UX design Archives - Visual Identity

CMS Web Design: A Guide to Dynamic Content Applications aside

This post was written by Ian Spangler, Digital Designer for Toptal UI/UX techniques for the dynamic content-driven world of online media. A large majority of web applications and mobile apps, especially in the online media space, are powered by content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress, Drupal, and others. These systems have come into existence to meet the needs of an internet age where content is king and dynamic—changing continuously and frequently. In the past, most websites were static—not built to evolve and grow seamlessly. Now they are considered to be living systems, and there is an optimal way to design for them. The following is a guide for digital designers looking to expand their repertoire beyond static websites and landing pages, ...

Master Hot Design Trends with These Photoshop Tutorials aside

This post was written by Miklos Philips, UX Designer for Toptal Our daily lives are are saturated with amazing images. Visual design experiments become hot graphic design trends, and suddenly we see them everywhere. Striking visual designs are plastered all over the sides of buses, posters, billboards, TV ads, magazines and of course, digital products. They have many names, including duotone, double exposure, scan lines, glitch, smudge, color channel, photo masking, vibrant-garish colors, and misprint. The graphic design trend “glitch” on a New York City subway advertisement. As with fashion, design trends are often recycled from decades past—we see them coming back again and again: Russian constructivism, Bauhaus, screen printing, 1970’s… etc. Simple, saturated geometric design patterns have been around ...

Never Call Yourself a UI Designer: UI is UX aside

UI and UX are two very common design terms; however, these terms often get thrown around in the wrong context. Meanwhile, traditional job titles such as “website designer” and “app designer” are far less common nowadays, despite being perfect descriptions of the design services that a designer might offer. What is this fascination with the word “UI” all about? And why do some designers call themselves “UI designers” or “UX/UI designers”? Isn’t the UI a part of the UX? Why has “UI” become such a buzzword? UX vs. UI We, as designers (and as human beings), are obsessed with how things look. We know that it’s “what’s on the inside that counts,” but we still parade ourselves in front of the mirror every morning, trying to ...

The Comprehensive Guide to Information Architecture aside

As a standard part of the UX process, designers create information architecture when building products. Defining every avenue and path that users can take through an app or website, information architecture is much more than just a sitemap to show what page leads where. Similar to building architects using a blueprint to construct every part of a house, from physical structures to more complex inner workings like electrical and plumbing, information architecture describes the hierarchy, navigation, features, and interactions of a website or application. And just as blueprints are the most valuable document for an architect to use in the construction of a building, information architecture can be the most powerful tool in a designer’s arsenal. However, developing one isn’t ...

Net Promoter Score Isn’t Enough: You Need User Research aside

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a common consumer insight method used to track customer loyalty. Advocates of NPS maintain that if someone is highly likely to recommend a product or service to a friend, they are also highly likely to be a loyal customer and will generate revenue for a company through referrals. It’s a single question that goes something like this: “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product or service to a friend or colleague?” Net Promoter Score (NPS) asks users how likely they are to recommend a product or service. How Net Promoter Score Works Net Promoter Score tracks one thing and one thing only: how likely a customer will be ...

Designing a VUI – Voice User Interface aside

More and more voice-controlled devices, such as the Apple HomePod, Google Home, and Amazon Echo, are storming the market. Voice user interfaces are helping to improve all kinds of different user experiences, and some believe that voice will power 50% of all searches by 2020. Voice-enabled AI can take care of almost anything in an instant. “What’s next in my Calendar?” “Book me a taxi to Oxford Street.” “Play me some Jazz on Spotify!” All five of the “Big Five” tech companies—Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook—have developed (or are currently developing) voice-enabled AI assistants. Siri, the AI assistant for Apple iOS and HomePod devices, is helping more than 40 million users per month, and according to ComScore, one in ten households in the US already own ...

The Value of Design Thinking in Business aside

Successful businesses are making billions by recognizing the value of integrating “design thinking” into their process. Great design is simple, beautiful, and easy to use. It creates a sense of purpose and place. It responds to user needs, and it just works. Aside from these characteristics, how can we know whether a design is “good”? Moreover, how can a business know whether the investment of time and money into a design was worth it? The proof is in the numbers. Businesses have slowly come around to recognize that design can be used as a differentiator to respond to changing trends and consumer behaviors. Time and time again, Fortune 500 names such as Apple, Microsoft, Disney, and IBM have demonstrated the ...

5 Clear Signs That You Should Hire a UX Expert aside

If your company’s product is not performing as expected, it may be time to bring in a UX expert. Industry surveys show that every dollar invested in UX brings a return of between $2 and $100 dollars. UX covers all aspects of a system (website, app, product, service, community, etc.) as experienced by users. Great UX design can mean the difference between breaking it or making it as demonstrated by the success of Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, and Google. User experience design is the discipline of what UX designers do, and user-centered design (UCD) is the UX design process. Design thinking and HCD (human-centered design) are other terms that are widely used. All of them typically include user research, sketching, wireframing, prototyping, interaction design, visual design, user testing, ...

How to Hire a UX Designer aside

If you are looking to hire a UX designer, it means you are about to embark on a life changing journey or are in the throes of saving lives while trying to keep the boat afloat. Either way, when something needs to be built or has to be fixed, the trail of gingerbread crumbs comes back to the cradle of design: UXD (user experience design). This phase can wear many hats and can go from truly enlightening to astronomically daunting. This is where the difference between producing a truly meaningful and viable product that transcends the connections between life and technology itself can also meet complete oversights, where requirements are thrown to the wind and the steady foundation required to ...

Mastering Fintech UX – A Design Case Study aside

Financial tools aren’t the most exciting products to use—they can feel cold, boring, and corporate. As complex tools with tons of functionality and customization, most provide insufficient training and education—and don’t even get me started on documentation. While regulatory obligations often require that financial apps behave in a certain way, there are opportunities to make the experience fun and hassle-free for users while still keeping it professional and easy to use. With the appropriate context, financial apps can offer a pleasant and interesting user experience instead of following the drab status quo model. With Fisdom—an investment app designed to make investing easy for people without an education in the Indian stock exchange, the client has three main goals: Resolve the high dropout rate ...

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