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Design Theory

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What Is Holistic Design? The Future of UX or a Buzzword?

  • Customer Experience, Design, Design Theory, Product design

“Holistic design” sounds like a new flashy trend that’s used without a real meaning behind it. However, the term was present long before UX design was born. Nowadays, when we use “product design” for digital products and “industrial design” for things, “holistic design” makes a comeback to UX design.

Article by Masha Panchenko
IDEAS IN BRIEF
What Is Holistic Design? The Future of UX or a Buzzword?
  • To apply holistic design principles is to consider different facets of a product, stakeholders’ interests and the environment within which it functions.
  • Best practices of holistic design consist of involving stakeholders, being sustainable, creating an ecosystem, and, last but not least, going beyond digital.
  • When it comes to holistic design in UX, it’s essential to apply design thinking and reflect on the design system, make sure that solutions are inclusive and consistently invest in UX research.
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7 min read
Frame 1 Holistic Design

5 Reasons Why Designing Simple Experiences is Psychologically Impossible

  • Behavioral Science, Customer Experience, Design, Design Theory, Neuroscience, Usability, UX Education, UX Magazine

Simple is exponentially harder than complex, namely because there’s a psychological chasm that most teams cannot surpass… or perhaps they have not been setup to succeed.

Article by Joe Smiley
IDEAS IN BRIEF
5 Reasons Why Designing Simple Experiences is Psychologically Impossible
  • Designing simple and seamless experiences is exponentially harder than designing complex solutions
  • Simple solutions require an extraordinary amount of time, money, and skill
  • Other obstacles to simple design include complexity bias, loss aversion, unpredicted behavior, and fear of risks
Read the full article to learn more about the psychology behind designing a simple experience.
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5 min read

Why I stopped letting the design speak for itself

  • Content and Copy, Customer Experience, Design, Design Theory

Good design doesn’t speak for itself. You are the best person to tell the story you create. So when the opportunity arises, tell it impressively!

Article by Hoang Nguyen
IDEAS IN BRIEF
Why I stopped letting the design speak for itself
  • Since ancient times, stories have been a useful tool to connect and convey human culture, reduce loneliness, and inspire the team by connecting the facts and create shared goals.
  • Powered by passion, designers can create great stories but often forget investing in telling them and then regret seeing them fade away.
  • Storytelling thinking helps design stand out. Through storytelling, we can put ourselves in other people’s shoes. And when we can understand what they’re going through, empathy emerges.
  • Customers or decision-makers in projects are not rational as they think; they make emotional decisions, relying on their feelings for the product.

Read the full article to get this author’s perspective on why storytelling matters in design.

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3 min read

User Journey Mapping for Complex Enterprise Systems

  • Customer Experience, Design, Design Theory, Enterprise Products, Project Management, Strategy

At its most basic, journey mapping is a compilation of user goals and actions into a timeline. Here we show insightful details that add value to the design process.

Article by Bansi Mehta
IDEAS IN BRIEF
User Journey Mapping for Complex Enterprise Systems

Journey maps are meant to demonstrate the holistic user experience. Here are 5 ways that using journey maps can help with organizing complex enterprise systems:

  1. Drive the organization’s outlook from inside-out to outside-in
  2. Create a common vision that is followed across the company
  3. Enable departments to own responsibility of key touchpoints
  4. Target specific areas of improvement
  5. Help make sense of problem areas in work processes

Read the full article for more some journey map examples and more information on how they can help simplify complex systems.

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3 min read

What is at the top of the UX pyramid?

  • Business UX Leaders, Content Strategy, Design Theory, Internal Company Dynamics

If you do a Google search on “UX pyramid”, you get lots and lots of UX pyramids – but they don’t all look the same

Article by Dennis Hambeukers
IDEAS IN BRIEF
What is at the top of the UX pyramid?

Idea in Brief If you do a Google search on “UX pyramid”, you get lots and lots of UX pyramids. If you take a closer look, you’ll see that most people agree about the bottom of the pyramid, but the top differs. What belongs at the top? At the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we find self-actualization: the desire to become the most that one can be. What is the most UX design can be?

  • UX aligned to strategy – Focussing on the things that are bigger than the application is strategy.
  • UX shaping strategy – Most strategists get strategy, but getting digital is a different game and UX designers with a feeling for strategy can help shape engaging strategies.
  • Game changing UX – UX design can help change the game. That is the top of the UX pyramid for this author. UX design is about uncovering the deepest needs of people and creating solutions that solve these fundamental needs that they didn’t even know they had in an engaging way.

Read the full article for more details on what might lie at the top of the UX Pyramid.

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6 min read

Law of diminishing returns, design and decision making

  • Behavioral Science, Business Value and ROI, Contextual User Studies, Design Theory, Research Methods and Techniques

How do you know if there’s still room for improvement?

Article by Sol Mesz
IDEAS IN BRIEF
Law of diminishing returns, design and decision making
How do you know if there is still room for improvement in the experiences you design?
  • The law of diminishing returns, a widely used concept in Economics that shows the relationship between investment (time, money, resources) and benefits can help Designers, UXers and Product Owners/Managers make better design, product and business decisions.
  • The Law of Diminishing returns is a bell curve:
    • Section 1 – curving upwards: is the fastest growing part of the curve, which means that efforts invested provide a more than proportional return.
    • Section 2 – leveling off: along this part of the curve we still see returns on our investment, and will keep decreasing as we approach section 3, as the curve becomes less and less steep.
    • Section 3 – curving downwards: here the slope starts to go down, meaning that our efforts stop having positive returns. This means it doesn’t make sense to keep investing (effort, resources, etc.).
  • Knowing how this curve works and where in the curve your problem lies is key so you don’t invest effort into something that doesn’t make sense to optimize. 

Read the full article to learn more about the different ways that the law of diminishing returns can be applied to design problems.

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