Tag: UX

Li, Jacky. “3 Practical Tips for Product Builders When Designing in an Era of Digital Exhaustion.” Medium, 11 Jan. 2020. Retrieved from https://uxdesign.cc/3-practical-tips-for-product-builders-when-designing-in-an-era-of-digital-exhaustion-47131d933baa.

In this article, Jacky Li discusses ways to create a successful online presence in the midst of consumers feeling less and less excited about the digital sphere. He opens when an anecdote about the excitement he felt with his first interaction with the internet. He then says how that excitement in consumers is slowly dwindling. This generation is more reliant on digital platforms than any other, so how can we keep the digital realm interesting and excitable?

Li suggests three points to follow when creating a digital space. First, we must get inside the head of our site visitors and potential customers to understand their headspace. We must understand the behaviors and routines of our customers. Do they mindlessly scroll through Twitter every 2 hours? Do they have a designated time of day where they check their social accounts then stay off for the entire day? Understanding the relationship between the consumer and digital platforms is important.

Next, we must understand what behaviors we want our digital platforms to encourage or cause. Everything has an effect, and we want to understand what the effect is. We can control what the effect will be by understanding what the effects are.

Finally, we establish an emotional piggy bank so we can create a more personal relationship with consumers. We must empathize with our consumers, so they can feel acknowledged and heard. This is a simple marketing tool to create quality relationships and therefor increase customer retention.

Li, Jacky. “3 Practical Tips for Product Builders When Designing in an Era of Digital Exhaustion.” Medium, 11 Jan. 2020. Retrieved from https://uxdesign.cc/3-practical-tips-for-product-builders-when-designing-in-an-era-of-digital-exhaustion-47131d933baa.

The article provides insights into the new wave of digital exhaustion users are experiencing and ways designers can overcome this. Li discusses how smartphones and mobile applications consume a large amount of people’s lives. The term digital wellbeing is brought up indicating that designers need to be aware of their audience’s cognitive capacity. Li also suggested using maintain/shift/inspire framework. Rather than creating new digital spaces, a focus can be placed on maintaining current behavior by shifting the structure of the space and inspiring user’s to sustain this altered behavior. The third tip Li introduces is being aware of the concept of the emotional piggy bank. The piggybank represents the empathetic relationship built between the designer and the user.

The article suggests solutions to digital exhaustion can extend past creating new technology and focus on improving the one’s that currently exist. This tip can be applied to our redesign of the Greenspring Review. For a redesign you must take what currently exists and rework it to better suit today’s target audience. This also follows the maintain/shift/inspire framework. In order to do a successful redesign, we must also take other concepts from the article into consideration. Knowing your audience is crucial to the redesign process. Following Li’s advice, we must identify their needs and ensure our design effectively meets them without surpassing their cognitive capacity. Li helped teach me that for a successful user experience and to be able to break through the clutter of this digital age designers need to speak with their target audience. Designs and products must be user centered.

Braga, Caio. “Rendering Intentionality.” Medium, 16 Jan. 2020, https://uxdesign.cc/rendering-intentionality-1a57df40b585.

In the article, Rendering Intentionality, Caio Braga spoke of developers tendency to dilute their work by continuously adding to the quantity of their products features, rather than their quality. This is done in an effort to keep the product relevant as time passes.

Inversely, user experience diminishes as the product becomes more complex and less meaningful to its users. Reasons for this phenomena, as provided by Braga, are:

1. Users ask for more features and the design team accepts and implements said feedback.
2. Business stakeholders create pressure for constant growth.
3. Performance is evaluated by the number of features delivered.

Issues related to biases, abuse, and misuse, requires developers to actively fix them. Doing so prevents further perpetuation of established values rooted in these issues. This also requires developers to care more about their users and the impact of their work rather than the work itself. In essence, being intentional means knowing the job is to design in accordance to user needs, not to keep developers busy.

Braga’s holistic analysis resonates with my experiences as a user when utilizing a product that contains an abundance of features, but all of lesser quality. Though, the concept of business stakeholders pressuring developers into this constant quantitative growth is one that I have not considered before. Concerning the redesign of the Greenspring Review, the idea of intentionality will aid me in selecting ideas to improve the quality of the literary magazine rather than weighing it down with features that do not allow for, or enhance, a user-friendly experience.

Rundle, Jon. “Designing your digital product like a concept car.” Medium, Transform, 15 Jan. 2020, https://medium.com/snapdocs-design/designing-your-digital-product-like-a-concept-car-26e382eb56e. Accessed 17 Feb. 2020.

