Designing access control (Permissions) for enterprise app – SaaS app

Designing access control (permissions) for an enterprise app is pivotal as these applications keep on evolving by the time the company grows. Being a designer understanding the access control helps to design user management screens. I am sharing some concepts and ideas based on my long experience in designing SaaS applications. ACL (Access Control List) … Continue reading “Designing access control (Permissions) for enterprise app – SaaS app”

How much research is required to design persona?

It’s a well-known statement that “UX without research is not UX” If any design decision is not based on research, it’s not UX. It’s purely the designer’s perception which may be risky for the product. Persona plays a vital role in the product journey, each and every pointer of persona should be chosen carefully and … Continue reading “How much research is required to design persona?”

Performance is an essential design feature

Designer’s role doesn’t end at UX conceptualization, it actually should be on peak from there. One of the most essential parts of design is; performance that plays a vital role in making products addictive and left with good user experience. Along with formative and summative usability testing there should be dedicated performance testing of each … Continue reading “Performance is an essential design feature”

Designing for peripheral vision

Brain guides the eye to look from one place to another place and peripheral vision helps in it as peripheral vision attracts the foveal (central) vision, “where to look”. Peripheral vision cannot get detailed information like color, size and shape, but it has strength like movement, contrast and sound. A designer can engage user by … Continue reading “Designing for peripheral vision”

Emotional experience is the end goal today for any product to success – Emotionally intelligent design

Have you ever experienced that you had a first look at a product and want to explore it or purchase it? There are multiple apps, websites in the digital world. But why a few apps/websites attract immediately? Why? And how it happens? It takes 50ms for a user to make first impression for a website. … Continue reading “Emotional experience is the end goal today for any product to success – Emotionally intelligent design”

Digital and physical experience are merging – Electroencephalogrphy and synesthetic feedback

Line between the digital and physical experience is getting blurred gradually, and having disruptive impact across the industry. Technology like AI, Blockchain and IOT are staging new opportunities for companies to meet customer’s expectations. Marketing strategy has changed; companies are reading brain activities of the users and working on digital experience that imitate as physical … Continue reading “Digital and physical experience are merging – Electroencephalogrphy and synesthetic feedback”

Electroencephalography (EEG) in UX Design

Adoption of scientific techniques in User Experience is not new. Eye tracker is being used in user testing for long time. It is getting more advancement by the efforts of companies like Emotiv, Neurosky and Braingineers. These companies are working on neuro marketing research. Marketing strategy has changed as now we are able to capture … Continue reading “Electroencephalography (EEG) in UX Design”

Custom Property of CSS – Variable in native CSS

Custom properties are the wonderful new features of CSS with extensive support in contemporary browsers. A custom property name that is pre-fixed with ‘–’ like, –heading-color: #00ff00; and are accessed using the var() function. For example color: var(–heading-color);

Previously we have been using variables with CSS preprocessor like Sass and Less, now variables have … Continue reading “Custom Property of CSS – Variable in native CSS”

Balanced experience or User experience, what will be the right name?

User exists only because of business, and business exists or grows by happy users. So, most important role of UX team is; to identify and fill the gap between user needs and business goals. UX team is answerable or responsible to two completely different people. Most of the time users and the client (business stakeholders) … Continue reading “Balanced experience or User experience, what will be the right name?”

Role of a generalist, specialist or unicorn skillset in a UX (design) team

UX (Design) is a bigger umbrella and it’s getting broader. Design is not limited to a defined skillset; ideally a designer gets involved in an abstraction face of a product, where product is a vague thought of a client. It has to be materialized on web or in other accessible platform. Between the abstractions to … Continue reading “Role of a generalist, specialist or unicorn skillset in a UX (design) team”

Is jQuery still a relevant library in front end development?

Yes or No will not be the correct answer for this question, but jQuery should be considered as other library and only be added when needed. It should not be added by default in all the projects. It costs you 30 kb of compressed script that in turns give you simple code for easy handling … Continue reading “Is jQuery still a relevant library in front end development?”

Information Visualization – How to effectively convert an abstract data to visual?

Data is getting generated from different sources. Walmart handles more than 1 million customer transaction every hour, Wikipedia handles billions of pages. Skip and take me to step-by-step guide Social networking sites Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook etc. generates new huge bytes of data in quintillion daily, the amount of data is only getting larger, deeper … Continue reading “Information Visualization – How to effectively convert an abstract data to visual?”

Javascript Callback Function explained in a story of “King and his spy”

Callback function are almost everywhere and play very important role in javaScript. Before jumping directly into the story, let’s clear the dust and understand “What is callback function?” and “Why callback function is important?” If not interested in basic, jump directly to the story. What is callback function? JavaScript code is executed line by line, … Continue reading “Javascript Callback Function explained in a story of “King and his spy””

Ready to use cool CSS animation libraries to speed up development and improve user experience

CSS has improved a lot from last few years and capable of pretty drastic output for web. I am not going to add an animation tutorial. My focus is to list out cool ready to use css libraries; that improve user experience and and speed up development. How these css libraries can be used effectively … Continue reading “Ready to use cool CSS animation libraries to speed up development and improve user experience”

Who doesn’t know anything, knows user experience.

This funny statement was given irritably, by one of my team member, when he came from a meeting. After having a brief discussion about the meeting, I came to know it was a common problem that a designer faces in most of the meetings. We start user center design and gradually, it becomes client centered … Continue reading “Who doesn’t know anything, knows user experience.”

