Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two highly regarded academics in the field of economics are responsible for much of what we know about heuristics. In psychology, a heuristic is simply a fancy word meaning mental shortcut. We have so many decisions to make on a daily basis; there is no way we could think about all of the pros and cons of each option. Our minds would be overloaded and we would stop functioning. People frequently use heuristics to make decisions; you should use them to your advantage in your design. Here, we’ll discuss four common heuristics that researchers have identified, with examples of how to address them in digital design.
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The success of your app definitely does not depend solely on its looks: it has to be functional and solve someone’s problem, or enhance a current experience. But, given the human attraction to looks and visual cues, giving app screenshots a good amount of focus cannot be wrong. App store optimization (ASO) has become a handy addition to an app developer’s marketing plan, and promises to help increase visibility and, as a consequence, downloads. In this article, Melanie Haselmayr will take a closer look at app screenshots, one of the two key decision-making helpers for anyone who downloads an app.
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Mail.Ru Group has about 40 products — even more if you add mobile and tablet websites and apps, promo websites, etc. Yury Vetrov’s team deals with almost half of them. Their goal is to update these products and unify them around several guidelines. Continue reading of Part Two. In this article Yury will discuss the transformation of their design process from the classic Prototype → Design Mockup → HTML → Implement approach for every screen to a modern and more efficient framework-based approach.
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The diffusion of innovations is a complex process; design teams can use their knowledge of the theory to create a road map for how they will address critical factors in the design and marketing of their product. In this second part, Victor Yocco presents the five characteristics of an innovation that determine its use. According to the diffusion of innovations theory, how well an innovation addresses these characteristics will determine people’s long-term adoption of an innovation. Design teams can address many components of these characteristics.
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Users don’t automatically or simultaneously accept even the best ideas and most useful technologies. Acceptance and adoption happens in stages, and in order to stick, it has to happen the right way. In this two-part series of articles, Victor Yocco will explore the application of the diffusion of innovations to digital design and will provide examples of how design teams can account for these principles. In this part, he will give a basic overview of the theory and then discuss two main components of the theory: the different types of adopters, and the key steps in the process of adoption.
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Today, Brian Casel is proud to own and operate a business that does not revolve around billing for time. Instead of writing proposals and taking on client work to pay the bills, he’s building an asset that grows in value year after year. In this article, Brian will share five key lessons he learned from making this transition. He’ll share the story of how he iterated and improved the business because of them. His goal here is to show you that you can still find success by doing a lot of things wrong. That’s how you level up from freelancing to owning a thriving, growing business.
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During the initial design process for your product, answers will come from brainstorming on the product and from execution at the highest level, with all necessary stakeholders (along with their egos). In this article, Chris Bank explains why defining your product matters and how to prepare and conduct creative exercises for kickoff meetings during the initial phase of product development.
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An abandonment means that a customer has visited a website, browsed around, added one or more products to their cart and then left without completing their purchase. Reducing the number of abandoned carts would lead to higher store revenue. The question then becomes how can we, as designers and developers, help convert “warm leads” into paying customers for our clients? Designers and developers are in a powerful position to help their clients increase their revenue, and being armed with tactics such as the ones outlined in this article will hopefully enable them to offer a wider range of services.
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In the context of software development, a product is the website, application or online service that users interact with. Depending on the size of the company and its products, a product manager could be responsible for an entire system or part of a system. This is confusing because, in most contexts, a product is a thing you sell to people. Product managers often get confused with category managers, which are the team that sources and merchandises the products sold on an e-commerce website. So, yes, “product” isn’t the best word for it, but it’s what we’ve got, But do companies really need product managers? And, if we can agree on that, what are the characteristics of a good one? Also, where does this role fit in an organization’s structure? Let’s explore these questions.
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Aspiring to beauty in our designs is admirable. But it doesn’t guarantee usability, nor is it a product or marketing strategy. “Beautiful” says very little about the product. How many people, fed up with PowerPoint, cry out in frustration, “If only it were more beautiful”? No one has figured out how to describe their product effectively. For example, Write, a note-taking app, describes itself as “a beautiful home for all your notes,” which doesn’t say much about why one might want it. Macworld describes it as “Easy Markdown Writing for Dropbox Users.” That’s both concise and specific: If you like Markdown and use Dropbox, you’ll read more. It wasn’t always this way. Indeed, when Dave Feldman became a designer, he had the opposite problem.
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