Forms: The Complete Guide–Part 3

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Forms are important—they’re the most common way to get information from our users. But just making wireframes of a form misses a big piece of the picture—what it’s like to interact with it. An HTML prototype of a form, on the other hand, can look and behave just like the real thing. In the first post, I showed you how to lay out a form and align the labels the way you want, using HTML and Foundation. In the second

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Forms: The Complete Guide–Part 2

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Forms are one of the most important parts of any site or app—they are the most common way for our users to give us the information that we need to help them do what they want to do. But in many instances, we design forms statically, often as wireframes. But so often, what makes or breaks a form is what it’s like to interact with it. When the user clicks on a particular radio button, some additional inputs appear. How

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How to Breathe Life Into Personas

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Personas are essential when you are working on a project and don’t know the target audience very well. For instance, not every designer has experience in fashion or banking. Creating a model of your target audience may help you and your stakeholders feel significantly more empathy for those people. Personas can also help you get out of the mindset of thinking about users abstractly. “User” sounds like it does not refer to real people who have desires, concerns, past experiences.

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UX One-liners

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A little background to start: I’ve had the honor of working as a designer-in-residence for General Assembly’s User Experience Design Immersive Pilot Program (UXDI) from June through July. Our team built, launched, and taught a UX course 5-days a week, 8-hours a day, for 8-weeks straight.  It was quite the challenging, yet rewarding experience. However, learning from our approach, I found something about the way we bring people into the fold that we can stand to improve. We instructors spent

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Information Architecture’s Teenage Dilemma

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Imagine if you will information architecture as a pimply-faced, malcontent teenager.  IA is eager to express and redefine itself. It wants to be an individual yet accepted by its peers. It is simultaneously aggravated and apathetic about its parents, mentors, and role-models. It is a bit of a mess, but a wonderful, beautiful mess with endless opportunity and potential. The IA Summit (and information architecture) enters adolescence The first IA Summit was held April 8-9, 2000, in Boston, MA, and

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