Category: User Experience
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How to do effective user interviews?
A few years ago I did a really useful online class on user interviews, which was instructed by Julie Blitzer. Julie is an experienced UX designer/strategist who shared some great learnings and tips on how to best do qualitative user interviews. This is the main thing that I learned from Julie’s session: Yes, you guessed it…
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Which principles do underpin game design?
Gamification is more than just creating some mechanisms around rewards and motivation. In his online lectures on gamification, Kevin Werbach – an Associate Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at Wharton School – explained about some of the design rules which underpin gamification and game design: Main learning point: It’s so easy to underplay the value of games…
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Using mental models to prevent “human error”
One of the last lectures of my online Human-Computer Interaction (‘HCI’) course by Scott Klemmer was all about “mental models” and their role within HCI. The proposition that people rely on mental models was first introduced by Scottish psychologist Kenneth Craik who wrote that the mind constructs “small-scale models” of reality that it uses to reason,…
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Learning more about direct manipulation and reducing the ‘gulfs’
“Direct manipulation” is one of those Human-Computer Interaction (‘HCI’) terms that sounds intriguing. During the online HCI course instructed by Scott Klemmer which I did recently, I learned a bit more about what direct manipulation means. Direct manipulation is a HCI method which involves continuous representation of objects of interest and rapid, reversible, and incremental actions…
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Heuristics – Finding usability problems in designs (part 2)
In my last post I wrote about the use of heuristics to find usability problems in designs. In this post, I’ll look into the individual heuristic principles in more detail. It was UX expert Jakob Nielsen who introduced these “10 Heuristics for User Interface Design” in 1985 and these principles serve as a great context to…
As I learn ... 