on May 15, 2018 - 12:01pm
Summary: Flat Design Origins reveal its strengths and weaknesses. Flat Design comes with negatives and positives. It's main challenge is "correctly" implementing Flat standards that work for your UI or brand .
User Experience Insights
Dive into user experience topics, issues and discussions based on our usability consulting. Want to learn about Lean UX, Mobile UX or how Interaction Design can apply to your project? You're in the right place.
A piece of our mind / our blog
on May 9, 2018 - 9:16am
Summary: UX Design strategies for Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) run the risk of overloading users with too much input: complex menus, unclear or complicated tasks, too much movement etc. For AR/VR UX to be useful and compelling, "less is more" applies for reasons users reveal in user testing.
Disconnects in comfort zones
Developers and designers often want to impress their users with exciting visualizations and manipulations of their physical environment eg. with holograms, moving objects or augmented/virtual spaces to explore. This creates a disconnect between what your bias may be, versus that of your audience.
The problem that many new and returning users to Virtual or Augmented environments seem to experience overwhelm caused possibly by expectations patterned from passive media experiences (television or 2D Desktop/ Mobile).
on May 3, 2018 - 4:47pm
Summary: For UX management to be effective, the entirety of UX roles needs to be understood. The most common misperception rests with the UX Designer role. For UX to include strong user representation, (its absence is a marker of failure in software projects), the User researcher role is as important as UX Designer.
Why UX org charts are important
User Experience (UX) has matured over the last decade to a level of practice that is standard in software development. However the level to which UX is practiced, for it to have a positive return on investment on your UX efforts (INFOGRAPHIC) varies between organizations. This is due to incomplete or poorly understood Organizational Charting.
on April 23, 2018 - 5:28pm
Summary: Flat Design has become an industry-standard approach to UI/UX Design with Microsoft, Apple and Google all backing Flat UI styles. Flat Design's minimalism aims to bring visual breathing room to a design by eliminating visual clutter and chrome (UI extras). The problem with this approach is it is easier to imagine than to execute with maximum usability intact. In this post we will discuss some of the common pitfalls in designing Flat or Flat 2.0 Design.
Minimalism needs to balance with function. This is particularly challenging for Visual or Graphic designers who can embrace minimalism at the cost of hiding UI signals, "information scent" or triggers for user action. A few years ago this led to the "Flat 2.0" update to the approach, which seeks to minimize yet allow UI's to be perceived and used.
on March 2, 2018 - 9:33am
Summary: Feature-rich UI's run the risk of doing too much and being difficult for users to discover. The cure is to remove features and replace them with tasks. Task-features anchor your feature sets in what users want to do, not what you think they want from you.
Popularity is building for a new minimalist smartphone called a 'dumb-phone' aka the Light Phone 2 (pictured above). The phone was deliberately designed without social media apps, to reflect the growing problem of smartphone addiction. The minimalist design strategy of this product offers a good reflection point to consider your 'dumb-phone' strategy for minimalizing feature creep and getting results from Flat Design approaches.