Design: UX Design

Today’s world of mobile app and Web-site development is seeing high adoption of UX design and research, from planning to product launch. UX design is a human-first approach to product design and sets the tone for app development, keeping the focus on satisfying your users. Whether you’re designing physical or digital products, your goal is to create useful, easy-to-use products that provide a great experience to the users who interact with them. Those everyday interactions should be enjoyable and accessible to all users. Throughout your design process, it’s important to closely integrate your UX and UI design efforts. UI design focuses on the look and feel, the aesthetic experience of a product, including its fonts, colors, visual affordances for interaction such as buttons, and page layouts.

In this article, we’ll focus on our UX design journey, creating a motion-design app for smartphones and tablets. A unique feature of this app is its platform: The use of smartphones and tablets for professional motion design is not common. Designers typically create motion designs using applications on desktop computers. Read More

Some people mistakenly use the terms user experience and usability almost interchangeably. However, usability is increasingly being used to refer specifically to the ease with which users can complete their intended tasks, and is closely associated with usability testing. Therefore, many perceive usability to be a rather tactical aspect of product design. In contrast, UX professionals use the term user experience much more broadly, to cover everything ranging from ease of use to user engagement to visual appeal. User experience better captures all of the psychological and behavioral aspects of users’ interactions with products.

To help define the objectives and scope of user experience efforts, as well as enable their meaningful measurement, I would like to propose a conceptual framework that describes four distinct elements of user experience, as shown in Figure 1, and how they interact with one another in driving better product designs. Read More

The first time I opened a banking app while abroad, I experienced a cascade of error messages, log-in delays, and a red banner flashing “Fraud Alert.” My heart rate surged—not because I had made a mistake, but because the user interface made me feel like I had. I wasn’t actually under threat, I was experiencing an inadequate design.

In moments such as this, we can see just how deeply product user experiences can affect people’s emotional well-being. User interfaces that confuse, rush, or overwhelm users create more than friction, they create anxiety. Although we often speak of frictionless design in terms of usability, the truth is that some of the most damaging friction is psychological. In an already stressful world, our digital products all too often amplify that stress. Read More