Rundle compared designing a concept car to your digital product. He discussed how doing concept work for your digital product may help you explore and imagine your product without limitations, to unlock ideas you probably wouldn’t even realize within normal project constraints. This gets you and your team excited to use the concept as a tool to take practical steps towards improving your product in the iterative process of design.

Rundle is a product designer so the information and insight he shared is credible and coming from experience as he used a personal example. Relating concept car design to how you improve your digital product is an interesting perspective that makes sense, making this a useful source.

I learned that brainstorming without limitations or using logic will help you realize ideas and actually get you motivated and excited to design your product. In this class, our product is The Greenspring Review. I will think of ideas as if there isn’t a box (no constraints) to improve the user interface that will, hopefully, positively affect the user.

“What Newspapers Can Teach Us About Web Design.” Smashing Magazine, 8 Nov. 2019, https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2019/11/newspapers-teach-web-design/.

Technology is constantly changing every day and web designers must keep up with it to take advantage of the many features that can be used to develop a great website. However, it is easy to get caught up in the latest trends in web design and sometimes old techniques are all you need. This article looks back at news design and shows their connection to best practice online.  A popular newspaper phrase ‘above the fold’ can be compared to a web designers job to make an impression on their visitors when they see the homepage of a website. After grabbing attention, a good principle to follow when thinking about how people engage with a page of content is the Z pattern, or The Gutenburg Principle. It is the theory that, when faced with a lot of content, people tend to read at the top left hand corner and finish at the bottom right hand corner, flicking from right to left as they go. Due to newpapers being packed with pure content, the arrangement and layout is very important. Newspapers us grid systems and content blocks to help with organization. Columns are the most important in order to help the text flow down the page. Newspapers follow more techniques than I realize and each can be used for the redesign of The Villager.

O’Brien, Frederick. “What Newspapers Can Teach Us About Web Design.” Smashing Magazine, 8 Nov. 2019, https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2019/11/newspapers-teach-web-design/.

Frederick O’Brien’s article, “What Newspapers Can Teach Us About Web Designs,” focuses on taking a minute to look back on newspapers and learning from their designs to provide insight on how websites should look. Newspapers have been around for centuries and have been highly successful. Many of the web designs seen today have ties to newspaper designs. The big elements that carry over have to do with form and how readers process information.

The first big element that translates from newspaper to web design is the term “above the fold.” This term defines itself, as with newspapers, the first thing the reader sees is what is above the fold line. In reference to websites, it is what the user sees on the home page without scrolling. By having compelling “above the fold” content, users will know what the designer wants them to know and will be interested to find out more.

Another common element in newspapers is what is known as “The Guttenberg Principle,” which is the reading gravity of readers from the top left-hand corner to the right bottom corner and how important content should be laid out both in print and on the web. Grid systems and content blocks follow this same principle. It organizes the information and makes it easier for the users to follow and read. Nameplates are another element that web designers have taken from newspapers. This allows the name of the website to be seen from every page the user goes to without changing, just like the titles of newspapers do not change from day to day.

By taking a look back at newspapers, web designers are gaining insight into good design elements that have been so successful for centuries and continue to be successful today. These elements can be applied to The Greenspring Review, as the original format was print, but has now gone to the digital format.

O’Brien, Frederick. “What Newspapers Can Teach Us About Web Design.” Smashing Magazine, Nov. 8, 2019. www.smashingmagazine.com/2019/11/newspapers-teach-web-design/

The article I chose was “What Newspapers Can Teach Us About Web Design”

This article explains how in the fast-paced and constantly changing world, web design is a fast moving trend that pays its dues to newspapers. Newspapers have been successful for many many more years than web news and it’s important for these web articles to understand what makes newspapers so successful, simplicity and usability. Web news and newspapers share many similar terms such as “above the fold” which is a term used by both explaining the first thing you see when you pick up the newspaper or open the site. The page above the fold and the website homepage are intended to hook the user and bring them in to keep them interested and reading along. Furthermore the article explains the importance of “The Gutenberg Principle” and how it manifests itself in both newspapers and web articles. To encompass the principle, users tend to start reading at the top left of a page and tend to finish or find themselves gravitating toward the bottom right of the page. However what I found most interesting is this principle does not transcend language and say for an arabic site or newspaper, the same principle applies but it is flipped. The article further discusses nameplates and the importance of branding for websites and newspapers to create a memory in the reader’s mind and to create a connection. Newspapers utilize grid systems and content blocks which make organization of the page easy and when it comes to reading a smaller article it’s easy to follow and read. I found a great quote within the article, “newspaper designers are students of the web, so too should web designers be students of newspapers.” Newspapers and websites are never “done” as they are constantly changing and improving, the process never ends.