July 6, 2016 - Every designer has their favorite prototyping tools. However, when it comes to UX wireframing and prototyping, there is often more than one tool involved. Sooner or later, you find yourself switching from one tool to another to cherry-pick the best ones among them. Adobe announced Project Comet in October last year to provide a fast and efficient all-in-one solution. A few months ago,... Read More

July 5, 2016 - Any time a user’s experience is interrupted, the chance of them leaving increases. Changing from one page to another will often cause this interruption by showing a white flash of no content, by taking too long to load or by otherwise taking the user out of the context they were in before the new page opened. Transitions between pages can enhance the experience by retaining (or even... Read More

June 29, 2016 - Prototyping tools have become an important resource for us designers — allowing us to document multiple states of a single screen, including animations, transitions and microinteractions that are hard to represent in static documentation. Companies that pay attention to this trend have started to build prototyping tools to address this need; and today we're seeing a plethora of tools... Read More

June 27, 2016 - Let’s be honest: We designers can be difficult to work with. We might come from a controversial company culture, work an unconventional schedule or get impatient whenever our Internet connection is slower than the speed of light. Would you be at ease with a service provider who matches this description? When talking to potential clients, be aware that many will have never solicited a... Read More

June 21, 2016 - According to Colour Blind Awareness 4.5% of the population are color-blind. If your audience is mostly male this increases to 8%. Designing for color-blind people can be easily forgotten because most designers aren't color-blind. In this article I provide 13 tips to improve the experience for color-blind people – something which can often benefit people with normal vision too. There are... Read More

June 15, 2016 - Using a style guide to drive development is a practice that is gaining a lot of traction in front-end development — and for good reason. Developers will start in the style guide by adding new code or updating existing code, thereby contributing to a modular UI system that is later integrated in the application. But in order to implement a modular UI system, we must approach design in a modular... Read More

June 14, 2016 - A large metropolitan underground train network might as well be a teleportation device: People don’t care how it gets them from A to B, just that it does. In London, Paris and Moscow, the map of the metro does not show surface geography, because there is not much empty space on the sheet. Designing a city’s metro map is quite a challenging task, even when there is just one line. Last... Read More

June 14, 2016 - Brainstorming is notorious for being unstructured and often unactionable. People get in a room with some Post-its and whiteboards and expect the great ideas to happen. The problem is, even if there are great ideas in the room, there is often no clear-cut way to decide on what ideas to take action on. About a year ago, I and my colleague Michael (founding partner at AJ&Smart) were... Read More

June 6, 2016 - We have a lot of passwords to remember, and it’s becoming a problem. Authentication is clearly important, but there are many ways to reliably authenticate users – not just passwords. Passwords are written off as inconvenient and unavoidable, but even if true a few years ago, that’s not true today. Due to a combination of sensors, encryption and seasoned technology users, authentication is... Read More