UX/UI Design for globalization – more than just translation

When you’re designing for international users of web products, internationalization and localization are things you have to consider. With the two together, we can call it web globalization (= internationalization + localization). The first and right instinct is to deal with translation, but it’s more than just using an auto-translator to simply translate the language …

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Google’s HEART Framework- Measuring and Tracking Progress Towards Key Goals

What is the HEART Framework? The HEART Framework was created by 3 members of Google’s research department to help UX teams focus on specific dimensions of user experience that should be focused on for the project, and to identify goals and tools to track progress.  Using the Heart Framework to measure and track process can …

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Spa Sensation on the Web

Canyon Ranch, the luxury destination spa, makes good use of visual interface design to convey a highly sensory experience for its desktop and mobile web users. In particular, strategic use of text, shapes, and the size of the shapes along with high-quality video and dramatic contrasts among elements make the site attractive, drawing in even …

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Design for Difficult Contexts – The Imperative of Functionality and the Uses of Pleasure

  Designing for difficult contexts—for situations where a product or interface is serving users in heightened emotional states or positions of physical or sociopolitical vulnerability—presents particular challenges to the designer. Literature on the issue stresses the importance of ensuring that general usability principles are part of the design process (e.g., functionality, flow, aesthetics, task success, and …

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the evolving search in context

BERRYPICKING A discussion based on Bates’s The Design of Browsing… (1989)

This discussion on berrypicking techniques and how users retrieve information online is heavily based on Marcia Bates’s, The Design of Browsing and Berrypicking Techniques for the Online Search Interface (1989). The berrypicking technique is… well, it refers to a lot of things. First, it’s a model for information retrieval, or how we search and find …

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Word Clouds in Four Steps: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Word clouds — a form of “tag clouds” — are visual representations of the prominent word choices in a selected text. The relative importance of a term is indicated by the weight of the font: the more often it appeared in the original source, the larger the word appears in the graphic “cloud.” This “Web …

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The Ethics of Persuasion: Can an Interface be too Useable?

Usability is important, well researched and designed interfaces are Communicative and persuasive Guide, limit and create a user’s actions and experience to help meet needs   Are related to and fulfill deeply rooted emotions As researchers we’re acutely aware of this, at every stage we attempt to capture a user’s attention and we have a …

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Design Critique: MailChimp (Web Platform)

Description Mailchimp is a platform that helps manage, create, distribute, and track analytics from newsletters. Newsletters are a commonly used marketing tool commonly used by organizations to promote products, circulate ideas or stay connected with an audience. Due to inconsistencies in the rendering of HTML and CSS code on different devices, platforms and operating systems …

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Pure Methodology : A Usability Evaluation Method

    What is Pure Methodology and why is it important? While interning with Techsmith this summer, I got the opportunity to participate in a usability evaluation method called Pure (Pragmatic Usability Rating by Experts) Methodology. This was my first experience participating in PURE usability evaluation method and found the method to be very productive …

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Image showing Wireframing

My Experience with Balsamiq Mockups – A Rapid Wireframing Tool

Introduction “Fail early, fail often”, a quote extremely relevant to the field of User Experience due to the fact that following such a modus operandi is essential for making swift iterative improvements to products. Mockups and wireframes are great tools that assist in rapid-prototyping, due to their lower level of detail and simpler construction. While …

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