UX practitioners, both consultants and in house, sometimes conduct research. Be it usability testing or user research with a generative goal, research requires planning. To make sure product managers, developers, marketers and executives (let’s call them stakeholders) act on UX research results, planning must be crystal clear, collaborative, fast and digestible. Long plans or no plans don’t work for people. You must be able to boil a UX research plan down to one page. If you can’t or won’t, then you won’t get buy-in for the research and its results. This...

   Using illustration in web design has become quite trendy these days. People love to see beautifully designed illustration based websites because they stand out from the rest. Not only because of the beautiful illustrative art work and carefully crafted web designs but also because of the perfect balance struck between these two important components. Today, we want to dig into some creative ways you can work beautiful illustrations into your web design projects. We hope that this compilation will inspire some new ideas. You can see in the examples where designers...

   Photographers put a lot of focus and emphasis on the lighting for their pictures. After all, lighting is a powerful instrument in setting the overall tone and feel of the piece. Even when there is very little light to work with. In fact, it is in these situations that the lighting can create extremely emotive and distinctive compositions for the pics. Giving the shadows so much reign to run freely, carving interesting depths and crevaces into the pieces. This can also prove very tricky for photographers as some equipment does not work as well under these...

   Web design is a craft that is constantly evolving and yet also sometimes sabotaged. The moment a design is released, a new version is born. In the beginning, like a baby, it seems vulnerable and weak, but in time it grows up and becomes self-sufficient. Redesigning a website for its own sake doesn’t prove anything; quite the contrary, it reveals a lack of effectiveness on the part of the designer. Product design is a craft in which new versions come to life with increasing difficulty. We can learn a thing or two from it when designing for the Web. First, let’s...