fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
All In One B2B Mobile Marketing Super App
By: Dimitar Ivanovski
Tags: B2b Marketing, Super Apps, UX Design, UX Research, Interaction Design

The project is a B2B mobile marketing super app that enables companies to create and execute direct marketing campaigns and interactive services. More exactly, it enables companies to create mobile marketing campaigns (one-way and two-way interactions), multi-channel oriented solution covering messaging (SMS/MMS/USSD) and can be used as a powerful administration providing flexibility to create and manage partners, pricing packages, services packages as required by marketing departments.

The challenge for the project was the scope of the project and the ambitious time frame for finishing the project. For overcoming this challenge, agile development was used along with a Style Guide that was finished before the first iteration of development even begins. Another challenge was how to make the very complicated forms easy to fill in and without mistakes. In order to achieve that, I divided each form into three or four steps, and also added required fields, so the users can feel in the forms faster and without making mistakes. I only highlight the required fields with text, because the ratio of required to optional fields was around 20:80.

For the research, I used the shareholder database and business requirements. When doing the user analysis the main objective was to find out what devices and browsers are users using, what is their main goal when using the solution (as user stories), and what roles and permissions they have at the company they work for.

Role

UX lead

UX designer

UX engineer

Personas

User segmentation

Admin can:

Login to system

Access primary and secondary navigation

Create SMS campaign

Send messages to users of his company

Information Architecture

Super App Site Map

Search and search flow

Because of the high amounts of data for each app, search is one of the most important features of this project. Thus the decision was made to include it on every page and load the data only after the user searches. When designing the search flow it was important to always return to search results for the last search query.

Search Flow For Super App

Implementation and testing

JavaServer Pages (JSP) with a combination of JavaScript was used for building the HTML screens. NodeJS, NPM, and GULP were used for building and deploying the theme for the project. Liferay 7.1 was used for building the pages of the project and testing the navigation and users' permissions.

Stress testing, functionality, and usability testing were done in-house with 5 users. Then the project was tested by the shareholders at A1 with open answer questions. The final testing was done with the end-users of different companies.
Thanks for your detailed feedback Charles, I really appreciate your points!
By: Krisztina Szerovay
Tags: Collaboration, Web Design, UX Design, Interaction Design, Product Design

Thanks for your detailed feedback Charles, I really appreciate your points!

“Development is not a limitation or a constraint as implied by the first question.” I’m not implying that development is a limitation! I’m saying that designers should take into consideration this “contributing factor”. In my experience, some designers tend to design in a “vacuum”.

And I completely agree with you: feasibility aspects are temporary, these can change throughout the project. However, being a great designer means that you are aware of both the business and the technical implications of your design decisions at any given stage of the product development process.

The “…and designers should not give instructions to developers on how to write their code” statement is of course exaggerated, I just wanted to underline that both professions should respect boundaries throughout the collaborative process.

As for your last comment: I know that it’s a great challenge to find the “right order” of operations, especially in agile / lean frameworks. Consider my list as a starting point, in reality it’s very hard to work together in such an ideal way.
Why users rule your development process
By: Aleksander Nygård Tonheim
Tags: Prototyping, Methodology, UX, Ucd, Interaction Design

Understand the context of use

Start a conversation with your users. Structure your conversation with some questions. Is there a problem you can solve in their everyday lives?

There are several ways of understanding the context of use. There are several ways to collect data. For example, you can jot down notes on a piece of paper, use a computer, conduct a quantitative questionnaire or sound record the conversation to capture the requirements.

Refine the user requirements

The conversation with the target group has hopefully been fruitful and the paper is full of notes or low-fidelity prototypes. Structure the collected data by your choice, normally by functional and non-functional requirements.

Create prototypes

Visualize the collected data using pen and paper and show them to your target group. In the early stages of the prototype development, low-fidelity prototypes are favoured over high-fidelity prototypes.

Low-fidelity prototypes are cost-effective and provide the level of detail needed in the first iteration. In contrast, high-fidelity prototypes require more time and need a level of detail that is hard to capture in the first iteration.

Evaluate the prototypes

Evaluate and get feedback on the prototypes you have created. There are methods you can use to evaluate your prototype, such as the System Usability Score. The core concept with evaluation is to show and discuss the prototype with your users.

When the evaluation is reviewed, go back to the user requirements and readjust the prototype using the initial user requirements. Did you really understand the context of use?
LinkedIn Case Study — Beyond networking, a job-tracking system
By: Daniella Dasso
Tags: Design Thinking, Design Process, Research, UX, Interaction Design

The problem

LinkedIn is one of the most powerful and useful tools used worldwide to connect with professionals, search and apply to jobs. After conducting some secondary research and also 5 interviews and analysing the 40 responses I got to my online survey, I quickly realised that the power of LinkedIn lies on its networking, but not on the job application side. As you will read below, the application experience on LinkedIn is actually considered to be “stressful” or plain “bad” both for candidates and recruiters. Simply put, after you apply to a job, well, nothing really happens.

