fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
My UX design process. My UX design process is inspired by the…
By: Sanika Vedak
Tags: UX Design, Design Thinking, Interaction Design, Design

Understand and Empathize

Image Source: Thrive Global

Research: In this phase: I conduct secondary research to better understand the problem space. The research helps me recognize the cause and impact of the problem. The measures taken to solve the problem and why are they inadequate.

Understand the Users: This phase demands to conduct contextual inquiry to know users’ pain points and empathize with their issues and abilities. Asking the right questions is an important aspect of this step

2. Analyze and Define

Image Source: DisplayR

Synthesize Data: Creating affinity diagrams, empathy mapping, open coding are some of the approaches I follow to gather insights from the data.

Define User Requirements: Once I have insights from the data I define key user goals and requirements. This is followed by creating personas. This phase acts as the catalyst for the next step of ideation.

3. Ideate and Sketch

This is my favorite step in the process. It’s iterative and involves

Explore Solutions: I brainstorm in stages to find possible ideas. After every stage, I iterate on the list of explored ideas to combine them and improve on them further.

Check Feasibility: It is important to check the social, economic and technical feasibility of a solution to move forward with it. Although the original design framework does not focus much on the feasibility aspect, I believe this is an important factor and it reduces the possibility of re-considering a solution due to few constraints as I move forward in the process.

4. Prototype

Image Source: CareerFoundry

This step brings the idea to reality.

Low Fidelity Prototypes: To conduct initial self-evaluations I create quick low fidelity prototypes. Creating low fidelity mockups is easy, saves time and cheaper.

High Fidelity Prototypes: Once I have done the self-evaluations and identified errors I move to create a high fidelity prototype. I keep iterating on this step until I have created a design with the least possible errors.

5. Evaluate

Image Source: Tsarin Slavov

This is the most important step in the process. Testing the product with real users helps in finding any usability errors.

User Evaluations: Based on the product design I select a user evaluation method to test the product with actual users. Results from these evaluations help me decide if I need to go back and iterate on the step of Ideation or Prototype. The scale to which the product needs to be refined is based on user evaluations.

After numerous iterations of evaluations and refining the product, forms the Final Product.

6. Reflect

This is a critical step involving:

Process Reflection: Once the final product is out I reflect on the entire process to assess my work at each step. This self-assessment helps me identify areas where I could not perform well and find reasons for the same.

Improvements: Once I know my faults I can identify the areas where I need to improve myself in order to create better design solutions in the future.
Vancouver International Film Festival — UX/UI case study
By: Rafay Shaukat
Tags: UI, Visual Design, UX, Interaction Design, Product Design

Users and Audience

The target audience of this app are young working professionals. These users have a strong preference for mobile-first, fast, and interactive experiences. Printed guide just doesn’t cut it any more.

A key differentiator of this user group is that they are heavy users of streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime, so they want something that feels familiar to those experiences in terms of browsing and discovering content.

Team and Role

This project was part of my User Experience Design (UxD) certification program at Red Academy. I worked with a team of 4 UX (including me!) and 2 UI designers with occasional support from instructors.

My team and I conducted user research using methods such as interviews, surveys, affinity diagrams, competitive analysis, and usability testing. Having had previous experience designing a mobile app from the ground up, I led all facets of visual design: including user task flows, interaction and visual design, and prototyping.

Members

Jennifer Su, Amanda Kurek, Abdul Rafay (me!), Miriam Bellon, Newton Ribeiro, Achal Kshirsagar

Research

Competitive Analysis

We began our research by looking at other film festivals. We discovered that although not many festivals had a supplement app, their websites provided a good mobile-first experience for users. However, we felt that creating a mobile app would allow us to provide a truly personalized festival-going experience for attendees.
Constraint & Feedback — How to make the policies and fight-back your users
By: Leo Hoang
Tags: Design Process, Startup, Design, UX, Interaction Design

"Firstly, thank you, my friend, Rey, for writing this post — I just support him to finish it."

Because we are all human, then we can't avoid mistakes. This is the reason why constraint was born as a barrier to protect users from performing any mistakes.

So, what exactly is constraint do?

Let's say that it prevents users from making errors when they select or input any specific tasks. Furthermore, it also restricts the possible action or we call it limiting the interacts of users. We shall move to the examples so it will be much easier to have a look.

An example of restricting the possible action — you only can put texts into the box and some kind of text.

With another example, constraint prevents us from pressing any character on a calculator, input email in the email text box, and input passcode when unlocking iPhone. The opposite of constraint is to provide and make everything visible to the user so that they will be easily making an error.

Oops, surprise!!!! You have to try it again.

