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Mikal Hallstrup,, the Chief Visionary Officer of Designit says; “The world doesn’t necessarily need more products, it needs better solutions.” While a solution may commonly be a product or a service, it’s more likely to be a combination of the two in many instances today.The combination of a product and a service is a product-service hybrid. For example, the iPod and iTunes were a famous example of this approach. Yet, they were complementary hybrids – it was possible to use an iPod without iTunes and vice-versa. This hybrid approach meant that Apple would be able to treat them as separate components of a product-service hybrid and manage them individually.Another example would be something l...

Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research in order to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way. Creating personas will help you to understand your users’ needs, experiences, behaviours and goals. Creating personas can help you step out of yourself. It can help you to recognise that different people have different needs and expectations, and it can also help you to identify with the user you’re designing for. Personas make the design task at hand less complex, they guide your ideation processes, and they can help you to achieve the goal of creating a good user experience for your target user gro...

Lighthouse is a free and open-source tool for assessing your website’s performance, accessibility, progressive web app metrics, SEO, and more. The easiest way to use it is through the Chrome DevTools panel. Once you open the DevTools, you will see a “Lighthouse” tab. Clicking the “Generate report” b..

It’s getting better and better but, still, how many times have you had to justify why user experience matters and what it actually means? To be prepared, as part of your UX toolbox, you should have a set of examples and visuals to ground your arguments. Case studies are great ways to exemplify the relevance of UX for product and service development. Graphics are also great tools to become the perfect advocate of UX.There are lots of classifications and forms to provide a visual overview of the User Experience field. The truth is that UX is a pretty high level term and often too ambiguous for people outside the field. What does UX exactly mean? Is it a philosophy, a process, a guideline, a st...

Application design is the biggest field of endeavour in technology at the moment. It seems that ever since Apple launched the iPhone that clever people are coming together to try and make our lives ever more interesting via the various app stores. Yet, there are some simple things that these wonderful folks could do to improve our overall user experience:1. Stop Using Lengthy Tours of FeaturesAuthor/Copyright holder: Joseph Morris. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-ND 2.0 We’ll give you a hint; if an app is going to be useful on a smartphone screen – it needs to be simple. If you need to use a lengthy tour of features to familiarize me with the app; it’s incredibly likely that you’ve tried...

Social proof (sometimes referred to as informational social influence) is a psychological concept. It refers to the tendency of human beings to follow the actions of others when making decisions and placing weight on those actions to assume “the correct decision”. It’s a concept that can be used in product design for the Internet and mobile web to help drive user decisions in the direction that a business wants them to go.Human beings are social creatures. We live in communities, towns and cities. We raise families and have friends. It’s what defines us. It also makes us vulnerable to the influence of other people. Social influence, which is what we refer to when we talk about the impact of...

The prospect of winning a new client is something that leaves us all a little excited. Yet, the more clients we bring on, the more we realize that there are great clients and there are clients with whom every interaction sucks our will to live. Signing the former is a great shot in the arm and leaves us enthusiastic and signing the latter usually turns out to be far more effort than it is worth.So how do we protect ourselves against terrible clients and moreover how do we deal with them if we do make the mistake of signing on the dotted line with them?You Have to Be Upfront From the Word GoMost clients, including the good ones, tend to send vague request for proposals or information when the...

Ideation is the process where you generate ideas and solutions through sessions such as Sketching, Prototyping, Brainstorming, Brainwriting, Worst Possible Idea, and a wealth of other ideation techniques. Ideation is also the third stage in the Design Thinking process. Although many people might have experienced a “brainstorming” session before, it is not easy to facilitate a truly fruitful ideation session. In this article, we’ll teach you some processes and guidelines which will help you facilitate and prepare for productive, effective, innovative and fun ideation sessions. Ideation is often the most exciting stage in a Design Thinking project, because during Ideation, the aim is to gener...

In any type of research that involves human participants, it’s important to consider the ethics of the research project. That is also the case when you do user research. You are responsible for your participants’ wellbeing, for representing them honestly, and for keeping their personal information safe. That is a big responsibility, so it’s important to know what to consider when you plan to do user research so as to keep your project ethically sound. Here, we will show you some of the most important rules for doing ethical user research so that you can ensure that your own research is indeed ethically sound. Unlike academic research, where an ethics committee must approve research involvin...

Content fried is the point we reach when we subject ourselves to too much data. It commonly affects content curators but it can affect any of us. The “always on” Internet may be a blessing much of the time but it can also be a curse. The term “content fried” was defined Beth Kanter, who is a trainer, researcher, speaker and motivator. Content fried is when we’re subject to too much data. Beth Kanter coined the term and I do have the symptoms! How Do I Know If I’m Content Fried?Well firstly, you might want to consider if any of the obvious symptoms apply to you: Are you online all the time? Is your smartphone in your hand when you’re not in front of your computer? When you go offline...