When it comes down to it, you need to find out if your design works for the end user. That’s what usability testing is all about. As a designer, you live in a small bubble, intimately familiar with the design, fluent enough to navigate complex menus with ease. But will the user attain the same […]
The Hamburger Menu Is Stupid and Worth Killing
If you don’t know what the “hamburger menu” is, it’s a mobile app design icon used to indicate the presence of a hidden menu. The familiar icon includes three horizontal lines of equal length stacked on top of each other, representing an abstracted, flattened hamburger in its most basic elements. Its cutesy name has stuck […]
Best Practices for Designing Push Notifications
Notifications are a crucial part of any app. Not only are they a key part of keeping users engaged with your application: many apps require notifications for their basic functionality. You won’t have much of an email app, for example, if you don’t have notifications. But the line between good notifications and bad notifications is […]
How to Write Helpful User Tutorials and Onboarding Guides
Writing user tutorials is essential to launching any new software project. But writing helpful user tutorials requires a careful hand, with a correct understanding of the user’s needs and expectations. With a solid foundation of empathy and understanding, we can build user tutorials that will educate our users without losing their attention or going over […]
How Non-Digital Elements Can Improve UX
Designers draw ideas for website design and best user experience (UX) from everywhere – not just the digital sphere. If it annoys in real life, it can hinder user experience online. If it uplifts emotions or forms connections in the outside world, chances are it can be used for inspiration in designing online experiences as […]
5 Above the Fold Elements that Get Your Audience’s Attention
An old study from Nielsen states that web visitors spend 80.3% of their time above the fold – the top area of your site that’s immediately viewable upon loading. Furthermore, Google found out that ads above the fold had 68% viewability, as opposed to ads below the fold with only 40%. Naturally, a lot of […]
UX Design Is the New Web Design: How to Shift Your Career
Advancing technology and the digital revolution are rapidly changing the career landscape for designers. Where web design once reigned as the career of choice for digitally-minded visual designers, that job has recently been dethroned by a new supreme leader of the design realm: UX designer. As more people do business digitally – not just on computers, […]
Getting Started with Usability Testing for Web Design
The Internet is all about people. Websites are designed as information hubs and interactive applications catering directly towards people. So it should be natural to assume that designers and developers want to fix up troubling issues within the user experience. Unfortunately it seems like this process has fallen to the wayside for a number of […]