#UX Posts

Intuition and experience without UX data lead to a dangerous assumption: Designer knows best. We’re drawing a line in the sand: If it’s not based on user research, it’s not UX design.

Design education is often accused of being costly and irrelevant. But with a shift in perspective, universities don’t simply prepare students for a job, they cultivate innovation and ambition.

For decades, a design diploma was the golden ticket to career opportunity. As this path now faces scrutiny, we examine the issues plaguing design institutions and offer radical solutions for change.

Empty states are often overlooked in UX design, but they can be drivers of substantial business benefits, and if done right, contribute to a more compelling user experience.

Every year, hot new UX design trends emerge that provide better user experiences. This retrospective explores some of the most interesting and effective ones from 2018.

Designers who approach minimalist design as being easy are often surprised at the amount of effort, time, and skill required to create a product that can achieve its aims while remaining truly minimalist.

Color: It’s stunningly beautiful and maddeningly deceptive. Use this color theory field guide (with an infographic) to make lightning-quick color choices with unwavering confidence.

There’s much confusion and hyperbole surrounding chatbots. The tech is promising, but the user experience is lacking. We examine five chatbot fails and share practical tips to improve their UX.

The right color palette encourages people to behave in ways designers want them to, while the wrong palette can turn visitors away before they take any action at all.

We can achieve better user experiences with mobile UX design by following best practices, understanding constraints and facilitating a solid working relationship with developers.

Are remote-working and freelancing viable options for designers? We interview Toptal designers to discover how they’re forging freelance careers with meaningful work for high-impact global companies.

Great features and seamless integration with the Adobe ecosystem makes Adobe XD a powerful design tool that competes with industry favorites like Sketch and Figma.

What makes a winning UX portfolio? More than a showcase of skills, a UX designer’s portfolio is an opportunity for them to create an enjoyable user experience as well as demonstrate their UX mastery.

On this week’s Design Talks we discuss research in action with Caitria O’Neill, a UX researcher at Airbnb. She studies people’s relationships with technology and how they behave with digital products.

How do product teams avoid wasting months of valuable time building something no one wants? Apply the iterative validation principles of Lean UX and create products that their end-users actually need.

In the first of our Toptal Design Talks series, futurist Pamela Pavliscak discusses how emotions are deeply integrated into digital experiences and designers are positioned to facilitate genuine relationships through technology.

Human-centered design is about solving problems, not implementing solutions. This guide provides an overview of HCD, a process that ensures optimum user experiences, effortless interaction, and ultimately, business benefits.

How can designers move beyond personal insights to understand the problems users face? We introduce time-tested UX research methods that inspire user empathy and lead to better user experiences.

A vital part of creating an optimal user experience, visual hierarchy determines the order in which people take in and process information on a page, regardless of whether it’s digital or print.

Sound can be easily overlooked in UX design, but it’s an essential element in building impactful user interactions, such as providing feedback for user’s actions and building brand recognition.

Nearly one in four users will abandon a mobile app after using it just once. Good onboarding makes a great first impression, gives users a guided introduction, and can significantly improve user retention.

Well-crafted words improve UX and provide people with decision-making clarity. We explore the true value of UX copy and provide sensible writing tips for greater user engagement.

The use of color in design can affect the emotions and moods of the people. Using colors wisely can improve UX and induce desired behaviors in significant ways.

Billions are lost by businesses due to poor UX. This article outlines key UX statistics and insights that stress the importance of “knowing your user” (with infographic).

UI components are about modularity and reusability. A/B testing can be employed very effectively during a lean product development process to test components that make up an application’s UI.

There are many UX design tools on the market, but their capabilities vary. This review examines the effectiveness of Sketch, Axure, and Figma with a task-based comparison.

Learn about the evolution of design systems and how designers can adopt a holistic approach to systems thinking.

Many exciting trends in eCommerce are on the horizon, from AI and AR to chatbots and voice ordering. The future of eCommerce will be shaped by trailblazing tech and savvy UX design (with infographic).

This guide shows UX designers how to craft a brilliant portfolio by examining questions about process and sharing practical design tips.

