Have you ever heard of “dark equations”?
User experience design, or UXD, refers to the creation of user-friendly, user-empowering, and user-pleasing interactions with products. The word “user” really is the focus here. We should design for accessibility, for people of all backgrounds, and should ask real people to test our product before we put it out in the world to ensure the quality and efficacy of our design.
Since many similar design problems are often found in several projects, repeatable solutions — or UX patterns — were born. For example, if you need to break up a single website into different sections or pages, you may use a navigation bar across the top of the page. If your app has properties that can be changed or customised, maybe you should add a settings page. These are commonly used solutions used for specific problems that have been proven to work and, for familiarity purposes, should be used across projects. …
Around 2 months ago I started my first full-time job as a UX designer. Until then I had only worked at a research institute, so it was my first job in a more “corporate” environment. And it was my first time living in Lisbon, so a lot of firsts happened at the same time!
Because of the amount of changes, I was definitely counting on learning a lot of new things, but some of them were very surprising. Let’s break it down:
1) Any knowledge is always a plus
Coming from a software engineering background, I was afraid I wouldn’t feel at home among so many graphic designers and artists. And indeed the majority of UXers at my company started in the arts, but everyone has different backgrounds, distinct life experiences, and contrasting perspectives. …
A short primer on health literacy
The information age is upon us and for the first time in History we have virtually endless knowledge readily available at our fingertips. If you have any question about any topic at any time of day, odds are you can discover the answer in mere seconds. That wasn’t a reality mere decades ago.
So why is there still misinformation? Why don’t more people know basic health concepts? Where did we go wrong?
What is health literacy?
To answer those questions, we should start by defining health literacy. Even though there are several slightly different definitions, health literacy is most commonly understood as a person’s ability to gather, process, understand and apply health information in their daily life. It depends on an individual’s skills and knowledge, but also on external factors (such as the complexity of the message being transmitted). Health literacy alone may not be enough to improve health outcomes; other factors such as barriers to change (both intrinsic and extrinsic to the individual), the characteristics of the country’s health system, and community support, all play important roles in the well-being of an individual [1,2,3,4,5]. …
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