Designing a city’s metro map is quite a challenging task, even when there is just one line. In this article, Ilya Birman will cover his design process. It’s going to be detailed, so, depending on your interests, this might be very boring or very exciting. In no way is this meant to be a comprehensive guide to designing a map. Each city presents its own set of problems and peculiarities. But hopefully this gives you an idea of what to look for and what to try if you take on such an assignment!
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The problem with brainstorming is, even if there are great ideas in the room, there is often no clear-cut way to decide on what ideas to take action on. But there is a technique that Jonathan Courtney has been using with all his clients over the past year to release or enhance many successful products. Over the last year he’s found that applied USM is not just a fantastic way to get ideas that nobody would have come up with on their own, it’s also the perfect alignment tool for your client or stakeholders. Let Jonathan show you exactly how it’s done.
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An ever-growing number of web users around the world are living with dementia. They have very varied levels of computer literacy and may be experiencing some of the following issues: memory loss, confusion, issues with vision and perception. In this article, Laurence Ivil and Paul Myles will share some lessons they learned along the way about making a dementia-friendly front end on a tight budget. By making websites more accessible to a growing group of users who are so often excluded from the benefits that the internet has to offer, designers are not only supporting people living with dementia, but also those with similar accessibility challenges.
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As our artifacts and everything around us become more connected, we run the risk as humans of becoming increasingly disconnected from each other. We have a responsibility as interaction designers and user experience researchers to consider the ways in which we create interfaces for everyday experiences in the home, at school, out and about, and with our trusted advisors such as financial planners, doctors and educators. In this article, Jes Koepfler & Kieran Evans will discuss the concept of shallow interaction design and show how we applied some basic principles of this approach to a learning game related to disaster resilience.
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Besides creating the best conditions for users to complete their tasks, it’s important to map their motivation to convert their good intentions into tangible outcomes. When UX combines motivation with users’ ability and triggers, it gets easier to persuade them to perform an action. In this article, we’ll explain from a psychological perspective what drives behaviour, and we’ll share three tips on how you can use these insights along with UX best practices to change your users’ behaviour — and count on the formal model Fogg’s to help you structure research and design processes to ensure that users’ needs are considered.
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Any experienced traveler will tell you that some companies do it better than others. To find out, let’s take a closer look at a few airline websites from around the world. With this article, we start exploring various industries and study the current state of front-end, UX and performance of relatively complex websites. First up are airline websites. Some sections of the article were written by the editorial team. We’d love to hear your flights booking experience in the comments to this article! Along the way, Joshua Johnson will discover the critical steps of booking air travel and how they’re presented by different companies.
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In record time, our smartphones have become indispensable, and as mobile technology has become integrated into nearly every aspect of our lives, our smartphones are shifting from device to dependency. But while it’s now clear that we are locked in an intense relationship with our smartphones, one has to wonder why this courtship hasn’t turned into a love triangle with tablets. What is it about our smartphones that makes them so attractive? And why is the addiction we feel toward them so much stronger than to our tablets?
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There has been a slight change in the UX Design editorial team. We’d like to introduce you to our new editor, Chui Chui Tan, who will continue to publish high-quality articles in this section.
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Dmitry Fadeyev examines how the desire to build a large audience by giving away your products and services free of charge can cause conflicts of interest. Spoiler alert: Free products themselves are not the problem.
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In this second part, Jeff Gothlef covers challenges related to hiring: a central point of impact to build and grow a successful user experience team.
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