How do we balance the user experience (UX) with reasonable security measures? It can be done, if you keep these fundamentals in mind.

If you don’t want your company's site to fail on the web, you’d do well to observe these best web design practices and make sure you implement them when applicable.

If you’re trying to turn your small- to medium-sized business website into something great, then look to some of the strategies being used by similarly sized businesses for inspiration.

Although it can be difficult to imagine, someday your child will have a career of his or her own. He or she will likely start a family, buy a home and start having their own children.

So, while being a kid is still extremely important, it’s also important for you, as the parent, to start thinking about your child’s future. For many of us, that means investing in a college fund — but that’s hardly the end of it.

What many of us don’t do is truly prepare our child for the working world. It’s not until middle school or high school that we really start discussing the idea of going to college. Maybe we need to start a little earlier than that?

I’m not suggesting you should choose a career for your child. But you should be able to identify certain skills and characteristics that would make them a suitable candidate in various types of industries, such as a future developer or UX designer. You can nurture that skill set early on, and prepare him or her for a potential career in one of those fields.
 

Invest in Future Developers and UX Designers

To make this simpler, I’ll merge these two career paths into one.

Computer scientists drive the technological infrastructure of our world. They develop and create new hardware, software, applications and even methods for using technology. Many opportunities like software engineers, mobile application developers, game developers and even UX designers fit into this broad field.

Why does this matter? Well, since …

It’s a strangely common occurrence that when you send someone their login details for a system, they can’t get in. This article will help you understand why it happens, and what you can do about it.

I've been asked to discuss some of the UX activities that I'm using with my team. Here I will share some details about how we approach UX projects.

In order to bring contextual and meaningful factors into a design task (Kouprie & Visser, 2009) designers should try to be close to the lives, feelings, and experiences of users to design in the way that meets users’ needs (Koskinen et al., 2003). Empathy can be counted as one of the most important attributes of the design process in a human centric project. Both designers' and users' minds help each other to reveal the exact feelings about the user who uses that specific product. For example, designers might spend a lot of time with users with disabilities to design wheelchairs for them; they may need to feel the same pain that disabled people feel to see what issues a disabled person has with an automatic wheelchair.

There have been many studies about empathic design and all of them argue that empathy is a significant quality in the process of product development that helps designers to meet customer needs (Mattelmäki & Battarbee, 2002, Suri, 2003). Empathic design supports a wide range of issues in design from rational issues to private contexts (Mattelmäki & Battarbee, 2002).

Approaches to Design with Empathy

There are several techniques for empathy in design; however, Kouprie and Visser (2009) try to categorize them into three main categories that will be presented here.

First of all, the most popular and accepted approach is being in direct contact with users (McDonagh & Bruseberg, 2000, Mattelmäki & Battarbee, 2002, Suri, 2003). Some advocates…

Design solutions come from a creative mind.

It is not necessary to involve a lot of expert creative designers in each design process. It is important to catch creative insights of participants in a design issue -- users and owners -- in an exact moment which that creative momentum is happening (Dorst & Cross 2001).

Dorst and Cross in their research also mention that designers must be able to collect all of these insights during the process in order to come up with key features of the design concept. However, it is not guaranteed that the expected creative moment should happen for sure because it is related to the situation that the design process being done.

In participatory design one of the items that affects the creative process is the tool for participatory design (Sanders, 2002). Sanders belives that using "make tools" is a projective way for participants in any level of design ability to express what they want and what they have in mind. In other words, it can be a language in common for all stakeholders in a design project.

For example, people can use LEGO pieces to make product in a simplest way, but in the meantime they are talking about those features that they want. That is how that LEGO playing enables them to talk more and more about their needs. In a nutshell, this activity enables them to say, do and make their dreams.

Christiaans (1992) shows that time is an important issue in creative process. If participants spend more time to map ideas from …

Marc Hassenzahl believes “user experience (UX) is a strange phenomenon” (Hassenzahl & Tractinsky, 2006, p. 91). He also says user experience supports all aspects of the interaction of the user with the whole product and services around it (Hassenzahl, 2006). In another discussion the concept of user experience is associated with a wide variety of meanings (Forlizzi & Battarbee, 2004) from beautiful to hedonic and the functional features of a product (Hassenzahl, 2006).

Hassenzahl (2008), in another article about UX, says: “User Experience (UX) is not just old wine in new bottles” (Hassenzahl, 2008). It tries to widen the horizon of interactive technology in a high quality way, and also tries to have a closer connection to humans in order to create a good experience around a product (Hassenzahl, 2008). Regarding this description, Hassenzahl added a definition; he believes a “Good UX” is the consequence of fulfilling the human needs for autonomy, competency, stimulation, relatedness, and popularity besides being in touch with the product or service.

In another research paper he calls these features hedonic qualities of a product (Hassenzahl, 2005). On the other hand, pragmatic quality will be mentioned. They should facilitate the way that a product can achieve its own functional goals. He puts hedonic quality against pragmatic quality and in another article uses these two qualities to describe a model of user experience.

Hassenzahl (2005) proposes a model for user …

Have you ever wanted to create graphical elements directly in inDesign? This tutorial will teach you how to have an image bound within text using the pathfinder tool in inDesign CS6. This technique will help decrease the amount of time spent opening other applications, creating and editing files, saving files, closing the program, and finally placing the element on the page giving you the same end result.

Instead of the text having a font color, the image will fill the area. First, open the application. Choose to create a new document. Feel free to use any settings you prefer. I decided to go with a half letter in a landscape orientation. Click OK.

Once the document has loaded follow the steps below:
 

1. Select the rectangle frame tool. Click anywhere on the document and drag (while still holding down the click) to the size you desire. The image will be placed inside this frame.
2. Now it is time to place the image within the rectangle frame. While the frame is still selected, go to  File > Place. Find and select the image you would like to be the background of your text.
3. If your image is larger than the rectangle frame and you would like to reposition, use the selection tool to double click the rectangle frame. A brown bordered box will appear around the entire image. Rearrange and resize for desired look. Click anywhere on the page to escape the brown bordered box.
4. Next, select the

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When designing and editing page layouts in inDesign, fonts can become messy without the help of paragraph styles. How many times have you re-read through a document you created and noticed a sentence in the middle of a paragraph happened to be a different font-size? How much time have you wasted scanning a ten page document adjusting styles manually? Paragraph styles can help speed up the process of editing font styles and decrease the amount of display errors in your document. In this tutorial I will go over the basics of paragraph styles in inDesign CS6 to hopefully help your future page layout projects.
 

1. First, open the inDesign CS6 application. Once it has launched, select document under Create New.
2. A new document window will appear, for this tutorial edit a one 8.5 X 11in page with 1in margins and no bleed. Click OK.
3. Once the document has loaded, put some filler text on the page using the type tool. To do this, select the type tool on the right toolbar. Click anywhere on the document, drag to the desired width and release to create a text box. For this tutorial make sure to include a header, subheader, paragraph, quote, and a caption. If you do not want to write content, right-click the text box and select Fill with Placeholder Text. I went ahead and did this for my paragraph, quote, and caption sections. 
4. If you are working in the Typography workspace find the paragraph styles panel in the right toolbar. If you do not see it go to Window > Styles > Paragraph Styles.

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