Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/abduzeedo/~3/LUsnlfowdQY/game-design-colorful-word-galaxy

Game Design for the Colorful Word Galaxy

abduzeedo
Aug 10, 2018

NestStrix Studio shared a beautiful game design project on their Behance profile. It is for three iOS games, Word Puzzle, Quiz, Sudoku. They were really nice to share a bit of the behind the scenes. You can see the evolution from the interaction design point of view, including wireframes, to the visual design with the style up to the iconography. I love the friendly look they achieved with a 3Dish cartoon look. Everything feels very inviting to touch and interact, and that’s one of the reasons I am a fan of this project and game design in general.

NestStrix studio is a team of illustrators with a lot of experience. They love to create game stuff especially game characters and game backgrounds. Their portfolio showcase work they’ve done with companies and organizations all over the world. For more information make sure to check out their website.

Game design

You can also follow them on:

Dribbble
Artstation
Instagram
Facebook

 

 

game design

Original Source: https://inspiredm.com/yootheme-pro-review-powerful-theme-and-page-builder-for-wordpress-and-joomla/

Meta: This YOOtheme review focuses on YOOtheme Pro features, functionalities and the corresponding pricing, plus overall efficacy.

For now, forget about all the fancy sales language you know. Or your products’ amazing and exceptional features. There’s only one thing that will make your traffic stay immediately they land on your site.

Yes, you’re dead right. It all comes down to your web design.

And the numbers are astonishing. Basically, 94% of your traffic would not trust a site with poor design. Chances are, they’ll just leave to engage other businesses with better-designed sites.

That’s why I’ve always been extremely keen about the themes and templates I adopt for my sites, especially if they come from third-party providers.

Speaking of which, WordPress users have always been lucky when it comes to this. We have a wide range of options to choose from, including dedicated theme providers, and page-builders that also come with their own set of professionally-designed themes.

And you know what? The providers are not having it easy. Each additional tool means increased competition. So, of course, they have to keep reinventing themselves to provide better, well-optimized themes, layouts, and templates to survive.

Now, I’ve followed a couple of promising services through this journey, and I have to admit that YOOtheme has outstandingly improved its themes quite substantially over the years.

While I knew that the solution was in for the long haul, I never, not even once, predicted that they would ultimately go for the long ball.

Let’s face it. YOOtheme Pro caught many of us by surprise. Because although they are closely tied, themes and page building are two utterly different ballgames.

But guess what? That’s exactly what makes this move exceptionally intriguing. According to their team, YOOtheme Pro is the most powerful theme and page builder for WordPress and Joomla. They are not playing around here. They mean business.

So, let’s see how much of that they can actually deliver. This YOOtheme review focuses on YOOtheme Pro features, functionalities and the corresponding pricing, plus overall efficacy.

How good is it, really?

But first, let’s see what YOOtheme is all about.

YOOtheme Reviews: Overview

YOOtheme Pro might be new. But the company has been around for quite some time. For longer than a decade, to be precise.

Joomla and WordPress themes plus plugins might have been their principal focus all along. But you’d be mistaken to assume that that’s pretty much all they’ve been doing.

That said, have you ever heard of Ulkit?  It’s basically an open source front-end framework for web interface development.

If not, what about Pagekit? That’s another open source solution, which is essentially a modern intuitive CMS.

Well, YOOtheme is also the brains behind these two projects. Both of them created from their Hamburg, Germany headquarters. Quite a number of remarkable solutions to their name, to say the least.

In retrospect, the first move was made back in 2007 by Steffan and Sascha, in one of their basements. YOOtheme has since grown exponentially, to host more than 150,000 customers. Ulkit has also managed to attract an admirably extensive fan-base, going by the half a million sites it has helped build.

The experts and creatives at YOOtheme continue striving to develop what they call “most cutting-edge web software”. Hence the introduction of YOOtheme Pro to further empower users on WordPress and Joomla.

So, how about assessing just how powerful it actually is?

Well, let’s dive in.

YOOtheme Pro Reviews: Features
Page Builder

Let’s start off at the top. With what is considered the core offering on YOOtheme Pro.

To keep everything simple and intuitive, the page builder is built around the well-known drag-and-drop functionality. This makes the whole design interface clean and pleasantly ideal for both developers and inexperienced builders.

The subsequent editing process is equally straightforward. You can systematically structure your pages into grids, rows, and columns to create an attractive layout that visitors can easily follow through.

