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How to Start Designing the Obvious using UX Consultants Tips

Posted by Mitch Ahiers on Mon, September, 26, 2022

Congratulations on drawing people to your website or app…Now be sure not to lose them by giving them the best design they deserve by contacting UX consultants!

An average website user will spend roughly 15 seconds – if you’re lucky – looking for what they want on your website before bouncing.

If your users have to burn brain calories just to relearn everything, from the moment they open your app or visit your website, they’ll lose interest and head to something more user friendly.

 

“It’s time to stop feeling the need to be clever & discover the magic of the obvious by using UX consultants”

 

Design is all about communicating to your users to get something accomplished. And HOW you communicate that is important.

While you may be an expert in your field, your users are not, which is why they are coming to you.

They are seeking guidance on what they need to do in order to solve a problem that they have. If they get lost because your site or app is overly complex—Davinci code style—they’ll bounce and will likely be lost to you forever.

Because, tbh, they don’t owe us anything. They don’t have to give us their business or purchase our product. So, we want to make sure it is as obvious and user friendly for them as possible.

How do you do that?

 

Make it easy for your audience by discussing with ux consultants

 

Jakob’s Law

The Grandfather of them all [insert angels singing].

Jakob Nielsen, a pioneer of UX on the internet had this one simple rule that all designers should know:

“Most audiences spend more time on other sites than yours.”

This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.

It’s really a popularity contest if you think about it. Especially with the most popular of cliques to stand out among sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

The audience comes to expect websites to look and function a certain way based on what they already know. Don’t make them jump through hoops to find what they want.

Long story short, they won’t.

Here are a few crucial examples of applying Jakob’s Law to benefit your users (and therefore, you). Make your UX work for your audience and for you.

Obvious links

On websites, we expect links to be obvious. If it’s underlined on a website, especially when it’s in blue (and it should be), users expect that word or phrase to be clickable.

Links should be used on your site in two ways:

  • Use underlined links to guide them where you want them to go.
  • Make use of links to help them go where they want to go.
  • From navigation to internal articles to blog titles to products, links are one of the most important things.
  • Use what they already know how to use the way they know how to use it.
If you absolutely insist on using your own stylistic twist on linked material, such as boldface or making linked text a particular color, do yourself a favor and at least use it consistently 100% of the time on your page.


Follow the rules your audience follows

When most people click on the website’s logo, they expect to go home.

When they look to navigate the website, they will look at the top of the page for the “hamburger button,” those three little lines that open the menu.

If you put that button at the bottom of the page, it’s going to throw them for a loop because they are expecting it to be where they usually find it on other websites they frequent..

We want to borrow these conventions that users already understand—layouts, placements, sizing—and use them to our advantage.

We have been conditioned through those other sites mentioned in Jakob’s Law to look for those features. Use your audience’s internet muscle memory. Make it obvious.

UX consultants suggest you use colors intentionally + consistently

Color has a huge effect on how users read a page or a website. How do you differentiate colors in text that matters?

‘Cause let’s be straight up…audiences don’t like to read (sorry not sorry content writers). Carefully selected colors help users find their desired content faster.

While all that body copy is good for SEO and users who truly read through lengthy text, most audiences are skimmers looking for an answer to their one question:

Does this company give us what we want?

It’s fine to use color to call attention to something important on your page, but when you make the decision to use color this way, use it consistently. Your audience will expect a word or header to show up the same way every time.

Pro tip: Be aware of accessibility and color blind individuals when deciding on colors to use.

 

Design rules matter

Everything that functions the same on your page should look the same.

Just as links should be underlined and color should differentiate content/functions consistently, headers, labels, buttons, and CTAs should also be used consistently.

Header 1, header 2, and so on, should always be formatted as such, using the same:

Format

Sizing

Font

Color

Every time they appear.

A blog post should always look like a blog post, a purchase button should always look like a purchase button…You get the idea.

Don’t be clever merely for the sake of being clever. Help your audience and help yourself by following these simple guidelines and contacting ux consultants to keep it obvious and beneficial.

