Business: Case Studies

Today’s world of mobile app and Web-site development is seeing high adoption of UX design and research, from planning to product launch. UX design is a human-first approach to product design and sets the tone for app development, keeping the focus on satisfying your users. Whether you’re designing physical or digital products, your goal is to create useful, easy-to-use products that provide a great experience to the users who interact with them. Those everyday interactions should be enjoyable and accessible to all users. Throughout your design process, it’s important to closely integrate your UX and UI design efforts. UI design focuses on the look and feel, the aesthetic experience of a product, including its fonts, colors, visual affordances for interaction such as buttons, and page layouts.

In this article, we’ll focus on our UX design journey, creating a motion-design app for smartphones and tablets. A unique feature of this app is its platform: The use of smartphones and tablets for professional motion design is not common. Designers typically create motion designs using applications on desktop computers. Read More

As UX researchers, we have a great variety of tools and methods that are available to us. However, at times, a project’s scope, timeline, and budget limit our choices. Therefore, we may need to get creative and come up with a new method that both fits the business criteria and helps us discover usability issues.

In this article, I’ll describe how I combined a software-development technique—pair programming—with usability testing on a recent, exciting project at a smart-lighting company for which I was the usability engineer. The project had a very tight deadline. One of my tasks was to test the user experience of a mobile app called Casambi, a remote-control app for smart lighting, which is shown in Figure 1. Read More

As UX professionals, we pride ourselves on making software that is human friendly and easy to use. But keeping the right balance between adding features that customers and users need and maintaining a clean, simple user-interface design is often harder than it seems it should be. This is a challenge that most product teams have in common. In this case study, I’ll describe how our team at Bloomfire integrated Lean UX into our product-development process to address this challenge.

How can you distinguish between what the people who purchase and use your products say they want and what they actually need? Luckily, there are some effective ways to reduce the risk that you might design products your customers don’t want or your users can’t use and, instead, to design for their actual needs. Read More