Should Designer code? Or at what level, a designer should code?

User Experience, Design thinking, Innovation, Customer Experience; these are a few terms floating in the IT field for the success of a product. Designers are considered to be crucial in the success of a product. A big responsibility is already on the shoulder of a designer. Should designer know or do coding along with designing? … Continue reading “Should Designer code? Or at what level, a designer should code?”

Responsive Web Design – Performance Enhancement

Treating performance as design improves the user experience. No matters how perfectly we have design the information architecture and a great user experience with everything just one click away. Usability is useless, if performance is slow. Based on the survey , almost half of the web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds, … Continue reading “Responsive Web Design – Performance Enhancement”

Mobile and Web strategy to launch a product

We are living in a technology changing world. Every year new technologies, new frameworks and new devices are launching. Users are accessing the web product with different devices. Now, web is not limited to desktop on our workstation. It is in our pocket with mobile, it is in our living area with smart TV, It … Continue reading “Mobile and Web strategy to launch a product”

How to use grunt? – A build tool for web development

During the web development process, there are bunch of tasks that you’ll be doing regularly. Minifying files, concatenating files, compiling sass or less to CSS, unit testing and linting JS files are some of them. Grunt helps to make these regular tasks automated. It saves lots of time and energy, it has bunch of built-in … Continue reading “How to use grunt? – A build tool for web development”

Package Manager – why use npm? How to use npm?

Package manager manages assets (install, upgrade, remove, manages dependencies) used in a project. NPM is used to install node packages (such as underscore, grunt, gulp, jsHint etc.) from npm registry. NPM makes it easy for JavaScript developers to share and reuse their code. You just need to publish package to the registry. These reusable codes … Continue reading “Package Manager – why use npm? How to use npm?”

Why mobile UX customization is important for different platforms ? – Android vs iOS

When designing a mobile application or mobile website, UX people pay special focus on Android and iOS. It’s because, both platforms have combined market share around 94% and both have different appearance and personality. Both the platforms have their own design guidelines. If a user has to switch from one platform to another, it takes … Continue reading “Why mobile UX customization is important for different platforms ? – Android vs iOS”

CSS3 Basic UI module – working draft published by w3c

W3c published a working draft of CSS basic module level 3 on 10th March 2015, where they have extends user interface related features from the selectors, properties and values of CSS level 2. These UI related selectors, properties and value are proposed for CSS level 3. Note: it’s a working draft may change in the … Continue reading “CSS3 Basic UI module – working draft published by w3c”

JavaScript – Singleton Design Pattern

Singleton design patterns ensures a class has only one instance and provide a global point to access it. Singleton pattern is handy when you want to create a class whose functionality does not required any changes for its multiple instances. Basic Singleton implementation in JavaScript A basic singleton pattern can be created using simple object … Continue reading “JavaScript – Singleton Design Pattern”

Custom responsive grid with sass susy – grids on demand

While starting the responsive web development, first question pops up. Which grid framework to use? There are many grid framework to choose like bootstrap, foundation, 960 Grid System, Golden Grid System and many more. Are these grid framework flexible enough for modern designs? Class based grid frameworks are not flexible enough Bootstrap is one of … Continue reading “Custom responsive grid with sass susy – grids on demand”

Consistency and conventions are true friends for web

Consistency and conventions are two important element of design. By following the existing conventions, anything can be made easy to grasp. Consistency make user feel at home. Universal color code for traffic lights is (red, yellow, and green). Some conventions are must to follow, like stop lights are red and red means stop. Drivers know … Continue reading “Consistency and conventions are true friends for web”

SASS – Efficient use of Mixin and Placeholder

SASS (Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets) is an efficient modular way of writing CSS. It is Powerful and most stable css preprocessor, around us for almost 7 years. There are n-number of frameworks built with Sass. Compass, Susy, Gumby and Bourbon just a few name. Beauty of the SASS a CSS preprocessor Writing a vanilla CSS is … Continue reading “SASS – Efficient use of Mixin and Placeholder”

Mental model and conceptual model in user experience.

Design is a conversation between designer and user. How effective this conversation can happen; is depends on the conceptual model of the designer for the product. Designer does not interact directly with user. Designer only talk to the user via product. Imagine a scenario you have never seen a kindle device or iPad, and you … Continue reading “Mental model and conceptual model in user experience.”

Usability testing with blind users – How blind users work with web sites ?

Observer in usability testing gets actual insight of the users while watching them using a product. But what about the users using adaptive technology? like blind web users, how blind users work with web sites? While surfing net, I found a very good case study where 16 blind users were observed while using screen readers … Continue reading “Usability testing with blind users – How blind users work with web sites ?”

Meta tag – Configuring viewport in responsive web design

Desktop browser and mobile browser are not the same. There is no window, scrollbar, resizing option in the mobile browser. User flick, pinch and zoom in mobile browser, and these gestures are not there in the desktop browsers. Because of these interaction differences, viewport on the desktop and mobile are not same. Why viewport is … Continue reading “Meta tag – Configuring viewport in responsive web design”

Responsive Web Design – Pixels density and resolution

Any physical size of device cannot stop web from spreading its wings; be it a smart TV with bigger size or a smartphone in the pocket. Web is spreading all around, Though, physical size of the device is shrinking but resolution of these devices is increasing. Why? and how? High DPI and Retina Retina is … Continue reading “Responsive Web Design – Pixels density and resolution”