Well dear, when a product manager and a developer love each other very, very much….. 🙂 Ahem! Not really! But there are a few main backgrounds that we tend to come from and it’s helpful for teams to understand these backgrounds to know what they’re likely to get. Each background tends to have strengths and weaknesses though individuals from a given background may vary from the typical strengths and weaknesses…
Read MoreHow to Design an Application
User Experience Design Process First, a few notes: What’s below mostly applies to a waterfall methodology. In Agile Experience Design, portions of this process can be applied in short sprints but there are additional concerns that are not addressed here. In general, all of these steps still happen, but often in parallel to each other, where this article makes it sound sequential. Identifying a need in the market is a…
Read More3 Usability Best Practices You Dare Not Break!
Everyone has an opinion about user interface design. Trained or untrained. Engineer. Sales person. Product manager. Executive management. It doesn’t matter who you are, anyone who works in software has some kind of opinion on the user experience. And this is a good thing! Through collaboration, the user interface becomes stronger. Many usability best practices are not set in stone. But these 3 are. User Experience Best Practices But there…
Read MoreUser Interface Design Prototyping Tools – A Review
There are many options for rapid prototyping these days. There are the old stalwart standbys like Visio, InDesign, and even PowerPoint. I’ve been using Visio for years, but decided to step out of my box and see what else was out there for user interface design prototyping tools. Here’s a bit of what I’ve found. Balsamiq Review Balsamiq creates interfaces that look like they were sketched by hand. This is…
Read MorePersona Abuse in User Interface Design
Personas in User Experience Design Personas in User Experience design should always be referred to by name as if they are real people. If you start talking about them and identifying them by their role, you are no longer doing persona-based user interface design! Back when Alan Cooper first wrote, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, I had an opportunity to work with his agency. I brought them in to help…
Read More7 +/- 2 in User Interface Design
George A Miller wrote a seminal paper back in 1956 called, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information”, which has often been used as the basis for many user interface design decisions including the practice of “information chunking.” Working Memory and User Interface Design Many tasks require us to hold a certain amount of information in our head. This is called “working…
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