Design with Intent Toolkit COM : Technology I always think you should have some sort of philosophy when you design your software , this may not be a a opinion just related to UIs but i think it is important. I think it is very good if you have a simple concept that a user can understand. The ideal case is if the two first pages of your Documentation makes the user "get it" and everything after that is following that rule. Classics is of course the UNIX concept of "Everything is a file", Or in HTML everything is done by tags, and even if you have to most fancy HTML tool in the world it helps to know a bit about what a tag is and some basics of how to write HTML manually. It makes the user understand what the application does, and makes it more predictable. Don't ever try to hide the the basics of the software, even though the user will almost only use high level functions to do fancy things, He or She will sooner or later want to do something by hand, just to have total control and then the app should let them!
8 ways to reduce cognitive load: Part 2 In the previous part of the article I described 5 major design techniques that help to reduce cognitive load. This notion refers to the total amount of mental effort that is required from a user to complete a task. Increase of this phenomena above the level that is acceptable for user can cause serious usability issues such as: rise of bounce rateshallow visit depthlower conversion than expected to name a few. Yet, even if a service or product requires complex activity from a user, there are ways to make the design help people go through the process smooth and clear. 5. When people read on paper, eye movement create a Z-shaped path from left to right and diagonally down or right to left for Arabic or Japanese speakers. Do we read in a zig-zag pattern online to? How the awareness about this pattern can be used by designers to help users consume the content? 6. Are there any doubts what is the main CTA on this site? And just for the comparison… 7. 8. Reading list
A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design So, here's a Vision Of The Future that's popular right now. It's a lot of this sort of thing. As it happens, designing Future Interfaces For The Future used to be my line of work. I had the opportunity to design with real working prototypes, not green screens and After Effects, so there certainly are some interactions in the video which I'm a little skeptical of, given that I've actually tried them and the animators presumably haven't. My problem is the opposite, really — this vision, from an interaction perspective, is not visionary. This matters, because visions matter. This little rant isn't going to lay out any grand vision or anything. Before we think about how we should interact with our Tools Of The Future, let's consider what a tool is in the first place. I like this definition: A tool addresses human needs by amplifying human capabilities. That is, a tool converts what we can do into what we want to do. In this rant, I'm not going to talk about human needs. That's right! So then.
How Google Unified Its Products With A Humble Index Card If you hadn’t noticed, every Google service has been trending toward a certain understated elegance. The company’s infamous era of championing 41 shades of blue is long over, as the company has learned to embrace clean lines, airy typography, and liberal white space across their platforms. But amidst implementing these long-established good design practices, Google rediscovered an old idea: index cards. Just like index and business cards of yore (or at least the late '90s), Google’s cards are plain, white rectangles peppered with nothing more than a little bit of type and maybe a photo. Are cards the epitome of flat modernism, or are they subconscious skeuomorphism? Even Google’s designers debated this point when I posed the question. We first saw cards returning results through Search’s Knowledge Graph, as Google began summarizing Wikipedia entries into condensed blurbs. Yes, Google is even developing cards on cards. Are Cards Good Design, Or A Foregone Conclusion?
The vital role of user research – Design at IBM To many people, conducting user research is a bit like cleaning up the garage: they know it would be a good thing to do and would bring some real benefits, yet somehow they never quite get round to it. For others, user research is something that does happen, but only occasionally, such as at the beginning of a big new project. Then there are those who do carry out some form of user research activity fairly frequently, but who tend to just use the one or two research methods that they have used previously. Obviously some user research is better than none. User research helps us to understand how people go about performing tasks and achieving goals that are important to them. Or, to put it another way, User research focuses on understanding user expectations, behaviors, needs, and motivations through methodical, investigative approaches. It helps us identify unarticulated needs and to fill in any gaps in our knowledge about our users, context of use, challenges, and opportunities.
Wishbox: Get User Feedback with Annotated Screenshots Wishbox is a new way to get feedback. With its screenshots, you’ll be able to find out exactly what the problem is and receive suggestions. You can use it for online customer support, or even manage web design projects with Wishbox as a form of communication between you and your client. Feedback Button A simple, customizable feedback button to engage your users without disturbing their visit. Screenshot Wishbox can take a screenshot of your website. Web Form Jotform, the engine running behind Wishbox, will enable you to embed any web form in your Wishbox. Email Notification Get notified instantly by email. Game design vs UX design Short form: UX design is about removing problems from the user. Game design is about giving problems to the user. In both cases you look at users’ cognitive reasoning and process capacity. And these days, we have UX designers on game teams, and they are incredibly valuable. Most UX designers don’t work in games. transparent, so that the user needs to think as little as possibleaffordant, so that the user knows what possibilities it offersscalable, so that it unfolds as the user develops skillsfeedback-rich, so that the user knows when they did somethingconstraining, so that the user can’t do things that get them in trouble What they do not do is actually specify the inner workings of whatever is being used. UX design in non-game applications is absolutely not about teaching the player how the guts of the software works. In general a game designer’s job is to create a great experience when playing a game. challenging. In addition, game designers In general, these lines get blurry.