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March 17, 2025 Edition

UX Design for Crisis Situations: Lessons from the Los Angeles Wildfires

Inclusive User Experiences

Designing for neurodiversity

A column by Yuri Shapochka
March 17, 2025

The sky over Los Angeles glowed orange as thick smoke rolled through the city. Sirens blared, helicopters circled, and streets emptied as residents scrambled to evacuate. Amidst the chaos, digital tools became a lifeline. Apps such as Watch Duty tracked the wildfires’ progression, air-quality monitors warned of toxic conditions, and cars’ navigation systems helped determine escape routes. But even with this wealth of information, confusion reigned.

I found myself—and everyone around me—cycling between multiple apps, cross-referencing sources, and second-guessing decisions. Some updates contradicted each other. Evacuation notices often arrived too late. Road-closure data lagged behind real-world conditions. This experience underscored a harsh truth: even in the digital age, user experiences for crisis-response remain deeply flawed. Read More

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Leveraging 3 Types of User Feedback to Create Better User Experiences

March 17, 2025

While you must create products that meet your business goals, you must also ensure that your products address users’ needs. Ascertaining whether a product works for users requires gathering their feedback. Listening to users’ viewpoints helps you better understand their experiences, ultimately providing you an opportunity to take corrective actions to meet their expectations.

Research by Syncly indicates that 40% of the 300 software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies they studied were collecting user feedback. These businesses have implemented user-feedback systems to shape their product experiences.

User feedback can help teams create meaningful, easy-to-use designs for Web apps, mobile apps, Web sites, and SaaS products. However, before endeavoring to make gathering user feedback a core part of your product-development process, you should learn about the three major types of user feedback and methods and tools for collecting that data. Read More


How Generative AI is Shaping Digital Marketing

March 17, 2025

By 2025, the global artificial intelligence (AI) market will be over $190 billion, and generative AI (GenAI) is a prime mover of innovation. GenAI is much more than a buzzword and requires really reconsidering the way businesses connect with their audiences. GenAI can also deliver advanced personalization and create dynamic content at scale.

Read this article to discover how GenAI is transforming digital marketing by revolutionizing content creation, enhancing ecommerce strategies, and elevating paid advertising. Along the way, I’ll explore real-world examples, key statistics, and actionable insights that can enable you to harness this game-changing technology for your marketing efforts. Read More


Explaining UX Design Through the Lens of Construction

March 17, 2025

Explaining my work as a UX designer to my dad inspired this comparison, and I often find myself explaining my work to others in similarly relatable terms. When my dad, a civil engineer, asked me what I do as a UX designer, I was stumped. To my dad, my world of wireframes, prototypes, and user research seemed abstract and intangible. Then, inspiration struck: “Imagine you were building a house. You would’t start construction without understanding who will live there, right? In the same way, I design digital products to meet people’s needs.”

That analogy instantly clicked with him. Not only did it help me explain my work, but it also revealed a profound similarity between the process of constructing a house and designing a user experience. Both involve carefully planned phases, collaboration between experts, and a balance of creativity and technical precision. Read More


The Role of User-Centered Innovation in UX Design

March 17, 2025

According to IBM’s research, design thinking can cut development expenses by around 75% on some projects. Design thinking is all about solving problems by keeping users at the center of the design process and can reshape the entire product experience, whether a mobile app, Web platform, or software as a service (SaaS) tool.

With thousands of apps, Web sites, and services competing for users’ attention, we must exceed their expectations. User behaviors are shifting faster than ever, so keeping up with the marketplace can feel like a never-ending sprint. Imbibing a user-centered mindset through UX innovation can bring clarity and focus in the midst of that rush. Focus on what real people expect and value to avoid wasting time coding features that would fall flat. Start putting users first.

