Dive into 1,760 free articles packed with 730 videos, illustrations, and hands-on templates by 209 industry experts, bestselling authors, and Ivy League professors.
Learn Design and AI From the Best
Get one powerful email each week,
like 315,720 others.
Next email in:
You can use design skills to make a meaningful impact on your own career, your company and the people you help. Dive into the articles and videos that millions of other people love.
Design thinking is a methodology that provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It’s extremely useful when used to tackle complex problems that are ill-defined or unknown—because it serves to understand the human needs involved, reframe the problem in human-centric ways, create numerou
Design Thinking is not an exclusive property of designers—all great innovators in literature, art, music, science, engineering, and business have practiced it. So, why call it Design Thinking? What’s special about Design Thinking is that designers’ work processes can help us systematically extract,
Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way. Creating personas will help you understand your users’ needs, experiences, behaviors and goals. Creating personas
Looking at examples of bad design alongside counter-examples of good design is not only fun but also draws important lessons for designers. They highlight pitfalls for designers to avoid and let us understand how to translate design theories into solutions that work in the real world. Jared Spool, t
Interaction design is an important component within the giant umbrella of user experience (UX) design. In this article, we’ll explain what interaction design is, some useful models of interaction design, as well as briefly describe what an interaction designer usually does.A simple and useful unders
Apple’s Product Development Process may be one of the most successful design processes ever implemented. With a valuation that exceeds $2 trillion, there’s a lot that designers can learn from Apple and introduce into their own design environments.Apple is a notoriously secretive business. In Steve J
An integral part of the Design Thinking process is the definition of a meaningful and actionable problem statement, which the design thinker will focus on solving. This is perhaps the most challenging part of the Design Thinking process, as the definition of a problem (also called a design challenge
You don’t want to spend your whole life redesigning the wheel, do you? No, neither do we. If you are looking for a design that solves a problem that has been solved with a different application before, then the template for your wheel is probably already out there. This lets you save time and make a
Combine AI skills with timeless skills in User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) design. Skills like empathy, user-centered design, and creative problem-solving are deeply human, and no technology can replace them.
Forms are an essential part of many interactions, but good form layout and clear labels are only part of the picture. Forms also need to work in all the ways users interact with them. Not everyone uses a mouse. Many users rely on keyboards, whether by preference, motor impairments, or because they u
Before you have a single real user in a testing session, you can already find a significant proportion of the usability problems in a design. Expert evaluation, also known as heuristic evaluation, is one of the most cost-effective methods available to UX practitioners. It requires no recruitment, fa
In this video, William Hudson, User Experience Strategist and Founder of Syntagm Ltd, explores the psychological phenomena that affect how users perceive changes in dynamic web interfaces. While the focus is on web pages, these principles apply to any interactive technology, from desktop application
Understanding the legal requirements for accessibility is essential for anyone building digital products and services. Accessibility legislation exists worldwide, and failure to comply can result in costly lawsuits and reputational damage. This lesson explores the legal landscape, compliance standar
Fear plays such a dominant role in our lives that several businesses and products have succeeded on the back of this single emotion. Here’s a look at some of the fears that affect our decision making, how businesses and products exploit these tendencies to their advantage, and how, as a designer, yo
Imagine your next product launch soaring beyond expectations. Your customers raving about experiences crafted just for them. Your ideas finally connecting with the people who matter most. This isn't wishful thinking—it's what happens when you master personas, user experience (UX) design's secret wea
Personas help you get inside your users’ heads—and build things they’ll actually value. Now imagine having a tool that makes it all click faster. That’s AI. Let it handle the grind while you do what only a human can: feel, connect, and create solutions people truly love. Here are seven ways to make
UX (user experience) design has the potential to improve people’s everyday lives. The stakes are even higher if you work as a UX designer in the healthcare industry. The health-tech sector is among the fastest-growing in the world, with expected revenue of USD 1,305.1 billion in 2030, according to G
Skills in design are not just for designers. They're for everyone. In any job, any industry.
You can benefit from the key principles of User Experience (UX), Customer Experience (CX) and User Interface (UI) Design in most jobs and most companies.
That's because UX, CX and UI Design help people reach their goals and meet their needs. Your design skills can help increase sales, keep customers loyal and turn them into powerful advocates of your company.
User Experience (UX) Design is all about creating meaningful and valuable experiences for other people.
You'll create products and services that people love to use, increase business success and profits, and make the world a better place by solving real-world problems.
