Tales of Design & User Experience (ToDUX) #10 ⁂ Dear readers & friends, I took a little summer break, but have recently gotten back to writing articles. My latest piece “Designing together: the importance of shared principles for design teams” has been published by The UX Collective. It’s the fourth in what will be a series… Continue reading Design Principles, Why They’re Important, and How They Relate to Team Values
Category: Professional
UX vs. Product Design vs. UI: The Never-Ending Battle
Digital product design teams are often referred to as “the UX team” or “the UX/UI team,” which are terminologies that can significantly disturb a proper understanding of what UX and digital product design actually are and what a digital product design team does. For one, the user’s experience can’t be designed in the first place, and “doing UX” goes way beyond the scope of digital product design. For another, saying “UX/UI” isn’t meaningful since they’re neither the same nor separable concepts within a process; one can’t “do UI” without also “doing UX.” Generally speaking, digital product design covers design research, interaction design, and visual design, and it’s a much more accurate term for what’s commonly referred to as “UX” or “UX/UI.” We believe a proper understanding of terminology is essential for being able to deliver one’s best possible work as a designer.
“We Need to Get Rid of Significance in A/B Testing, Seriously!” Published in ACM interactions
The way A/B testing is done in many—if not most—companies today, p-values and significance are pretty much meaningless. Still, decision models often only allow treatments to be implemented if they achieved a "significant uplift". One better alternative is to employ a Bayesian approach which allows to report probabilities for minimum uplifts and to calculate ROI on a case-by-case basis.
5 Foolproof Conversion Rate Optimizations for Your E-commerce Business
When hearing conversion rate optimization, many think of the application of psychological principles such as social proof or scarcity. But before employing those, e-commerce businesses first have to get their fundamentals down—which many don't. In this article, I present five foolproof (and proven) ways to optimize your conversion rate: optimizing your checkout, getting rid of shipping costs (as much as possible), focusing on usability, getting rid of dark patterns, and gaining a deep understanding of your customers.
Product Discovery ‒ A Systematic Approach for Customer Research Methods
There is a plethora of customer research methods out there and it can be difficult to stay on top of things when it comes to choosing the right method for a given research question. Specifically in the realm of product discovery, when it comes down to being able to decide whether an idea generates business value or not, certain methods lack validity or are not properly applied. In this article, André Morys provides an overview over when to use which (combination of) methods(s) for product discovery.
Successful E-commerce Personalization in 3 (Relatively) Easy Steps
An effective personalization strategy should be treated as a design problem with a structured framework of ideation, implementation, and evaluation. Co-creation workshops are used to brainstorm audiences and personalized content based on credible hypotheses, which are then implemented and continuously monitored to assess the performance of the personalization strategy and individual campaigns. A good strategy focuses on UX while helping with achieving business goals.
How to Build and Lead User Experience (UX) Teams
This article presents 9 guidelines for building and leading UX teams. They are based on what I learned from the people who led me as well as my own experience: recruit diverse talent; set up a process (and iterate); involve other teams from the start; be fair; have regular ceremonies; pass on knowledge; have a vision; ask questions (a lot); and make UX visible.
5 Design Methods I’ve Successfully Applied as a UX Manager at C&A
Depending on the environment you have to navigate, it's not always easy to try and apply all of the awesome design methods that are out there, be it due to daily business or a lack of management buy-in. In this article, I describe 5 methods that I have successfully and effectively applied in C&A's eCommerce department: Design Jams, Storyboards, Crazy 8s, 4×4×4, and Buy a Feature.
Lean Support: The Case of HoloBuilder
When I started working on HoloBuilder.com over a year ago, there was no support. Of course, we would've immediately helped anyone who sent us a question via e-mail or Twitter, but those options weren't communicated anywhere. Users accessing HoloBuilder ended up directly in our augmented/virtual reality creator, the only way for communication with us being a… Continue reading Lean Support: The Case of HoloBuilder
Enabling Industry 4.0 with HoloBuilder
At this year's INFORMATIK conference held by the GI in Cottbus, I had the chance to present a research paper (full text here) about HoloBuilder—officially titled "Enabling Industry 4.0 with holobuilder"1—that I wrote together with my colleagues Kristina Tenhaft, Simon Heinen and Harry Handorf. In our paper, we examine HoloBuilder from a research rather than… Continue reading Enabling Industry 4.0 with HoloBuilder
2008 – Tales of Design & User Experience 