The challenge

As mentioned before, my personal challenge is to add, in just 4 days, a “follow up feature to LinkedIn’s job application process.”

The Users & Scope: Frustration, on both sides

As you might have started noticing, there are 2 main users involved in the making of this feature: on one hand, you have the candidate, that is, the person applying for the job. On the other hand, you have the recruiter, that is, the person reviewing the job application. It seems almost impossible to design something for one without taking into consideration the needs and pain points of the other. So, for this project, we will talk about both, but with a focus only on the candidate, given the constraints of time and other resources.

As I mentioned earlier, I conducted 5 interviews and 1 survey that was answered by 40 people, and I complemented this research with secondary information about the platform that was easily available online.

The objectives for my investigation were to understand the application experience for both profiles (candidate and recruiter) and also to identify the different steps taken during the whole process by both.

Here’s what I found out:

Candidate

Insight 1 — No visibility:

89% of the candidates feel they have very low or no visibility of their application process, making this a huge pain point, especially when they are actively looking for a job.

Insight 2 — Abandonment:

83% of candidates think their application experience on LinkedIn is not good, and they feel “abandoned” by the system as soon as they submit their application.

Recruiter

Insight 3 — Too much info:

Recruiters receive on average 250 CVs per job post, making them feel “overwhelmed” by the amount of information and work.

Insight 4 — Frustration:

Out of these 250 CVs, 88% of them are considered “unqualified,” making them feel even more frustrated and overwhelmed.

2. Define

User Personas

With these insights in mind, the two personas started naturally to come to life.
Case study: web design focused on interaction design.
By: Nana Jeon
Tags: UI, Web Design, Design, UX, Interaction Design

Typographic

Typography is the part I care the most. I spend a lot of time to polish every fine detail of Typography based on the web standard. To do this, I research a lot on what to do or not to do in the two design system guidelines, Atlassian design and Material design system. Thanks for sharing valuable information.

Let me break it down. I frequently resorted to looking at standard in the Material design library Sketch file and see how they manage to name so many symbols, components and layers.

Also, I referenced how they present many states (disabled, selected, hover) and how they combine each element or each component. Especially I adopted the type system, H1~H6, subtitle, body, caption and buttons like the image below.

The type system in Material design guideline Ⓒ Material design system at google

Material design library file in Sketch Ⓒ Material design system at google

I was inspired by Material design, however, probably due to the limitation of Sketch, I felt a lack of something which I wanted to do polishing more such as changing properties to each text element as their individual roles in Sketch. I found a nice solution and explained it as follows.

How to design each element efficiently for their individual roles in Sketch.

Even if Sketch has a symbol-function, I found that it is not as flexible as writing the code. For instance, There were two paragraphs, overview and CV, in Sketch file like the image below.

Both contents are included in the body category. But the line-height property must be different due to the content type, the line-height of the overview content is taller than the CV content. Because overview content is a long paragraph that needs more space between each line for better readability than CV content.

I always think about how to write the code as I do design.

I already knew Ryan Yu, front-end engineer, prefers to using OOCSS (Object Oriented CSS) like the image below, also I love this way which allows us to combine or change each property easily with CSS classes. Here is an article Ryan Yu wrote in CSS-tricks, Combining the Powers of SEM and BIO for Improving CSS.

OOCSS

It must be much easier if I could just write code using OOCSS. But I had to hand over the prototyping to engineer with Sketch file as a designer. As I mentioned before Sketch is not flexible. It doesn’t allow me to override styles (properties) as opposed to OOCSS or style sheets in Adobe product. (if there is an overriding style function in Sketch, please let me know.😃)

I found that solution in the Atlassian design guidelines.
Final Project Week 2 — Slow But Steady Improvement
By: Pj Teh
Tags: Interaction Design, UX Design, Design, Ciid, Aging

So it was with a slightly apprehensive heart that I turned up on Thursday morning. On Wednesday evening, I had told my classmates that if I didn’t see them in school on Thursday, that’s a good thing. But even though I turned up at school, it was actually a wonderful chat I had with S.

It started with my asking if she had some time, and she said “depends on how long”; I told her I will take maybe 15 mins or so, and she invited me into the room.

I explained my purpose, which was to focus on the design challenge of how might we rekindle the spark, empathy and energy to care in carers and caregivers (especially in institutions)? I also clarified with her that I won’t get in the way of things, but to just document (within the guidelines of the European GDPR), and ask questions later. I also offered to help however I can, while shadowing. She laughed and said that they are actually very used to having people shadow them: just a few weeks ago, apparently they had dentistry students following them for a whole day.

