One of the most common questions in visual design is: “Should the button be on the left or the right?” It depends on where you have created visual “edges”.

The Axis of Interaction

The Axis of Interaction is the imaginary "edge" your eye follows naturally. The closer something is to the Axis, the more visible it is to the user. While we’re focusing on one chunk of content, the other chunks of content effectively become invisible.

The Fold

One of the most popular old-school misconceptions is about “The Fold” which is the part of your design that is visible before the user scrolls.

Everything above The Fold will get maximum visibility. However, you can expect 60-80% of users to scroll if they expect to find something useful below the fold. Whatever is above The Fold should inform users about what is below The Fold. If user’s don’t know what is down there, they might not be interested enough to find out.

It is popular right now to use huge background images at the top of the page. If it looks like the site ends at The Fold, people might leave instead of scrolling. And if you need to add a graphic that says “scroll down” your design is probably weak.

Images

Many UX designers treat images as if they are not fu...

Different people use sites and apps for different reasons. If you design for the wrong behavior, you won’t get the results you want. Hence it's important to plan out your user flows keeping these three user behaviors in mind. Briefly,

Browsing is when you go to a store like Ikea to look at all the model rooms “just to get ideas”.

Searching is when you go to Ikea looking for a new sofa that will fit in your small apartment.

Discovery is when you find the sofa you’re looking for, and also buy those clever little nested end-tables because they are so damn clever and nested, and go well with the sofa.

Browsing

When you visit an online store just because their products look nice or because you’re following trends, you are browsing.

A browsing user will glance quickly at most of the i...

The first step in designing a real solution is the general structure of the thing. This is where Information Architecture comes in.

Information Architecture

Information Architecture (IA) can be relatively simple with a small project, and incredibly complicated with a large project.

IA is invisible. To work with it, we need to draw a Site Map. Here is a simple example:

After creating Empathy maps and User Journey maps, the next step is to look for patterns in your observations and create a few personas for your project.

Creating User Personas

First of all, let’s nail down what personas or profiles are NOT:

• Personality types
• Demographics
• Characters in your “brand story”
• Stereotypes based on your experience
• Shallow or 1-dimensional
• Concepts
• Predictions

So what is a persona / user profile?

It is easy to imagine every user excitedly reading every letter you write and every pixel you make. Get over it, because real users don’t do that. They scan. Scanning means they only stop to read when something catches their eye. So today we will learn about scanning patterns:

The Z-Pattern

Let’s start with the most boring design I can imagine: an entire newspaper page of solid text. All one story. No headlines. No images. No breaks or pull quotes. Just text, in even columns, from corner-to-corner.

Congratulations for having made through the UX list. You are almost done, and hopefully you feel comfortable exploring the field of UX a little more by yourself now. In this article, we will list down some UX Project ideas that may be helpful for you to get started. At this point, you probably want to fill an empty portfolio and get into user research without too much risk or cost. Here's a recipe you can follow:

1. Download 10 professional apps in the app store. This will be even better if they are not the most common apps, but still good.
2. Create a short list of tasks that can be achieved in each app.
3. Find 5 people that are willing to give you some of their time. You don’t have to do this all at once. Spread it out — people are busy and have stuff to do
4. Get each of the 5 people to try each of the 10 apps, and do the tasks you decided on.
5. Do not help. Do not give them instructions...