Interaction design is an important component within the giant umbrella of user experience (UX) design. In this article, we’ll explain what interaction design is, some useful models of interaction design, as well as briefly describe what an interaction designer usually does.A simple and useful unders
Apple’s Product Development Process may be one of the most successful design processes ever implemented. With a valuation that exceeds $2 trillion, there’s a lot that designers can learn from Apple and introduce into their own design environments.Apple is a notoriously secretive business. In Steve J
Follow Ben Shneiderman’s 'Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design' if you want to design great, productive and frustration-free user interfaces. Apple, Google and Microsoft are among some of the highly successful companies whose well-designed products reflect Shneiderman’s rules. The characteristics
If there’s an occupation that is 100% linked with the public’s idea of what design is all about, it’s graphic design. From the familiar golden arches of the McDonald’s brand to the typography and colors of movie posters, graphic designers create some of the most iconic and ubiquitous designs around
Now that we’ve seen some grids at work in the Rule of Thirds article, let’s examine them a little more deeply. As a concept that deals so fundamentally with the fabric and background of our work as designers, it’s easy to overlook the power of grids and think more about the elements we want to creat
Service design is all about taking a service and making it meet the user’s and customer’s needs for that service. It can be used to improve an existing service or to create a new service from scratch. In order to adapt to service design, a UX designer will need to understand the basic principles of
Lean UX is an incredibly useful technique when working on projects where the Agile development method is used. Traditional UX techniques often don’t work when development is conducted in rapid bursts – there’s not enough time to deliver UX in the same way. Fundamentally Lean UX and other forms of UX
Let’s pay a virtual visit to a famous industrial designer’s workshop. By examining the principles of his winning approach, we can incorporate vital elements into our designs in the “less is more” age.As user experience practitioners, most of us have worked with Nielsen and Molich’s 10 heuristics or
Ever wondered how companies like Apple and Google dominate their fields?
Part of the answer lies in a powerful 5-stage work process called Design Thinking. But it's not just for tech giants. Design Thinking can empower people just like you in most industries and jobs, from business to engineering to marketing. Design Thinking is a solution-oriented approach to solve real-world problems and create better, customer interactions, products, services, and experiences.
Design Thinking is not an exclusive property of designers—all great innovators in literature, art, music, science, engineering, and business have practiced it. So, why call it Design Thinking? What’s special about Design Thinking is that designers’ work processes can help us systematically extract,
Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way. Creating personas will help you understand your users’ needs, experiences, behaviors and goals. Creating personas
An integral part of the Design Thinking process is the definition of a meaningful and actionable problem statement, which the design thinker will focus on solving. This is perhaps the most challenging part of the Design Thinking process, as the definition of a problem (also called a design challenge
Here’s an interesting fact you may—or may not—know: users are more likely to choose, buy, and use products that meet their needs than products that just meet their wants. And an Empathy map will help you understand your user’s needs while you develop a deeper understanding of the persons you’re desi
Ideation is the process where you generate ideas and solutions through sessions such as Sketching, Prototyping, Brainstorming, Cheatstorming, Brainwriting, Worst Possible Idea, and a wealth of other ideation techniques. Ideation is also the third stage in the Design Thinking process. Although many p
Affinity diagrams are a great method to use when you want to make sense of a large volume of mixed information and data—facts, ethnographic research, ideas from brainstorms, user opinions, user needs, insights and design issues, just to name a few! Affinity diagrams require you to cluster informatio
One of the best ways to gain insights in a Design Thinking process is to carry out some form of prototyping. This method involves producing an early, inexpensive, and scaled down version of the product in order to reveal any problems with the current design. Prototyping offers designers the opportun
We need to appreciate the roots and origins of a concept to truly understand it—we need to know how it came to be. Let’s take a look at how design thinking emerged from an exploration of theory and practice to become one of the most effective ways to address the human, technological and strategic in
Did you ever use a website or app that felt so easy to use that it was almost like magic? On the other hand, have you been frustrated when you couldn't figure out how to use an app or your new microwave oven?
The difference between these experiences lies in the art of User Interface (UI) design. UI design is about creating intuitive, user-friendly experiences. The principles of UI design can empower you to create amazing customer interactions even if you don't design user interfaces yourself.
You don’t want to spend your whole life redesigning the wheel, do you? No, neither do we. If you are looking for a design that solves a problem that has been solved with a different application before, then the template for your wheel is probably already out there. This lets you save time and make a
Follow Ben Shneiderman’s 'Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design' if you want to design great, productive and frustration-free user interfaces. Apple, Google and Microsoft are among some of the highly successful companies whose well-designed products reflect Shneiderman’s rules. The characteristics
Learn to design with your user’s needs and expectations in mind by applying Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich’s Ten User Interface Guidelines. These heuristics have been reflected in many of the products designed by some of the most successful companies in the world such as Apple, Google, and Adobe. Fur
Let’s look at three subjects that, at first glance, may strike you as being incredibly basic and self-explanatory. However, although they may seem like they should need no introduction, we should study them. By understanding these concepts, you’ll be able to apply them more effectively to captivate
Now that we’ve seen some grids at work in the Rule of Thirds article, let’s examine them a little more deeply. As a concept that deals so fundamentally with the fabric and background of our work as designers, it’s easy to overlook the power of grids and think more about the elements we want to creat
Now, we’re going to look at a subject that comes directly from mathematics and that we can also find all around us – the golden ratio. Don’t worry; we’re not going back into the classroom for long. We will examine what this concept is and exactly how much it is a fundamental part of making designs p
Wireframes help you quickly ideate and test your ideas. While paper wireframes are the fastest to create, digital wireframes look more polished and presentable. If you are looking for a pocket-friendly wireframing tool, look no further.Whether you prefer browser-based apps or offline desktop tools,
Learn to design with consistency and standards in mind and understand the reasons why they’re important to incorporate them into your work. Derived from Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich’s Ten User Interface (UI) Guidelines, ‘Consistency and Standards’ are evident in many of the widely-used produc
Usability is all about human behavior: it recognizes that people are emotional, have limited attention spans, and usually choose the easiest and most appealing path to meet their needs. It's no wonder that Apple's products are so successful.