I’m particularly fond of the masonry effect option, which allows users to establish neat layouts with multiple columns. The resultant gap-free system even looks great on pages with varying grid cell lengths.

If you find this a bit too monotonous, you can throw in the parallax effect to come up with an extensively dynamic page outlook.

When you’re done with the general structure, you can shift to edit the finer details that ultimately determine a page’s functions and features. For this, thankfully, YOOtheme Pro provides not just the basic element options like “Image” and “Heading”, but also advanced ones like “Slideshow”.

The slideshow element, for instance, offers five different systems of animations, optimized for both PC and mobile. Plus, you can embed both videos and images to achieve a distinctively refreshing and modern website.

And guess what? Using all these tools doesn’t require any coding experience. You can have a website in just minutes without hiring a developer.

But, don’t get me wrong. While it’s possible to create a page in a couple of minutes, you should be extremely careful with the whole process. A perfect, well-optimized page is best created when you put your mind to it, thinking through all the possible options.

In the layout library, for example, it’s advisable to analyze all the premium layouts to select the most suitable one. Well, of course, this is easier said than done since YOOtheme has engaged a team of professional to churn out attractive and trendy templates. You’ll possibly be spoilt for choice here since most of them look like they can fit perfectly on any website.

To help you sort through the entire heap, YOOtheme Pro allows you to filter by topic. Consequently, you’ll be able to conveniently select a layout that suits your preferences and business needs. And changing the general outlook of your WordPress site is as simple as a single click.

Now, even with a wide array of professionally designed layouts and templates, it’s impossible to address all possible user preferences. So, to work around this, YOOtheme pro also supports extensive customization. You can adjust pretty much anything- from colors, typography, element sizes, fonts, spacing, and position, to global settings for PC and mobile.

Local Google Fonts

And speaking of font customization, YOOtheme handles Google fonts locally. If you choose to proceed with any of the Google font styles, the corresponding files are automatically downloaded to your site’s server and embedded into the CSS.

But, why is this even a big deal?

Normally, introducing an extra font, admittedly, would be a good thing. And although this would be welcome, admit it.  It wouldn’t be exciting enough for a bottle of champagne.

But Google Fonts are different in every sense of the word. Storing them locally, for starters, drastically improves your Google page loading speed. The browser doesn’t have to make a roundtrip to the Google servers because everything is available locally.

Secondly, it sorts out the whole issue of GDPR-compliance. Your traffic’s privacy is adequately assured as a result.

Integrated Unsplash Library

It might seem like a small and negligible problem at first. But, when you come to think of it, finding ideal stock images has got to be one of the biggest challenges for website owners.

We’d all probably be walking around with digital cameras, looking for picturesque shots for our sites. Or maybe steal a couple of copyrighted ones, which would, of course, invite Google’s penalty whips. But then sites like Unsplash came to the rescue with an extensive array of stock images.

Now, sourcing for images from Unsplash, for most site owners, requires you to first download to your PC before uploading to the site. Not much of a problem for small sites. But it comes quite a hassle when you’re dealing with multiple pages.

Thankfully, YOOtheme Pro has made things much easier by bringing the library to you. Unsplash is now seamlessly integrated into the service’s media manager, allowing you to search and lift images directly. You can also filter the images and scan through the various collections.

Finally, instead of downloading the images to your PC, they are simply added to your site’s media folder when you save your layout. It really is that simple.

Developer Support

YOOtheme is simple, with a solid list of elements, and is universally customizable. Plus, of course, the drag-and-drop functionality is intuitive, and should go well with the range of layouts available.

Now, that pretty much covers everything standard users need to comfortably build a site without any coding experience. User-friendliness and flexibility.

But that’s not all that YOOtheme provides. One interesting fact about it is that it doesn’t lock out experienced coders.

Well, you could use the standard page building functionalities like regular users. Or alternatively, capitalize YOOtheme Pro’s expandable and modular framework to code your way to a well-customized site.

This provision essentially allows you to override all elements, and introduce your own custom themes and layouts.

And since it’s not always a smooth process, YOOtheme Pro provides comprehensive documentation with precise details on all the customization options. It should come in handy before you finally learn the ropes.

