Regardless of your methods, you need to validate your design decisions somehow. The problem is that many people think research and validation are the same thing.
A button seems like such a simple, common thing, and yet when they are being created we suddenly forget everything we know about clicking buttons, and presume that our users are the most curious people ever to exist.
They’re not.
It is tempting to think that spreading our content to every corner of the internet is the best way to create a viral effect, but it isn’t. In fact, it’s the worst — and the most expensive.
It is often tempting to create something from our own perspective rather than the users’, and the main menu is the most common way to make that mistake. A main menu should be a list of what the user can do, not what the site can do.
This week’s ProTip is a subtle-yet-effective tip for making your copywriting more persuasive. It is also a way to make negative things feel lighter and keep the reader reading or the listening listening. It is the subtle art of “and” vs. “but”.
Most of the time, we plan a way for users to use our site or app, and design a way for it to be used like that. However, users often misunderstand or take a different path and to us, it feels like they are making “mistakes”. The best way to eliminate user mistakes, is to design them out of the product in the first place.
Wireframes are the extensive documents full of empty rectangles with labels like “user name here” and “image”. I admit, they can be boring. But they’re important, if not essential. If we are the “architect”, wireframes are the blueprints.
This week’s ProTip is brought to you by the letter F! Yay!
There are always 1000 ways we can design a website. One major factor that makes a layout easy to use is how well you use the F-Pattern.
When we design stuff, we always have good intentions. However, users don’t care about your intentions, they only care about the what they care about.
In User experience design (UX) we can test a lot of things: the colour of a button, the impact of our copy, or the effectiveness of a layout, just to name a few.
Or we can launch a site.
