User Experience articles

Every human being needs, rather desperately, to feel accepted. They don’t necessarily need to feel accepted by everyone, but they do need to feel accepted by someone. It’s a part of our nature, and nature in general. Even as I type this, my cat Cleocatra is demanding that I give her attention, and if I don’t, she’ll leave my room in a huff. [A few minutes later:] She didn’t leave. She stuck her claws into me. Users can have very similar...

Okay, for the love of any God you prefer, read this bit before you start writing comments…please? I’ve been studying up on philosophical Taoism lately because someone very near and dear to me is a (philosophical) Taoist, and I wanted to understand her better. What I’ve found is that web and UX designers have, by studying the data, come to a lot of the same conclusions as ancient Eastern philosophers. While the lessons in this article may...


If WordPress is the world’s favorite blogging platform, then WooCommerce is surely the most popular e-commerce solution available. WooCommerce is currently leading the WordPress e-commerce market and in popularity exceeds its nearest rivals—Shopify and Magento—roughly 4 times over. In this post we’ll learn how to capture and recover abandoned shopping carts in WooCommerce and how to create a successful abandoned cart...

Creating great UX is a primary goal for all product designers. It’s up to the designer to make a process of interaction with a product as simple as possible. Modern products try to achieve simplicity by following a fundamentally different approach called Anticipatory Design. This article is intended to make you familiar with the concept of anticipatory design, as well as share a few excellent examples of how anticipatory design can be used...

UX is a crucial component of modern web design, and users’ expectations are constantly shifting. Though we cannot see into the future, changes made throughout the last decade indicate that adjusting for user needs has never been more crucial. To get ahead in the ever-changing mobile app sphere, designers have to be proactive at all times. Let the following 7 UX trends be your guide to help prep for both the present and the future of UX design:...

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...