Overall Features

YOOtheme Pro also provides:

One-click updates
WooCommerce integration for ecommerce
Numerous blog options
Customized footers
Three mobile header layouts
16 header layout options
User-friendly color picker
More than 125 icons
Global user interface components
WebP image format
Automatically generated scrsets
Lazy-loading images
Max width breakpoint
Mobile optimization
Extensive style customizer
Modernized layouts
Thumbnail navigation

YOOtheme Pro Reviews: Pricing

Sadly, there is no free option here. You have to pay to use YOOtheme Pro.

And that brings us to another downside. For a service that doesn’t come with a free package, we expect at least a limited free-trial period. But YOOtheme is having none of that either.

The only thing you get is a 30 day money-back guarantee period. If you don’t like its offerings, you can request for a full refund.

That said, there are three standard packages:

Basic- € 49

Risk-free guarantee
Technical support
Regular updates
Access to all themes
Subscription for 3 months
Updates for 1 site

Standard- € 99

All Basic features
Subscription for 12 months
Updates for 3 sites

Developer- € 299

All Standard features
Unsplash integration
For WordPress and Joomla
Subscription for 12 months
Updates for unlimited sites

Who Should Consider Using YOOtheme Pro

To recap, let’s first review the key takeaways:

Basically, 94% of your traffic would not trust a site with poor design.
YOOtheme has outstandingly improved its themes quite substantially over the years.
According to their team, YOOtheme Pro is the most powerful theme and page builder for WordPress and Joomla.
To keep everything simple and intuitive, the page builder is built around the well-known drag-and-drop functionality. This makes the whole design interface clean and pleasantly ideal for both developers and inexperienced builders.
YOOtheme Pro provides not just the basic element options like “Image” and “Heading”, but also advanced ones like “Slideshow”.
If you choose to proceed with any of the Google font styles, the corresponding files are automatically downloaded to your site’s server and embedded into the CSS.
Unsplash is now seamlessly integrated into YOOtheme Pro media manager, allowing you to search and lift images directly.
You could also capitalize YOOtheme Pro’s expandable and modular framework to code your way to a well-customized site. This provision essentially allows you to override all elements, and introduce your own custom themes and layouts.
YOOtheme Pro comes with a 30 day money-back guarantee period. If you don’t like its offerings, you can request for a full refund.

Evidently, YOOtheme Pro attempts to cater to both standard users and developers. It combines simplicity for non-coders with modular flexibility for experienced coders. Quite a tricky balance there, but so far so good for this solution.

At the moment, YOOtheme Pro is ideal for standard websites and blogs. Ecommerce blogs, on the other hand, are better off with services that come with specialized tools for building and managing stores.

All in all, I have to admit that YOOtheme is doing very well for a relatively new page builder, although it still has a couple of features to catch up on. But going by the frequency of new feature rollouts, I predict that YOOtheme could possibly be the next big thing in the WordPress page building space. For now, let’s wait and see.

The post YOOtheme Pro Review: Strong Theme and Page Builder for WordPress and Joomla appeared first on Inspired Magazine.

Original Source: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2018/08/20-best-new-portfolios-august-2018/

Ladies, Gentlemen, and Our Secret Reptilian Overlords, I asked for more color in last month’s article, and you have delivered. It’s August, now, and to distract myself from the oppressive heat, I have gathered some 20 of these more colorful designs together for your perusal.

So as you might guess, there’s a fair bit of variety this month. There’s still some good old monochromatic minimalism for those of you who like that, so never fear. There’s just a bit more balance, this time around.

Note: I’m judging these sites by how good they look to me. If they’re creative and original, or classic but really well-done, it’s all good to me. Sometimes, UX and accessibility suffer. For example, many of these sites depend on JavaScript to display their content at all; this is a Bad Idea, kids. If you find an idea you like and want to adapt to your own site, remember to implement it responsibly.

karlssonwilker

The karlssonwilker agency site is a blow to the eyeballs. Whether or not that’s a good thing is going to be down to personal taste; but I literally can’t remember the last time I saw an actual animated kaleidoscope effect used on the Web.

I definitely can’t remember the last time I saw one used this well. There’s also a rather interesting use of flowchart-style layout on the “About” page. Yeah. Flowcharts.

Platform: WordPress

iconwerk

iconwerk is the first icon designer portfolio that I’ve seen in a while. It’s a meta work of genius. Before you can click on individual projects, you’re given a grid of images that contain icons, clients lists, and other snapshots of their work, but also kind of look like icons in their own right.

That’s right, they put icons in your icons, so you can look at icons while you look at icons.

