Improved Experience

UX – Smashing Magazine

• Fables, Myths And Narratives: Converting Our Stories Into Multi-Screen Experiences May 13, 2013
     Storytelling takes many forms. In the past, stories were told orally, with people telling and retelling myths, fables and even histories. As writing technology became more prevalent, we began to record our stories, and we told them in the pages of books. Now, our society is awash in different devices and technologies, and those traditions of spoken storie […]
  Senongo Akpem
• Whiteboards, Visions And Banned Words: How To Help A Real-Life Knight Achieve His Goals May 7, 2013
     This article is about design consultancy. It’s about wrangling that client who uses empty sentences like, “We want a snappy, simple experience,” or, “It should be on brand and should really pop.” It’s about commanding the room and setting a vision before moving on to wireframes and pixels. While I’ll talk in terms of consultation, these ideas can be appli […]
  Will Dayble
• Design Patterns: Infinite Scrolling: Let’s Get To The Bottom Of This May 3, 2013
     Infinite scrolling promises a better experience for users. However, the good is often accompanied by the bad and the ugly. Once we understand the strengths and weaknesses of infinite scrolling, we can begin to use it to enhance our interfaces. Human nature demands hierarchy and structures that are easy to navigate. But infinite scrolling sometimes leaves […]
  Yogev Ahuvia
• The Rainbow Spreadsheet: A Collaborative Lean UX Research Tool April 11, 2013
     Liverpool FC fans sing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” to their players during matches. UX research is best done when a team is involved. When you run UX research on your own without active observers, you are missing its point. This article describes and gives you a tool I created called the Rainbow Spreadsheet. With it, you will be able to collaboratively obse […]
  Tomer Sharon
• Making Your Site Responsive: Mastering Real-World Constraints (A Case Study) March 28, 2013
     As UI designers, we’re always interested in learning, reading user research, understanding best practices and keeping up to date on all the latest approaches and tactics for building websites and applications. One of the most exciting concepts we’ve started to apply to our thinking is the mobile-first approach, famously pioneered by designer Luke Wroblews […]
  Alex Fedorov
• A Case Study: The Art Of Storytelling Around An App March 19, 2013
     Every app tells a story. Apps like Pandora tell the story of music; apps like Tip N Split tell a story of a calculator; and apps like Temperature tell the story of weather. Then we have storybook apps like Alice for the iPad, which literally tell stories! The story of the cluttered app market is well known! Biz Report recently reported that the number of […]
  John Casey
• Best Practices And Examples: Designing A Better Mobile Checkout Process March 14, 2013
     A record number of shoppers are turning to their smartphones to research potential purchases. Meanwhile, the bigger question — are those same users willing to complete the purchases on their mobile device? — is quickly being answered. The US, for example, saw an 81% spike in mobile e-commerce (m-commerce) sales in 2012, comprising a $25 billion market. An […]
  Derek Nelson
• Designing For The Multifaceted User March 12, 2013
     Designing with users in mind is a tricky thing. Not only does it require of us a sound understanding of who our users are, but the actual act of translating what we know about them into a well-designed product is not always an obvious or easy path. Currently, our user experience tools tend to focus on “who” users are. I believe this is a hangover from how […]
  Stephanie Troeth
• Learning From Cinema: What Sci-Fi Tells Interaction Designers About Gestural Interfaces March 1, 2013
     One of the most famous interfaces in sci-fi is gestural — the precog scrubber interface used by the Precrime police force in Minority Report. Using this interface, Detective John Anderton uses gestures to “scrub” through the video-like precognitive visions of psychic triplets. After observing a future crime, Anderton rushes to the scene to prevent it and […]
  Christopher Noessel
• Building Trust And Credibility: How To Sell Your UX Design Solution To Clients February 20, 2013
     How do you convince clients to trust you with their valuable and much-loved product? In my experience, the best way to sell work to clients is to apply user-centered design not only to the work we produce, but also to the clients who commission that work. We have to understand who our clients are, what is important to them and what their goals are. And th […]
  Rian van der Merwe