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Topics: UX, Design, Tech Trends, How-To, Web

How Long Does It Take to Build an App

Posted by Mitch Ahiers on Wed, September, 21, 2022

Countless times, people have been asking How long does it take to build an app? Well, let me ask some questions also; how big is your application? How many features does your app have? And what does it need to do?

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Topics: Mobile Applications, Development, Design, Tools

What Are The Benefits Of Ideation Workshops?

Posted by Mitch Ahiers on Wed, September, 21, 2022

Help the best ideas rise to the top, not the loudest, by enjoying the benefits of ideation workshops instead of a noisy brainstorming meeting.

What is an Innovation Workshop? on YouTube

Wanna solve a problem? Get the best ideas all out on the table. Sounds easy, but brainstorming sessions often fail to elevate the best idea. Whether a clash of egos, fear of repercussion from disagreeing with the boss, or just having the wrong people in the room, there’s a better way to collaborate: deploy a workshop. Need help? EX Squared is happy to facilitate!

Key benefits of ideation workshops

  • Get ideas out of heads and into the ether
  • Ideas breed other ideas and inspire people to speak up
  • Have a variety of opinions contributing instead of the same people, having the same conversations
  • Empower the quietest to speak up. Their ideas may be the best.
  • Help slough off tunnel vision

Problem types that ideation workshops can help solve

  • Why aren’t people wearing their hard hats on the job site?
  • What should we name our start-up?
  • Should we go with modern or classic furniture?
  • Is it possible to put billions of dollars into millions of pockets?
  • Can you make a fast-growing metropolitan downtown more pedestrian-friendly?

So, yeah, pretty much any sort of problem can be bettered by workshopping with the right people. The benefits of ideation workshops are structured, whereas brainstorming or whiteboarding is typically chaotic.

Two (or more) more heads are better than one. We’ve all been in long, drawn-out brainstorming meetings that breakdown into conversations about what’s happened on Sunday’s episode of some popular cable show. Brainstorming or collaboration sessions often become unfocused, where the best idea of the day gets lost in the shuffle of the competing voices.

Brainstorm Together

Two (or more) more heads are better than one. We all know this axiom. But, we have all been in long, drawn-out brainstorming meetings that breakdown into conversations about what’s happened on Sunday’s episode of some popular cable show. Brainstorming or collaboration sessions often become unfocused, where the best idea of the day gets lost in the shuffle of the competing voices.

Too often, the loudest or highest-profile opinion in the room starts taking root. Not because it’s the best idea, but because psychology shows us that humans want to fit-in with others. We’ll adapt our opinions to fit those of the group to gain temporary acceptance. If done right, brainstorming sessions unlock potential & creativity. If is perform poorly, they just reinforce bad ideas and leave participants feeling like time’s been wasted.

No fear. Innovation Workshops to the rescue!


Workshop vs Brainstorming

Brainstorming is typically a bunch of people, often in the same work-group or product team, coming together to strategize some problem they need to figure out. Though it’s intended to facilitate outside-the-norm thinking, because they are used as triage points on existing situations, they tend to just be faster ways to come to a conclusion the team would have already arrived.

Workshops, whether a design workshop or innovation workshop, are structured, planned events that focus on creating a divergence of ideas from participants, then helping those involved arrive at convergence of a direction moving forward.

Collaboration and output are the goals of both, but a workshop is structured specifically to make this happen. For success, EX Squared follows a set of key steps in our innovation workshop facilitation.



Divergence & Convergence is the key to successful innovation

Want a new way to solve a problem? Get different people trying to answer the burning questions.

Divergence is created when different vantage points are brought in and asked to view the problem. Dozens of wonderful, exciting, and yes, sometimes bad ideas get tossed into the mix. But each of those ideas has the ability to spurn another idea and another vantage point. Divergence is the fertilizer. Or water. Or some sort of gardening example.

Teams get tunnel-vision because they see samething. Elephants stay tied to posts they could easily pull out of the ground because when they were small, they lacked the strength. Conditioning causes us to stop pushing because we don’t like the discomfort of failure. That didn’t work yesterday, so why try again? Over time, these restrictions add up and solutions become stale.

