Posts tagged “user experience”

10 principles of inclusive web design

Inclusive design is well established in architecture and industrial design and the principles that apply to these disciplines are equally relevant on the web. It’s people that your website engages with, not technologies, so a user-centred approach is fundamental.


11 laws and principles to use in design

Design elements, laws and principles, garnered over centuries of observation, describe fundamental ideas about the practice of good visual design that are assumed to be the basis of all intentional visual design strategies. These elements form the ‘vocabulary’ of the design, while the laws and principles constitute the broader structural aspects of its composition.


43 things customers think are fun

We’ve all played games as children. Today, millions of people ‘lose’ themselves in massively multiplayer games (MMPG) like World of Warcraft, strategy games like League of Legends and social media games like FarmVille. Games satisfy our need to interact, compete, and exercise our imagination. And they’re fun.


Apple’s 27 guidelines for mobile user experience design

People appreciate mobile apps that feel as though they were designed expressly for the device. For example, when an app fits well on the device screen and responds to the gestures that people know, it provides much of the experience people are looking for. And, although people might not be aware of human interface design principles, such as direct manipulation or consistency, they can tell when apps follow them and when they don’t.


Design Principles – The Philosophy of UX

The visual principles of harmony, unity, contrast, emphasis, variety, balance, proportion, pattern and direction (and others) are widely recognised and practiced, even when they aren’t formally articulated. But creating a good design doesn’t automatically mean creating a good experience. In order for us to cultivate positive experiences for our users, we need to establish a set of guiding principles for experience design.


Dieter Rams’ 10 Rules of Good Design

Dieter Rams is a German industrial designer closely associated with the consumer products company Braun and the Functionalist school of industrial design. Many of Rams’ designs—coffee makers, calculators, radios, audio/visual equipment, consumer appliances and office products—have found a permanent home at many museums over the world, including MoMA in New York.


Disney’s 12 basic principles of animation

The Twelve Basic Principles of Animation is a set of principles of animation introduced by the Disney animators Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas in their 1981 book The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation.


Donald Norman’s 3 dimensions of emotional design

Emotional Design is both the title of a book by Donald Norman and of the concept it represents. The main issue discussed is that emotions have a crucial role in the human ability to understand the world, and how they learn new things.


Game Dynamics, or Gamification to you and me

In behavioural economics, gamification is the use of game dynamics for non-game applications, particularly consumer-oriented web and mobile sites, in order to encourage people to adopt the applications. It also strives to encourage users to engage in desired behaviours in connection with the applications.


Hansen’s user engineering principles for interactive systems

The ‘feel’ of an interactive system can be compared to the impressions generated by a piece of music. Both can only be experienced over a period of time. With either, the user must abstract the structure of the system from a sequence of details. Each may have a quality of ‘naturalness’ because successive actions follow a logically self-consistent pattern. A good composer can write a new pattern which will seem, after a few listenings, to be so natural the observer wonders why it was never done before.


IBM’s design principles

Software can be designed to simplify tasks and to create a positive overall experience for users. Thoroughly understanding the goals of users and stakeholders and designing software with those goals in mind are the best approaches to successfully delivering products that will delight customers.


Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics

These are ten general principles for user interface design suggested by Jakob Nielsen. They are called heuristics because they are more in the nature of rules of thumb than specific usability guidelines.


Lund’s expert ratings of usability maxims

Published in the Ergonomics in Design journal in 1997, Arnold Lund collected and created this list of 34 rules-of-thumb (given below in order of priority) that were found particularly useful during the design process by colleagues working in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) design field.


Prototyping towards a better user experience

Designing websites has traditionally been an expensive and laboured experience. Many hours have been spent pouring over information architecture, deliberating interactions, elaborating upon wireframes and creating pixel-perfect Photoshop and Illustrator compositions, only for those design artefacts to be archived neatly away, on a server, never to be seen again.


The dimensions of a good experience

Good designs are useful, usable and desirable. But what is a good experience? While crafting the experience of her own startup, Foodspotting, Alexa Andrzejewski found answers in urban design. Asking the same question about urban experiences, Kevin Lynch, author of Good City Form, extracted a set of dimensions for evaluating experiences. By applying these principles to interactive experiences, you can identify what kind of experience you’re creating for users: Is it adaptable? Does it tell a story? Are there signs of life? You’ll leave with a set of guidelines that, unlike traditional heuristics, will enable you to evaluate the experiential qualities of your designs.


User experience design and research interview questions

During my time on both sides of the interview table, I’ve asked and received a wide range of design and research related questions. For each interview, I’ve tried to compile the questions asked. In planning interviews, I’ve also researched and collated questions others have asked. Here are a few of them.


What would augment reality?

From a series of tweets by luke wroblewski

The technology industry is buzzing about Augmented Reality (AR) applications and hardware. In a series of illustrations titled “what would augment reality?” Luke Wroblewski attempts to answer “what value would exceed the pain of charging and wearing augmented reality headsets each day?” and “Are there enough compelling use cases to make AR a daily necessity?”.


You’re being gamed

You, like many people, aren’t stupid, but it’s an unfortunate fact of life that you can be fooled. Since the dawn of time, the best salespeople, rightly or wrongly, have been known to exploit vulnerabilities and weaknesses of the human mind to their own gain.


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