Design

You’re probably not aware that good user experience design and good usability are actually just like great sex. The conditions must be perfect, rhythm and timing are paramount, a bit of kink goes a long way, interruptions are a big no-no, and cuddle time can't be underestimated. Read on. The Conditions Must Be Perfect You know what time it is…that’s right…it’s business time. Just as with the beast with two backs, if you want a user to have an amazing experience on ...

User Experience (UX) analysis and design is a rapidly growing field for good reason. Websites, apps and services are placing a lot of focus on UX to differentiate themselves from competitors. To get a quick taste of how design can be informed by clever UX analysis and thinking, just compare MWEB's ADSL options and sign-up page, with that of Telkom's product offering page. Even (especially, perhaps) if you are not well-versed in web development and design, it is probably clear ...

User Experience (UX) guru, Andy Budd, says most of today's websites remind him of "leaking buckets". UX, he says, can plug these leaks to "catch people and keep them there". So using a UX designer is a small investment which could result in profit of millions. It's what supermarkets do so well and why they have an almost 100% conversion rate with customers. Budd says it’s because designers guide users through the experience of a supermarket. Memeburn.com stole a few ...

An old World War II bomb shelter under a cathedral in Helsinki, combined with some brilliant thinking, will soon lead to the greenest databank on the planet and an innovative way to keep a city warm. Or at least that's what Juha Sipila, the project manager for Helsingin Energia, based in the Finnish capital seems to think. Server farms are so energy-intensive that some, like Google's, are reported to use as much electricity as a small city. Many ideas have been ...

With the current surge in popularity of smartphones and web-capable phones, increased focus has been put on designing for mobile. There are however some marked differences between designing for the web and designing for mobile. Here are some must-have tips which cut through the mystery of designing for mobile phones. Before You Start. The mobile screen is small, and instead of planning around this, many designers use that fact as an excuse to take shortcuts. You wouldn’t want a website that only ...

Web designers have been on the frontlines of the browser-war battlefields for some time now, dodging the shells of legacy browsers exploding all over carefully-crafted pages. Even the design of a simple page would require the designer to have an arsenal of hacks and tricks to ensure cross-browser compatibility. But is it time for the designers and developers to stop fighting the good fight and move the industry forward by refusing to design for legacy browsers? Certainly with the advent of ...

Recently, I was craving a Nando’s burger but had no menu or phonebook. Easy I thought - just go to their mobile site, find a menu and the number of the nearest branch. If only it were that easy! Nando’s first mistake was not detecting my mobile browser, thereby subjecting me to their second mistake – a site built entirely in Flash. So not only could I not see their menu, but I couldn't even get their phone number! Google rescued ...

First impressions count, especially online where your landing page is the battleground on which visitors and customers can be won and lost. You have a matter of seconds to make someone feel welcome enough to progress onwards through your website to where you really want them to be. The key theme that runs through each of these five points is: Don’t Make Them Think! Certain designs elements and styles are more cognitively taxing than others. Our brains are lazy, and ...

A small South African web design and development company, Obox Design have announced a deal with well-known international blogging platform Posterous to supply custom design themes to their users. Posterous is a simplified blog site, funded by American seed-stage startup funding company Y Combinator, that boasts integrated and automatic posting to other social media tools such as Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook, a built-in Google Analytics package, and custom themes. The Silicon Valley start-up took the tech scene by storm when it launched ...

What is design? Most people will answer that question by pointing to a designed object – the iPhone, for example. Now that’s good design! The Mini Cooper. London’s famous map of the Tube. Anything ever built by Norman Foster. That’s design, right? Wrong. Design is not the object, but the process that created that object. It’s a process that is part creativity, part method. A process that takes a lot of time, many failed attempts and a great deal of thinking. ...