Our ears are the second-most important sensors we have, and in some situations, voice conversation is a very effective communication channel. But relying just on verbal communication is not enough. For example, would you buy a shoe without seeing it first? Of course not. As long as visual image-processing remains people’s main information source, and we are able to process complex information faster visually, the GUI is here to stay. On the other hand, more traditional GUI patterns cannot survive in their current form either. So, instead of radical predictions, David Pasztor suggests another idea: User interfaces will adapt to our sensors even more.
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Humor is an important aspect of life. It has many positive benefits, like reducing stress, increasing psychological well being and increasing tolerance for pain. Humor is integral and inherent to human relationships. You can use humor in your design to create a positive user experience. We want to develop positive relationships with our users — humor can help make that happen. In this article, Victor Yocco will show you that you can incorporate humor in your design, maintain your brand identity and not look like you are trying too hard in the process.
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As UX specialists, you have varied and diverse backgrounds, but visual interfaces are what you spend most of our time on. You are visual thinkers with a highly trained eye. That’s why it’s tempting sometimes to jump straight to the visual UI design stage when starting a new project, and one of the reasons why you may be bored by some other tasks. In this article, Javier will give you some hints and tips on how to put that app design you are working on to the test, and to see whether it’s ready to be released into the wild. Changing your workflow might be challenging in the beginning, but after a while you will enjoy working within the constraints. This will also transform the way you think, and hopefully help you to move away from focusing on the visual details.
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Even though gestural controls have been around since the early 1980s and have enjoyed a level of ubiquity since the early 2000s, designers are still in the beta-testing phase of making gestural controls intuitive for everyday use. In this article, Kyle Sanders will explore the benefits and drawbacks of gestural controls for mobile UIs, as well as offer advice on effective implementation that avoids the gap in user familiarity.
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In this article, Nick Babich will talk about the role of functional animation in UX design and see when to incorporate motion into a design. If you’d like to follow along and spice up your designs with animations, Adobe introduced Adobe XD which you can download and test for free, and get started right away. Identifying the places where animation has utility is only half the story. If you’re going to use animations in your designs, they should be built well, and that is only possible when an animation is a natural part of the design process.
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In this article, Charles Hannon will show you how to wave the structure of jokes into the structure of an interaction, so that the feeling of delight one gets from a joke is re-expressed as a more lasting form of understanding and competence through the interaction. Specifically how the very moment one does or does not get a joke, does or does not understand an interaction.
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Too complex and feature-driven products may not provide the users what they need or want. When designers reduce to the minimum the footprint of their product in the user’s life, they provide better actual usage for digital products. They should be focusing on processes, not screens, to get more results with less interactions. In this article, Goran Peuc will dive into a review of remarkable products and services that actually bring easy solutions through simpler processes. It’s up to you to remove complexity for the user and to minimize the footprint of your product in the user’s life. Yes, this requires a lot of work, but that is how you will differentiate your product from the competition’s.
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Usually, Numeric keypad Design is an inversion of the Calculator Layout, but why? Nowadays the users experience most of digital products using gestures, not only buttons. In this article, C Y Gopinath explores the roots of this disparity and proposes a better solution. He will discuss how to simplify and adapt a traditional numeric interface to a minimalist design norm by taking advantage of modern touch–driven modes of human–mobile interaction. He’ll also tackle the design logic behind developing a new interface for the basic calculator.
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As designers on the web, we have a responsibility to create things that empower kids and make them smarter, not the opposite. In this article Trine Falbe will give you some insights about what kids are like from the psychological point of view, and how this affects the way they use the web. She’ll also cover practical design guidelines to create better web stuff for kids. We should be the ones who make sure that the kinds of things that go on in apps like Talking Tom and The Smurfs’ Village don’t become the norm. Designing with respect should be our norm.
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In this article, Colleen Roller will show us that defaults are powerful because they provide a way for users to passively decide, thereby easing the difficulty and effort associated with decision-making. Also, that providing a default option is not always appropriate. Sometimes, it’s better for users to make an explicit choice — especially when they are more likely to follow through with a decision and be more committed to taking action on it. It’s imperative to understand that the design matters. UX design professionals have a responsibility to understand how design itself influences — and sometimes even drives — user perception and behavior and, therefore, decision outcomes. The decisions we make as designers matter.
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