Platform: Static Site

Humbert & Poyet

Humbert & Poyet is an architecture firm, so expect a lot of the usual: animation everywhere, elegant serif type, and text overlapping onto other elements. As is usual though, it’s all about how these elements are combined. In this case, the result is a visual treat that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Platform: Static Site

Juicymo

Juicymo is a mobile app developer, and their site goes all in on the flashy visuals you might expect from them. We get gradients galore, a lot of diagonal lines (a personal favorite of mine), rounded corners, and overall it’s just bright and colorful.

Really, it’s as if Web 2.0 and flat design had a baby. This makes it stand out, and I rather like it. Man, I never thought I’d miss rounded corners.

Platform: Static Site

Effectlab

Effectlab brings us back to that good old flat design with strong type and animated geometry on the home page. Further in, we get some overlapping elements, and a strong use of their admittedly limited color scheme.

To bring us back to the typography, I haven’t seen a lot of Greek websites. But even so, the text feels beautifully rendered, and some of the more rune-like characters absolutely bring out the nerd in me.

Platform: Static Site

Jveb Studio

Jveb Studio uses light animation and background illustration to fantastic effect. With a clearly modern-yet-artistic style, this is a simple-looking site that nonetheless has a fair few moving parts under the hood. Give it a look.

Platform: WordPress

Buzzworthy Studio

Buzzworthy Studio showcases their projects with a list of names, like many sites do nowadays. Overall, their style is clean, playful, and very marketing-friendly, which works for them. Animations is clearly emphasized, but not overwhelming, and I particularly like the way they use color.

Platform: Static Site

Fortnum & Fox

Fortnum & Fox also embrace the dual-color background, but takes more of an earth-tone approach for the most part. But instead of only using this theme on the home page, the site doubles down on the dual-background theme, featuring it prominently when displaying portfolio items.

As presentation sites go, it looks elegant and fancy. It takes some inspiration from print design, without feeling trapped by its inspiration.

Platform: WordPress

Eric Van Holtz

Eric Van Holtz’ portfolio goes big and bold with both color and type, combined with a light dash of animation, and a penchant for those diagonal lines I like so much. It’s a design that doesn’t hold back, and so is memorable.

Platform: Static Site

Salva Lopez

Salva Lopez’ portfolio seems to embrace the “split website” theme as well, with all of his photography organized in “personal” and “commissioned” categories. It’s a simple site with little text and lots of galleries, but that’s basically what you want from a photography portfolio, no?

Platform: WordPress

2xElliott

2xEllliott is a design consultancy, so their site’s aesthetic embraces that sort of corporate-elegant feel we’ve come to expect from that sort of agency. There’s a heavy emphasis on imagery, art direction, and not using more pages than you have to.

By that I mean that clicking on navigation items like “News” or “Contact” will open up a side panel to show that content, since there’s not enough of either to warrant their own pages. It’s a bit JS-dependent for my taste, but I otherwise like the approach.

Platform: WordPress

Canopy Films

Canopy Films’ site takes a highly grid-based approach to showing off its videos, and the grid itself is… animated? I’ll be honest, I’m not sure how that’s done; but it’s actually a pretty cool effect. And that’s coming from Mr. I-wish-sites-depended-less-on-animation. The rest of the site is fairly clean and modern, and is just generally worth a look.

Platform: Static Site

JOJX

JOJX goes for that dead-simple minimalism that was everywhere in last month’s article. Since it’s a portfolio site for directors, that works just fine. It’s just you, some navigation, a video, and a title. What more do you need?

Platform: WordPress

Humble

Humble takes much the same approach to showing off its video portfolio as JOJX, above. They use more color, though, with a bit of asymmetry and element overlap thrown in. It’s an excellent example of how two designs that are very similar on paper can have wildly different personalities.

Platform: WordPress

David Collins Studio

The David Collins Studio site takes me way back to like, a month or so ago, with its serif type, and minimalist collage approach to the art of the portfolio. It’s simple and elegant, and fairly effective.

Platform: Static Site (?)

Barkas

When you first load this portfolio up, it kind of feels like a spreadsheet that’s much prettier than it ought to be. As someone who kind of likes spreadsheets to begin with, that’s actually a compliment.

I’m not a huge fan of the cursor change, but otherwise it’s a good-looking portfolio that gets straight to the point.