When having the right UX tools is the crucial difference between having an effective design workflow and one that’s slow and unproductive, it’s important to stay up to date with the latest tools (with infographic).

An illuminating infographic highlights ten eCommerce pain points that ruin the user experience and lead to shopping cart abandonment.

Color is the master key to compelling design communication, but UI designers must learn to wield its power. This guide simplifies color theory concepts and shows designers how to use color with precision.

A well-thought-out color palette can elevate a design from “good” to “great” while a mediocre palette can detract from a user’s experience and even interfere with their ability to use a site or app.

Just as there are cause and effect relationships, there are the laws of UX: predictable outcomes and human behaviors in UX a designer can use to design superior products. This infographic explains it all.

Designers can brush up on solid fundamentals and be inspired by innovative new ideas by reading the great books and free ebooks about design and creativity on this list.

UI and UX designers must work in tandem in order to create a finished product that delights users both visually and functionally.

How does Figma improve the design process and outperform Sketch and other design tools when it comes to designer collaboration? Learn the big differences that every designer should know.

A consistent UI leads to a better UX. But with so many moving parts in modern user interfaces, how can UI designers be sure they’re staying true to a digital product’s look and feel?

AI has become an over-hyped buzzword and the design world is no exception. Instead of resisting it, designers will soon be co-creating with AI. It will make them smarter. (Includes infographic)

Poor client management can cost designers work and damage reputations. By proactively managing project expectations and responsibilities early, designers can build great relationships with their clients.

The ultimate aim of icon design is to enhance the user experience. But what does that look like, and how can UI designers ensure that the icons they make will be easily understood?

If a freshly minted app is getting low ratings, bad reviews, and complaints about its usability, or the website is not generating the expected conversions, it may be time to bring in a UX expert.

UX designers often need to convince company executives on the ROI of a UX redesign initiative. Here are some real-life B2B redesign case studies a UX team identified in order to make a compelling case.

Designing an eCommerce site is not just about building a website to sell products, but designing a pleasant online shopping experience. This comprehensive guide walks us through the best practices.

Shopify merchants have achieved over $40 billion in sales, but with poorly executed UX design being one of the biggest contributors to abandoned checkouts, it’s clear that superior UX can boost this statistic even further.

UX designers often need to persuade executives on the ROI of a UX initiative. In this example scenario, the UX team presented the projected ROI of a UX redesign to make a convincing case.

UX design attempts to deliver the right solution, in the right way, at the right time and delight people when they use a product. This comprehensive UX guide walks through the various methods, tools, and techniques that make up the process.

The internet is a primary source of information, entertainment, and communication. Yet, for people with disabilities, there are barriers that make it inaccessible, as many websites don’t consider their needs.

Travel gives a fresh perspective, inspires creativity, and improves our empathy for people around the world. By making the globe your office, you can benefit from new insights and become a better designer.

Want to become a phenomenal designer? Take a multidisciplinary design approach and study the methods of other design disciplines.

Users form mental models around how products should work through use. In order to design for maximum usability, designers need to understand and leverage users’ mental models.

In this age of lean startups, designers often find themselves in stretch roles where they are not only in charge of a product’s design but also in charge of coming up with the type of product to build.

A lion’s share of websites and apps in the online media space are powered by content management systems (CMS). The optimal way to design for these applications is putting content first, style second.

UI and UX are two design terms that often get used in the wrong context. Designers who call themselves “UI designers,” or design for trends rather than users, could be harming their reputation.

Polished design wireframes are great but don’t reveal the work that goes into research and content organization. See how a thorough approach to early project planning leads to successful website redesign.

UX testing is a crucial step in the design process but is often overlooked for tight budgets or deadlines. You do not need a formal lab to do quality research—just the right tools and a clear plan.

Human cognition is complex, and many factors play into instant impressions. Design psychology is coming to the forefront as more and more companies are using neuroscience to design better user experiences.

The market share for mobile and desktop browsing is about 50/50. For designers, this means responsive design is more important than ever, as users expect a seamless experience across all platforms and screen sizes.