Another constraint which we called it logical constraint, forces users to follow step-by-step. It likes "I love the T-shirt and how to purchase it?": Added it to the shopping cart -> Click "Purchase" -> Enter "Shipping address" -> Put your card detail. Why you have to put the "Shipping address" before putting your card? So, do you want to pay again for the shipping fee? In fact, some sites did that but it feels very odd when I saw my bank gets charged 2 times.

Look at how we feel when we spend money on buying our tools.

Now, what the hell is feedback?

Feedback is the information which is telling the user about what action or activity has been done, accomplished, or the task fails to complete. It has to keep informed user about action in any stage. The feedback information can be a sound, highlighting, animation and combinations of these sonic/aural, visual, textual, animation, tactile, highlighting, etc.

Animation feedback example.

Text feedback and other loading animated feedback.

In other to give feedback, it has to be

Immediately: The system must send back information to the user immediately, whether the task is succeeded or a failed.

Informative: Feedback must give the user information such as:

Location: where the user is standing? Example: Google map provides users current location.

Current status: what is happening, is it in progress, is it running? Example: download application iPhone, and send a message on Facebook Messenger.

Future status: what will happen after a particulate task is done.

Outcomes and results: What have just happened? Example: the sound of a flying object when we press the send button to send an email.
Hamburger menus are bad
By: Leyi Lei
Tags: Design Thinking, Hamburger Menu, UI, Design, Interaction Design

Delicious hamburger menus… Bad for me online and real life

When James Archer brought up the decline in engagement for companies who implemented the hamburger menu, I was shocked.

Before reading Why Hamburger Menus Don’t Always Work, I took it that hamburger menus were wildly loved and had universal usability. But boy, was I was surprised to see the data behind this seemingly insignificant web page decision. Spotify was identified as one of the companies who gained a 30% increase in navigation item clicks when they ditched the hamburger menu. This statistic was the turning point in my set feelings for the great hamburger menu, and it made me reassess the purpose of the design in the first place.

Designs are supposed to help people, boost business, and aid in everyday human life. Because of this belief and the fact that a simple menu icon went against everything good design was supposed to be, I am on board with Archer’s view on hamburger menus.

However, I am still not completely against them. As I was reading his reasons why they don’t work, his example of a user trying to find the pricing page and failing because of the lack of “information scent” made me skeptical. However accurate I am about this next statement, I do wonder if different industries suffer more from their hamburger menu usage than others. To me, it felt intuitive to click on the menu to find more options if I couldn’t find it on the existing tabs, and I believed that the majority of people who have gotten used to hamburger menus would also act similarly. This might be shortsighted on my part, because not everyone finds this intuitive as they have not had the exposure or need to understand what three horizontal lines stacked on top of each other means. And I do agree with the positive presence of information scent. People are constantly loaded with choices, and when a web page highlights their most common or user desired tabs out front, it makes the navigational clicks, and ultimately conversion rates, much higher.

A quote from Archer’s article sums this up,

“…you’ll realize that users often don’t know quite what they want, and they rely on site navigation to nudge them in the right direction by telling them what their options are and what content they should be looking at.”

In different contexts, hamburger menus are great. Healthcare workers, sales associates, managers, and other professionals who are handling the same piece of software everyday knows exactly which tab to do their work in. Archer addresses this too, and recognizes that it is not all that bad.

In the end, interaction designers need to take note of these issues and solve this very real interaction problem.
How to present UX designs flawlessly
By: Isha Beniwal
Tags: UI, Visual Design, Design, UX Design, Interaction Design

There’s a demo tomorrow. You’ve just pulled an all-nighter. You’ve been working on these designs for weeks, and you’ve put a lot of effort into every decision that’s been made, to deliver an immensely smooth user experience.

And yet, when you finally start to present your magnificent concept, you find your audience hung up on trivial things like button colours, alignments or microcopy. Congratulations, your presentation has been completely derailed.

Perhaps in an ideal world, these things won’t matter. People will look at exactly what you want to show them. But right now, things are far from ideal — and as designers, we need to prepare for the worst.

So, here are a few points for UX designers to check off before presenting their designs to non-design stakeholders:

1. Weave a tale

Engage with your audience, capture their attention. Gain their empathy through your users’ journeys — their motivations, pain points and goals. It shouldn’t just be a bunch of screens. Tell them a story.

2. Get your ducks in a row

Make sure your elements are perfectly aligned. Using a grid always help. Grids also come in handy when you need to move around elements or introduce new components into the design

3. Lorem Ipsum is evil

I know how tempted you are to wrap things up with a bunch of “Lorem ipsum” pasted on the screen — trust me, don’t do it. Take the time to fill in meaningful copy — this leaves a good impression on your audience. It means you weren’t lazy, and you’ve thought through all possible use cases.

