Resources | UX Central

Ideal UX Team Makeup: Specialists, Generalists, or Compartmentalists

Rob Cowie — Thu, 16 Oct 2014 19:32:16 +0000

When building a User Experience team, the same question comes up: How do you know what kind of UX professional to hire?

Specialists are professionals who have the time, experience, and projects to allow them to go deep into a discipline, such as information architecture or visual design.

Because they can concentrate on the one discipline, they become very knowledgeable and experienced at solving the problems that crop up. Having a specialist on board is often very valuable, since they’ll know how to tackle the many subtleties that can make or break a project.

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32 Mobile App Usability Resources

Rob Cowie — Mon, 13 Oct 2014 21:15:30 +0000

The reviews in the App Store and Google Play can be ruthless. If your app has a poor user experience and gets bad reviews early on, your chances at success are shot. You’ll want to make sure you’re building an excellent, highly-usable app from the very start!

To help you study up and make your app as user-friendly as possible, here is our list of 32 articles, books, presentations, and courses on mobile app usability and UX.

Categories:

General UX and Design Articles
Specific Feature Usability
Touchscreen Interaction
Accessibility
Books
Presentations
Courses

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When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods

Rob Cowie — Mon, 13 Oct 2014 21:09:04 +0000

Summary: Modern day UX research methods answer a wide range of questions. To know when to use which method, each of 20 methods is mapped across 3 dimensions and over time within a typical product-development process.

The field of user experience has a wide range of research methods available, ranging from tried-and-true methods such as lab-based usability studies to those that have been more recently developed, such as unmoderated online UX assessments.

While it’s not realistic to use the full set of methods on a given project, nearly all projects would benefit from multiple research methods and from combining insights. Unfortunatley many design teams only use one or two methods that they are familiar with. The key question is what to do when

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UX Companion – How to Make Sense of all the UX Industry Jargon

Rob Cowie — Mon, 13 Oct 2014 21:06:24 +0000

Have you ever sat in a meeting with professionals from a different field, who use so much jargon that they may as well be speaking Chinese? If you haven’t you are lucky. I certainly have and sometimes consult a dictionary when I meet with my year-end accountant.

While I do not mind being confused by my accountant, I do mind when I or someone else at my digital agency Cyber-Duck confuse others. On a number of occasions I have realized that clients or other teams of developers do not speak the same UX language as us. Either they are not familiar with the jargon or they use the same terms to mean different things. For instance, there is frequent confusion between the scope of ‘UX’ itself, and ‘usability’.

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User Experience – Value, Strategy and a Practical Approach

Rob Cowie — Fri, 10 Oct 2014 10:15:13 +0000

I recently presented at the Tech4Africa conference in Johannesburg – “Africa’s version of SxSW”. It was a great experience, and awesome to represent UX at a tech-focused conference. This is the first 1/3 of my presentation entitled “User Experience – Value, Strategy and a Practical Approach”. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to present the rest of it soon.

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