5-Card Friday

Storyboarding in UX Design

Storyboarding in UX is tool which help you visually predict and explore a user’s experience with a product. It’s a very much as thinking about your product as if it was a movie in term of how people would use it. It would help you to understand how people would flow through the interaction with it over time, giving you a clear sense of how to create a strong narrative.

Accessible Content Design for Emojis

There’s a range of ways to approach this accessibility consideration, some of which involve a more significant effort than others. Let’s start with three key issues:

1. When rendered as speech, an emoji’s default description may change the core message of its accompanying text.
2. When spoken, an emoji’s default description may cause the message to omit critical information.
3. Emojis with similar colors and shapes may be indistinguishable to people with varying levels of vision ability, even when using screen magnification.

The Value of Copywork in UI Design

The most important thing to note is copywork, as we call it, is very different from plagiarism. We never encourage passing off someone else's work as your own. However, we strongly believe in the practice of copying designs in educational settings because it doesn't just help with learning technical tools, like Figma, Sketch, or Adobe XD—it forces interpretation. 

No doubt, reproducing successful designs will also reveal conventions and design patterns. Design patterns are reoccurring solutions that solve commonly seen problems in UI design. While browsing the web may help you generate an exhaustive list of design patterns, copying existing designs will help you get a clear understanding of why those solutions exist and how they're best applied.  

The UX of Notifications | How to Master the Art of Interrupting

Think about every push notification that’s duplicated in-app instead of being converted to a digest, and every gratuitous red circle you see on a mobile app just to find an impersonal event alert or system update in your inbox. Notification UX should be an extension of the core product UX but many brands fail to make the connection between the two. It’s possible this product was rolling out the door and the notification “strategy” was just a box the product team needed to check. Unfortunately, a failure to consider the complexity of notification UX could have huge consequences for the rest of the product. Poorly timed notifications are interruptions and impersonal messages are spam. Too many bad notifications can frustrate users, stall their progress, and even lead them to abandon your product entirely.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that these push notifications increase each of these brand’s retention rates. These apps are reaching out to me when I’m outside of their product, and I’m more likely to open their product because of the personalized messaging I’m seeing. Localytics observed that mobile apps with in-app messaging have a 30% better chance of retaining users than apps without. Push notifications are also known to lift this retention rate and have a 97% higher response rate than emails. Furthermore, best practice states users are more likely to be nurtured from new to advanced if they’re fed a balanced diet of omnichannel notifications..

The Differences Between UX Writing and Content Strategy

The biggest takeaway in my experience (TL;DR) — content strategists tend to focus on big picture content while UX writers tend to get into the minutia of the details. Despite this, the skills for both roles often overlap and both roles require collaboration across departments.

The true take-away is that good writers have skills they can use across content roles. They also understand that writing doesn’t usually happen in a bubble and great writing is the result of great collaboration between teams, stakeholders, clients and users. So, I guess the true question isn’t “what are the differences between UX writing and content strategy” but rather, “what skills do I need to succeed at either of them.”