Recruiting participants for UX research is one of the biggest challenges that UX professionals face. There’s a lot to handle—from finding enough participants who qualify for a particular study to screening them and ensuring that they actually show up for the research session.

At UXtweak, we recently finished a community project called Research Recruities, whose aim was to gather some great recruiting stories and professional advice and turn everything into a guide on how to overcome some of the most common recruiting challenges that UX professionals encounter. We collected the expert advice that you’ll find in this article as part of the Research Recruities project by UXtweak, which aimed to round up funny, relatable, and strange stories from recruiting. Read More

Log monitoring holds significant value for improving the user experience despite its primary association with Operations or Information Technology (IT). The problems that many IT teams face include stuttering pages, slow page-loading times, and frequent crashes. Logs can reveal bottlenecks and bugs and often hold the answers to identifying and solving such problems.

Understanding why such problems are occurring lets you resolve their root cause and ensure a smooth user experience that prevents user frustration. Let’s consider several ways in which log monitoring can contribute to enhancing the user experience:

• proactive issue identification
• performance optimization
• user-behavior analysis
• enhanced troubleshooting
• optimization of user journeys
• security and privacy assurance  Read More

Have you ever wondered why popular UX designs are so well loved by users? Or why a change in color scheme or a new call to action (CTA) on your site results in a sudden bump in traffic or conversions? While accessibility principles can explain some of these outcomes, because the best sites are operable by all, many successful UX design decisions come down to human psychology.

Understanding the psychology behind popular UX design choices can make a world of difference to your site or application. Even simple changes such as reconsidering your color scheme by applying color theory can lead to a reduction in a page’s bounce rate and an uptick in user engagement. Read More

In 2023, there were 257 billion mobile-app downloads globally. This highlights the industry’s fierce competition and makes consistently improving mobile apps’ user experience essential, considering factors such as ease of use, functionality, and design satisfaction.

Why Is the Mobile-App User Experience Important?

The mobile-app user experience greatly influences its success in the marketplace and impacts its popularity among users. Benefits of creating a mobile app with an excellent user experience include the following:

• enhanced user satisfaction—When users have a fantastic mobile-app experience, you can be sure of their satisfaction with the app.
• increased user retention and loyalty—Users who have an excellent mobile-app experience are more likely to use the app repeatedly, increasing both user retention and loyalty. Read More

In the world of technology-driven design, finding the right balance between relying on our design skills and understanding what users truly need poses a challenging question for UX designers. Should we base our designs on assumptions or dig deeper to solve users’ real problems? How can we steer away from assumptions-based design and instead focus on addressing users’ needs?

The Designer’s Challenge in Technology

When working in the fast-paced world of technology, the unrelenting pressure to innovate often leads to our ideas overshadowing what users really want and need. At PayPal, where I work, quickly implemented design solutions can sometimes miss the mark. Read More

UX design and UI design are all about creating seamless user experiences. One way of achieving this goal is by strategizing a happy path for your audience—an ideal user journey the user can take when using a product or service. In this article, I’ll cover everything you need to know about creating happy paths in UX design. Let’s dive deeper so you can understand how to optimize user journeys for maximal user engagement and satisfaction.

What Is a Happy Path?

The happy path represents an ideal journey that the user can take when interacting with a product or service. It is the smoothest, easiest to follow route that leads users to their desired outcome, whether they’re using a mobile app, Web site, or even shopping in an online clothing store. This scenario is free from errors, confusion, or obstacles that could frustrate the user or hinder the user experience. Read More

User-centered design (UCD) processes prioritize meeting the needs and preferences of actual users. UCD is grounded in the belief that the most effective designs address the needs, preferences, and limitations of those using a product or Web site.

In this article, I’ll highlight the following:

• goals of UCD and their importance to the design process
• benefits and challenges of UCD
• five advanced tips for practicing UCD Read More

In Part 1 of this series, I described the types of disabilities and their corresponding assistive technologies, highlighted best practices for designing for accessibility and their specific benefits, and covered some additional factors to consider when working on an accessible product design.

Now, in Part 2, I’ll outline some tools and techniques for evaluating the accessibility of screen designs and consider some industry trends and future technologies that could greatly impact accessibility. Then, we’ll dive into a guided exercise that demonstrates how we can analyze and improve a screen design. Read More

UX designers should implement accessibility standards when designing mobile applications. While many designers concentrate just on the functional aspects of accessibility, it is equally important to consider the visual aspects because the first impression that a business makes has a remarkable impact on the audience’s perception of the business. By giving priority to accessibility, you can enhance the audience’s brand perception and thus increase the number of users who download an app. This also minimizes the chances that users will encounter accessibility issues.

An accessible mobile app ensures that all users have an equivalent experience while using the app. The primary goal of accessibility and inclusive design is to make your app work equivalently for different ranges of users. Whether you’re designing a Web app, a native app, or a hybrid app, accessibility can help you to create a highly performative product. In this article, I’ll discuss the importance of designing accessible mobile apps. Let’s dive in and explore this topic in depth. Read More