This article is an excerpt from the first volume of The Product Analytics Playbook: Mastering Retention. Retention is the one metric that matters for sustainable growth. The Playbook is a comprehensive guide to understanding user retention that provides a novel framework for analyzing retention at every stage of the user journey.
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On one end of the spectrum is information architecture, which is about systems thinking. The people who specialize in this role arrange the different types of database objects into logical relationships with respect to how the user will move through that information (heavily influenced by user research). Ultimately, Information Architecture establishes content hierarchies and identifies necessary functionalities.
UX design-based projects can vary in scale and process. A product development process typically is either a waterfall project where upfront requirements lead to staggered delivery of the whole implementation, or agile where the team works more closely with stakeholders and delivers the work in short sprints.
Design is one of the most important drivers of user engagement. As users’ preferences shift toward a simpler interface, stripping the UI to its very basic, necessary elements is the key to success. Minimalism is a perfect marriage of form and function. It’s greatest strength is clarity of form — clean lines, generous whitespace, and minimal graphical elements brings simplicity to even the most confounding subject matter. That is, of course, if it’s used effectively.
UI design is moving towards removing any unnecessary elements to focus much more on functionality. But while functional aspect of a design is key to product success, visual details are equally important — particularly how they can improve those functional elements.
In this article I’ll show you how visual elements, such as shadows, carry information that is processed by the user of the interface.
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ccording to Patnaik (2009), Design Thinking is “any process that applies the methods of industrial designers to problems beyond how a product should look.” The term was already used as early as 1987 by Rowe in his eponymous book in an architectural context and has lately become popular through research done at Stanford University and the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany (Schmalzried, 2013). In his introductory article about Design Thinking, Brown (2008), the CEO and president of IDEO, uses the example of Thomas Edison to illustrate the underlying methodology. While Edison invented the lightbulb — which undoubtedly was a significant innovation in itself from a pure engineering perspective — he did not stop at that point. Rather, he understood that the lightbulb alone would be of no use to people, so he also created “a system of electric power generation and transmission to make it truly useful” (Brown, 2008). This means that “Edison’s genius lay in his ability to conceive a fully developed marketplace, not simply a discrete device” (Brown, 2008), which underpins that one of the prime principles of Design Thinking is to consider a broader context with the user at its center.
After years of graphic and web design freelancing, I started my career in User Experience and Interaction Design a few years back. Everyone learns tremendous amounts of lessons when they try to start a new career or develop their current one. The User Experience (UX) career, like any others, starts with the discovery period similar to cognitive development milestones in children. From the moment you make a decision on your own, you are discovering, learning, thinking, exploring and even realizing new things about yourself.
User Experience (UX) has become incredibly popular over the last five years – companies are finally understanding how creating great experiences can have an impact on how people perceive their brand and on achieving the company’s business goals.
Despite its popularity amongst designers and developers, User Experience is still not a mainstream term – and some people still have questions about what it is, who is responsible for creating it (the so-called “User Experience Designers”) and what that professional does from 9 to 5.