Effective user research doesn’t have to cost a fortune. In fact, there are many low-cost methods available to designers, all of which will put a designer on the road to designing better products.

Sketch plugins can help designers speed up their design process and automate repetitive tasks in Sketch. Learning Sketch plugin development allows designers to constantly improve their workflow.

The wearable technology revolution is shifting our long established patterns of how we utilize data in our daily lives and social interactions. In many ways, it’s a lot more personal.

Learn about information architecture—how designers and product managers build an IA using design principles as well as IA tools and best practices.

Net Promoter Score is a consumer insight method to track customer loyalty, but it falls short in many ways. Applying various user research methods gives a more complete picture of the user experience.

Discover why conversational UIs and voice apps are surging in popularity and learn how to design voice user interfaces (VUIs) for both mobile and smart home speakers.

Some products prove irresistible because they combine psychological design techniques that create an ultimate UX hook: anticipatory, persuasive, and emotional design.

Prototype design is a powerful process detailing how designers do everything required to test, iterate, and develop prototypes, beginning with user flows and ending in functional wireframes.

eCommerce sales are expected to more than double by 2021. eCommerce retailers and designers who pay close attention to user experience and follow eCommerce UX design principles can capitalize on this growth.

New design tools are emerging at an incredible rate, but the future promises a vast array of astonishing tools that will forever change the way designers think and work.

For designers, working in enterprise is a challenge because of all the different stakeholders and moving parts. This guide reviews the collaborative design process for working better in that environment.

Mobile usability isn’t just about scaling a website or app to fit various devices. It’s about understanding how people use mobile devices and that the mobile experience is as unique as the user.

The explosive growth of eCommerce has created a need for online stores to adapt to mobile experiences. This post outlines the many aspects that make a successful mobile eCommerce experience.

Conducting UX analysis as part of an iterative process provides valuable, actionable insights into enhancing and optimizing a product’s user experience.

Product innovation happens at the intersection of desirability, business viability, and technological feasibility. Design thinking—with a proven ROI—integrates all three and delivers business value.

New fintech apps are changing how we see our investment goals and interact with financial institutions. This article reviews best practices for building trust without sacrificing fun or usability.

Microinteractions are single interactive moments in a product that enhance the workflow and make a product more enjoyable. This article highlights key parts of microinteractions and patterns.

Customer journey maps are a visual storytelling tool used to help designers empathize with users and identify actionable opportunities for providing a better user experience.

Landing pages are powerful tools used to convert visitors into leads and buyers. This post outlines the psychological aspects and design considerations that make up a successful landing page.

Great designers help teams and stakeholders make better decisions by using questions to identify opportunities, reveal underlying needs, and understand user context—all of which lead to better designs.

Web design is changing. Minimalist web design has been the reigning approach for years, but brutalist design is gaining in popularity. Despite its inelegant clutter and raw functionality, brutalist design may be taking over the web.

Dashboards are a unique and powerful way to present data-based intelligence using data visualization techniques. This post looks at the fundamental principles that lie at the heart of every successful dashboard design.

By leveraging new and emerging technologies like AI, AR, VR, and MR, designers have fresh and exciting opportunities ahead in designing future products.

Working under a tight deadline? We’ve all picked up design projects that required us to deliver outstanding results under severe time constraints. This article outlines a 30 day branding case study that breaks down the process of how to get it done effectively.

What is UX design? This article dispels the myths and lays bare the many misconceptions surrounding the discipline by looking at what UX design is and what it is not.

Many a promising project can be stymied by unyielding personalities, inflexible attitudes, and big egos. Learn to navigate these tricky waters with grace and professionalism.

Designers are not mere pixel pushers. They must frame the problem, identify a solution, and engage users while also impacting their client’s bottom line. This article explains how the S.M.A.R.T. framework helps designers stay goal-oriented and increase their success rate.

Prototyping with real data can be compared to building something out of LEGO blocks: Instead of working with imaginary, loose shapes, we can use existing components from the box and build something real.

This Framer tutorial uses real data and public APIs. Working prototypes and code snippets are included.

