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At Sitback, we have had the opportunity to work on a wealth of products and services across different brands and industries. It’s perfect for us since we have an endless curiosity about how people think and do things and how we can design better experiences for them.
Human capacity to perceive and process information is limited. If you think about how many thousands of stimuli we come into contact with each day, it's a wonder we can function at all!
To cope with this overload of information, we as humans have evolved a number of strategies to help us function within our busy world. As Experience Designers, understanding these strategies can help us conduct better research resulting in more accurate observations, and design interfaces that are easier to use and require less mental effort (i.e. cognitive load).
This article focuses specifically on cognitive biases, what they are, and how we can address them.
As a Marketing Professional, I was recently asked by an acquaintance back in the UK, "How do you choose the right Digital Agency to build a website? What should I look for and what questions should I be asking?"
Choosing a Digital Partner to build your website is an important decision. The result can consume a considerable portion of your annual Marketing budget, it can have a huge impact on customer perception of your brand, and it can help advance your career as a Digital Marketer.
While I don't pretend to have all the right answers, and a lot of the time the decision could well come down to going with whatever your gut tells you, I thought others out there might also find the advice interesting, since it doesn't centre on the considerations I often see mentioned.
But first, let me tell you a little story...
At Sitback, user experience (UX) design does not simply describe the look-and-feel of a website or the user’s journey through it. It permeates all the way through to the development process of a website as well.
Sitback has a Support team who are responsible for maintaining and optimizing the web solutions of our retainer clients. Some of these solutions are built by our project team and some we inherit. The solutions that we inherit, we sometimes find the lack of a consistent coding practice. In the same solution, a multitude of variance with algorithmic approach, code formatting and solution pattern. Though these solutions are in working order and do not contain any bugs, they do present a significant challenge when it comes to introducing a new feature or optimising an existing functionality. These projects are hard to maintain as they are hard to read, understand and extend.
There is something humane about designing technology with the needs of its users at the forefront. At its core, UX is both an empathic and analytical practice, utilising research methods that allow us to observe, record and dissect the behaviours of our human users, both conscious and subconscious.
Planning a UX Workshop just got easier AND quicker!
The anonymity and asynchronous nature of the internet offers individuals the opportunity to be whoever they want – just watch the latest episode of ‘Catfish’ to see this in action. Although Facebook is regularly labelled as ‘Fakebook’, presenting a fake version of yourself on this social networking site may actually take a detrimental toll on your mental health. Recent psychology research conducted by Rachel Grieve and Jarrah Watkinson at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia has demonstrated that presenting a version of yourself on Facebook that is too different from your true self may actually be associated with high stress and feelings of social disconnectedness.
As User Experience practitioners, we have traditionally focused on understanding how users think, identifying customer pain points and envisioning a better experience for them.