Platform: WordPress

Pigment

Pigment shows off their work in a decidedly modernist fashion, with lots of white space and good old black borders. I do find their two-column approach to the actual portfolio items interesting. It looks like a good way to prioritize some of your work while not quite hiding the rest of it.

I also kind of like the way it looks like most of the content is “floating” above the rest of the page/background. It’s an effect you don’t often see in such a relatively flat design. It’s depth without any trace of skeuomorphism.

Platform: WordPress

Pierrick Calvez

Pierrick Calvez’ site is pretty much peak minimalism, but it’s good-looking for all that. I appreciate the way the zoom function works on individual portfolio images, and the typographical style of the whole thing.

Platform: Webflow

U-P

U-P is hard to classify. It’s so reminiscent of the Wild West days of the Internet that it’s almost brutalist. And yet, it looks good in a way that is sometimes a little cramped. Despite its design roots, it follows fairly modern usability conventions. It works, even if it sometimes seems like it shouldn’t.

That’s always impressive.

Platform: Static Site

Dexter Navy

Dexter Navy’s site is an odd duck, and I quite like it. Some photographers and videographers have collage-style sites. Others do that “preview-on-hover-over-the-title” thing. This one manages to combine them both in a riot of color and movement that still manages to feel purposeful.

The photography and video are mixed together delightfully. I also quite like the horizintal-scrolling image galleries for each project.

Platform: Static Site

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Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Designrfix/~3/947wk4xs5Zw/differences-between-adobe-photoshop-and-adobe-illustrator

Adobe Photoshop Adobe Photoshop is a graphics editor tool that enhances the work of graphic designers. This tool revolutionized the scenario of raster graphics and is considered as the benchmark of graphic editing. The very literal usage of the term “Photoshop,” as a verb denotes its global popularity and significance. Regular updates in the form […]

The post Differences between Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator appeared first on designrfix.com.

Original Source: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/08/ux-lifecycle-attracting-user/

Attracting Users To Evaluate Your Product

Attracting Users To Evaluate Your Product

Joe Leech

2018-08-05T23:30:38+01:00
2018-08-07T12:41:07+00:00

(This is a sponsored article.) The entire ecosystem in which we are designing and researching the user experience is shifting and changing constantly. Traditional UX skills need to be expanded to meet the reality of the modern digital ecosystem. Understanding the user is essential to the job, but you also need to understand the wider user context. How do they discover they have a need? How do they find and evaluate a product to meet that need?

This three-part series outlines the three phases of the product life cycle, the future of UX, and the skills and approach you’ll need to design modern digital products.

Part 1: Attraction
Going out there to get users to evaluate your product.
Part 2: Activation
Signing up, onboarding users, asking for payment.
Part 3: Retention
Encouraging users to come back and keep using and paying for your product.

Due to their technical skills, creativity and deep understanding of user needs, UXers are in a perfect position to apply marketing, SEO and growth-hacking tools and processes to their work.

For focused UX efforts, it’s all about knowing user outcomes at each stage of their journey.

1. Attraction

Large preview

Getting Started

The days of changing the text on one button and having a dramatic effect on the user experience are behind us. Luckily, we have the processes and skills in our UX toolbox to meet this changing world.

More often than not, there are many small usability and experience issues throughout a user journey that cumulatively create a poor experience.

Mapping out the full user life cycle will help us discover and fix these problems. It’s often the case that a problem at the very beginning of the user journey only surfaces when a user drops out further along in the product life cycle.

We need data to help us understand how UX professional can improve performance. We’ll need user research data, business metrics, data to frame decisions made when improving UX, and metrics to help us understand the business values.

Marketing metrics tracked by team employing growth hacking. (Source). (Large preview)

Plotting Out the Journey

When we talk about the attraction phase, we’re talking about users discovering they have a need, discovering our product and visiting our website to see if our product meets their needs.

Within the life cycle, we can split the larger three phases into smaller phases to help us plan our approach. In this case, we can use Philip Kotler’s model (expanded to six steps by Bryony Thomas):

Awareness: realizing they have a need;
Interest: looking for something to help with that need;
Evaluation: looking at products that help with their need;
Trial: trying the product to see if it meets their need;
Adoption: choosing a product and using it for a while;
Loyalty: deciding to continue using the product or switching to a different one.

We’re interested in the first three parts, which fall under the attraction phase.

Large preview

We’ll look into trial, adoption and loyalty in future parts of this series.

