This article will be an introdrction to the human-centered design process. I’ll tell a personal story in which I built a challenged family member a device to help them communicate more efficient and effortlessly and I’ll share lessons I learned from the failures and successes along the way.
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Are you a web designer or developer who dreams about creating a mobile game and bringing it to the app store? We have good news: Your road to the app store might be shorter than you think! And if you can recall your experience with ActionScript and the Flash platform from days of old, then you’ll even have a shortcut.
Building a native app with Flash might sound weird at first. In this article, we will share some insights on how we built a game for iOS that is written entirely in ActionScript.
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Many of today’s hottest technology companies, both large and small, are increasingly using the concept of the minimum viable product (MVP) as way to iteratively learn about their customers and develop their product ideas. By focusing on an integral set of core functionality and corresponding features for product development, these companies can efficiently launch and build on new products.
While the concepts are relatively easy to grasp, the many trade-offs considered and decisions made in execution are seldom easy and are often highly debated. This two-part series, looks into the product design process of Dropbox’s Carousel and the product team at UXPin shares our way of thinking about product design, whether you’re in a meeting, whiteboarding, sketching, writing down requirements, or wireframing and prototyping.
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“Free Time” is an iPhone app that flips your calendar upside down and lets you focus on the free time in your day, instead of all the busy time. Read on to find out how it came to be and what the team ultimately learned in the process.
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When interacting with mobile devices, users have little patience for confusing interfaces or unnecessary steps that impede their progress. As designers, we must understand the role of momentum in effective user interface design and create experiences that keep our users moving forward.
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Since a smartphone landed in almost everyone’s pocket, developers have been faced with the question of whether to go with a mobile website or a native app. Native applications offer the smoothest and most feature-rich user experience in almost every case. They have direct access to the GPU, making layer compositions and pixel movements buttery-smooth.
Native applications also provide native UI frameworks that end users are familiar with, and they take care of the low-level aspects of UI development that developers don’t have time to deal with. When eschewing an app in favor of a mobile website, developers often sacrifice user experience, deep native integration and a complex UI in favor of SEO and accessibility.
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The value you bring to any project as a designer or user experience professional isn’t only your ability to execute a series of tasks. Good clients will recognize and appreciate the guidance, recommendations and opinions that come with your experience.
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Like many great ideas, ours was born of a problem. When I was a graduate student at MIT, I sat next to a classmate who is visually impaired. He would whisper to me to ask the time, even though he wore a watch — which prompted me to wonder how the blind tell time.
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As more designers and writers look to analytics to inform their decisions, many still struggle to implement their findings in a sustainable, ongoing way. Too often, testing and analysis are one-off activities, providing plenty of important-looking numbers but not lot of context or specific direction.
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Five-inch mobile devices are on the market that have the same screen resolution as 50-inch TVs. We have users with unlimited high-speed broadband as well as users who pay money for each megabyte transferred. Responsive design for images is about optimizing the process of serving images to users.
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