It turns out that she just hadn’t had the time to read my emails. So all my fretting was really just overthinking on my part.

The rest of the short chat with S. was very good, as she suggested that we could block dates for me to shadow the carers on the floor. She even offered to let me shadow the night shift carers/caregivers. We agreed to meet up on Friday, when I was going to interview her formally for about 30 mins, and then she was going to introduce me to her team.

The rest of Thursday was spent putting together my Board for the studio update on Friday:

My Board for the studio update

I also put together a diary template, with an emotional seismograph example, for the caregivers on S.’s team:

Diary, diary template and emotional seimograph example

I also typed up an individual letter to each of the caregivers, which I signed by hand. The intention was to clarify what I intended for them to do with the journals, but also to add a personal touch that hopefully helps motivate them to help with my project (which is really meant to help them too!) Unfortunately I don’t have a photograph of the letter, but the text is here:
Beyond Chatbots: Customer Service in 2023
By: Tanel Kärp
Tags: User Experience, Customer Service, Interaction Design, Service Design

Alexia also worked with the “Whatevers” target group, but came up with a totally different concept.

A large majority of the young population in Estonia are part of a family package for the mobile data amongst other things. Around the age of 18, important changes start to take place — they have to discover what they want to study or what they would like to do in their lives, they travel much more to other countries. However, when they want to change some features in their mobile package to adapt to these changes, they still need legal parent permission to do so — what an inconvenience!

As a possible solution, Alexia targets the parents and proposes them a new way to help their kids towards independency with her concept «The Birthday Message». On their 18th birthday, the youngsters would receive a message from their parents that will lead them towards this new mobile app. Thanks to this app they would now begin to understand and change any feature concerning their package according to their needs. This way Elisa increases the trust with the parents, and the youngsters that could become, later on when they’re ready, new loyal customers.
Design. When it is most uncomfortable.
By: Anastasia Masadi
Tags: Design Thinking, Design Process, Innovation, Interaction Design, Design Methods

We are at a point as a craftsmanship, that we are exceeding more than ever before the boundaries of design and what it means in all directions. We are called to design education, businesses, government services, algorithms and we should because we put people in the epicentre. Yet, it is most uncomfortable.

Here are my learnings in order to bring your team forward and create amazing design:

🧠. Focus on your ability.

And your ability to focus. We are thinkers but foremost doers and makers. Contextualise the conversation by starting to sketch. Your team’s worse nightmare. Once it is out of your head, move on. Sketch again. And again. Ask everyone in your team to sketch and do a roleplay. Move it to digital only when you are all really believing it in.

Here is a beautiful inspirational quote from my beloved Nelson Mandela:

“Do not look the other way; do not hesitate. Recognise that the world is hungry for action, not words.”

👩🏻‍🔬. Your design is a hypothesis.

Admit it, but still do it. Create great design and show it. Then be prepared to see it fail. Because it might. Be clear and transparent about it.

Use that feeling of unease to your advantage. Be open about the points you see the biggest risk in and throw them ASAP into research. There is nothing more professional and scientific by admitting what you don’t know.

As Albert Einstein would say:

“If we knew what we were doing it would not be called research.”

🏀. You should be uncomfortable.

But also excited. And you should use that feeling as an advantage. Feel the fear, acknowledge that you are going into unmapped territories when you are designing something truly innovative, fuel your passion from it. Put that passion into your design and iterate fullheartedly until you get it right.

“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Michael Jordan

ᚃ

I suffer from acrophobia so the picture I chose is killing me — although the adrenaline is stimulating. I remind myself that I can always challenge my boundaries having the phobia, instead of the phobia defining me.
Designing with Fluid Assemblages
By: Heather Wiltse
Tags: Fluid Assemblages, Design Education, Design, Interaction Design, Design Theory

Contemporary digital things are more like fluid assemblages than stable objects. They are composed of a variety of components and connections, including resources provided by various platforms and other kinds of infrastructure. They change over time and in response to activities and other inputs they are configured to register. And in doing this they collect data that they feed back into the networks of which they are a part, and to other actors that extract different kinds of value from those networks and data generated by end users’ use.

This course challenged students in the Interaction Design MFA programme at Umeå Institute of Design to work with fluid assemblages: to assemble responsive things from a variety of components, to build on top of existing platforms, and to care for multiple users and types of use. While these types of things are often developed through progressive optimization in relation to certain metrics (and there can certainly be a place for that), this course asked students to bring their sharpest design skills and sensibilities to bear — especially a concern for meaningful wholes, and care for human experience and integrity.

