The hottest UX Design Substack posts right now

And their main takeaways
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Top Design Topics

AI and the Third Age of Human-Computer Interaction

Year 2049 • 15 implied HN points • 14 Apr 23
🕹 Technology AI Interfaces UX Design Chatbots Machine Learning
  1. In the First Age of Human-Computer Interaction, communication with machines was through code like punched cards.
  2. The Second Age introduced point-and-click interfaces, making interactions more visual and user-friendly.
  3. The Third Age brings natural language interactions where AI understands us, like with ChatGPT, changing how we interact with technology.

Creating personas with secondary data

UX Psychology • 59 implied HN points • 05 Jan 22
🕹 Technology UX Design User Research
  1. Personas are crucial in design, representing target users based on research. They help focus design efforts, improve team communication, make assumptions explicit, and bring empathy to the process.
  2. Secondary data can be utilized to create personas, saving time and costs. Social media, case studies, and internal research are potential sources.
  3. Creating multiple personas ensures a more accurate representation of the target group. It's essential to limit personas to 3-4 major ones, each representing a segment of the target users.

Heuristic evaluation vs. user testing

UX Psychology • 39 implied HN points • 20 Jan 22
🕹 Technology UX Design User Experience Software Development Research Studies
  1. Heuristic Evaluation involves experts examining an interface to find good and bad points, following specific industry standards for evaluation.
  2. User Testing is a more effective method since real users perform tasks on the interface, detecting major usability issues and providing valuable insights.
  3. While Heuristic Evaluation is quicker and cheaper, User Testing offers better performance estimates and detects more significant problems that affect user experience.

What’s the best way to display dates to international users?

UX Psychology • 19 implied HN points • 10 Aug 22
🕹 Technology Design User Experience UX Design
  1. Date formatting should consider international users as different cultures have varying ways of expressing dates.
  2. ISO 8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD) can help avoid confusion in international date communication.
  3. Design date-entry fields with user familiarity and comfort in mind, using intuitive formats, labels, and separators to prevent errors.
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UX is more than just usability or look and feel

A Better Designed World • 7 implied HN points • 16 Feb 23
🕹 Technology UX Design Product Development User Experience E-commerce
  1. UX is composed of five key areas that include usability, utility, functional integrity, visual design, and persuasiveness.
  2. Good UX balances all five areas; a product might excel in one but lacking in others.
  3. Usability is crucial for a product to be easily learnable and memorable; utility determines the value; functional integrity focuses on reliability; visual design impacts appeal and perception; persuasiveness drives conversions and user engagement.

Online Forms: how to communicate format restrictions?

UX Psychology • 19 implied HN points • 25 Feb 22
🕹 Technology UX Design
  1. Good web form design should aim to prevent user errors during data entry but also help users correct mistakes quickly.
  2. Format restrictions in online forms, like for date of birth or password creation, should be clearly communicated to users to prevent errors and frustration.
  3. Research suggests that explaining format specifications to users in advance is crucial for reducing errors, while using format examples alone may lead to interpretation errors.

Best practices for moderated user testing

UX Psychology • 19 implied HN points • 09 Dec 21
🕹 Technology User Experience UX Design
  1. Moderated user testing requires active participation of a moderator and can be done in person or remotely.
  2. Moderators play key roles like being a gracious host, leader, and neutral observer during usability testing.
  3. To excel in moderated user testing, prepare well, manage time effectively, build trust with users, maintain a clear session structure, and use prompts, probes, and assists appropriately.

Edition 20: Degrading UX to improve security hurts both UX and security

Boring AppSec • 2 HN points • 30 May 23
🕹 Technology UX Design Information Security User Experience Cybersecurity Internet Security
  1. Degrading user experience to enhance security can harm both aspects.
  2. Considering unintended consequences of design choices is crucial for all engineering disciplines, including security.
  3. Tradeoffs between usability and security can lead to negative impacts on password strength, user behavior, and session management.

Product Management Skills - Articulating adoption risks

Joseph Gefroh • 0 implied HN points • 16 Feb 24
💼 Business Product Management Risk management UX Design Customer Satisfaction
  1. Articulating adoption risks is crucial in product management to understand and address potential negative effects of a new solution.
  2. For a product manager, balancing the levers of creating value while ensuring adoption by users is key to successful product development.
  3. Adoption risks can be mitigated by strategies like improving awareness, simplifying usage, setting up effective defaults, and considering whether adoption is even desired for certain features.

2 things I aim to learn during my 3-week holiday

Eddie's startup voyage • 0 implied HN points • 22 Jun 23
💼 Business Copywriting UX Design Learning
  1. Always be learning - Opportunities are unlimited, but time is not. Choose wisely what to focus on for personal growth.
  2. Copywriting is crucial - Being able to write compelling text that sells a product or service is essential for business success.
  3. UX Design with Figma - Developing UX design skills can lead to creating more useful and pleasing products. Learning tools like Figma can help improve design quality.