Many of the developing economies across the worls are growing extraordinarily fast, with a rapidly expanding middle class that has increasing disposable income.
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Social media is one of the dominant forms of interactions on the Internet. Leading platforms such as Facebook and Twitter count hundreds of millions of users each month. In this article, I will show you how social media is a rich vein of data for user researchers.
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Maxwell is a researcher at a design firm that is working on a mobile payment app. He wants to learn more about how users currently interact with point-of-sale terminals. Maxwell contacts a local grocery store to coordinate times to observe customers as they are checking out. He then asks every fifth customer who checks out to complete a brief survey. Maxwell is engaging in intercepts as part of his recruitment of research participants.
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Chances are you’ve seen it: a child glued to a tablet or smartphone, swiping fearlessly with small, sticky fingers. From airports and restaurants, to homes and even schools, mobile devices are a ubiquitous part of childhood today.
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As a designer, you have the power to help millions of people live longer, healthier and happier lives. But a truly delightful and meaningful app doesn’t happen by magic. In this article, Jen Maroney presents useful examples and explains how you can achieve best results when design consumer-facing healthcare apps.
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Research should always influence our work. For copywriters, research is the key to creating content that engages and motivates our users, whether we’re writing homepage copy or press releases.
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As UX professionals, we know the value of conducting usability research. But UX research initiatives — even when designed well — are not perfect. A lab study to test a website, for example, would never perfectly capture a user’s actual behavior in the wild. This is because, inevitably, the research protocol itself will influence the findings.
A lab environment can never replicate the natural environment of the participant, and the mere presence of a research facilitator or moderator creates a dimension of artificiality that can thwart the research goals. They must not only facilitate sessions in such a way that the research goals are achieved, but also balance two challenges that are constantly at odds with each other: keeping the participant within the scope of the study, while allowing the participant to be in the driver’s seat in order to make the experience as realistic as possible.
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Following a recent economic windfall, Brazilians are faced with more choices of how to spend their money. This provides a situation for good UX to make a huge impact and sway customers to buy new products or services. Companies inside and outside Brazil are interested in capturing a part of this new market.
My company, Blink UX, had the opportunity to conduct in-home user interviews in São Paulo on behalf of a Brazilian real estate company called Zap Imóveis. This project provided me with invaluable insider knowledge on how to best conduct in-home user interviews in Brazil and, more broadly, how to conduct field research in foreign countries using the same underlying principles.
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Imagine two futures of mobile technology: in one, we are distracted away from our real-world experiences, increasingly focused on technology and missing out on what is going on around us; in the other, technology enhances our life experiences by providing a needed boost at just the right time.
The first reality is with us already. When was the last time you enjoyed a meal with friends without it being interrupted by people paying attention to their smartphones instead of you? How many times have you had to watch out for pedestrians who are walking with their faces buried in a device, oblivious to their surroundings?
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A lot of people in the tech industry talk about “changing the world” and “making people’s lives better.” But bad design is excluding whole sections of the population from the benefits of technology. If you’re a designer, you can help change that.
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