4. Add variety in imagery

If you are creating cards, or using tiles, don’t use repeat imagery. Good images bring variety and richness to your design. Use tools like Unsplash Plugin, or create and import folders of content.

Adding relevant copy gives a realistic feel to the design

5. Colour and style

If you’re working on a fresh project which doesn’t follow a style guide, try to make a rough one yourself, and stick to it during your presentation. Colour is deeply linked to emotion — dissonant colours distract your audience, leaving a bad taste. Tip: Find inspiration in nature for pleasing colour palettes.

6. Anticipate questions

There will always be some questions which you can expect — so why not answer them ahead of time. Eg. If you have a button on the screen, your audience will want to know what happens when it’s clicked. Include these flows in your design and save time.

7. Everyone loves micro-interactions

Don’t leave transitions and interactions to the imagination. Prototype, prototype, prototype! The move from one screen to the next should be as smooth as fine whiskey. Every small motion counts towards the best experience.

Conclusion

Aesthetically pleasing design creates a positive response in people’s brains, and leads them to believe the design actually works better.

And going that extra mile will make you stand out from the crowd. So like it or not, the devil really is in the details. Happy presenting, and good luck!
The Redesign of Everyday Things
By: Payal Bhujwala
Tags: User Centered Design, UX Design, Interaction Design, Product Design

I also added an additional feel feature as feedback to the user to feel the temperature that the user may want to set it to. The thermostat was a non-programmable one that is, it didn’t automatically sense the temperature and set it, but instead, the user had to do it themselves.

Feedback: My first iteration did not succeed in meeting the user needs effectively as the design wasn’t intuitive enough and did not provide enough feedforward. The controls also lacked visual coupling and were sparsely placed. Also, the fact that it was a non-programmable thermostat didn’t connect well with the users during the critique session and they felt that programmable thermostats would be more helpful.

The insights I learned from this iteration were,

“You are not the user of your system.” “Test and iterate more before zeroeing down on one design.”

Second Iteration

To begin with my second iteration, I improved the feedforward and coupling of the device by making the controls link visually with the information they displayed on the screen. I also chose to make it a programmable thermostat and make it a hands-free experience for the users.

I conducted A/B Testing to understand as to what alignment did people prefer for their control and what they thought had better visual coupling and feedforward. I conducted think-alouds with users to understand what problems they had in completing a certain task and also got general feedback about the design and how it was similar or different from their thermostat.
A New Frontier for Design Research
By: Henry Davis
Tags: Design, Virtual Reality, UX, Interaction Design, Design Research

The Solution

Enter stage-right, the virtual environment. Here is the primary question I hope to address:

How might we use this technology to innovate design research best practices?

First, before we dive into how testing in VR can help I’d like to make clear that definitely not advocating for the complete replacement of all conventional Design Research with it’s VR counterpart. Instead I’m recognizing that there are definitely areas where VR solves problems in conventional research best-practices and opens up opportunities that were previously only available with massive amounts of resources invested.

Let’s break down exactly what I mean:

Virtual versions of physical and/or interactive prototypes can be modified and tested again incredibly quickly, greatly increasing the efficiency of the iteration process.

More efficient research = more research available within the same budget = more insights = better principles = better designs.

Researchers have total control over the testing environment. Many scenarios that would require non-ideal in situ testing or expensive space rental now require relatively trivial amounts of resources to access when testing in VR.

These two points address most of the limiting factors on Design Research that I outlined earlier which just leaves the final issue: the cost of potential lost business.

This is where the major business opportunity lies. By using VR to test prototypes we can expand the scale of our research capabilities to include the products that few, if any, 3rd party Design Research firms are able to tackle. The three primary industries where this applies most wholly are:

Home Automation

Industrial Control Systems

Service Design

If Blink implements testing in VR it will open up our services to not only larger scoped projects with our current clients but to entire, previously inaccessible products and industries. As we champion this innovation Blink will be able to further capitalize on what already makes us different, our combination of design and research expertise, in whole new ways.
BASIC INTERACTIONS — PRESSING BUTTONS
By: Abbas Sbeity
Tags: Interactions, Cognitive Science, Design, Experience Design, Interaction Design

BASIC INTERACTIONS — PRESSING BUTTONS

Interaction is defined as a dialogue or a relationship between people and objects, systems, spaces, and services. It happens on a daily basis with everything designed around us.