Why do we still use buttons in our user interfaces? Technology has come so far and offers so many possibilities, there is no longer any reason to force our users to click the tiny rectangles we call “buttons.”

Dark-themed UIs can be dramatic, stylish and elegant. But despite the many benefits, they come with a slew of challenges and potential pitfalls that every designer would be wise to keep in mind.

Buttons—We use them daily in apps and websites to finalize crucial actions. Digital design develops at an incredible pace, and buttons as one of its most important elements along with it. How has their style developed over the past 8 years? Check the Dribbble Buttons Timeline.

Regardless of the environment or size of a project, UX professionals need a variety of deliverables to help facilitate design communication with various stakeholders and teams, document work and provide artifacts for meetings and ideation sessions. Here are 10 of the most common UX deliverables.

A well-produced, high-quality pitch video can go a long way toward helping a business or individual gain credibility and secure funding. Here are 7 tips.

What is a heuristic analysis? How do you run one effectively by employing a group of usability experts to dramatically improve a product’s UX?

It is now possible to more accurately shape experiences that dynamically personalize content by coupling behavioral design with data science and analytics.

Designing past mobile or desktop interaction boundaries and into the physical world opens up possibilities to create immersive environmental experiences.

A wireframe map is handy as a tool for estimating work at the start of a project and as a checklist to keep you on track throughout the design process.

Discover the top 13 design podcasts that will inspire you in your work and keep you focused and entertained—a nice change from your usual background music!

It’s crucial that designers focus not only on cultivating their abilities with creative tools but also improve their ability to communicate design effectively.

Remote UX workshops call for meticulous preparation and the use of proven techniques as complex details make it a challenge with many potential pitfalls.

These 10 surprising UX books from various disciplines will broaden a designer’s perspective and provide insight into diverse approaches to problem solving.

Interaction design principles form the bedrock of awesome UX. Truly great interaction design relies on a set of conventions, standards, best practices and rules-of-thumb.

The relationship between art and design is often misunderstood, and although a design outcome can be artful, the process behind it is altogether very different.

The top five reasons why creating a styleguide early is especially important for startups in spite of the inherent challenges.

Reflections on the disappearance of web forms. How mobile biometrics could unlock a personal data vault that provides what’s necessary, killing forms entirely.

In many product design scenarios wireframes may not be necessary and skipping them altogether may cut down on confusion and save a lot of time.

Every blog publisher hopes to turn their blog into an effective marketing and sales tool. But how do you design a high-conversion funnel for your blog?

Toptal designer Peter Davis offers some helpful examples and describes a series of steps you can take to make it a success.

UX and usability testing analysis is a critical skill. How do you go about collecting data and analyze results? Here’s a way to stay sane during the process.

Two eCommerce sites were losing customers due to poor UX. A small set of UX improvements were made that greatly enhanced the sites’ usability and boosted sales.

What can be done easily and inexpensively to substantially improve your product designs? User testing. User testing digital product designs is imperative if you are to design “useful” products.

This six-part process by Toptal designer John Roose describes how the insights you gain from observing how actual users use your product are well worth it.

Flipkart, India’s leading eCommerce marketplace, questioned why they were losing customers and asked themselves: How do you build a loyal customer base, increase engagement and solve the issue of app uninstalls? What behaviors should be studied to come up with a winning solution? The answer lay in designing a habit-forming experience.

Often, designers make the mistake of designing apps for their own vanity, focusing on the veneer instead of designing a great user experience. As Steve Jobs once said, “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like.”

In this article, Toptal UX Designer Miklos Philips discusses Jobs’s point of view and clarifies the importance of designing for people.

You probably wouldn’t stare at a white screen on a site or app for more than a few seconds without a page load status or time indicator. A well-crafted loading animation helps you stay engaged while you wait. Toptal Design Editor Tidjane Tall will show you how Slack, Trello, and Flickr loading animations can be done with ease. You’ll be able to apply what you learn to create your own branded loading animation from scratch.

