What we’re reading

To help us remain up to date on goings on in the digital design and technology industry we read A LOT here at Every Interaction. We tweet most of the articles we read, but we also keep a log of the interesting posts we find in this blog – What we‘re reading.

We also write our own posts where we share news and opinions on topics closer to home. View the Every Interaction blog.

How IoT and Internet will merge

• March 29th 2017•

The ability to connect machines, devices, sensors, and other everyday things into an intelligent network and make sense out of them, has huge promises to change everyday life. As can be expected by taking in our entire world and attempting…

What UX Designers Can Learn from Psychology

• March 29th 2017•

Learning more about psychology can help designers learn about how people make decisions, form habits and understand content. Armed with that knowledge, UX designers can better create products that are usable and understandable.Here are a few concepts to get started:Hick’s…

When Designers and Stakeholders Collide

• March 29th 2017•

“Empathy is a big buzzword in UX right now. There are books and blog posts espousing the idea that if designers can develop true empathy for users, then they’ll build better applications. That’s true, but what about stakeholders? Designers need…

Avoiding Hard-to-Answer Questions in User Interviews

• March 27th 2017•

Interviewing People to Identify Their NeedsPeople can tell you about the problems they face and the things that annoy them, but they have a difficult time articulating what they want or need.It’s a mistake simply to ask people what they…

Design Sprints Are Snake Oil

• March 27th 2017•

You think this is weird? Look up “snake milking”. That’s someone’s job.A design sprint is a five-day intensive process intended to solve tough business problems using design approaches.Design sprints are snake oil, and I’ll tell you why.Their creator, Jake Knapp,…

reCAPTCHA: Tough on Bots, Easy on Humans

• March 27th 2017•

​Since the launch of the no CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA, a simple checkbox has helped identify humans from even the sneakiest bots, stopping billions of attacks on websites around the world. Now we’re taking reCAPTCHA a step further and making it invisible….

The Humans Working Behind the AI Curtain

• March 27th 2017•

Just how artificial is Artificial Intelligence? Facebook created a PR firestorm last summer when reporters discovered a human “editorial team” – rather than just unbiased algorithms – selecting stories for its trending topics section. The revelation highlighted an elephant in the…

How Functional Animation Helps Improve User Experience

• March 27th 2017•

Since humans are visually driven creatures, the impact of imagery only increases with the help of animation. Our eyes innately pay attention to moving objects, and animation is like eye candy — catchy and bright elements that call attention to…

UX vs CX: Which is more important?

• March 27th 2017•

UX vs CX: Which is more important?You’ve probably heard the terms UX and CX, and how they’re the key to your company’s success. Many still aren’t clear, however about what the difference is between the two concepts. Perhaps you’re under…

Using real sample data to make great designs

• March 27th 2017•

Helping you create a customized JSON file to generate product related content.Most of us know ‘Death to Lorem Ipsum‘ and the benefits of designing products with real content. Smarter people in the design community have written about it so let…

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Product Design

The ‘Product’ is the website, service, application, interactive thing being worked on by the business. The practice of Product Design is similar in a lot of ways to UX Design. It involves the coming together of many specific design disciplines...

Call to action (CTA)

A call to action is a marketing term that refers to a prompt that invokes a response leading to a sale. When referring to a call to action (CTA) in the digital design world we usually mean the interactive element that leads to the next step in the experience - something that needs to be clicked or tapped.

User testing

User testing refers to a technique used in the design process to evaluate a product, feature or prototype with real users. There are several reasons why you might want to undergo usability testing, the most common is that it allows the design team to identify friction in a user experience they are designing, so that it can be addressed before being built or deployed.

WYSIWYG

WYSIWYG (pronounced WIZ-ee-wig) is an acronym for "What You See Is What You Get". It helps identify an an interface that allows user input resulting in an output that is rendered in a similar way. For example; a word processor application interface might resemble a piece of paper,so when printed the user can see how the output will appear.

Content Management System

A content management system (CMS) is an tool that allows a website editor/administrator to manage the content that is displayed. Websites are made of HTML and CSS to create pages. Pages can be hard-coded but would require technical development skills to make changes. A CMS usually allows a person without coding knowledge to amend existing and add new content to a website using a WYSIWYG interface.

Responsive Web Design

Responsive web design refers to a web page that dynamically adapts its layout to fit the size and orientation of the device on which it is viewed. A responsive design allows for a more optimised user experience across desktop and laptop computers as well as smartphones and tablets of varying sizes.

User Stories

User stories allow the functionality of a product or service to be expressed as written descriptions of an experience as seen from the users perspective. The writing of user stories creates a list of design and development tasks to complete in order to create any required functionality.

User Interface

A user interface (UI) is a conduit between human and computer interaction - the space where a user will interact with a computer or machine to complete tasks. The purpose of a UI is to enable a user to effectively control a computer or machine they are interacting with, and for feedback to be received in order to communicate effective completion of tasks.

Personas

A persona in UX Design is the characterisation of a user who represents a segment of your target audience. On a project you might create any number of personas to be representative of a range of user needs and desires. The solutions you design must answer these needs in order to deliver value to your target audience.

Card sorting

A great, reliable, inexpensive method for discovering patterns in how users would expect to find content or functionality. Card sorting is used to test the taxonomy of data with a group of subjects, usually to help inform the creation of the information architecture, user flow, or menu structure on a project.

Brainstorming

A technique used to generate ideas around a specific topic. Often done in groups, but can be done individuals. The process usually involves writing down all ideas around a topic onto paper, a whiteboard or stickies often implying some kind of association.

Minimum Viable Product

An MVP is a product that has the minimum set of features to prove the most essential hypothesis for a product. Businesses building a new product can create a Minimum Viable Product to prove that an idea is viable and warrants further investment. A further benefit being that the next stage of development can be informed by feedback obtained from testing that MVP.

Sitemap

A sitemap is a diagrammatic representation of a hierarchical system. It usually depicts the parent-sibling relationship between pages in a website, showing how sub pages might be arranged underneath their parent groupings. This arrangement forms a map of the site.

User journey

A user journey represents a sequence of events or experiences a user might encounter while using a product or service. A user journey can be mapped or designed to show the steps and choices presented as interactions, and the resulting actions.

Prototype

A prototype is draft representation built to test ideas for layout, behaviour and flow in a system. Prototypes are an indispensable tool for resolving a large number of potential issues in a concept or business before too many resources are deployed to put a design into production.

Wireframes

A Wireframe is a visual schematic that conveys a basic level of communication, structure and behaviour during the design of a system. Wireframes are low-fidelity designs that bypass including a detailed user interface or visual design, conveying just enough to get across the core idea.

Usability

To say something is usable is a qualitative statement about how easy that thing is to use. Usability is an assessment of how learnable a system is and how easy a user finds it to use. The usability of a system or product is a key factor in determining whether the user experience is a good one.

Information Architecture

Information architecture is the design and organisation of content, pages and data into a structure that aids users understanding of a system. A more organised system enables users to more easily find the information they require and complete the intended tasks.

UI Design

User Interface Design is the discipline of designing software interfaces for devices, ideally with a focus on maximising efficiency, responsiveness and aesthetics to foster a good user experience.

UX Design

The practice of User Experience (UX) Design is the coming together of many specific design related disciplines to improve the usability, responsiveness, uptake and aesthetics of a product or service.

User Experience

A general term that covers all aspects of a user's participation while engaging with something that has been designed. Usually when talking about User Experience in the digital design field it refers to the interactions, reactions, emotions and perceptions while using an app, service, website or product.