To begin my exploration with Interaction Design, I am starting with the basic type of interaction, the most common thing we do when interacting with a system or object is pressing buttons or clicking. This kind of “input” manifested by pressing the buttons is performed by us “the users” to the system, requesting it to perform a “function”.

Illustration by Nevi Ayu E.

Some of the daily examples portrayed in the photos below are iPhone Home Button, AC Remote Control, Water Dispensers, and Light Switches.

What makes these interactions effective?

As part of this exploration, for our course on Cognitive Science of Interaction Design, we discussed a few factors to consider if an interaction is good:

Discoverability — The ability to understand what operation can this object or system do Usability — The ease of use of the object at hand Feedback — The reception of signals of what happened User-Centered — Intentions or needs or goals are met Emotional Qualities — Understanding the emotional qualities of what is designed

To understand more these qualities, the below model “How do you…feel-know-do?” Created by Bill Verplank presents a classic feedback loop to portray the relationship between the user and the system through “Feeling” and “Doing”.
Can you think of hiring a team instead of hiring an individual resource?
By: Jyotirmaya Mahapatra
Tags: Human Resources, Hiring, User Experience, Decision Support Systems, Interaction Design

Talent Acquisition is one of the key challenges in modern organizations. Many organizations face increasingly complex business operations, people-intensive business process or high attrition level, which makes the talent acquisition problem especially cumbersome. Not surprisingly, significant research effort has been devoted to analyzing and automating parts of the talent acquisition process. In particular, sourcing of candidates and screening them automatically for interviews has been the focus of multiple recent commercial(1) and research projects(2).

Although sourcing and screening of individual candidates is one of the central topics in talent acquisition, most business operations need a team of employees with different job descriptions (JD). Creating a cohesive team is often necessary for efficient business operations. With this context of the team hiring problem, I got involved in the system design.

The team hiring problem has two main aspects. First, for each job description in the team, the available set of candidates needs to be ranked with respect to the role, to aid in screening by the hiring manager. Second, given a possible team formation, one needs to evaluate how effective the group of candidates will be as a team. However, the most important among all is to ensure the team has a great relationship and professional cohesiveness.

In this project, we designed an interactive decision support system for selecting a team of candidates for a given set of job descriptions such that, not only are the selected candidates suitable for their respective job descriptions, but also the formed team is as cohesive or compatible as possible.
Re: Evaluation
By: Zoë Urand
Tags: Evaluation, Participatory Design, Interaction Design, Design

Re: Evaluation

How does one define evaluation? What exactly do we evaluate as interaction designers? And with what tools? These questions are important to consider and reflect upon as designers in order to better understand the extent to which our projects meet their intentions.

To answer the first question, “How does one define evaluation?” we can look at the etymology of the word. Evaluation stems from the French évaluation, a noun from the action évaluer, meaning to find value from. The é = “out” + valuer = “be strong, be well; be of value, be worth.” More simply put, to evaluate means to find the value or worth of something.

Next question to consider, what do we evaluate as interaction designers? We evaluate not only at the end of a project, but throughout the entire process. This means it is not just the end product that matters, but also our initial ideas, mockups, prototypes, tools, and methods, for instance. We also evaluate aspects such as usability and emotional response. Here are some examples of tools we are able to use for evaluation:

Interviews/User Testimonials Survey/Questionnaire Cultural Probes Bodystorming Ethnographic Video Desirability Testing Think Aloud Protocol Storytelling Related Works Mentors/Peers

Photo of a small, clay object known as a ZEIGLING; taken from recent participatory design project with the patients of Psychiatrie St Gallen Nord, Ateliers-Living Museum in Wil, SG, Switzerland

What I have only now realized with my recent participatory design project with the Ateliers-Living Museum in Wil, SG, is the importance of acquiring user testimonials as a means of evaluation. To be more specific, the project I worked on had strong emotional aspects, and without the voices of the users the true essence of the work struggles to communicate its full potential. I think this is a valuable lesson learned and something I would like to focus on for further projects.
Visual abstraction
By: Paméla Schmidinger
Tags: Data Visualization, Seminar, Interaction Design, Design

Visual abstraction

“Visual representations are a fundamental component of human learning and understanding.” — Jock D. Mackinlay

One very important example regarding data visualization can be found when looking back in history. The graphic below depicts a great deal of information without being distracting. Most poignant is the drastic loss of life shown in just a small part of the diagram. It’s the simplicity of the visualization design that clearly conveys the complexity of the data.

