|
|||
 Joseph Addison (an English author, playwright, politician and all round lover of the written word) once said that, “Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.” In which case give your mind the exercise it craves by picking up some good UX books and get reading. There are tons of UX books out there so to help get you started I’ve listed some that I think are particularly good for any aspiring UXers out there. . . . Read more  Word clouds (also known as text clouds and tag clouds) are not just a cool way to show a bunch of tags they are also a great way to visually communicate all sorts of UX related information, from user stories to search keywords. In this article I outline what word clouds are, walk you through how to create them and discuss just a few of the many ways in which word clouds might be utilised. . . . Read more  Online surveys are a quick and incredibly useful tool for gathering all sorts of user feedback. In next to no time you can whip something up using one of the many online survey tools out there (I particularly recommend SurveyGizmo) and start gathering feedback from real users. Often implementing the survey is the easy bit, it’s designing the thing that’s the tricky part as you won’t get the feedback you’re after if you don’t ask the right questions. In this article I outline 15 useful user feedback questions for online surveys for you to pick and choose from. . . . Read more  There might be no such thing as a free lunch but thanks to the wonders of Open Source software, freeware and trial software there most certainly is such a thing as free software. In this article I list 25 great free UX tools, including tools to help with prototyping, annotating, screen grabbing, site mapping, usability testing, accessibility and analytics. . . . Read more  Think that you need to be a usability expert to carry out a usability review? Well I won’t deny that it helps (spoken like a true expert!) but since user experience certainly isn’t rocket science anyone can have a good stab at carrying out a usability review and learn a great deal in the process. In this article I walkthrough a method for examining the usability of an interactive system (website, application, mobile app etc.) by using a combination of a scenario based and heuristic (i.e. best practice guidelines) based review. I also discuss when usability reviews are most useful and outline some of the pros and cons of the technique. . . . Read more  ‘Buy a feature’ is a simple and effective design game for getting people to choose the features that they would like to be available for a given product. It’s a great means of teasing out of people which features they would like and why. In this article I outline how to play the ‘Buy a feature’ design game and provide some useful templates for the game so that you can get started straight away. . . . Read more  Priority poker is a really quick and easy design game for collaboratively prioritising items, be they features, goals, business objectives, usability issues, requirements, bugs or any number of other things. Priority poker will not only help to assign priorities but will also facilitate the discussion as to why something is important; and will help to ensure that everyone who needs to be is included in the prioritisation process. In this article I discuss what priority poker is, how you play it and when you might use it within a project. . . . Read more  Wireframes, your time is up. You’ve served your purpose. You’ve brought order where there was once chaos and provided gainful employment for thousands of UX designers, but I’m afraid now it’s time for you to go to the big recycling bin in the sky. You’re just no longer cut out for the cut and thrust of UX design and have been replaced by that young upstart called rapid prototyping. In this article I argue why you too should ditch wireframes and embrace rapid prototyping. . . . Read more  Scenario mapping is a really quick, easy and dare I say it even fun way to collaboratively create, discuss and communicate user scenarios. Scenario mapping will help you to think about your users, to think about their tasks and most importantly to think about the sort of user experience you want to provide. It will also help to ensure that your designs are grounded in the real world because scenario mapping forces you to consider the context in which a design is likely to be used. In this article I walk you though step by step how to go about creating scenario maps and why they’re so damn useful in the first place. . . . Read more  “You’re the real thing. Yeah the real thing. You’re the real thing. Even better than the real thing”. Of course the debate continues as to whether Bono was singing about online card sorting or not during U2’s seminal ‘Even better than the real thing’, but assuming he was, was he correct? Is online card sorting really better than the real thing or a poor substitute for face-to-face card sorting? What are the pros and cons of online card sorting and when might you use it (or not use it) for a project? In this article I try to answer these important questions, along with outlining a few online card sorting tools that you might use for a project. . . . Read more |
|||
|
Copyright © 2013 UX for the masses - All Rights Reserved
|
|||