We can harness the power of constraints by consciously choosing to place strict limits on design options, and we needn’t look beyond our own smartphones to find compelling examples of how this works.

Anticipatory design is the UX technique of simplifying processes and responding to user needs one step before they actually express those needs, simplifying user decisions and leading to magical experiences.

A client just hired you to design a landing page for their new offering. They want more than just a beautiful design – they want a page that converts. What do you do?

You read this post, which teaches you seven conversion rate optimization (CRO) tips for designing highly effective landing pages.

Check out a collection of mobile eCommerce inspirations created by different designers from around the world. Toptal Designer Cai Cardenas curated a selection of designs that each delights their users.

Some of the screens are captured from live products, some are still in development, and some are purely concepts designed to push the bounds of what is even considered possible.

Like all people, designers have biases about the world. Unfortunately, many of these biases can seriously damage our quality of work before it’s too late to notice. In this article, Toptal Design Blog Editor Michael Abehsera tells us what kinds of biases designers unwittingly hold and how they can overcome them.

Check out a collection of analytics dashboard design inspirations created by different designers from around the world. Toptal Designer Santiago Baigorria curated a selection of designs that each offers insightful analyses.

Some of the designs are captured from live products, some are still in development, and some are purely concepts designed to push the bounds of what is even considered possible.

Most designers know that feature creep is a big time problem, but knowing is only half the battle. How do we stop feature creep from smothering our projects?

In this article, Toptal Designer Luciano Vizza guides us through the steps to recognize and dispel feature creep in your next project. One extra feature might not sink the ship. But, it doesn’t take long for one feature to become 20 features, and before you know it, Captain, you are going down with the ship.

Designing across cultural boundaries has broader implications and more challenges than Google Translate can solve. Designers must consider not just language differences, but also cultural tendencies, values, and taboos.

In this article, Toptal designer Jônatas Vieira gives us the tools to navigate cultural boundaries and shows us one of his own projects that taught him the value of cross-cultural design.

Designers too often work for their ego and choose to redesign the next billion-user start-up to boost their career, rather than doing something that will really help them grow. We receive no substantial criticism when publishing portfolio work online, but when we design for reality we put ourselves in a position to learn.

In this article, Toptal Lead Blog Design Editor Michael Abehsera shows us how to kill our egos, design for the small and local, and to always be students.

Most people know that the world of digital products, and how we design them, is changing every day. The question that we must ask then is: how will this affect the role of designers in the future?

In this article, Toptal designer Bree Chapin gives us an overview of user interactions today and how they are changing for tomorrow. Keep reading to learn how designers have to pivot and redirect their foci to create products and services that can adapt for the future.

UX sketching is a crucial, yet often overlooked, aspect of user-experience design. Sketching is a very efficient way of communicating design ideas while allowing designers to try out a multitude of options and iterate them before settling on one.

In this post, Toptal Freelance Designer Nick Vyhouski explains UX sketching step by step and outlines a range of tips and techniques used by leading designers.

Toptal Freelance Designer Danielle Reid presents a number of exciting technologies and various interfaces to interact with them, while taking a historical perspective on interactions with man-made objects that have evolved with us to where we are.

From typewriters to touchscreens and beyond, UI design is constantly evolving to improve user experience and boost productivity. Find out what the next generation of connected devices will bring to the table.

Many modern web trends offer a lot of visual appeal and the temptation to follow them blindly is quite real. These trends are not always bad, but they can be dangerous if not implemented with caution. In this article, Toptal designer Bojan Janjanin discusses some of the most common UX mistakes and some insights on finding the balance between what looks nice and what is actually usable.

For some people, front-end design and development can sometimes start to seem like a chore, and can be monotonous and time consuming. Through a modular design approach, it is possible to both save time and streamline the design and development process.

With an ever-growing device landscape, it is becoming increasingly difficult to design consistent user interfaces across all devices. Using paper and pencil, or design tools that do not properly mimic the dynamic nature of web browsers across multiple platforms and screen sizes, can sometimes lead to obvious inefficiencies. However, the web browser can be used as a critical and efficient tool for designing websites and interfaces.