Minard’s graphic of Napoleon in Russia

In order to underline the importance of data, several techniques can be used such as;

colour — highlighting important numbers with a different colour

saturation — decrease the saturation to make it more visible

enlargement — increasing the size of important data

When designing a product, it is essential to include some kind of testing. In relation to data, A/B testing is a prominent example. Different variants are compared to each other to find out which one is the most suitable. This process is iterated many times to figure out the weakness of a design or its strengths. Big companies like Google, Facebook and Netflix have the infrastructure and the user base to quickly and effectively conduct such testings. Nevertheless, when talking about using data we also have to consider our own behaviour and maybe reflect and be aware that each click is scrutinized and is used, whether we like it or not.
Re: Evaluation
By: Paméla Schmidinger
Tags: Evaluation, Seminar, Interaction Design, Design

Re: Evaluation

What does it mean to evaluate and what are the tools we can use? — A reflection from an interaction design student. Paméla Schmidinger May 6, 2019·2 min read

Evaluation occurs all the time; from the first idea that arises spontaneously to the evaluation of how a project turned out. Through evaluating our work from the beginning on, we are able to quickly test whether or not we are moving in the right direction with our designs. We can quickly assess the usability, usefulness, engaging level and motivation. However, when conducting evaluation we have to be aware that it can be challenging to remain objective due to our own individual interpretations resulting in biases.

In class, we summarized some tools that can be used for evaluation.

Interviews/User Testimonials Survey/Questionnaire Cultural Probes Bodystorming Ethnographic Video Desirability Testing Think Aloud Protocol Storytelling Related Works Mentors/Peers

In the paper, “Staying Open to Interpretation: Engaging Multiple Meanings in Design and Evaluation”, Phoebe Sengers and Bill Gaver talk about how different, interpretations of a system can be taken advantage of. The paper suggests that shifting from only designing for a single, correct way of interpreting a system, to specifically designing for multiple interpretations may bring forth richer, more personally meaningful interpretations.
52 Weeks of Interaction Design: Introductory Article
By: Saleh Riaz
Tags: UI, Case Study, Design, UX, Interaction Design

2020 was a banger when it comes to design. I, for once made several achievements including getting my portfolio right (I guess we all know how much of a big deal that is for designers).

This year, I wanted to do something different. So I started a weekly series. I like to call it, ‘52 Weeks of Interaction Design’.

The idea is pretty simple.

Research. Prototype. Test. But most importantly, design unconventional solutions.

I won’t lie when I tell you guys that I am bored of designing apps using the predominant design systems and guidelines that literally everyone is using. I want to try out new things. Yes, I understand that it's really difficult to implement unconventional designs, especially for mobile apps, keeping the performance in mind but I am all in for designing solutions that break the layout.

Each week, I will be working on a use case and design interaction for it. I will try to humanize the interaction so the users can relate to it more automatically making the interaction intuitive. I will be collaborating with developers from all around the world to make interaction libraries for my design without keeping the performance in mind since I am only designing to explore options and not actual products. Although I do hope one we get rid of the limitations and actually use the interactions in real applications.

52 Weeks of Interaction Design

This article serves as a table of content containing all the links to the different weeks I have worked on.

Week 1 — A palpable card fling

Week 2 — A veristic swipe

Week 3— The first impression

Week 4— The statistical peek

Week 5 — The live preview

Week 6 — Duolongo Flash
Case study: Welma by BCA
By: Muhamad Reza Adityawarman
Tags: UI, Case Study, Apps, UX Design, Interaction Design

Solution

On this project I want to improve “Buy Transaction” flow in Welma App. Because I think I can improve in UI also in UX, I try using Design Thinking for design methodology process. Let me share with you step by step, hope you enjoy!

Emphatize

On this step i’m try to know paint point from participant, using user interview and usability testing.

Usability Task:

1. Create account : success

2. Login : success

3. Search specific categories : success

4. Buy Reksa Dana : success

Define

I’m trying to define pain point from participant

Pain Point

Ideate

After know pain point i’m try to create solution based on ux research with participant. I have 6 point can be improve.

Solution Idea

Prototype

I don’t know when design in UI taken a lot of time when i’m not create sketch on paper. Do you have same experience with me? :D here my wireframe on paper.

Confused When Login

Solution : Redesign login page

login

2.

Don’t know information about reksadana

Solution : Move learning into main menu and change to “Pelajaran”

UI not clear

Solution : Redesign home page

Icon inbox not clear

Solution : Change icon

Home Page

3. Bad information architecture

home page

product page

Detail Page

4.

Don’t want contact CS for buy

Hard to buy reksa dana

Interactive Prototype available on figma Wilma Project

Thank’s for reading, let me know your feedback!

