Christina Wodtke
Stories by Christina Wodtke
One of our finest tasks as designers is to filter the abundance of choice into easily digestible bits. Creating great interfaces is as much about motivating, teasing, leading, and guiding users along—so that they experience value, faster—as it is to improve usability by removing friction. This requires an endeavor into product psychology and the art…
Build a command line option into your next user interface. Some of you techies may be reading this and thinking, “Yes! I live in a command window all the time on my computer.” Well, I’m not really thinking about you as my target audience. I’m talking more about applications used by everyday people outside the…
August 16th, 2016
10 Practical Tips for Increasing the Impact of Your Research Insights
by Mike Katz
User experience (UX) researchers tasked with improving customer-facing products face many challenges on a daily basis—perhaps none more daunting than translating their research insights into positive change. This article presents 10 tips I have learned over the course of my career to help UX researchers increase the impact of their research insights in applied settings….
August 1st, 2016
Book in Brief: Designing Interface Animation
Meaningful Motion for User Experience
by Val Head
Editors’ note: We’re introducing a “Book in Brief” feature here on Boxes and Arrows. We’ll publish an excerpt, up to 500 words, of your book. The catch is that we’ll only publicize one book a month; first come, first serve. Other rules will certainly occur to us over time. Hit us up at idea at boxesandarrows.com….
Something that I feel is overlooked by a lot of product designers is the second-hand experience of their product. That is to say, above and beyond the target user, who is affected by the product—and most importantly—what is their experience? If the UX team has satisfied all the needs and desires of the target user,…
Douglas Adams, in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, tells the story of the Golgafrinchians. The people of planet Golgafrincham, the story goes, figured out how to get rid of an entire useless third of their population by duping them into thinking the planet was doomed and that they were eligible for the…
June 14th, 2016
Card Sorting a Kitchen Taxonomy
Taxonomy of Spices and Pantries: Part 4
by Grace G Lau
Validating with users is a fundamental part of the taxonomy recipe because all this planning and re-organizing is in vain if my in-laws come back in six months and the kitchen reverts to its original state.
The world as we know it today is rich in information. At whim, we can usually find (without much delay) an information source that answers a question, suggests nearby restaurants, tells us how to travel, or provides us with data for the paper we are writing. The internet, as well as the technological innovations that…
April 5th, 2016
4 Tips for Designing Apple Watch Apps
by Marian Mota
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The global wearable technology marketplace is growing at a staggering rate, estimated to increase from $7.1 billion in 2015 to $12.6 billion by 2018. One of the hottest segments in that market is smartwatches. In the past year alone, smartwatch shipments have increased from 7.4 million units in 2014 to nearly 25 million units in…
On alternating Tuesdays, I get to be a young second-generation immigrant woman named Selene with great phone presence and multilingual skills. Or I could be a beefy mid-30s guy named Silas with a buzz cut and a flair for figures. Or any of a few others, or several of them in succession. Every second Tuesday…