Here’s our round up of the most useful user experience design resources we’ve come across recently.
Design’s fully-baked deliverables and half-baked artifacts (UIE)
“Deliverables tell the story of what we think the design should be. Artifacts tell the story of how we got there. Each are powerful storytelling tools.”
“Deliverables are often horrible tools for debating options. The team really wants to have settled on their decisions before they construct their deliverables. Artifacts, on the other hand, are perfect for debate and discussion. Their lightweight and short-term view makes them the perfect straw man proposal to test ideas and explore the problems.”
Top 3 information architecture questions about navigation menus (Nielsen Norman Group)
“The number and order of navigation categories, and use of hover menus for touch screens are frequently asked questions that arise when organising information on a website or application.”
When to override native UI components (Baymard Institute)
During our usability tests, we generally find the default native UI components to be very user-friendly. Meanwhile, custom designed UI components tend to be a lot more hit and miss. In fact, our testing often finds custom UI components to be poor for usability. In the worst cases, we have found them to be outright harmful to the user experience and be the direct cause for site abandonments. In a few rare instances, we find that it is acceptable to override the standard UI components provided natively by browsers and instead implement custom UI components.
Hypothesis driven UX design (Medium)
“The value of design changes when you enable whole teams to learn instead of just looking at pretty mockups.”
Treating users like adults: Incorporating 6 principles of Andragogy into UX Design (UX Booth)
Most digital experiences require users to learn something new, which makes it our responsibility to teach them. This article covers andragogy, the study of how people learn, and how this can be leveraged to improve our user’s experience.
Other Links:
A Venn Diagram of UX & Software Testing (Øredev 2014)
PDF: UX SketchNotes (UX Mastery)
Get our weekly roundups delivered straight to your inbox
Sign-up for our email newsletter and get all our posts by email as soon as they’re published.