Here’s our round up of the most useful user experience (UX) design resources we’ve come across recently. Get actionable advice you can start implementing today by clicking on the “continue reading” link.
Time with Users: Set Personal and Company Goals (Nielsen Norman Group)
How much time do you allocate to simply observing your customers use your products and services online? This article is such a useful reminder that interviews, surveys and research papers are no substitute for observation. The crux of this article suggests you need to set an hourly target for the number of hours you and your team spend observing customers.
Product Page Usability: Recommend Both Alternative & Supplementary Products – Only 42% Get it Right (Baymard Institute)
“While there’s generally a correlation between good usability and “good for business”, there are some instances where the two align exceptionally well. Suggesting both alternative and supplementary products is one of those instances: it’s good for business and great for usability. Yet, when benchmarking 50 top e-commerce sites we discovered that only 42% tap into this “match made in heaven”. In this article we’ll look at the benefits and characteristics of product suggestions for both alternative and supplementary products respectively, and why both types of suggestions are needed, along with 4 implementation details to beware of.”
Increasing Customer Empathy From Day 1 (UX Booth)
Lynsey Thornton, who leads the User Experience Research team at Shopify, details her approach to employee on-boarding and how this helps establish and hopefully enshrine a focus on the customer across a rapidly expanding company.
My Design Process (Cap Watkins)
This is part 1 of a 3 part series in which Cap Watkins, Design Manager at Etsy, shares his and his team’s design process. He also recommends a number of useful tools for each stage in the process.
About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design (UX Matters)
A sample chapter from the 4th Edition of About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design, by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, David Cronin, and Christopher Noessel.
“In this chapter we’d like to share a few thoughts about the practice of Goal-Directed design and how design teams integrate into the larger product team.”
Got time for more?
Want to learn how to design great mobile user experiences? Check out these free videos from UX Immersion 2014.
Next month’s links
Next month we’ll be sharing some of the user research resources we’ve come across and bookmarked lately.
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