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Wireframing Tools for Beginners
Wireframing is a key skill for UX design and often used to show layouts or visualize ideas to clients, stakeholders, and developers. Today’s wireframing programs can make it quicker and easier to develop these deliverable. Sketch, Figma, Codepen, Invision, Mindmeister, and many more are available and widely used.
It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer number of available design tools when creating your wireframes. I haven’t even mention Adobe, PowerPoint, and good old pen and paper. Sometimes a sketch on a piece of paper works just as well as presenting digital wireframes. As beginners, many UX professionals get caught up in software – Which ones are the best to use? What will look best on my resume for future jobs? The design stage, project requirements, and even the client or employer will influence which tool to use.
Wireframes range from low fidelity, with placeholders for elements, text, and media, to high fidelity versions that look, and may even function, like the finished ..
Lessons Learned from An Event Apart Denver
Editor’s Note: An Event Apart (AEA) just finished its first event of 2018 in Seattle. For the first time, the 2018 conference series has three Special Edition events, which feature 18 speakers over three-day.
Today we look back at the 2017 AEA Special Edition. UX Booth columnist Jess Vice highlights some of the biggest takeaways.
Use the discount code AEAUXBooth to save $100 on any AEA multi-day event.
From Research to Redesign Jeffrey Zeldman, founder and creative director at studio.zeldman and co-founder of An Event Apart, kicked the conference off with a reminder of why we design in the first place. We can only identify and solve problems when we know who our customers are, who our users are, and which markets we’re reaching. Research is an often overlooked (yet vital) stage of the design process. Research sets us up to not only know who we’re designing for now but helps us discover what we should be solving for next.
Research saves time and money and allows us to build the righ..
Website Personalization Planning
Users’ expectations are high, and attention spans are short. There’s a multitude of alternative destinations if a website doesn’t present messaging, content, or functionality that immediately connects with what a visitor wants and needs. If a company is lucky enough to get users to its website, it should do everything in its power to keep them there and content. Website personalization is a proven way to engage audiences more effectively. Not only does it create better experiences for users, it can increase conversion rates, generate more revenue, and build brand affinity. Organizations who fail to personalize experiences are missing out on opportunities to better connect with prospects, retain existing customers, and generate greater brand loyalty.
What is personalization and why does it matter? Website personalization is about creating a highly relevant, targeted, and individualized experience to suit a user’s needs. It is dynamically presenting something that might be helpful or mo..
Full-stack UXers: Who They Are and How to Find Them
Within the user experience community, there’s been an increasing push toward finding individuals whose skill sets extend beyond those of a typical UX designer. Specifically, businesses are looking for leaders who can carry a project from initial design to front-end development.
These leaders are called full-stack UXers.
But when it comes to filling this in-demand position, there’s not a lot of clarity about what qualifications a full-stack UXer should bring to the table – or how to find them.
What is a full-stack UXer? Perhaps the best entrypoint into understanding a full-stack UXer is to explain what they are not. Contrary to what the title might suggest – and what certain job postings may unrealistically demand – the role doesn’t call for someone with a deep mastery of every part of the design trajectory. In practice, there are very few UXers who are as skilled in programming languages as they are in pixel-perfect design.
While full-stack UXers don’t need to have in-depth experie..
Meeting Design: Agile Style Daily Scrum
Kevin Hoffman is the master of meetings. In his new book Meeting Design from Rosenfeld Media, Kevin lays out exactly how to take on meetings as a design problem, but you don’t have to be a designer to appreciate this advice. He deftly illustrates how the designer’s toolkit—a collection of questions, activities, and conversations—can be applied to create the best outcomes for these age-old activities. We’re excited to provide the excerpt from Meeting Design below.
The daily scrum is the heart of an agile process—it’s the meeting you’ll have the most often. The name “scrum” is based on the “scrummage:” the part of a rugby game when play restarts after a foul occurs or the ball goes out of bounds. Everyone from each team grabs for the ball huddled together in a circle and then puts their heads together in interlocking fashion. Afterward, play continues from that point. In an agile scrum style meeting, everyone is grabbing for work to undertake.
Goal of an Agile Style Daily Scrum Hopeful..