We’ll use the customer life cycle to align user needs and expectations — what they want and when they need it — to business metrics. We’ll also look at a tool and UX process to use at each step on the journey.

As we move through the process we’ll use the example of a money management app that helps people understand what they are spending and save money.

1. Awareness: They Understand That They Have A Need

The first battle isn’t fought on the ground but in the mind of the customer.
It isn’t fought with your built out solution but instead with an offer.

— The Science of How Customers Buy Anything

This is most challenging phase because there is very little that is concrete in terms of user need.

Users can’t articulate what they want, but by looking at how they complete a task or the context of their life, we can identify the problems they face, how they address (or don’t!) the problems now, and potential product features to address the problems.

The goal here is to identify unmet, hidden user needs. This is something Amazon, for example, is very good at.

The secret to Amazon’s success? Be the first to uncover hidden needs. Jeff Bezos, founder of amazon.com. (Large preview)

How To Identify A Need And A Solution Using Fro-Tos

A good technique to use here is to plot the current problem as articulated by the user and then the result of that problem being solved.

Al Ramadan, in his book Play Bigger, named this overarching science category design.

Category design takes people on a journey. We refer to it as creating a from/to. Actually, we use a shorthand term: frotos. Remember, a great new category is one that solves a problem people didn’t know they had, or solves an obvious problem no one thought could be solved.

You have to help them move from the way they used to think, to a new frame of reference. This is what it means to condition the market. You have to first define and market the problem — and only then can you help people understand that you can solve the problem better than anyone else.

The “from” is the problem the user is facing. The “to” is the solution your product offers. The solution described here are the words the user uses to solve the problem.

If we take the example of our money management tool, in user research, we would identify the from as:

I don’t have much money left at the end of the month. Why?

The user then identifies the to as:

I need to something to help me analyze what I spend.

Put the two together and you have frotos: a definition of the problem and an articulation of the solution.

There is a slidedeck that has a good overview of Play Bigger and its techniques.

Bonus: You can also use the jobs-to-be-done timeline as a great tool to map the intent phase.

User research helps us uncover the hidden needs and identify the frotos.

User Research To Uncover Frotos And Other Useful Details

Traditionally, user research has been focused on the experience of the product. We need to expand user research to include all parts of the user acquisition phase.

It’s not easy to research with users who aren’t yet interacting with you. We can turn to the same tools that we are using to raise awareness to also find users to research with.

Recruit and conduct research with users who might respond to your product’s messaging by using Facebook ads or Google demographic targeting. You can then use a tool like Ethn.io to ask them a few questions to aid with recruitment.

The value in researching users who are in the user acquisition phase is that they don’t bring any preconceptions of your product. In fact, when you are reaching out to users for them to give you feedback, don’t talk much about who you are researching for.

Ethnographic and contextual research is the most useful tool here. Going out and observing users in their homes and offices is a great technique. Watching a user go through a typical task will help you identify their needs. You can’t simply ask users what their unmet needs are because they won’t know. The only true way to get to unmet need is to observe behavior.

With our money management app, we might observe that some potential users under 30 years of age don’t have much money left at the end of the month to save or are curious about how much they spend on coffee.

The user research can also uncover any common identifiable traits (and patterns of behavior) that your users show, such as age-related (for example, they are under 30) or interests they share (love of coffee). We can use these traits to target them in our messaging.

The goal from the user research is to uncover unmet needs and identify the frotos: the from state and the to state.

An example of a froto might be:

FROM
I love coffee, but it can get expensive. I wonder how much I spend a month on coffee?

TO
I need to know how much I spend on expensive luxuries like coffee, so that I can reduce my spend.

We can also use the jobs-to-be-done interview framework to help identify unmet needs.

Journey Maps To Understand The Details

Taking the frotos and other learnings, you can add more detail to the journey by mapping out the steps and behaviors at a granular level.

Niall O’Connor has a great overview of how to build a journey and experience map.

Below is a high-level journey map for our money management app, showing needs mapped against each phase of the life cycle.

In the awareness phase, we can see how the need is quite abstract, but we can clearly see a need for our product. Our money management app can help people understand their current spending. (Large preview)

Personas To Target

Personas are a divisive issue in the UX world. For the purpose of targeting users in the intent stage, we need to know demographic traits and interests.

We can then use tools such as Facebook ads to target the users who will respond to our frotos.