This course series took place within the frame of the ‘Interaction Concept’ course in the second year of the IxD MFA programme, in connection to the research project “Design Philosophy for Things That Change” funded by the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation.
The Proto-Sketching Method ✢
By: Ak, Cs, Re
Tags: Embodied Interaction, Interaction Design

The Proto-Sketching Method ✢

Thursday, November 26th

Yesterday our group was split between the textile workshop and the atelier where we continued to work on our concept/prototype. Those of us who were not in the workshop began the day with a quick refresher of the discussion from the previous evening. We had considered a wearable that attempts to engage the user in a conversation and provoke a self-reflection of their ever-changing emotional state. What this conversation looks like we’re not entirely sure at the moment. Of course technology cannot know exactly what you’re feeling, but emotions do manifest themselves physically. For instance your heartbeat goes up or you feel tension in certain areas of the body. So maybe the wearable is able to measure certain kinds of physical activity in the body, such as the heart rate, and it shares this information with the user. It’s aim is not necessarily to give meaning to the data, but to provide an interpretation which allows the user to become aware of and self-reflect on the physical manifestations of their emotions. The wearable would be similar to a friend who asks, “Hey are you okay?” or “What’s wrong?”

Because we are questioning what kind of relationship we have with our emotions, and we are looking to make a wearable that strengthens this relationship, we also discussed the different forms communication which take place in a relationship. For example, when you first meet someone you exchange the most basic info about yourself, like where you grew up, if you’re a coffee or a tea person, what you do for a living, etc. With time you also become more comfortable with each other and can share moments together in silence, because everything has been said. Sometimes you even argue. As we saw from our quick brainstorm there are many kinds of communication in a relationship, and this gave us the idea that the wearable could have different states—not just on/off.

Brainstorm of the different types of communication that happen in relationships

At this point we felt it would be good to produce some very basic prototypes, exploring various ways in which the wearable could communicate with the user. In other words, what would be it’s language? By chance we discovered on Facebook that lululemon in the Niederdörfli was giving away free mannequins, so we picked two up, thinking they could be a good way to prototype and visualize our ideas. This actually led to a newly discovered method we like to call Proto-Sketching. Basically we rapid prototype the wearable on a mannequin, not focusing necessarily on functionality, but rather on material and the idea itself. This allowed us to consider questions such as, “Would it even be feasible to produce this?” or “What would the wearable language be?” Below you can see some of our first proto-sketches.
Coming up with Little Worlds Toy Shop Website
By: Carlos Arellano
Tags: Website, User Experience, Website Design, Toys, Interaction Design

Understanding Little Worlds

The company, a small toy shop, describes itself as local, community-driven and customer service-based. They are passionate about their heritage and quality products.

As they saw the increase of e-commerce popularity and its benefits, they wanted to expand their business online. And wanted for us to specifically focus on:

A clear way to navigate the website and find products.

Efficient means of purchasing products.

Steer customers toward popular products.

Showcase their heritage.

Getting started

To kick things off, I decided to apply the Double Diamond process. This helped me to follow a logical order in the design process, by segmenting it into 4 stages: discover, define, develop and deliver.

Discovering

As we all know, there are many toy shops, so we started looking at those competitors to see what was working, what wasn’t, and what was missing.

Comparing Little Worlds to other toy shops

Competitive Quadrant.

I then incorporated the competitors in a quadrant format to be able to see where Little Worlds values would stand in comparison to them. And then I also looked at their websites, finding trends such as:

The bigger the company, the more products and information, they offer. However, we do not provide information about their heritage.

The smaller the company, they have a smaller, curated inventory, and heritage seems to be more important.

We understood that if we wanted the website to succeed, we needed to showcase plenty of information of the products, as well their heritage so it would set them apart from the big, hollow, companies.

Interviewing the targeted audience

We as a group conducted 5 interviews, as we needed to know where their pain points were so we could work towards solving them and not to make the same mistakes our competitors made. Finding that:

People tend to buy toys as gifts.

People value multiple images of the product itself, as well as their measurements and being able to tell the quality.

Too many filters result in overwhelming them.

This helped us realized the importance of, for example, quality images and succinct information when navigating, so we could reduce the frustration level of the users.

Understanding how users go about information

We applied a technique called Card Sorting, where users are given a series of labelled cards and asked to organise and sort them into groups that they think are appropriate. We wanted to know how they would go about searching and finding the products, toys. We gave them an inventory of toys from Little Worlds. And we found:

People categorize toys by type.

Some of the categories they created are not used globally.

Therefore, we ended using the categories that were similar to the ones used globally, so it would make sense for most users that already buy from other toy shops.

Defining

Representing our users, meet June

Entering into this phase, we started working alone. And I decided to create a Persona, to frame our user research, and have a user to refer back.
Memes @ Instagram. Product design solution proposal
By: Atul Khola
Tags: Memes, Ui Ux Design, Instagram, Interaction Design, Product Design

& All this because of FOMO, fear of missing out.

