Chances are you’ve seen it: a child glued to a tablet or smartphone, swiping fearlessly with small, sticky fingers. From airports and restaurants, to homes and even schools, mobile devices are a ubiquitous part of childhood today. Apple launched a curated ‘Kids’ category in the App Store last year that already has more than 80,000 apps.
With so many apps for kids out there, you may have... Read More
When working on a project, have you ever felt that you and the rest of the team were making a lot of decisions based on assumptions? Having to make choices with limited information is not unusual — especially in complex projects or with brand new products.
Phrases like “We think people will use this feature because of X” or “We believe user group Y will switch to this product” become part... Read More
Imagine that this is what you know about me: I am a college-educated male between the ages of 35 and 45. I own a MacBook Pro and an iPhone 5, on which I browse the Internet via the Google Chrome browser. I tweet and blog publicly, where you can discover that I like chocolate and corgis. I’m married. I drive a Toyota Corolla. I have brown hair and brown eyes. My credit-card statement shows... Read More
Planning user experience (UX) projects is a balancing act of getting the right amount of user input within the constraints of your project. The trick is to work out the best use of your time. How can you get the most UX goodness for your client’s budget? This article explains how to choose the right mix of tools for the task at hand.
The planning phase is all about understanding what you... Read More
UX practitioners, both consultants and in house, sometimes conduct research. Be it usability testing or user research with a generative goal, research requires planning. To make sure product managers, developers, marketers and executives (let’s call them stakeholders) act on UX research results, planning must be crystal clear, collaborative, fast and digestible. Long plans or no plans don’t... Read More
Ah, the love of a client. That is indeed what we all seek as professionals, is it not? If we lived in a utopia, then that’s all there would be. Openness. Honesty. Passion. Flowing in both directions, client to service provider and vice versa. We want our clients to be right behind us in our ideas and open to new ones. In order for this to happen, there has to be trust.
Clients that deal... Read More
It’s easy to see your top-visited pages, navigation patterns and conversion metrics using visitor-tracking tools like Google Analytics. However, this data doesn’t show the roadblocks that users typically run into on your website. Tracking and optimizing error messages will help you measurably improve your website’s user experience. We’ll walk through how to add error tracking using Google... Read More
Metrics can be a touchy subject in design. When I say things like, “Designers should embrace A/B testing” or “Metrics can improve design,” I often hear concerns. Many designers tell me they feel that metrics displace creativity or create a paint-by-numbers scenario. They don’t want their training and intuition to be overruled by what a chart says a link color should be.
These are valid... Read More
The entire process of designing digital applications comes with many challenges and decisions. For the majority of projects, you will be designing in somewhat familiar territory. But what happens when you have to design something to be used by hundreds of children around the world? How do you accommodate your design for kids of different ages and backgrounds? What special challenges emerge,... Read More
