User Experience articles

When designers and developers work on projects, they have a lot of questions: What do our users expect to see on this screen? How are users supposed to interact with our product? What should our onboarding feel like? These questions are commonly asked during product development. Every team wants to reduce the risk of incorrect design decisions and as the complexity of products increases, the digital product design industry puts usability...

We spend a lot of time online reading news, navigating websites and using web apps. In some cases, our experience online is not the best that we could have. And all this is due to poor design that didn’t take user experience into consideration. It’s easy to look from afar and notice these errors, but it’s a bit trickier when you are the one handling a project. As designers, it’s our duty to create design with great user experience. And it...

Almost two decades ago Steve Krug first advised us not to make users think. Today designers strive to create experiences that require no extra effort on the user’s part. Frictionless interaction has become a popular qualifier for evaluating user experiences. As designers and developers, it’s beneficial to familiarize yourself with methods that allow you to create frictionless interactions. In this article, I’ll analyze steps...

The 17th May 2018 is Global Accessibility Awareness day, which makes today the ideal time to consider how inclusive our experiences are for those users who may be disabled, differently-abled, or temporarily inconvenienced. 2017 was a big year for website accessibility lawsuits. Seyfarth and Shaw reported that, by year’s end, there were 814 ADA Title III federal lawsuits filed against websites in the United States alone. Perhaps the...

On the 18th of March, one of Uber’s autonomous cars in Tempe, Arizona struck and killed a woman in the street in what is the first pedestrian death caused by a driverless car in America. No doubt, the (rightful) media interest around this will create the perception that driverless cars are unsafe. Public sentiment toward driverless cars will be affected, and increased regulatory scrutiny may follow. This is despite the fact that autonomous...

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...