UX – Design and Code

Interaction Design

The Next-Level of User-Friendliness

A complex software application often involves multiple personas, several user journeys, and complicated interactions between different user groups. Without a thoughtful design, these complexities can be overwhelming and frustrating: Users are forced to deal with a cluttered UI with overloaded features, or to search for an obscure button or command, or to figure out a user flow that’s hard for laymen to understand. As a result, they get lost while using the software and are forced to seek help or go through trainings.

Instead of forcing the users to learn and adapt, how can we design an application in such as way that it proactively tries to help the users? Well, one way to do that is to predict the user intent using various contextual cues, such as the user’s skill level, the content the user is working on, etc, and present the right features at the right stage of the user journey through an adaptive UI.

Be an Excellent Facilitator: Learnings from Reading Communicating the UX Vision

If you want to design the best product or experience for your team, you might want to read Communicating the UX Vision by Martina Hodges-Schell and James O’Brien. It isn’t a book about design thinking, or user research, or interaction design, but a collection of anti-patterns that we designers often exhibit that prevent us from working in the most effective way with the team. Below are my learnings from the book and I’d like to share them with you.

4 Things I learned about Running UX Workshops

We recently completed a design project in which a series of workshops were needed at the beginning to help us gain clarity on the problem we were solving and think creatively. The workshops went well, and it was a good opportunity for me to put my knowledge into practice. I figured it’d be nice to summarize the things I’ve learned about UX workshops here, and hope you’ll find them useful too.

Design in General

What Do Designers Really Do?

Design is a vaguely defined term, and people tend to have misconceptions about what designers do. When you tell people you’re a designer, especially those outside of tech, chances are they will think that your job is to sit in front of a monitor, pushing pixels and make things look beautiful.

3 Ways to Get Survey Respondents for User Research

Surveys are a great way for us to understand our target users during the discovery phase of a UX project. Using just a Google form or Microsoft form, we can reach out to potential users, asking them questions without being constrained by time or location. Oftentimes, the hard part of conducting a survey is getting respondents. Below are 3 ways to do that.