Best,

Reza
52 weeks of interaction design — Week 1: A palpable card fling
By: Saleh Riaz
Tags: Prototyping, UI, Case Study, Design, Interaction Design

Week 1 — A Palpable Card Fling

Use case

The project manager shall easily select and add tasks to create a new project sprint. The ability to peak a task quickly shall also be present.

Understanding and defining the problem

John, who happens to be a project manager for a valley-based startup called Startup XYZ is managing a small cross-functional team of designers, developers, and testers.

According to John, he takes a ferry every day to work and while sipping his coffee, he has 10–15 free minutes in which he wants to be able to quickly create a weekly sprint before entering the office so every Monday, he can gather the team for a standup meeting and discuss the sprint. The sprint can also be for a single team only.

So the task at hand is to design a user flow for a project management app where the project manager can simply look at the tasks and quickly create a sprint.

Discovering possible options

A small independent ideation workshop was conducted where possible ideas were Quick wireframes were designed first to define a solution space onto which multiple options were prototyped.

Ideation and wireframing

Prototyping the interaction

The designs were tested on screen by screen. Hi-fidelity designs were crafted for each idea and the screens were prototyped according to the defined flow. A modern design was created. The projects’ home screen had the active elements and each project had its most important elements up front. The project has a dashboard-like-view to display important information such as task breakdown. Cards were used to represent the task and very human interaction was employed to add them to the sprint — fling. It's a very humanizing interaction because it depicts the activity of sorting or dealing with a deck of cards. The user can glance at the details of the task as well. The final screen is a lovely feedback animation that shows that the sprint has been completed.

All the animations and interactions were paced at 0.4s to follow Doherty’s Law of UX Design. A nice little cubic-bezier function is used as well for smooth transitions.
The elevator call button conundrum: quick UX explorations
By: Kunal Rathore
Tags: User Experience, Button Design, Interaction Design, Design, Elevator

We all might have come across situations when we are inside the elevator (or lift)and it stops on a floor, and the person standing outside doesn’t enter as the person meant to go in opposite direction. Why do so many people around the world make mistake of pressing the wrong call button?

They need to pick the correct one out of just two options. It shouldn’t be such a difficult task. The problem arises due to the incorrect mental modals of these buttons. The buttons are supposed to be pressed according to the direction the user intends to go- up for up and down for down. Pretty easy, Right! But many users perceive it as button to be used for control of motion of the elevator-if the elevator is currently on an above floor then the user presses the down button and vice-versa. Many confused users press both the buttons simultaneously.

Solution 1

What if this confuse is removed by installing a single button to call the elevator?

In case of single call button, the person already in the elevator (Mr. Red) will spend more time in the elevator and the person calling the elevator(Ms. Blue) might take same time to reach destination floor but more of that time period will be spent in the elevator.

Single call button can be used in some special cases like residential building, multi-story parking, hotel, etc. In all these cases a user will always travel from ground floor to residential floor or vice-versa. Travel between different residential floors can be assumed minimal so direction of travel can be assumed towards the ground floor if the elevator is called from a residential floor.

Solution 2

Another possible solution can be to select the destination floor before entering the elevator. It would be more efficient if multiple elevators are hooked to this single input and the nearest elevator stops for the user.

Solution 3

We can just improve the affordance of the buttons to better signify its correct function.

Solution 4

Just remove the indicator that creates the confusion for these poor souls, i.e., the indicator saying which floor the elevator is currently on.

It serves an essential function to give users an estimate about the waiting time (or whether the elevator is functional or stuck on a floor) so it could be directly replaced by display of estimated time for elevator to arrive.
Interfaces in the 80s: Creating GUIs before it was cool
By: Lahesh Kavinda
Tags: UI, Operating Systems, UX, Interaction Design, Product Design

Recently I was going through some early implementations of current operating systems to familiarize myself with the evolution of GUI mechanics over time. One particular thing that caught my eye was the “InterfaceBuilder.app” from the NeXTStep OS which was created by NeXT in the late 1980s. It was an era where the human-computer interaction was heavily driven by Command-Line interfaces and some earlier iterations of current Windows OSs like Windows 3.0.

Here I managed to deploy a running snapshot of the NeXTStep OS (runs through OpenStep API) on a VirtualBox even though it was based on a (virtual) Floppy. Yes, a floppy!

NeXTStep running on a VirtualBox

It’s magical to see an OS this small and from late ’80s offer you a completely GUI based software design/development application called “InterfaceBuilder” packaged with useful tools like “ProjectBuilder” and “IconBuilder”. The interface itself is very straightforward and easy to understand on the first run as it was intended to cater to the general public even though it only comes with the developer bundle of the NeXTStep. It has its own tiny what we call now a “design system” sort of a thing and it’s easy to arrange those components to form a UI. Also, there’s a pre-defined set of events and functions (which can be customized later on) that corresponds to respective components as well. So there you go, you can design, build and ship a product from your 80’s computer.

