Color can increase conversions, create feelings of warmth or even incite people to get behind a cause. If you want your website to really impact site visitors, then it is vital to consider the impact color has on them.

Because your company can’t afford for you to make SEO mistakes, you’ll want to ensure you’re taking the right steps each and every time you post a new piece of content. This list of optimization do’s and don’ts can help you become an SEO wizard.

An enjoyable and seamless user experience can go a long way on an eCommerce site. While a cohesive layout and engaging copy play roles in creating a positive user experience, some sites neglect aspects that seem marginal but in actuality prove very pivotal in lead conversion.

Any business that wants to seriously grow needs to keep the needs and desires of an international audience of their websites in mind. Making a website friendly to international users isn’t prohibitively expensive and can provide an incredible return on investment if handled right.

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 …

"In order to have an organized way for empathy mapping, we rely on a psychological model and trying to model it in a simple way, so we will split the board to three section for each persona and a scenario and try to see what those personas would Do, Think and Feel, when they are in that scenario."

Elizabeth Sanders (2002) believes there is a shift happening in design that generated an attitude to think about designing with users instead of designing for users (Sanders, 2002). Everyone has something to add on top of the main idea in a design process, so why should they be ignored? She also stated If they can have appropriate toolkits to express their ideas, they can share their thoughts and ideas in a creative process. However, it should be considered that these participants are not part of the team, but they speak for the research and share their insights.

It is also believed that, it is hard to design experience, because it is a step-by-step creative activity and users will produce it. This process has two sides, communicator and communicate, it is important to see how these two are interacting in a certain moment. The question here is how this communication can be understood and how they can be collected in a sort of valuable conversation, which can create positive effects during the design process in order to design a meaningful experience? To summarize, how do we access experience?

Access to Experience

Elizabeth Sanders (2002) in her all encompassing research about user-centered process and co-design has proposed sort of rules in order to collect users’ current experience and their preferred experience. She believes designers can listen to what people say, and catch what they think. Designers also can watch what people do…

Wireframe design, a tool for being more creative!

When information, interface, and navigation are being designed, page concept comes up to create a unified skeleton for a website. Garrett (2010) says: “the page layout must incorporate all the various navigation systems, each designed to convey a different view of the architecture” (Garret, 2010, p. 128); all of these pieces are necessary because they have a role in the page. Therefore, information design is crucial for a good result in this part.

A wireframe can be defined as schematic way to create the skeleton of a website that shows how all elements can be fit together to communicate with users (Garrett, 2010). Wireframes collect all ideas in a single document and in the process of working on a web project it is an important reference for the implementation of visual design (Garrett, 2010).

Wireframes are the first phase in a formal visual design for a web project (Garrett, 2010), and in the whole process of development, the developers must be able to come back and compare the product with what has been defined in the wireframe. A wireframe should be a tool for builders of a website to check if they are progressing correctly.

Garrett also believes that when there are separate visual designers and user experience designers in a project, the wireframe enables both sides to share their comments and ideas on a specific topic. It also helps them find hidden questions, apart from its utility in uncovering …

McNamara and Kirakowski have published several articles regarding the process of evaluating for user experience. Literature in this area shows that Functionality, Usability, and Experience are the main three aspects of using a product that need to be considered when designing and evaluating technology (McNamara & Kirakowski, 2006).

In their research they argued that functionality is a technical issue and directly in contact with the product (McNamara & Kirakowski, 2006). So an evaluator tries to find out that what the product exactly does.

Usability measures the interaction between users and a product. The product should solve an issue for users, so obviously it should be completely user-oriented and satisfy user needs. Usability attempts to give users the opportunity to see if the product acts exactly like what they really need.

User experience covers the wider area of the connection and interaction of the user with the product to see if it really fits with users’ nature (McNamara & Kirakowski, 2006). According to the literature, questions might include “how the person felt about the experience, what it meant to them, whether it was important to them, and whether it sat comfortably with their other values and goals.” (McCarthy & Wright, 2005, McCarthy & Wright, 2004).

In order to measure and evaluate each aspect, the study suggests valuable points that need to be considered when the assessment is being done. Guidelines for all these three parts is …

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 …

Introduction

In this tutorial, I'll explain how to create an animated progress meter in a wireframe prototype developed using Axure RP 7.0 - a leading prototyping tool for designing web sites and software. (For more information about Axure and getting started with it, check out: http://www.experts-exchange.com/Web_Development/Software/A_17344-Setting-Up-Basic-Interactions-in-Axure.html)

Here's a sneak preview of what you'll be building:


Please note that this tutorial does require the use of Axure 7.0 or later, which introduced the "Set Panel Size" action that the method used here relies upon.
 

Part 1: Creating the Basic Wireframe

1.) Add a rectangle to the page and resize it to be the full shape of the progress bar. This will act as the outline of the meter. (Take note of the width of this rectangle, you'll need to know it later on. I set mine to 400 pixels.)

Protip: I highly recommend giving descriptive names to all the objects you create in any Axure prototype. While it doesn't matter much in a page with very few objects, these things quickly pile up and when you're setting up actions, figuring out which object in your list to perform the action on is really difficult if nothing has a label! You do this by entering a value in the Name field of the Widget Interactions and Notes pane for each object.

2.) Duplicate the rectangle created in Step 1, but give it a color fill. This rectangle will act as the filled-in portion of the progress bar.

3.)…

“You cannot NOT have a user experience” - Lou Carbone
 

User experience (UX) in the past has been an underrated subject of discussion. It has existed since the late 19th century during the machine age. According to Where UX Comes From, an article from uxbooth.com, user experience was conceptualized when labor activities became more efficient. The observation of workers becoming more effective with their tools was the precursor to the UX concept. The machine age philosophy pioneered ways for labor to be more productive and routinized by “pushing the boundaries of what human labor could make possible.” Because of this people began to understand the importance of user experience. The more efficient, the more profitable. The next major leap was in the early-mid 20th century, when ergonomics emerged. Ergonomics motivated people to focus on the “design of equipment and devices to best align with human capabilities.” It made logical sense to design a product based off of the ease it was for someone to interact with it.
 

Over time as user experience adapted and was discovered, a definition was formed. According to the Nielsen Norman Group, user experience "encompasses all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products” (www.nngroup.com).

It is essential to understand how a user interacts with a device or product, and how design strategies can heavily influence that interaction. When coming up …