People shared memes from a private account with a couple of emojis ( Imma DED! | This is so you! | We be like! | 😁 😂 🤣 😃 😄 😅 😆) with their friends who were likely intrigued and wanted to know what it was & tapped that follow button. This wasn’t a secret for long and soon spread like a wildfire. Soon all the major meme accounts were private.

Basically, It all worked out, but once upon a time.

But times are changing and people are aware of this marketing tactic and very cautious about their followers to following ratio and least motivated to perform all those taps. No one wants to invest in an extra addition in their following number or move a muscle if it’s not worth it.

What they lack is intent and that’s what I am purposing as a design solution.

Introducing ☝️

Preview Account

Currently, any private account’s content can be shared by people as screenshots and screen recordings. So it’s pretty clear that Instagram doesn’t want it to stop, as it’s possible to block devices from doing that on your platform eg. Netflix doesn’t allow you to do either on their application.

So basically if some content is really good & worth sharing

The sender has to take a crazy amount of effort of taking screenshots/screen recording. The receiver gets to see the content at the cost of messy gallery & lost storage space (also the sender) The content creator gets no psych appreciation or follows

This is an all loss situation, that’s where ‘Preview Account Feature’ comes in.

With this feature, instead of getting a link to a locked profile every time you receive a post from a private account. You get a 30-sec preview window of that post and account’s feed. If you feel it’s worth it, you can tap on that follow button.

No more screenshots, screen recordings, messy galleries, wasted storage space, missed content appreciation & credits.

But it’ll have certain other aspects to itself.

It’ll be an opt-in based feature, obviously

You can only preview an account once a month

Looking forward to meme-ious future, Let there be LOLs. Hoping this idea gets picked up by Instagram , Instagram Engineering 🤞

Tadaa… That’s all for today.

I’ll be pushing out more case studies soon. Stay Tuned.
Working Through a Design Exercise
By: Cj Gabriel
Tags: UX Design, Process, Design Exercise, Interaction Design

After going through my storyboards and user flows, I decided on three main touch points important in the user’s interaction: Main Ordering Screen, Text Convo after ordering pickup, and Text Convo after ordering delivery.

I chose the text convos to be key screens to interact with because they show the flow after ordering the donuts. Since the user will no longer be interacting with the kiosk, any form of communication will be amongst the user, their phone, and deliverer/pickup area. So it’s important that those text messages best guide the user on the next steps.

Reflection & Takeaways

I tried my best to replicate the time spent on each phase as if I were in the room with everyone. Tried to make this exercise as real as possible using a timer to hold myself accountable. It was great practice!

Going back to the goal of the concept, I feel like I’ve proposed a good solution to the prompt, given the assumptions I made. Obviously without the actual team, it would be hard to gage if my assumptions hold true. For this problem, I really focused on efficiency because I felt like that would alleviate the issue of long wait times that resulted in customer dissatisfaction. Obviously, in a real world situation, adding more kiosks requires more resources & money being put into the project. But with essentially no constraints or budget details, I shot for the moon a little bit.

Looking back, I feel like there were some important questions I might have missed and more assumptions I could have made. Makes me think what the solution could’ve been with a team to collaborate with. But I did the best I felt I could with the information I had.

Thanks for reading! :)
08 January — Day 3. Day 3 was dedicated to do a recap with…
By: Adri Bodor-Pék
Tags: Design Process, Design Studies, Body Modification, Design Fiction, Interaction Design

Day 3 was dedicated to do a recap with one of our tutors, Dr. Joëlle Bitton. As we did the previous exercises alone, without getting feedback, it was time to receive comments on what we have done. During this round turned out that most of us — including myself — missed the mark. Instead of trying to characterise the project, we should have list possible solutions to the problem we are dealing with. Oops. Anyway, Joëlle gave all of us feedback of how she sees our initial steps. In my case she commented that my topic field is pretty rich, I have a lot of reference to work with, however I need to find the borders of my playground.

Exercise 3

The next exercise we got was to find 3 key aspects of our bachelor project and populate upon those our design space with 50 sketches of concrete ideas. Something like small elevator pitches. Was not easy again. I was not sure about my 3 aspects still. I am quite confident using design fiction as a method, it got a post-it right away. I am also tend to picture my final artefact as a tangible physical object. I know that there are tons of body extensions and alteration that is either on of off or one can reach out to a final look with phases (small tattoo on a finger, then a bigger on the arm and within time the full body is tattooed). So my idea was to introduce a dynamically changing body extension. The third aspect I put on a post-it but I left a bit of freedom for myself. It was about the individual’s attitude towards body alteration: one either expressing his ideal self and looks for a community he fits in, or he adopts to group norms and alternates his body accordingly.

