UI/UX Articles and Interesting Tidbits of the Week

April//5//2019

Here are some interesting finds on UI/UX of the week!

1.https://designmodo.com/transactional-emails/
Transactional E-mails. Another relevant and detailed article on how to build effective e-mail/newsletters. With e-mail communications being of paramount importance when establishing contact with customers, this article provides insight and tips for how to build e-mail campaigns that are substantial, effective and tested. Highlight of the article includes:

“Here’s some more general advice for specific types of transactional emails. For welcome emails, use as much information as possible. Provide links, explain why you are the best, make the onboarding process clear by using visual cues, etc. Show advantages of your company supported by backlinks to corresponding landing pages. With the most popular «Reset password» email, get straight to business by providing the exact link as well as adding login credentials. Here you can include special offers or fresh news as an added bonus. For new comment notifications, use all the personal information that is available plus an avatar. You can also add links to hot discussions.”

2.https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/28/smarter-living/productivity-isnt-about-time-management-its-about-attention-management.html
Attention Management. Interesting article from the New York Times and writer Adam Grant, focused on Productivity, Time Management, and how these activities are actually deeply connected with the concept of Attention Management. The article also offers considerations on the relationship between Productivity and Creativity, something crucial and deeply associated with designers work. Highlight of the article includes:

“My favorite part of attention management is the when. Most of our productivity challenges are with tasks that we don’t want to do but that we need to do. For years, I thought the way to handle those tasks was to do them right after the most interesting tasks so the energy would spill over. Then my colleague Jihae Shin and I ran a study in a Korean department store and found that when employees had a highly interesting task, they actually performed worse on their most boring tasks.”

3.https://medium.com/down-the-rabbit-hole/replacing-personas-with-characters-aa72d3cf6c69
Replacing Personas with Characters. An extremely relevant article, well worth revisiting, one that tackles head on the relationship between the concepts of Personas and Characters. The article advocates the usage of the latter, since it indicates that this term, and what it stands for, in actuality provides further insight into the users process and decision making considerations. Impeccable in its scope and structure, it’s well worth a read. Highlight of the article includes:

“Over the years, many people have recognized that Personas can cause more problems than they solve. To fix this, designers began making Personas bigger and more rich. Some Personas can be 1–2 typed pages which meticulously describe attributes of these imaginary customers. Yet, no amount of colorful attributes can fill the gaps our brains will automatically fill when reading Personas. These missing gaps are the causalities which drove the customer to consume a particular product. When reading a Persona, the brain craves a story that ties everything together. If the story lacks causality, it will struggle to create that story, and will eventually just make up it’s own causalities — the WYSIATI effect.”