5-Card Friday
A Bi-Weekly Update from the ITS UX Team
Wordle UX: Sometimes a game just feels good
Every once in a generation something beautifully simple comes along and revolutionizes our lives: the paperclip, Post-its, the iPod, Wordle. Wordle?
Flip the card over to learn more about the UX behind this popular game.
Wordle UX
Wordle started taking off in mid-December 2021, and grew to such a popular game that it was bought by The New York Times months later in the "low seven figures."
One of the reasons why Wordle became so popular so fast is from its simple UX. The UX principles that make Wordle so great include:
- The instructions are simple
- There's no barrier to entry
- the animations are smooth
- It's not designed for addiction
- It's unspoiled camaraderie
Learn more by following the link to the full article.
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Comprehensive Anatomy of Design Thinking Workshops
Storyboarding, dot voting, customer journey map workshops... You may have heard terms like this and wondering what they are, how they're used by UX professionals, and how they are different.
Flip the card over to learn more.
Design Thinking Workshops
Not many design projects run without colorful sticky notes and team exercises on the whiteboard these days. But the number of workshop types scares! Empathy mapping, value proposition, customer journey, personas, business model, design sprint, etc. And these are just several "classic" examples without countless derivations and mixtures.
But I’ve got good news: all workshops are atomic–just like design systems. Anyone can easily grasp the nature of any complex workshop by learning its elementary parts and key principles.
Learn all about the different types of design workshops in the full article.
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How Dropbox Onboards New Users
Dropbox is a cloud storage service that lets you save files online and sync them to your devices.
Learn about the UX that Dropbox uses to onboard new users on the back of this card.
Case Study on Dropbox Onboarding
Go through this case study on how Dropbox onboards new users to learn some of the UX techniques used by this popular file hosting service.
From the text they use on the onboarding screens, to the features and functionality they offer along the way, to the user interface design, the pros and cons of Dropbox's design for onboarding new users is examined in detail.
View Case Study
Updates to the ITS UX Team's Pattern Library
The ITS UX Team has been building out a pattern library for several years now.
Learn more on the back of this card about some of the newer updates.
Updates to the ITS UX Team's Pattern Libary
The IUX Team's Pattern Library is a collection of user interface design elements and components which are used for the frontend design of APA’s web applications. The components promote the branding of APA and meet the standards of responsiveness and accessibility.
The Pattern Library also generates a CSS file which is used in several web applications, including GradStudy and the Course Adoption System application.
We are currently up to version 1.4.5 of the Pattern Library. Much of the recent updates have been cleaning up older files and moving "usage rules" from out of the .SCSS pages and into the HTML demo files so that they do not print to the generated CSS file.
Coming up, we plan to add styles and usage rules for a "text button" that we have used on several sites, button groups, and designs for responsive tables and tabs.
Visit the Pattern Library
Calculating ROI for Design Projects
Demonstrating the value of design improvements and other UX work can be done by calculating the return-on-investment (ROI). Usually you compare before/after measures of relevant metrics, but sometimes you have to convert a user metrics into a business-oriented KPI (key performance indicator).
View this video and related article from NN/g to learn more about calculating ROI for design projects.