“We know that consumer purchase decisions are often made quickly and subconsciously, but there are opportunities where it’s possible to influence a consumer’s perception of a brand. People often make buying decisions by using all five of their senses and once product designers discover what each of these sensory influencers are, they can develop packaging … Read more
So how do you make the complex simple? How do you accommodate a person’s first-time experience from their familiar routine from their advance experts needs? With progressive disclosure. Progressive disclosure is an interaction design technique to help maintain the focus of a person’s attention by reducing clutter, confusion, and cognitive load by presenting only the … Read more
I was having lunch with a colleague – catching up on family and his new gig, when we got on a conversation about the difference in US and Japanese business cultures (he has spent the last 25 years working in both). One thing in particular that stood out to me was that Japanese companies have … Read more
Psychologists William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman define “the time it takes for a person to make a decision as a result of the possible choices he or she has” in the Hick–Hyman Law.That is, increasing the number of choices will increase the decision time logarithmically. This means that people subdivide their total collection of choices into categories, eliminating … Read more
Psychologist James J. Gibson originally introduced the term “Affordance” in his 1977 article “The Theory of Affordances” and elaborated on it further in his 1979 book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Gibson defined affordances as all “action possibilities” latent in the environment, objectively measurable and independent of the individual’s ability to recognize them, but … Read more
Over the years, I have seen different design principles come into play at design reviews. One of the most frequent and important design principles has been gestalt perception. Around the beginning of the 20th century, Gestalt theorists were intrigued by the way our mind perceives the whole out of incomplete elements. Gestaltists believed that context … Read more
Wayfinding encompasses all of the ways in which people and animals orient themselves in physical space and navigate from place to place. Historically, wayfinding refers to the techniques used by travelers over land and sea to find relatively unmarked and often mislabeled routes. Urban planners borrowed the term in the 1960s, where they defined wayfinding as … Read more
Validate that customers’ needs are met and tasks are easy to do. Putting your solution in context for your customers and users, is a key to validating that the solution meets their needs and is easy to use. You need to work with people who fit the profile of your target customers and conduct design … Read more
Businesses frequently want an evaluation of their websites—mostly to know how they compare to the competition. Based on our experience, most businesses are disappointed with their website’s ability to convert visitors to loyal customers. In fact, many people say they aren’t really sure what their website does for them. To assess and enhance website effectiveness, … Read more
You need to decide how much user research, design, and usability testing you can afford. This depends on your competitive market, business objectives, and release cycles. During the early phases of a product development lifecycle, activities include conducting market, customer, and competitive user research. User research may include surveys, focus groups, interviews, and contextual inquiries. … Read more
Once you have validated that your product’s overall workflow meets customer and user needs, do usability testing to evaluate individual tasks to ensure they are easy to complete. Usability evaluation assesses the degree to which users can operate a system and their efficiency and satisfaction when using the system. Such evaluations validate that tasks are … Read more
Developing prototypes and reviewing them with target customers and users is key to designing easy-to-use solutions. You must spend some time validating workflow, navigation, information grouping, information hierarchy, terminology, labels, and interactions to ensure they meet the needs of the market and your users. Your understanding of various customers’ needs, users’ workflows, and content overlaps … Read more