Personas have been in use since the mid-’90s and since then have gained widespread awareness within the design community. Once Shlomo Goltz understood why personas were valuable and how they could be put into action, he started using them in his own work, and then his process became more efficient and fun, while the fruits of his labor became more impactful and useful to others. Personas will supercharge your work and help you take your designs to the next level.
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Knowing how groups influence people can help you to move from being a common designer to a strategic influencer of your target audience with relative ease, and social influence, particularly social identity theory, provides key concepts for you to address through UX design. You can influence people by thoughtfully incorporating social identity concepts into your design. In this article, Victor Yocco will focus on how concepts related to social identity theory can help UX professionals to more effectively incorporate social influence in their work.
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Responsive web design is great, but it’s not a silver bullet. In this article, Maximiliano Firtman will cover the relationship between the mobile web and responsive design, starting with how to apply responsive design intelligently, why responsive design should not be your website’s goal, and ending with the performance issues of the technique to help us understand the problem. According to Guy Podjarny’s research, 72% of responsive websites deliver the same number of bytes regardless of screen size, even on slow mobile network connections. Not all users will wait for your website to load. With just a basic understanding of the problem, you can minimize this loss.
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Is drawing the best way to begin to design an interface? Luca Leone started by writing an imagined human-computer conversation, and only afterwards he continued by drawing. The easiest tool is to imagine an interaction. The diagrams and sketches come afterwards. This changed his way of thinking and he never went back to drawing first. In this article Luca will explain the reasons behind his decision.
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The method of pitting two versions of a landing page against each other in a battle of conversion is called A/B testing, and it lets you test two entirely different designs for a landing page or you can test small tweaks, like changes to a few words in your copy. Running A/B tests on your website can help you improve your communication with visitors and back up important design decisions with real data from real users. With the multitude of tools available, split testing has become easy for even non-technical people to design and manage.
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Having to make choices with limited information is not unusual — especially in complex projects or with brand new products. But, at some point, though, these choices start to feel like pure guesses and the ground under your feet feels shaky. What can you do about it? Approaching potential users for research, such as interviews and usability tests will help your whole team build a solid foundation for product strategy and design. You’ll find that the skills you develop will give you confidence to pursue the answers you need, leading you to better experiences for yourself and others.
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The reason why app store reviews aren’t as effective as they could be is that they’re a one-way conversation, asking the user to say something positive to everyone else. There should be something better, something more conversational. In this article, Joshua Mauldin will investigate the various tactics of prompting for app reviews and ratings and how to make them better. He’ll also talk about how to ask users for feedback in a way that benefits everyone. Getting feedback on your app is important. How else can people tell you that your app is doing well or poorly?
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Interface designers use affordances all the time. They have to. Unlike physical objects, web and mobile interfaces must gain all of their affordance through design. For most designers, this is intuitive and instinctive, based on the thousands of design patterns we see every day. But have you ever thought about the qualities that make an object afford clicking, sliding, pulling or pushing? By deeply understanding how affordance works, you’ll better master interface or product design. Better affordance can have a dramatic impact on conversion rates, registration rates and the user actions that matter most to the website, app or product you’re designing for. This is why “affordance” is the most underrated word in web design.
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Some of us were born with this feeling of what feels and looks right. But other people also have a gift of aesthetic feeling, a gift to recognize beauty. Ordinary users, then, just like designers, recognize beauty and know what’s right and not right. This is not where the problem of handing over creative control arises. The problem is that they don’t know the principles that designers do. But there is a way. We can guide users simply by limiting their creative control, which also makes for a simpler tool.
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As designers, we must understand the role of momentum in effective user interface design and create experiences that keep our users moving forward. How do you know when your design has enough friction to be understood but is not overly complicated? In this article, Martijn van Tilburg considers different design scenarios and how to manage the user’s momentum by speeding up or slowing down their flow according to the situation. He will also discuss a framework for thinking about friction in your next design and when to be strategically innovative in order to maintain momentum.
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