So much of the conversation around digital wellness involves user-based actions, but what responsibility does product design have? Explore why and how helping users establish healthier relationships with tech is becoming a design consideration.
Tag: user interface
How to Improve Your 404 Page Design
As UX designers we work hard to understand where users tend to go wrong and why in order to prevent errors. But no one's perfect. Eventually someone’s going to make a typo, forget to input something, or hit the wrong button. Errors are part of the experience so UX design shouldn’t end with them. A bad error experience and all the work you’ve done up to that point may not matter. Your users get annoyed, confused, or frustrated and they’re gone. 404 pages are one of the more common culprits for this. Like every other page, they should have a design and content strategy that positively supports a good user experience. Check out some tips on how to create better 404 pages.
How Programming Knowledge Can Help UX/UI Designers
While it’s not a direct necessity to have this knowledge in order to create a good, usable design, understanding the medium used to bring your ideas to life can still be beneficial for UX and UI designers’ work. It helps you think differently, makes you a better communicator, a better collaborator and adds a skill to your resume.
Toward More Gender-Inclusive Form Design
Forms are like icebergs. They’re deceivingly more complicated and troublesome than they appear on the surface. Screw up a form’s design and you can stop users in their tracks, preventing them from meeting their intended goals, your business from collecting valuable data, or both. There are a lot of decisions that should go into determining how a form will be look. Since being inclusive and respectful of someone’s identity contributes to better UX, it's important to think through how even the smallest, design choices can be adjusted to help more people feel welcome using your product.
Content Audit: Doctors Without Borders
In her book The Content Strategy Toolkit, Meghan Casey (2015) lists 3 methods for identifying the problems and opportunities of a website’s content: a content audit, an analytics review, and user testing. This first option – a content audit – is what she recommends starting with. For this post I’ve conducted a sample content audit of Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders' (MSF) external-facing website for the United States. Read my full content audit report to learn more about how I evaluated the MSF site and what I found.
A UX Research Report: Connecticut Forest and Park Association
In the last 25 years, business websites have evolved into powerful interactive hubs where users go for far more than brochureware. And as COVID-19 has shown, they are also now the front doors to organizations. Along with social media, they are often the first or only means of interaction people have with a business so, your website's experience better be on point. If it's not, the good news is it's never been easier to learn what it takes to build a good experience for your users. I recently completed a UX research project on ctwoodlands.org, the website for the member-based conservation nonprofit Connecticut Forest and Park Association. Check it out to see one approach for quickly getting the insights and direction you need for a successful redesign.
Usability Testing for an Existing Product
Usability is the measure of how well a person can use a product to achieve an intended goal. In a previous post, I talked about how usability testing should be a key part of any iterative design process, preferably being implemented as early as possible to identify design problems. But usability testing is also an important tool to evaluate existing products before you ever sit down at the drawing board to devise a change or new design.
A/B Testing as a UX Research Technique
Redesigning a website is usually about making its experience better. But change doesn’t guarantee better, just different. This is why user experience (UX) designers focus so much on user research. The more you know about user needs, as well as business and other requirements, the more you can eliminate some of that uncertainty about the impact of a new design. However, you will never know for sure how a design choice will perform until it's used with real users in real life. This is a nerve-wracking reality. A UX designer nor most project stakeholders are comfortable taking the risk of just changing something and seeing how it goes. Enter A/B testing.
Module 6: Interface Motion (User Interface Animation)
Animating user interfaces can help users and offer them a better experience, but in doing so these animated elements are made to feel so natural that we often don't consider that they can be complex to design well. For this post, I've taken the general advice from Liz Blazer's Animated Storytelling: Simple Steps for Creating Animation and Motion Graphics and applied it to UI animation. Combined with research examples, I was able to create a looping sequence of UI animations for my previously developed Milford Resident App prototype.
Web Design Essentials: Color Palettes
A key component in your website’s feel, and some might argue the most readily noticeable, is color. We all have a favorite and before we can even read, we’re taught names and cultural associations for each. But choosing a color palette for a website that inspires the right emotions and works well with existing branding or content can be a challenge.
Web Design Essentials: Wireframes
Like architectural blueprints, wireframes depict the structure of a webpage but not the visual design elements of it. You can learn the layout of content blocks on a page, the types of content a page will contain, and some of the basic functionalities of a page from a wireframe.
8 Usability Musts for Good Web Design
Users’ attention spans are short. They make judgments they may not even consciously realize about websites in seconds. Every element of a website’s design works in coordination to sway those judgments negatively or positively. There’s an overwhelming list of elements to consider for web design, but to be helpful I’ve highlighted the following 8 design areas I think are important to offer a good user experience.
Redesigning A WordPress Blog
Websites are like living creatures. We’re constantly interacting with them, updating them with new content, and making technological and design advances that shape our expectations of them. Knowing when it's time then to redesign a website can be tricky. Learn how I identified what needed updates on my WordPress blog one year after starting it.
Getting Real with High-Fidelity Prototypes
There comes a time in every project when an idea transitions from conceptual to actual. In website and app design that time generally comes during the prototyping process. Prototyping can be done in a range of fidelities, or levels of detail, from low to high. Low-fidelity prototypes can be a great tool for quickly iterating design ideas and starting usability testing early in your design process, but the type of experience they offer is quite removed from a product’s endgame. High-fidelity prototyping is when things start to feel and look real.
Going Low Tech with Paper Prototypes
Sometimes when designing technology, you have to forgo technology and get back to basics with good ole pen and paper. With so much tech around us every day it’s pretty easy to just jump straight to software to start designing when the most helpful tools are actually the ones already sitting in our desk drawers. If you’re designing a website, app, or other tech product one of the best tool to use to start deciding what it will look like and how users will interact with is a paper prototype.
UX/UI Design and the Streaming Wars
When Disney Plus, the company’s streaming service, launched last November, I was intrigued by the possibility of adding some Disney magic to my life again, if only through the TV and movie content I’d loved as a kid. That content has proven as satisfying as I remember, but the Disney Plus experience has left a bad taste in my mouth. Learn how I used a feelings and needs website analyzation of UX and UI elements on Disney Plus and Netflix to find out if Disney's design is the root of my negative opinion.