Posted on: January 3, 2019
In 2018 we saw a lot happening in the world of UX. From a missile crisis caused by poor design to failing ride-sharing mobile apps, the Akendi team found a lot to write about. Here are our readers’ top 10 favourite posts of 2018:
1. The Art of Asking Questions in Usability Testing
Drawing from Akendi’s best practices for UX research, this article outlines the main goals across key moments of a usability testing study with tips of when and what to ask. Filled with strategies to help you formulate better questions as well as tactics to probe users further for greater insights.
2. Service Blueprinting
Service Blueprints are essential tools of Service Design that help organizations to plan the delivery of a service. But with experiences becoming more and more sophisticated and dependent of so many moving parts, how does one put a service blueprint together?
3. How to Visualize Experience Maps in 7 Steps
How do you create engaging experience maps that clearly communicate your research data to clients? Don’t fret if you’re not sure of the answer, we got you covered with our 7 steps to visualize data more effectively.
4. Hawaiian Missile Crisis: A Result from Design Error Not Human Error
Could false emergency alarms be avoided with more thoughtful UX design? Our take on the Hawaiian missile crisis, the effectiveness of drop-down menus to elicit user actions and the controversy of labeling mistakes as human error versus design error.
5. Designing for Different Mental Models
Cultural experience can have an impact on how people think and interact with different things. When it comes to products and services, doing user research to design for the right mental model can be the difference between failing or succeeding.
6. The UX of IOT Devices
In this era of high connectivity and IOT devices, product designers are faced with increasing usability challenges. How does one meet user’s expectations for cross devices interactions? A deeper look at a user’s struggles and wins using a connected thermostat.
7. Getting Stakeholder Buy-In
Getting stakeholder buy-in is a recurrent issue for designers and researchers alike. In this article, we explore a series of tactics to get decision makers on your side.
8. Brand Strategy: Is a Controversial Name a Good Approach?
Is all publicity good publicity? Our considerations on the role of customer research in developing a solid brand strategy and the different types of public reactions to expect when companies go for controversial names.
9. Using Fitts’s Law when Designing
Fitts’s law is an equation that models human behaviour. Learn about its basic principles, why it is relevant to the user experience process and how to use it effectively on your next interface design.
10. How to Fail Better than Uber
A good experience designer is someone who thinks about the optimal way a task can be performed while also predicting how things can go wrong. We compared different approaches to common usability problems to learn how some companies are failing better than others.
What was your favourite Akendi blog of 2018? Please let us know in the comments below.
Originally published at www.akendi.com on January 3, 2019.