And then the production of post-its have started. I was really surprised how crazy seeming ideas poped up. I felt quite under pressure generating 50 ideas and going for quantity over quantity. After 10–15 post-its I realised that I am stepping out of my space defined with the 3 mentioned cornerstones. Not only to get closer to 50, but also because the ideas coming one after the other made me realise how rich is actually the topic and the 3 key aspects are might not guiding but limiting me.

No surprise the feedback for my idea connection was that there are too much core ideas to work with. It went way beyond and to create a successful project on time, I need to be more strict finding the main scope of mine.

So this exercise was on one hand successful: I did not limit myself putting up crazy seeming, non-feasible seeming ideas which I normally don’t do, but on the other hand I did not take a step further. My next task for tomorrow’s mentoring is roll back my process a bit, revise my exercises and find possible smaller chunks of my topic to work with. Up for it.
SILENT INTERACTIONS — UBER. I don’t own a car in Beirut which makes…
By: Abbas Sbeity
Tags: Interaction Design, Uber, Experience Design, Design

SILENT INTERACTIONS — UBER

I don’t own a car in Beirut which makes my commuting experience very interesting on a daily business. I use all types of transportation services available to move around the city. This includes Service (the Lebanese shared-taxi), Vans (mini-buses), and Uber.

Selecting which service I am using depends on my current location or my destination, how much I am willing to pay, and recently, my mood.

When I am tired after a long day at school, especially that it is not easy to find a direct service to take me home, I prefer using Uber.

The most interesting part for me is the silent experience. I can order the cab from my phone, share my location and destination, and pay online. I can easily have a completely silent ride without a single interaction with the driver. I can later say thank you by rating the ride on the app and sending him/her some compliments and stickers. This might be sound bad, however, it is more relaxing to be silent after a long day. I am still all for human interactions, but sometimes it is good to have the other option.
GAMIFIED INTERACTIONS — LEADERBOARDS AND TROPHIES
By: Abbas Sbeity
Tags: Social Media, User Experience, Design, Gamification, Interaction Design

GAMIFIED INTERACTIONS — LEADERBOARDS AND TROPHIES

Recently, I was checking my facebook memories and I came across an old post where I was using the Foursquare app (later known as Swarm). I wondered why I was using the app and what motivated me to share my movements with friends (or more) online.

The thing about Swarm and Foursquare is they offered a playful experience where there are a leaderboard and stickers. Both features motivate users to keep checking in and using the app.

Leaderboards were known in video games but started to be introduced in products such as Swarm as a common behavior change design pattern. Designers use leaderboards to motivate people to use their products more because people like to win, especially when the competition is within the user’s own network.

Another version of the stickers in the Swarm app are the trophies in Snapchat. Snapchat also uses the trophies to add a bit of gamification and keep the snapping going. The user is rewarded with a trophy for performing a certain activity. For example, when verifying the email address, the user will directly receive the email trophy. There are a total of 32 total trophies and there is a guide about them: The Complete Guide To Snpachat Stories.
STUDIO PROJECT WEEK 2
By: Oli Page
Tags: Ideation, Studio Project, Conceptualization, Interaction Design, Product Design

STUDIO PROJECT WEEK 2

Content:

catch up

Week 3: Tuesday’s tutorial to do list

Initial ideation

Regarding the goals I planned to achieve this week I was not able to order any conductive ink so I wasn’t able to play around with it however on Monday I will order some in. Also I have been working on the questionnaire but to make sure it’s good i’m going to give myself more time to do it.

Week 3: Tuesday’s tutorial to do list:

have questionnaire example questions + questions to ask advisor about regarding the questionnaire

ask about other areas of research I should look into / what information i’m trying to find out?

finalise details on ideation sheet

Initial Ideation

As I did some quick ideation regarding various: interactions, environments and technologies it made me realise a few things.

There are definitely other technologies and methods that I could use apart from/as well as conductive ink. Although a lot of my ideas came from the possible interactions you can have with the medium there are still other ways to go about getting an engaging interaction. There are so many of the output that my project could provide shoppers with. For example some ideas express a more helpful concept that directly conveys the brands story and attributes, whilst some were more playful and interactive. In response to this I think it’s important to find out A) What information Cartocon want to convey to shoppers B) What would engage shoppers with a concept like mine. It will be important for me to find a balance of useful information however this information wouldn’t stick with users if it wasn’t communicated in an engaging way. There are some ideas that would not be plausible to do well in the timescale that the class has. Decisions need to be made promptly. My favourite ideas at the moment are: a) the clothes rail idea b) the interactive wall display c) the storage component d) the robot shop assistant that has different trigger points. All these ideas I could see being in a shop, but it’s important to take note of what the shop owners would want to gain from a concept like mine, therefore finding out more information from the shop owners would probably help condense my ideas down.

brainstorming and visualising ideas

Overall It was a useful process. However it will be important to start playing around with conductive ink very soon as that will open up a bunch of ideas.

