What are the best resources available online for learning design thinking?
Design can only be learned by doing.
The Stanford d.school has a Virtual Crash Course at http://dschool.stanford.e
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UPDATE 5/9/16: IDEO U has paid courses on ideou.com taught by some of their heavy hitters.
UPDATE 4/15: Coursera is currently running a class: “Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society” starting April 29, from Karl Ulrich at UPenn/Wharton. He’s also published a free e-book you can use with or without the course: http://ulrichbook.org
Also on Coursera: Human-Computer Interaction from Stanford’s Scott Klemmer, started March 31.The material is geared towards making user interfaces, but the design thinking process is simply a generalization of the design process, which Klemmer uses throughout in the context of UI. Recommended!
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After every project, no matter how small, ask yourself: “How did the process work for me? Where do I feel confident? Weak? Excited? Anxious?” Then iterate and improve yourself. Don’t judge yourself too harshly. If you aren’t failing, you aren’t doing it right. But remember: design is supposed to be playful and fun.
After that, try using the d.school “mixtapes” (more in-depth) http://dschool.stanford.e
Then study the Bootcamp Bootleg: http://dschool.stanford.e
Find someone else interested in learning with you, and use something like Edistorm to brainstorm with them, and Evernote to keep track of your interview notes and design insights and ideas.
Finally, find someone who can mentor you online. I don’t know of a comprehensive course, so the best option is to get someone with experience to coach you through it. [I just started doing this for a friend.]
And then… do a few more design projects! Get involved with OpenIDEO. Make boring things fun. Think big and start small. And let us know how it goes!
Do spinner-based date pickers on iOS & Android detract from the user’s experience?
Generally speaking, the rule of thumb on mobile devices is to follow the platform conventions, and that native controls are almost always better than custom UIs. However, I’m at a loss as to whether the spinner-based date pi…
Do spinner-based date pickers on iOS & Android detract from the user’s experience?
Generally speaking, the rule of thumb on mobile devices is to follow the platform conventions, and that native controls are almost always better than custom UIs. However, I’m at a loss as to whether the spinner-based date pi…
Drawing users’ attention to unrecoverable actions?
We’re working on an internal business app, and throughout the process the users have been very involved in all aspects of the design. They have explained their workflow, terminology, etc. and the app models that as closely as possible, with their input at every step.
Most actions in the app can be undone, but there’s one action that (per the users’ instructions) can’t be undone without going into the database and manually changing data. In order to confirm this action, the user has to click “yes” on a modal alert. Alerts are used very rarely in the app; there’s only one other action that will bring about an alert. Neither action is performed very frequently.
However, the users are still somehow occasionally clicking on the wrong action and confirming their choice in the alert (presumably ignoring the text on it). What’s the best way to remedy this?
The text in the alert is a bit long, so we’re looking at making it shorter and more to the point, and maybe renaming the buttons so they aren’t just yes/no, but we don’t know if that’s enough. Is there some other way to draw the users’ attention and make them really realize what they’re doing? Are there proven ways to reduce errors like this?
Our ultimate solution:
For now, we’re focusing on changing the text and appearance of the alert dialog, as per Matt Lavoie’s and André’s answers. We made the text shorter and more to the point, added a caution icon and a clear statement that the action can’t be undone, and changed the buttons to say what they’ll do and not just yes/no.
We also changed the text on the button that launches the action to be red and in caps (all the other button texts are in black and just first letter capitalized).
Finally we made the entire background of the app go bright red when the alert dialog comes up. It’s quite jarring, so the users should definitely notice it.
We mentioned the changes we’re making to the users, and they were totally in favor of it. If these aren’t sufficient we’ll add additional input requirements to the alert, as in Andrew Leach’s and JeffH’s answers.
What are good resources to learn the basics of UX?
I’ll keep it simple:
Start with Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. then Elements of User Experience by JJ Garrett, then Designing for Interaction by Dan Saffer, then Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, and finally Sketching User Experience by Bill Buxton. The path after those books can take you into a million possible directions, but starting there will give you the gravity leap into outer space that you need.
Next to all this is find a community and a mentor. You need the community to learn from through example and conversation and you need a mentor who can guide you individually.
Good luck.
How to convince a user to fill out a survey
I am working on a project that provides a service (landscaping) to members of the community. When the work for that client is finished we always encourage the client to go to our website to fill out a survey to review the wor…
Why is embedded help not popular?
I’m wondering why modern help systems are more passive than active? For example, each good guide through something look like this:
So why we don’t see this directly on website (service provider), but have to search for an…
UI/UX Design Patterns: What are good examples of registration flows that require a lot of info but manage to make it a painless experience?
When Twitter redesigned their sign up process with the goal of increasing user engagement, they actually added a screen / step. But, that actually helped them and they said the experienced a 29% increase in growth. It’s articulated very well in this article: http://www.lukew.com/ff/e
The key is to break up the sign up / process into logical steps for the user, keeping in mind that if you can show the user the result of their action, then they’re much more likely to keep going. People love feedback – show it to them.
What are the little arrows called that hide additional details?
In UI design, sometimes settings are hidden behind a little arrow or “+” symbol. When the user clicks on it, the item expands to show additional details.
Does this UI pattern have a name? Other than “little arrow”?
For ex…
How to make selecting a timezone more user-friendly?
The list of time zones is rather long, lots of duplication, and not very friendly to programmers let alone end-users.
Is there a way to shorten the list to something friendlier and sufficient for 80%+ of users? But then how shall one decide which are the popular Tz?
The list in Windows seems pretty good, but I’m not sure if that’s a good list to model after. It is interesting because DST is optional, is that why the list can be that short? Someone worked out the tz equivalents here.
I’m in Pacific Daylight Time (PDT). JS’s getTimezoneOffset() returns 420 ==> offset -7. If I use the time zones list above, how would one tell its US/Pacific (-8)?
Furthermore, what are the popular names for time zones? US/Pacific or Canada/Pacific sure sounds friendlier then America/Los_Angeles or America/Vancouver.
Lastly, how are the 2 timezones above different? Can they be safely grouped together and just use America/Los_Angeles in the app? How shall one group time zones together?