Today, banking apps are in wide use among consumers, not just professionals. Leading banks cooperate with experienced financial technology, or fintech, software-development companies to create efficient banking solutions that can meet the requirements of any customer.

In this era of increased mobility, digital services are becoming more and more popular. Therefore, it is vitally important to offer customers both Web services and mobile apps. Customers want to be able to manage their money in most situations and do it in the easiest way possible: using a mobile app. Their comfort of use greatly depends on a mobile app’s design.

In this article, I’ll consider the importance of UX design when developing mobile-banking solutions. Read More

The more senior your customers are in their profession, the harder it is to get them to talk to your UX researchers. Fortunately, these customers are already communicating with your company via other avenues and constantly feed insights to your sales team, customer-success managers, and marketing specialists.

Businesses receive a lot of exploratory feedback through all these channels: customers report their problems and blockers, make requests, ask questions about sales demos, and express their doubts during business-development qualification calls. All of this is valuable information, but without a robust system in place, businesses fail to capture and use it effectively. Read More

Any experienced UX researcher has typically met hundreds of participants and heard thousands of user quotations. We still remember a few of these several years later because they were either jarring or amusing. In this article, I’ll share some amusing examples that also provide insights into the craft of UX research. Several of my colleagues contributed some of these stories, a few of which go back as far as the 1990s.

Eyebrow-Raising Design Feedback

Research participants sometimes express their reactions to a design with an eyebrow-raising remark. Read More

Recently, jobs sites have ranked UX design as the fifth most in-demand job in the technology domain. There are reasons to believe that the demand will continue to rise, in part because this job niche is maturing and constantly branching into more areas of specialization.

If you’ve been thinking about which aspect of User Experience you might specialize in, know that many different opportunities are available. In this article, I’ve teamed up with experts from the international jobs aggregator Jooble to explore the top five UX jobs in 2022. Read More

In the first installment of my new column Continuous Research, I looked at automating recruitment processes for user-research panels, or user panels. These are lists of relevant participants who would be motivated to join your research and help you understand your target personas through their participation. Having a user panel can be helpful to any company that is conducting UX research, but absolutely essential for companies who are conducting collaborative and continuous research. The foundation of these research methods is built on having frequent, lightweight touchpoints with customers, involving the whole product team. To ensure you’ll have enough people to talk to, you need to have enough sufficiently engaged participants who have the right backgrounds.

Conducting collaborative, continuous research is a great way to start UX research activities when you don’t yet have enough dedicated researchers, as is likely during a startup’s early stages. Plus, this is the period when your company needs to gather the most feedback about the product you’re building from your prospects and customers. You can use these insights to make your early-stage product really stand out. Unfortunately, this is also the time when you have the least resources to get the feedback you need. Read More

All UX professionals are storytellers. Whether we’re describing a user’s journey or explaining our thought process and choices in designing a product, we rely on the power of narrative to make our case to our business stakeholders. It’s vital that we always tell ethical stories—ones that align with the values to which we and our organizations aspire.

Rather than being a question of what is good or bad, ethics is the process of deciding between conflicting values. How might your story displease one group of stakeholders or another? How should you communicate hotly debated issues? How should you decide what data to use in making design decisions and how should you represent that data? An ethical approach helps you to tackle making decisions such as these with confidence. Read More

Since the dawn of digital-product design, there have always been questions about the impacts applications and Web sites have on people’s minds. Some designers exploit dark, devious patterns to get people to waste their precious time and spend a few more seconds using an application or Web site. In fact, some big corporations optimize every small interaction to ensure maximum stickiness. In this column, I’ll consider dark patterns through the lens of User Experience and how we could apply them for good.

The inspiration behind this column was a product that I recently designed and built, whose focus was building habits of mindfulness and meditation. In that moment, I realized that patterns are dark because of the reasons for which designers use them, not because of their essential nature. If we applied the same foundational principles of behavioral psychology to something positive, we could actually help people to establish good habits. After all, hacking the toughest system of all—the human brain and nervous system—is no small feat. Doing this to help people build positive habits rather than negative ones would be a great way of gauging the role that User Experience could play in self-improvement applications. Read More

Accessible design is normal design. So the designers and developers of mobile apps should not draw a line between accessible and normal or usual design. Most people are likely to experience some form of disability—either temporarily or permanently—at some point in their life. Plus, we all make use of accessibility features at times—even if we don’t think of them in that way. If you’ve ever used your mobile device’s operating system in dark mode, zoomed or adjusted the size of text in a Web browser, or dictated text into Siri, you’ve benefited from your device’s accessibility features.

Designing accessible apps just means designing them so all users can navigate their user interface comfortably and easily—just as for any mobile app or Web site its navigation system and content must be in a logical order. In this article, I’ll share a few things you should keep in mind when designing for mobile accessibility. Read More

Have you ever wondered how developers fabricate business solutions, enhancing users’ productivity, converting visitors to customers, and driving revenues for their enterprise? Developing or adopting an existing front-end application framework can help companies to fulfill their business goals.

In this article, I’ll describe the top front-end frameworks in 2022, including their popularity, brief descriptions of their features, and their advantages. It is always important to align with the latest design and technology trends. So, if you want the application you’re creating to look attractive and behave more responsively, you are in the right place to explore some of the top front-end frameworks. Read More