Here’s our round up of the useful UX Design resources we’ve come across in June 2016.

Computer-assisted embarrassment (Nielsen Normal Group)

“Computer systems shouldn’t make us feel bad. But they often do. Contextual usability methods can help discover social defects in user experience.”

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The Ultimate Guide to User Onboarding for Mobile (Apptimize)

“When users first install an app, what do they notice? They don’t see how much time and effort your team spent building the perfect solution. They don’t see how your app will change their lives for the better. They don’t see how much excitement and joy it will bring once they’re invested.

All they know is how they feel about the app and what they’re able to do within just a few minutes or even seconds of opening it.

If you don’t excite them, inject value, and create hooks to re-engage them, they’re going to drop off, uninstall, and get on with their lives. So the Problem Isn’t Acquisition, It’s Activation.”

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Yes, you should be using Personas (Disambiguity)

“This is a golden oldie from the always amazing Leisa Reichelt. Personas seem to go in and out of fashion. Not long ago, people were advocating hyper-researched personas done in painstaking detail, these days designers seem more inclined to leave them out of the process.

So, are personas actually useful or should we stop wasting time and ditch them?”

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How to Run an Empathy Mapping Workshop (Medium)

“This article will teach you two popular design workshop techniques: empathy mapping and user journey mapping. Empathy mapping is a way to characterise your target users in order to make effective design decisions.User journey mapping is a way to deconstruct a user’s experience with a product or service as a series of steps and themes. Put simply, these methods encourage your stakeholders to think about user needs effectively, identifying pain points and opportunities in a systematic and straightforward way.”

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E-Commerce UX: What Information to Display in Product Listings, 46% Get it Wrong (Baymard Institute)

“Users select and reject products based upon the information available about those items in the product list. It therefore isn’t all that surprising that during our large scale usability study of Product Lists & Filtering we found poorly selected list item information to be one of the most severe usability issues related to product list navigation.”

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Needy Design Patterns: Please-Don’t-Go Popups & Get-Back-to-Me Tabs (Nielsen Norman Group)

“These two overly demanding website design patterns aimed at driving engagement are in conflict with how people utilize browser tabs.”

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François Roshdy

François is director of user experience at Border Crossing UX. He specialises in helping clients continuously improve the experiences they deliver.