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Design Principles

4 Tips for Designing Apple Watch Apps

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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 2015. Some analysts believe global smartwatch shipments will reach 101 million units by 2020. While Google, Samsung, and others are pouring money into wearables, Apple

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Personas

The Cult of User Personae

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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.

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Learning From Others / Process and Methods

Method Mondays: Never Stop Learning

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Benjamin Franklin once said: “Tell me and I forget; teach me and I may remember; involve me and I learn.” At the SAP Design & Co-Innovation Center (DCC), we frequently organize the so-called “Method Mondays,” a regular one-hour meeting series in which the team members share, practice, and test different methods. In this article, I would like to share the five methods with you that work best for us—they’re worth trying!

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Design Principles / Discovery, Research, and Testing

When Words Are Not Enough

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The frequently-raised objection when it comes to quality research, UX research included, is that the conclusions are drawn based on the participants’ declarations. However, there exist some methods which allow one to grasp the real behaviors of participants, and they can be easily implemented into the research scenario. During exploratory research, the respondents are often unable to articulate their needs or opinions. In turn, when it comes to usability tests or satisfaction surveys, it very often happens that the respondents’

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Design Principles

A New Challenger Appears

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Prototyping is fundamental in a host of different industries. Since I spend a lot of my time prototyping as a user experience (UX) designer, I look to other fields for insights into new techniques that might save time or more effectively communicate an interaction. Storyboards are a great example of a technique that the UX community borrowed from film, television, and comic books. What’s interesting is that despite the value UX has added to digital products across all industries, I

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