Design thinking sparks fresh concepts in UX design and each step of the process—research, prototyping, and feedback—can result in greater user engagement and a much better user experience, truly connecting users to your product. Let’s explore how a user-centric approach can encourage new ways of thinking about product design. Read More

March 03, 2025 Edition

Secure UX: Building Cybersecurity and Privacy into the UX Lifecycle

March 3, 2025

In today’s digital landscape, users demand more than just seamless user interfaces. They need secure user experiences that protect their data and build trust. Nevertheless, the UX community often overlooks cybersecurity, treating it as an afterthought rather than a core design principle. In this article, I’ll explore how integrating cybersecurity into the UX lifecycle safeguards users, builds lasting brand equity, and turns potential vulnerabilities into opportunities for innovation.

Despite the near-constant news about data breaches, online fraud, and identity theft, the UX community has, for the most part, remained silent on the topics of cybersecurity and privacy. While UX professionals often discuss brand management and the cross-channel consistency of user experiences—whether online or physical—and modalities—desktop, mobile, and tablet—and even consider the experience of visiting an affiliated social-media platform—we often don’t think about what comes after users enter their data and make their purchases. It’s as if the user experience ends when the user clicks a submit button, thereby neglecting the journey of their data beyond that point. But both users and their data persist. In fact, if users have entrusted your application with personally identifiable information (PII) or any type of financial, medical, or private information, their experience could potentially continue for decades. Read More


Beyond the Algorithm: Why GenAI Demands a UX Revolution

March 3, 2025

For decades, principles relating to usability, predictability, and efficiency have guided UX design, ensuring that users can complete their tasks with minimal cognitive effort. With traditional, direct-manipulation graphic user interfaces (GUIs), users take action, then the system responds in consistent, expected ways.

However, generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) disrupts this UX design paradigm by introducing an interaction model that is based on the specification of intent-based outcomes. [1] Instead of following predefined workflows, users describe what they want, and the AI generates variable results—often with unpredictable or emergent outcomes. [2, 3, 4]

This UX design paradigm shift that we’re currently experiencing challenges long-standing UX design heuristics such as consistency, predictability, and seamlessness. Designing for GenAI requires a new approach—one that embraces transparency, adaptability, and user control, empowering users to navigate uncertainty, iteration, and co-creation rather than expecting deterministic outputs. Read More


The Forgotten Art of Creating UX Design Documentation: Elevating Design Through Clear Communication

March 3, 2025

While wireframes, prototypes, and interactive design prototypes often steal the spotlight, solid UX design documentation remains the unsung hero in creating a successful user experience. Neglecting documentation can lead to inconsistent branding, confused stakeholders, and products that fall short of their full potential.

But let’s be honest: creating documentation doesn’t sound nearly as glamorous as crafting sleek user interfaces or conducting user interviews. Nevertheless, its impact is undeniable. Clear, well-structured UX design documentation acts as the glue that binds vision, design, and execution together. It bridges the gaps between teams, ensures design consistency, and helps maintain clarity from ideation to deployment. Read More


UX Analytics: How to Measure Your User Experience the Right Way

March 3, 2025

Offering a seamless user experience is essential to set your company and its products and services apart in the competitive landscape and establish lasting customer relationships. However, offering an enhanced user experience to your target audience might not be as easy as it sounds.

The interests and preferences of the audience segments you intend to serve change over time, along with the market dynamics. Furthermore, every company competes with many players in their respective industries, who keep optimizing their processes. Therefore, it is of critical importance that you keep an eye on the user experience you offer and identify areas for improvement. But measuring the user experience can be tricky. You must identify the right metrics that reflect your actual performance. In this article, I’ll guide you on how to measure your user experience in the right way, helping you identify your desired level of user engagement. Read More


From Features to Value: Designing SaaS Dashboards That Deliver Insights

March 3, 2025

In the realm of Software as a Service (SaaS), digital dashboards often serve as the central location in which users can interact with data, make decisions, and monitor key metrics. However, many dashboards fall short of delivering the value that users expect. All too often, they’re cluttered with features, lack a clear purpose, and overwhelm rather than inform. As product designers, our responsibility goes beyond simply presenting data, We must design dashboards that prioritize users’ goals, reduce their cognitive load, and help them turn raw data into actionable insights.

In this article, I’ll explore some strategies that can help product teams move from creating feature-heavy dashboards to value-driven dashboards. I’ll offer practical tips that enable UX designers to craft design solutions that truly resonate with users. Read More