Week 3: Goals

Have questionnaire ready to for Cartocon to fill in. Further research and insights noted regarding: independent clothing brands and what they’re trying to achieve Reach out to other streetwear brands in Dundee. Play around with conductive ink, getting an initial idea of what the possible interactions could be. Make some form of interaction ideation. For this concept, do some form of template fill out — regarding who, what, when where etc. Come up with Goals for the whole project: i.e. by Week 3 I want to have questionnaire ready for Cartocon.

(Goals not regarding studio project)
Sketchnotes of Interaction Design Specialization course on Coursera
By: Anna Iurchenko
Tags: Ixdonline, Coursera, Sketchnote, UX Design, Interaction Design

Sketchnote by anatinge@

I am often asked recommendations on what course to take to learn UX design. I have several favorite online resources and books that helped me in my UX journey (I am planning to write a post about this), but one of the most useful courses I took remains the Interaction Design Specialization course taught by Scott Klemmer on Coursera.

It teaches you how to design great user experiences, from finding the need, through UX research and iterations, to the final design that will delight your users. It is great foundational course on interaction design!

While taking this course several years ago, I was sketching every lecture and later professor Scott Klemmer included my sketchnotes to the course itself.

Since that time I got lots of “thank you” Linkedin messages and emails from people around the world who found my sketchnotes useful in their learning journey. I am really grateful for all your emails, it is great to see that my sketches are useful to so many future designers!

If you want to have all sketchnotes from the course in a single PDF, you can download them via link below.

It is free, just put “0” in the price field and press “I want this”. I use gumroad as a handy way to see the interest in my sketches.

Happy visual learning! :)
ACCOUNTABLE INTERACTIONS — OV. CHIPKAART
By: Abbas Sbeity
Tags: Travel, User Experience, Design, Experience Design, Interaction Design

The most important tip for using your public transport chip card is to always remember to check in and check out. This process helps in deducting the right amount of money after the trip is finished.

At the start of the journey, I have to hold the card up to a card reader usually installed inside a bus or a tram, or at stations gates, or on free-standing poles.

Free-standing poles at Schiphol Airport — Amsterdam

In case someone forgets to check in, there is a risk being fined by the transport operator. However, the operator doesn’t pass by all the time. This made me cautious about the system and how it creates a space for trust and accountability. This process might not work everywhere, however, it worked in the Netherlands where there are thousands of tourists and locals traveling daily within cities or by trains.

One of the product’s constraints of this card is that it requires to have more than enough credit for a certain journey. If I am traveling between Amsterdam and Rotterdam, the ticket is €16. I am required to have a minimum of €20 on the card in order to check in. Which means sometimes you can lose €4.

Can we design more interactions that foster accountability?
Integration Feature at Centersource
By: Shri Vidhya
Tags: Technology, Logistics, Supply Chain, Integration

Centersource seeks to automate and facilitate all trade and logistics related processes in a B2B context for all industries. It is a hard and ambitious task, but possible due to the existence of APIs. API can be described as a link between different softwares. With a one-time effort of defining requirements, coding and programming, the systems can communicate seamlessly in real-time.

The real-time updated vessel map is something we at Centersource are proud of. The map is a good example of what APIs have made possible to build. An example of integration with customer systems is the inventory feature where we can — with a one time effort — integrate the volume of sellable stock and forecast numbers from ERP systems, so sales staff can get a good overview with relevant information in one workspace. We can also fetch orders from business systems — simply taken, we can customize our platform after your requirements and how you execute deals and logistics activities.

https://www.centersource.io/integration
TSheets Name Change To Quickbooks Time
Tags: Quickbooks, Quickbooks Time, Integrations, Quickbooks Integration, Tsheets

TSheets recently announced that they have changed their name and their new name is Quickbooks Time. TSheets has been a part of the Quickbooks family for three years and the name change represents the product being further consolidated into the Quickbooks family.

Let’s look at how the TSheets name change will affect your business:

Visitors to https://tsheets.com will be automatically redirected to https://quickbooks.intuit.com/time-tracking/

Currently, users can still login to Quickbooks Time using https://app.tsheets.com/signin but this will shortly change to the new TSheets login address of http://tsheets.intuit.com/

Branding within apps will change from the TSheets logo to the new Quickbooks Time logo

Searching for the TSheets app in the iOS App Store will show the Quickbooks Time Tracker app as the top result

Searching for the TSheets app in the Google Play Store will show the Quickbooks Time Tracker Android App (with 15,000+ reviews, averaging 4/5 stars)

Integrations with TSheets will continue to work as usual

If your team was looking into using TSheets, get in contact with our team who can ensure you get set up properly on the new Quickbook Time platform with integrations that enhance your business.
Have you considered NiFi for your data integration needs? — HealthLX
Tags: Big Data, Integration, Interoperability, Apache Nifi

Author: Colin Brookes

With legislative and business pressures for interoperability heating up this year, payers are searching for the right data integration solution. Though Apache NiFi has been available for about five years, it’s still a virtually unknown data integration platform in the healthcare industry. HealthLX uses the NiFi open-source tool as the foundation for our core platform, and we believe it’s worth a closer look for solving modern large-volume and large message-size healthcare data flow challenges.