But who makes a GUI based software design/development application in an era where even the consumer faced apps were based on CLI?

This was straight-up the man, the myth, the legend Steve Jobs! Jobs founded NeXT after leaving Apple and he admired, prioritized, and practiced the importance of accessible design throughout his life, even before Apple. In an era where designing/developing software was pretty much rocket science, he directed it into a more humane phase while caring about the intuitiveness and the experience. Indeed Jobs was a visionary ahead of his, ours, everyone’s time. We miss you legend!

Today NeXTStep serves as the foundation for the whole Apple eco-system of OSs like macOS, iOS, iPadOS etc. while the “InterfaceBuilder” being the ancestor for his popular grandchild Xcode. So if you want to get into the rabbit hole, be my guest! You’ll find more interesting things that revolutionized HCI such as system-wide findbuffer which is the modern-day Finder/search, invented through NeXTStep researches as an advancement of the generic copybuffer in a time when text-based search was barely a thing. And did you catch the .app extension? Yes, that was the first time a program called an app, before the modern “app store” of course; before… it was cool.

Should I write more stuff like this? I don’t know, maybe. So let me know. Thanks for reading!

Originally posted here

Deploy your own NeXTStep image: https://openstep.bfx.re/
You must have heard of this or you must have said all of it to your best friend, because they are there in your hard times and understand you the best!!!
Tags: UX Design, UI, Interaction Design, Design

You must have heard of this or you must have said all of it to your best friend, because they are there in your hard times and understand you the best!!! Trynocode Aug 17·1 min read

Same is the case of a UX designer

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The main aim of a UX designer is to understand and fulfil the underlying emotional and functional needs of its customers.

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UX designer has to focus on all the aspects of a product development including design, function, branding, marketing, consulting with clients to understand their goals and explaining the research results, conducting usability testing, creating wireframes and product prototypes, developing personas and usage scenarios and the list is unending and you can learn all of it with

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ShakeIt — Fitness App: A UX Case Study on habit formation
By: Anusha Malla
Tags: User Research, UX Design, Interaction Design

Challenge: To create a Fitness mobile Application

Role: UX Design (User Research, Interaction Design, Visual Design)

Research

Every person is different, their diets, their daily routines, metabolic rates, sleep patterns vary greatly. This makes the task more challenging. So I set out to uncover the needs and frustrations of the target users to understand them better.

Research Goals

1. Determine needs and frustrations of target users

2. Learn about popular fitness Apps on the market

3. Define common behaviours of people who workout

4. Understand the challenges in current apps

5. Identify areas of the fitness experience that could be improved

6. Determine common and most expected features

Target Audience

Age group — 23 to 45

Busy Lifestyle

Office goers

Secondary Research : Competitive Analysis

Firstly, a competitive analysis was performed to understand the strengths, weaknesses, similarities, and differences between potential competitor fitness Apps.

Then I tried all of these apps to learn in detail about their functionality, approach, task flows and styles. A few heuristics like Navigation, Task flows, Labelling, Support, Integration were considered for comparision . From this, I found a few strengths, weaknesses, and some insights that would help me in the future.
Session - 4
By: Riddhi Mehta
Tags: Interaction Designer, Technology, Innovation, Interaction Design, Product Design

Session - 4

It was the wrap up session for interaction design. So the class started with greetings after that students were asking questions regarding Interaction design as it was the last session so students were clearing their queries regarding this discipline. During this discussion we came to know how things are interacting with people. For example, some people like some specific games because that games have some kind of Interaction with them whereas others games don't have such kind of interaction that's why they are included in their favourite list. Even we came to know that if we are developing a product it should be perfect. It should have Interaction with customers then only the product will be in demand. So after clearing all the queries we came to a portion where we were assigned an assignment as per the house analysing map that we did in earlier class. Find out the most interacting place in your house and represent it in visual forms . It should interact with that place . So from this session we came to know how everything has some Interaction with people. People like such things which Interact with them most so Interaction plays an important role in all aspects.
Presenting our official Product Trailer for History Adventures, World of Characters
By: Spencer Striker
Tags: History, Product, Technology, Education, Interaction Design

Presenting our official Product Trailer for History Adventures, World of Characters

The innovative product features highlighted in this trailer include:

Immersive 3D Environments

Animated, Interactive Infographics

Enhanced Original Historical Documents

Choose Your Own Adventure Experience

Animated Illustrations & Dynamic Text

AP World History Curriculum

Media-Rich Interactive Assessments

All running flawlessly on a mobile device!

