggested using one of the products I had already decided to ignore, and just do things their way. To hell with that. I’m the customer. I’m the guy...

Storytelling is great for design, so long as you aren’t trying to sell a fairy tale… Do you tell your users a story about how you’ll save them from their troubles? It’s not very realistic, and users generally know this. You might try a different approach. Once upon a time in the videogame industry, some game developers got tired of writing stories and quests into their games. So they made a bunch of sandbox-style games where the player...

SaaS Customer On-boarding is the process that users have to experience while initiating their journey on a company’s software application. Customer on-boarding initiates from the experience that employees previously had to undergo while joining a firm. The on-boarding process sets the tone for a good user experience. The SaaS customer on-boarding process is based on 6 comprehensive aspects, the first five of which we’ve already...

The hamburger menu was initially introduced as a means to obscure secondary navigation items in an effort to maintain a cleaner and more focused web or application design. Android was one of the early adopters of this design component, going as far as to include it in their popular Material Design guidelines. Since then it’s found its way into the majority of Android apps, as well as a proportion of iOS apps. It’s even become a staple across...

Creating products which respond to the user’s needs has become the de-facto standard approach for product design. In the attempt to create the best possible experience designers constantly search for new techniques that allow them to create better user experiences. One of the methods that recently became popular among many product designers is called gamification. In this article, I’ll share a few tips on how this technique can be...

A dark user experience pattern is loosely defined as a way to trick users into performing certain actions. These actions always benefit the company employing these techniques, and often leave user out of pocket in at least one way. Sometimes this is monetary; other times it’s at the cost of privacy, time, or even user rights. Some of the most common dark patterns include disguising advertisements, sneaking additional items into a user’s...

Data Import & Notifications is the 5th Part of The Ultimate UX Design Guide to SaaS Customer On-Boarding SaaS Customer On-boarding is the process that users have to experience while initiating their journey on a company’s software application. Customer on-boarding initiates from the experience that employees previously had to undergo while joining a firm. The on-boarding process sets the tone for a good user experience. The SaaS...

The thing about human beings is that you can’t trust them with anything. Okay, maybe that’s a bit unkind. However, it’s a simple truth that even the most caring, careful, and diligent of us are going to make mistakes. The rest of us are going to make a lot more mistakes. Those mistakes, in relation to web design, could be as simple as mistyping a URL, putting the wrong information in the wrong field in a sign-up form, or as bad as accidentally...

Gamification as a concept has been around just long enough for a number of experts to come out of nowhere. There was a brief moment where everybody wrote an article or five about it, and then it more or less became the preserve of “gamification experts” and business blogs. The thing is, we should still be thinking about it. Buzzword or not, it’s often incredibly effective. So, for the beginners: gamification is the practice of putting game-like...

UX Design is almost synonymous with conversational interfaces, which are used left, right, and center from natural language messaging to voice-based action. Biggies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon are neck-and-neck when it comes to taking conversation as a platform to the next level with their virtual assistants, that make it easy for users to take the next course of action. It is no different than talking to the next person...

When it comes to first impressions, design is everything. From colors, copy on buy buttons, to the layout of a website. Tapping into what makes brains tick is important for this, and certain aesthetics as far as design goes are much more persuasive if you want the visitors to take some kind of action on your website. When you combine behavioral and brain science with practical experience, you will get a much deeper insight into how and why humans...