NiFi’s Big Data Benefits

NiFi grew out of the NSA’s NiagraFalls data flow platform and was released as an open-source system in 2014. NiFi takes a blackbox approach similar to other integration platforms, but here’s where it’s different: Boxes in NiFi are loosely coupled, allowing users to separate their data flow and put each step on a dedicated server. By optimizing NiFi in this manner, organizations can effectively manage their high load requirements, a feature that seems tailor-made for handling high volumes of healthcare data at scale.

What else do we like about NiFi for healthcare data integration?

10X faster integration — NiFi’s building blocks are process-oriented rather than detail-oriented, enabling a higher-level, process-based integration that is remarkably faster than other platforms without any loss of functionality.

Data provenance — NiFi delivers an unprecedented amount of data lineage, which is becoming ever more essential in healthcare. NiFi gives up to 100X more provenance data than the original data.

HL7 processes — quite a few standard HL7 processes are available right out of the box with NiFi, which users can build into their own system in a matter of minutes.

Extensibility — users can rapidly develop and test extended code functionality that supports their organization’s specific business processes and goals.

Reliability — NiFi persists everything to disk, so there’s no risk of losing data or transactions, which is an essential capability for the healthcare industry.

Security — NiFi has a mature security model, and gives organizations fine-grained control over viewing and modification access.

It’s free — NiFi is open-source technology that’s actively developed and well-supported by a large open community. It is a key component of Cloudera’s (Hortonworks) Hadoop large-scale data movement platform.

NiFi may be a well-kept secret for now, but it’s likely to see rapid, widespread adoption as more health organizations come to understand its distinct value in big data processing and distribution. If you’d like to learn more about moving interoperability forward in your organization, please reach out. We’d love to start the conversation with you.
Integrate multiple apps using Zapier (Part 1)
By: Ravi Jain
Tags: Zap, Zapier, Automation, Integration, Slack

So you’re a business owner or a product manager and you want to automate small tasks in your project or organization processes. Something simple like shooting an email in case of a sales enquiry or Making a calendar invite in the same. What do you do? Speak to a developer about it? And now let’s say if you’re a developer and you want to do the same. So would you directly jump to write the code for it? Well with Zapier, its not necessary.

What is Zapier?

Zapier is useful for developers as well as non-developers who wants to automate repetitive tasks using minimal efforts and development skills.

In zapier we create a zap which acts like a blueprint for task we want to do over and over again.

In words, a Zap looks like this: “When a new thing is added in A, do this other thing in B.” The first part is the Trigger and the second part is the Action. Zap can have more than 1 action. More info can be found here.

Apart from this, there are more than 20,000 apps integration available directly as a plug and play template in Zapier. GSuite, Outlook, Spotify, Twitter, Slack.. you name it and you’ll have an integration available

Some use cases:

Google Calendar that triggers at specified time before event occurs to send Slack notification.

When a new pull request is created on Github send email or notification on Slack channel.

Why Zapier?

Once we’ve created a Zap, Zapier will run it automatically without any additional effort on our part.

Zapier is more useful for business oriented apps. Zapier supports more than 500 Apps and has more triggers and actions as compared to ifttt.

Zapier will also help you save time and money! With Zapier taking care of repetitive tasks, we can focus on the exciting business challenges that need our attention.

Build your first Zap (along with basic terminologies):

In this tutorial we are going to create a simple zap which will get triggered when a google form is submitted and will send message on slack channel.

While creating the zap we will also get familiar with some of the terminologies of zapier.

Steps:

Step 1. Login to Zapier

Step 2. Create Zap:

Let’s start on creation of zap by Clicking on `Make a Zap!` on the top right side of page.

Make a Zap!

Zap: A Zap is the link between different apps on Zapier. For example, new google form response to send as message on slack would be an example of a zap. Dashboard contains all created zaps. Also zap can only have one Trigger, but multiple Actions.

Step 3. Add Trigger:

Trigger: A Trigger is an event that starts a Zap. For example, if you want to automate sending a text message each time you receive a form submission, then “form submission” will be the trigger for zap.

Let’s add trigger app for our zap. In this tutorial we will use Google Forms App for trigger purpose. We can select any app as trigger based on our requirements and interests.

Add trigger

For any trigger app there can be many trigger methods. So in next step lets select a trigger method which suits our interests.

Select Trigger Method