March 2010
8 posts
3 tags
Honest Interfaces
“To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful.”—Edward R. Murrow
Users approach most products with an expectation of honesty. Things should do what they say, behave in an expected manner and reinforce their decision to use this product/service/website. The interface is your opportunity to gain their trust and confidence while...
2 tags
10 Principles of UX
1. The Experience Belongs to the User: Designers do not create experiences, they create artifacts to experience. This makes all the difference. Since experience is subjective it cannot be designed in quite the same way that a physical product can. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t design the framework within which people experience our product/service. If our framework is solid,...
2 tags
It's The Little Things
The restaurant is fairly full on this warm Sunday night at SXSW. The lights are low and the place has a back-woodsy charm about it. There is a small 4-piece band tucked away in the corner. The drummer keeps things swinging with just a snare and high-hat. There’s a man playing the upright bass and a guy on a semi-hollow body guitar with just the faintest crackle of distortion. And then...
1 tag
Why UX is really just good marketing
If you ask any User Experience Professional what the principles of their profession are, one of the first principles you’ll hear is “Know Your Users”. This makes sense: if we are to create great experiences for users then we must know something about them. You’ll also find this phrase if you stumble upon any sort of must-have usability checklist (long lists of Important...
3 tags
Visual Hierarchy
We have many words for the frustration we feel when an interface isn’t directing us to what we need to know. Loud, messy, cluttered, busy.
These words have been appropriated from other parts of life, of course, but we need them to express our feeling of being overwhelmed visually by content on a screen or page. We need them to express how unpleasant a user experience it is to not know...
1 tag
Visual Weight
Visual weight reinforces a page or screen’s visual hierarchy by contrasting the size, color and/or position of elements in the design. By adding visual weight to elements that are of primary importance and reducing the visual weight on elements of less importance you help guide the user and strengthen the overall design of the page or screen.
Just as you would consider each and every word...
2 tags
Make Less More
“What if instead of adding new features, a company concentrated on making the service or product much easier to use? Or making it much easier to access the advanced features it already has, but that few can master? Maybe what they lose in market share in one area will be more than compensated for in another area. In a lot of markets, it’s gotten so bad out there that simply being...
1 tag
Changing Existing Situations
“Everyone designs who devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that produces material artifacts is no different fundamentally from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick patient or the one that devises a new sales plan for a company or a social welfare policy for a state. Design, so construed, is the core of all...
