It is impossible to overstate the importance of creating a consistent, easy-to-learn user experience for a mobile app. A well-designed user experience is crucial to the success of any mobile app because it directly impacts user satisfaction, engagement, and retention. In today’s fast-paced digital world, users expect mobile apps to be user friendly and efficient to use and to have seamless workflows. Therefore, being able to design consistent, easy-to-learn mobile-app experiences is essential for app developers and businesses if they want to maintain a competitive edge and build a loyal user base. Let’s try to understand this need better. Read More

In today’s digital age, having a strong online presence is crucial for any business to succeed. However, with the growth of competition, it is no longer enough just to have a Web site. Your Web site must be user friendly, visually appealing, and offer a seamless user experience. The process of designing, testing, and developing the user interface and user experience for your Web site or application is paramount.

Testing the user interface and user experience are critical components of the Web-site and application-design process. UX testing helps ensure that the design meets users’ needs, goals, and expectations and results in a seamless and enjoyable user experience. In this article, I’ll explore the importance of UX testing, when to conduct testing, who to involve in testing, and the different types of UX design testing, as well as some popular UX testing methods and techniques. I’ll also provide a quick eight-step guide on how to conduct UX design testing. Read More

Have you ever found yourself in a dilemma over meeting the needs of your users versus achieving the company’s business goals? As UX designers, we understand the importance of creating products that satisfy users, but at the same time, we cannot overlook the business goals of the company. For example, having the CEO request the design and development of specific features can be quite challenging.

In this article, I’ll share my personal experiences and insights on how to strike a balance between achieving these two crucial aspects of UX design: meeting both users’ needs and business goals. I’ll discuss some of the challenges that come with prioritizing one over the other and the possible consequences that can arise from neglecting either.

This article can give you a better understanding of how to prioritize your design decisions to ensure that you meet both users’ needs and business goals simultaneously. Whether you’re designing a customer-onboarding user experience or any other primary user flow through a product, you can apply practical tips for aligning your design strategy with your business objectives, without sacrificing the user experience. Read More

Navigation design and information architecture are crucial design elements of any Web site or application, but are especially important for an ecommerce Web site or app. They provide a blueprint for the whole Web site or app and are largely responsible for the site’s usability and, thus, for gaining traction with users.

To ensure the success of your ecommerce Web site or app, you must pay close attention to the design of its user experience—the most critical element of a Web site or app’s success. Your ecommerce site’s or app’s navigation design and information architecture are of particular importance because they help improve the user experience.

The way a Web site or app is structured and the ease with which users can find what they’re seeking can make or break the ecommerce shopping experience. In this article, I’ll explore the significance of navigation design and information architecture to the ecommerce experience and show how they impact the customer journey. Read More

Do you remember a world in which smartphones couldn’t recognize your face to unlock automatically, dictionaries were essential for translating foreign languages, and you relied on magazines for music and TV-show recommendations? Our interactions with the world have changed dramatically, and it’s now hard to imagine life before these advancements. Artificial intelligence (AI) products are revolutionizing the way we live, work, and interact with technology.

Artificial intelligence is a broad term that refers to machine-learning (ML) algorithms and other technologies that mimic human intelligence and automate tasks that would typically require human intervention. [1] AI products—ranging from virtual assistants such as Siri and Alexa to self-driving cars and smart-home appliances—are becoming increasingly prevalent in our daily lives. Predictions forecast that the global AI software market will experience rapid growth, reaching an estimated $126 billion US by 2025. [2] Read More

Mental-health disorders that plague the world’s population include depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, a variety of eating disorders, and schizophrenia. Perhaps surprisingly, our experiences and interactions on the Internet can haunt our reality and are contributing significantly to some disturbing real-life consequences for people’s mental health. What is the solution to this problem? Careful, conscious, and compassionate user experience design.

A UX designer wields the power to determine how the audience on the other side of the screen feels about their experiences in the digital world. By using the power that technology confers on us responsibly, we can—and should!—create user experiences that support people’s well-being. But designing for mental health is not easy because people’s experiences are subjective. Read More

After heading a small business that created and sold educational products for ten years and seeing technology evolve and customer expectations shift, I realized that we needed more user research and product iterations to meet the scale of the challenge. Through my having conversations with researchers working across the domains of software as a service (SaaS), education, and medicine, as well as private-sector companies, plus countless hours of research, I have gained valuable knowledge that I’d like to pass on to you and other researchers who care about User Experience.

UX researchers influence how teams create and iterate on products. We rely on user research to identify and understand user problems and assess the usability and effectiveness of the solutions we create. But the user-research methods that we select in a given scenario depend on the phase of the product-development lifecycle and the questions we need to answer. Read More

A common refrain among UX professionals is that there never seems to be a big enough research budget. To be fair, it does often feel that this is the case. But, rather than focusing on what my team and I might not be able to change, we have attempted to streamline our use of the one asset that is completely within our control: our time.

Over the past year, I have attempted to improve our efficiency by creating a process for the operational aspects of our research work. Ideally, as an organization grows, they should be able to employ more ResearchOps employees. But, regardless of a UX team’s size, we can always attempt to improve our research practice by reducing the time we spend on operations tasks that we can easily standardize. Read More

Choose a blank sheet of white paper. Put a black dot in the center. Give it to someone and ask what they see. I bet all they’ll see is the black dot. No one sees the beautiful texture, immaculate whiteness, or shape of the paper. All they see is the black dot. Everything else is invisible. That’s how thankless developing a product can be. Nobody notices anything until something goes wrong. Then all hell breaks loose.

Every day, CEOs, project managers, product managers, brand managers, UX designers, developers, and digital marketers work hard developing new products and improving on existing ones. What users see are the shiny Web sites and colorful apps. But a lot happens behind the scenes, and the process is not as sleek as the outcomes.

But people often appreciate the results better when they know how much work went into achieving them. In this article, I’ll walk through the product-development process so you can better understand what makes it easy or complex. Read More