Meaning First: a manifesto for user-experience designMeaning is what we assign to every aspect of our lives from the simplest of actions to the most complex. The design of any digital experience that feels meaningful has to accommodate our basic human need for discovery.
Meaning-first is a design approach that puts emphasis on delivering meaningful interactions.
Accessible use of colour in web designA quick explanation on why colour shouldn’t be the only means of conveying the information on a website.
Researching meaning: making sense of behaviourMost of our decisions on a daily basis will be driven by some sort of emotional factor rather than thinking or reason. We process more than 11 million pieces of sensory information every second. We can only attend to about 40 of those but the rest is not disregarded – it’s processed. As interaction designers we need to learn to dive below the surface and uncover the factors that will help us design deeper meaning.
Invisible DesignDesign is a very complex subject and it has many definitions but one I particularly like is ‘to plan and fashion artistically or skillfully’ (dictionary.com). Design is a highly skillful activity and requires dedication and creativity. Good design is a process and one that is made up of many elements. It is the successful combination of elements that deliver a great design that make it compelling, engaging and ultimately, invisible.
5 tips for effortless layoutsA great website layout will deliver an intuitive, effective and enjoyable experience. Layouts are the foundation of presenting information clearly, attracting attention to the right parts and guiding people to their goals. This article focuses on layouts and how to help users interpret them correctly and positively as they scan the page. This guidance can be used throughout the website development process.
“Do we need to push?”: A proposed framework for persuasion in ecommerce designTo many online retailers, the holy grail of behavioural change would be engaging more customers in deciding to purchase! In a UCD ecommerce process what persuasive elements do we include and at what time? How do we “persuade and not force”? Exactly how hard do we push potential customers? This article proposes a potential framework for designing persuasive techniques into the design of an ecommerce website in order to maximise revenue and create great user experiences!
The Design Patterns of Social MediaMost websites nowadays incorporate some kind of community aspect which allows users to provide feedback to the site’s owners and to each other. In fact, ‘building community’ is one of the most important aspects of any modern website. Websites that focus on their community or group nature are described as being social sites, an umbrella term that can cover a great number of disparate services. This article will describe how Developers can utilise social design patterns on a site in order to promote or dull certain behaviours in an online community.
Using CSS focus pseudo classFocus is one of the lesser used Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) pseudo-classes. People familiar with CSS should be aware of the more commonly used pair, link and visited, but will often find that the focus and active pseudo-classes have been missed out. This article aims to explain why they are important and how they can [...]