“Screenwriters have been adapting historical stories for years, but Spencer Striker, PhD is using a new medium to bring history to life — a fully animated, interactive, narrative-driven digital book series.”

- Scriptmag.com / Script Magazine, May 7, 2020

https://scriptmag.com/interviews-features/interview-spencer-striker-phd-on-turning-history-into-entertainment

“Spencer Striker’s History Adventures couldn’t have come at a better time. As parents all over the US are scrambling to home school their children, the digital media professor and producer has delivered us the history of the world, in an enticing and entertaining format.”

- Film Daily, March 24, 2020

https://filmdaily.co/news/history-adventures/

For more History Adventures Press:

http://www.historyadventures.co/press/

History Adventures showcases a fresh approach to learning and literacy, designed for today’s digital generation: interactive, multimodal content that combines mobile entertainment with the power of story — bringing the pages of history to life!

Available now, for free, on all Apple devices,(iPhone, iPad, and Mac Desktop), in 51 countries around the world!

Download History Adventures today!! https://books.apple.com/us/book/history-adventures-world-of-characters/id1505237819

#history #mobile #education #innovation #apworldhistory #worldhistory #peopleshistory #technology #userexperiencedesign #animation #exploration #digitallearning #revolution #culperspyring #othersideofhistory #narrativedesign #opiumwar #gunboatdiplomacy #muckraking #thejungle #uptonsinclair #chicagomeatpackers #behindeverygreatfortunethereisacrime #botanybay #deeptime #kingleopoldsghost #interactiondesign #chooseyourownadventure
Gathering 3: Feedback Map
By: Diana Minji Chun
Tags: Architecture, Design Process, Interaction Design

Today, we looked at Bruder Klaus Field Chapel, designed by Peter Zumthor as case study to validate the framework we are developing.

To recap, Yiwei started with a more in-depth framework of our initial discussion.

Yiwei brought this to the meeting for us to look at.

After attempting to map the chapel case study on our own, we quickly found out that this was very limiting and the categories did not cover all the details of the architecture.

So we went to the beginning framework. How could we map the feedback loop that was happening/not happening in a clear way? To validate our framework, we focused on the one detail of the chapel; the rain gutter. The rain gutter of a building is usually hidden but in this chapel, it was exposed, collecting water from the skylight and directing to the pond in the center of the chapel.

We found out that this framework was more clear in terms of which aspect we are talking about but also limited in terms of mapping the relationship as well. Isha suggested that we should think about the feedback loop from the design process perspective. And I(Diana) thought about how that reminded me of the user journey mapping process. What if we can map each process on the service blueprint manner? We got down to it.
52 weeks of interaction design
By: Saleh Riaz
Tags: Prototyping, UI, Case Study, Design, Interaction Design

This mini-article is part 2 of a 52-part series — 52 Weeks of Interaction Design by Saleh Riaz. The series is meant to be a personal project. Read more about it in the introductory article or find all interactions here.

Designing an unconventional way of viewing your mobile wallet

Week 2— A Veristic Swipe

Use case

The user shall swipe through the different cards added in the application to view the details and history.

Defining the interaction

The idea was to define an unconventional, natural, and very delightful interaction. I wanted to work with swiping cards up or down instead of sideways and breaking the typical layout. This interaction gives a more human way of sorting/distributing cards, something that we do in real life a well.

Now, the trick was to experiment with possible solutions so I picked up my gear and started prototyping low-fidelity designs. The best solutions were tested with real users to get feedback on what they considered as the most human interaction.

After testing with 10 people with personas suited for using financial apps, 8 out of 10 preferred bottom to top swipe over top to bottom. All these eight people found this interaction more delighting as they could completely see the card going into the place. Some of these commented that the top to bottom interaction was a little weird because the cards were not placed in the thumb reachable area and had to operate using two hands to get it done for large mobiles. Some of them also pointed out that operating hand/thumb blocks the screen and the succeeding animation. The two who preferred top to bottom gave the reasoning that it was natural for them to swipe down as most of us do to bring down the notification panel of our mobiles.

Designing and Testing

Since the idea was to design something that would be unconventional that breaks the layout (the entire point of the series), Aesthetic Usability Effect was utilized. The law states that:

Users often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as design that’s more usable.

My idea was to create something beautiful. A piece of art — something veristic, if you may. And that is exactly what I did. The key was to design something different that swayed away from the typical design guidelines. Once the screens were designed, the interactions were prototyped and tested on real device with real users who were delighted with the interaction.