Looking at examples of bad design alongside counter-examples of good design is not only fun but also draws important lessons for designers. They highlight pitfalls for designers to avoid and let us understand how to translate design theories into solutions that work in the real world. Jared Spool, t
Learn to design with your user’s needs and expectations in mind by applying Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich’s Ten User Interface Guidelines. These heuristics have been reflected in many of the products designed by some of the most successful companies in the world such as Apple, Google, and Adobe. Fur
User Experience (UX) is critical to the success or failure of a product in the market but what do we mean by UX? All too often UX is confused with usability which describes to some extent how easy a product is to use and it is true that UX as a discipline began with usability – however, UX has grown
It was Albert Einstein who said; “If you can’t explain it, you don’t understand it well enough.” Though it is often mis-reported as being; “If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it well enough.” What Einstein was driving at was a particular application of “keep it simple, s
This subject may seem incredibly “big” for a single article, but it’s about the specific nature of usability that we often overlook or confuse. With this appreciation, you’ll be able to design more effectively, and your website’s users will be able to grow, too.Usability replaced the outmoded label
Don’t Make Me Think is the title of a book by the HCI and Usability engineer Steve Krug. It teaches UX designers how to deliver great user experiences in a very simple and accessible way. Since its release in the year 2000 it has become one of the defining texts in the industry and an invaluable gui
Usability and user experience (UX) are not the same thing: the usability of a product is a crucial part that shapes its UX, and hence falls under the umbrella of UX. While many might think that usability is solely about the “ease of use” of a product, it actually involves a great deal more than that
The question of usability compared to desirability comes up a lot in UX design, and it’s important to distinguish the two. Why? Because usability is the base level of the user experience, it is difficult to create a worthwhile user experience without it. However, without desirability, it’s unlikely
Design goes way beyond creating attractive visuals and aesthetics.
When you possess design skills, you're equipped to transform businesses, make technology more user-friendly, and innovate customer experiences because you understand the relationship between humans and technology. This is what Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is all about.
The iterative design process is a simple concept. Once, through user research, you have identified a user need and have generated ideas to meet that need, you develop a prototype. Then you test the prototype to see whether it meets the need in the best possible way. Then you take what you learned fr
Mental models are important in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and interaction design because they provide information about how users perceive the world and interact with products or services. Let’s explore this concept more closely.Mental models indicate what a user expects to happen based on exp
Human Computer Interaction is the academic discipline that most of us think of as UI design. It focuses on the way that human beings and computers interact to ever increasing levels of both complexity and simplicity.It’s a Very New DisciplineIt’s perhaps easy to see that until the mid to late 1970s
After more than 40 years in the field, Human Computer Interaction (HCI) is already a well-established design discipline. Now, the pervasiveness of big data, new data collection and interaction techniques is giving rise to a new but related discipline: Human Data Interaction (HDI). This is likely to
In a digital world—for that’s what it pretty much is—what could be more natural than for every brand, company, and digital professional to want to make a mark? No surprise, then, that with 93% of all brand communication being visual, a great deal of that is all about digital design—so a digital desi
Have you ever wondered how your brain makes sense of the world? It's a fascinating process! If you want to design helpful products and services that people love, you must first understand how they think. A large part of human interaction relies on perception, our ability to see, hear and feel our su
Design plays a role that’s utterly crucial in our daily lives—it bridges functionality with aesthetics to meet user needs. In product development, it’s design that determines how user-friendly and appealing a product is. The field of human-computer interaction (HCI) is foundational to UX design. To
Cognitive maps in UX show how users think about a product or service. Designers use these visual representations so they can understand the user's mental model—something that helps them make intuitive designs that match the user's expectations and improve their overall experience.Think about the las
Free textbooks written by more than 100 leading designers, bestselling authors, and Ivy League professors. We have assembled our textbooks in a gigantic encyclopedia, whose 4,000+ pages cover the design of interactive products and services such as websites, household objects, smartphones, computer software, aircraft cockpits, and what have you. Name an item of design interest, and you'll probably find it discussed inside.
Highly recommend the Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction […] the breadth and the depth of the invited contributions are quite impressive […] all with highly qualified authorities as authors.
– Don Norman
Highly recommend the Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction […] the breadth and the depth of the invited contributions are quite impressive […] all with highly qualified authorities as authors.
– Don Norman
Dive into all of IxDF open-source textbooks. Feeling a little lost in books and articles? Then try our engaging video-based courses.