Rocksauce Divergence & Convergence: Diverge with creative choices, then Converge by making choices that focus on a Point of View

Team Vision

Convergence happens when participants start to agree on a certain solution. Their point of view begin to align, and now, it’s the best idea in the room, that starts to take root. People from the Vice President of Regional Sales to the Customer Service Representative who was hired two months ago begin to align.

None of this happens by accident. All of it takes deliberate, considered facilitation to succeed. Otherwise, you risk falling back into the chaotic noise of a typical brainstorming session. The outcome of that is anyone’s guess.



6 Steps for a Successful Workshop

How do you make this all happen? Workshops succeed by letting imaginations run within a structured environment. Structure and a dash of discipline create the right sort of tension needed for solutions to flourish.

1. Have a good reason to be there

Want to get people in the room, have a good reason. Some sort of purpose. A goal in mind is necessary, otherwise, everyone will flounder. You can be broad, but you need to have some idea of why the Avengers are Assembling.

2. Get the right people

Step outside or your department. Go up and down the company ladder. Get the Director of Safety as well as the HR person who files the accident report. The Foreman on the job and the Safety Expert who goes out to check installations. Have a decision maker in the room, because they have to drive the solution forward when it comes to time & cost.

3. Have a facilitator (and listen to that person)

Facilitators are indispensable for workshops. They keep people on task. Facilitators keep the agenda moving forward when individuals want to go down tangential roads. And, very importantly, they keep some level of equality of ideas in the room, so good ideas can live. Using an outside facilitator, whether a company like Rocksauce or someone from a different department, helps. Everyone tends to be on their best manners, and the facilitator doesn’t know any of the interior politics of a group or company.

4. Follow a structure, framework or agenda

Know how long you’ll be in the room. Know how long you’ll be present in each activity. Outside facilitators will bring their own specific recipe for this, but, an inside facilitator can find tons of guidance online.

5. Make voting anonymous

Eventually, ideas will be voted on, and when that happens, do your best to have that be anonymous. Rocksauce uses a dotmocracy technique. Every participant gets a sheet of sticker-dots, and places them on the ideas they feel work best. Same color dots for everyone make this work even better.

6. Give yourself enough time

How much is enough? Depends on what you’re trying to solve and the people in the room. We’ve done workshops as short as 2 hours, and as long as 5 days.


Don’t let fear stop you from innovating

The great thing about a workshop is that it breaks down something daunting into easily executable chunks. Ideation leads to sticky-notes on a board which leads to voting and then sketching. Bit by bit, the walls that typically block innovation comes down, and great solutions go high.

People leave optimistic. And, most importantly, with a direction and purpose to carry out an activity!

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Topics: Design, Tools

Appreneur Tip: Suicide by Release Date

Posted by Mitch Ahiers on Mon, September, 19, 2022

When you are an Appreneur, it’s easy to get ahead of yourself. You’re an idea person. A money person. A vision person. You’re looking ahead, anticipating your success, and planning for the next phase. If you are savvy about the industry, you’re thinking about marketing. Promotions. Events. Commercials. Anything and everything you can do to let the public know about your app. You know an app will die on the vine without good marketing, so you’re talking to marketing agencies and preparing a suitably epic rollout plan. You’re looking into popular websites or magazines that might feature your app.

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Topics: Best Practices, Mobile Applications, Development, Digital Marketing, Digital Partner, Design

How to Develop Innovative Project Ideas

Posted by Mitch Ahiers on Mon, September, 19, 2022

Let’s look at something that has most of us spooked: innovation. What makes innovation so scary? I know you are wondering how you can develop innovative product design ideas that will make ur business stand out.

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Topics: Best Practices, Digital Transformation, Design, Tools

5 Things You Need For Your App

Posted by Mitch Ahiers on Mon, September, 19, 2022

Wondering what it takes to make an app that lasts? 

Nowadays, with the use of applications, people can use their mobile devices to do just about anything: check-in for flights, make a payment, check their bank accounts, send emails, order a taxi, communicate with friends, and so much more.

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Topics: Best Practices, Mobile Applications, Responsive Design, Development, UX, Design

Tech Trends & AR

Posted by Mitch Ahiers on Mon, September, 19, 2022

You might not believe this reality, but the tech world is about to get even more augmented.

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Topics: Augmented Reality, Design, Tech Trends







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