Facebook ad targeting: We can see how easy it is to find the users we are looking for based on their interests and age group. (Large preview)

In Facebook ads, we can target a specific age group who are coffee lovers. We can use this to target users who might be in the market for our product because they might spend a lot on coffee. Let’s roll up our sleeves and start designing the interactive elements to support this behavior.

Prototyping Attraction

Prototyping and wireframing have traditionally been limited to designing just the product. A modern UXer needs to take prototyping into the wider context and design interactions from the very beginning of the user journey. Rapid prototyping interactions at each step of the product life cycle to gather user feedback and validate ideas can save a lot of time, money and effort later.

For our money management app, we’ll design a Facebook ad to target potential users. We know what copy to include in the ad from our frotos.

An example showing how easy it is to create a Facebook ad prototype interaction. (Large preview)

When we get our target users and run user testing on the prototype, we’re testing the entire user experience — from awareness onwards — receiving high-quality UX insights from all parts of the user journey.

The attraction phase is really important for the user experience because it’s where expectations are set. As shown below, we need to use the tools and UX activities at our disposal to design the interactions with our user as we would design the interactions within the product.

An overview of tools and activities to use to improve the UX during the attraction phase. (Large preview)

2. Interest

The interest phase is characterized by the user looking for a product to help with the frotos we identified during the awareness phase.

Here, we’ll be working with our SEO colleagues, which means we UXers need to know the tools and processes that SEO practitioners use to help design the search and discovery journey.

Back To The Experience Map To Review The Interest Phase

We used user research to identify the frotos and the questions and information at each step of the journey.

Large preview

If we take the interest phase, we can see that the user has come to the conclusion they need something to:

Analyze what I spend, and
Manage my money.

We can take these interest statements and look to search and keyword-planning tools to refine the language used.

Using Google’s Keyword Planner:

Google’s Keyword Planner shows the suggested terms to target. (Large preview)

We are offered the following:

After selecting a keyword, we are shown alternatives we might not have considered. (Large preview)

Google’s documentation has some more useful help with the search terms report.

We can see from the related search terms what other words our target audience might type in when looking for our product. These words will help us design and improve the search user experience.

You can also use the free Google keyword research tool from SERPS.com to help define the terms used by your users to describe the problem. The higher the volume, the more likely a person is to search for that term.

A list of related search terms based on our initial query. Also shown is the relative popularity of each term. (Large preview)

We can use these search terms to refine the language we use when building the next part of our prototype.

Design The Ad In Your Prototype Tool

We can use Google’s Keyword Planner to design the interest phase of our prototype. You can update the text and the design will change in real time. This is the best approach because Google is constantly changing the format of paid and organic search listings, and any design templates will be quickly out of date.

Creating the ad in Google’s tool shows a live preview of how it will look. (Large preview)

You can also live prototype the ad in using Google’s tools on desktop and mobile.

You can preview the ad on desktop and mobile. (Large preview)

Our prototype now contains details for the first two subphases of the attraction part of the user life cycle.

Now that we have generated interest in the product, we need to start looking at how our user will evaluate our product to see if it is something they would want to invest time in.

3. Evaluation

The evaluation phase is all about the first visit to our website and that all-important first impression.

We need to look at where users are landing from, be it Facebook ads, Google search results or indeed other routes to our product, such as YouTube, Instagram or Pinterest.

Google Analytics can tell us the most common landing pages and where people come from. A report named “Network Referrals” can help.

We can see here that Facebook is major source of inbound traffic. (Large preview)

SiteTuners’ custom Google Analytics report identifies landing pages with a high bounce rate. We can interpret these as pages users are interested in, but users can’t find what they need or the messaging might not resonate with them. This report is fantastic for UXers to find pages that are causing problems and need to be improved.

Google Analytics shows pages with high-traffic and high-bounce rates (i.e. problematic pages). (Large preview)

Quick Sprout’s tool is great for evaluating landing pages to give you some clues as to why the page we identified from the custom report is failing.

Prototype The Landing Page

User research has helped us define what our users need at each step, and we’ve mapped out those needs. If it’s an existing product, then we know which landing pages are causing us problems.

The journey map can help us determine the type of copy to include on the landing page — what the user is expecting to see, what questions they need answering and what concerns they may have.

The three parts of the attraction phase and user questions and information needs. (Large preview)

We can then directly translate the user needs into the design for the landing page.

A quick mockup of the landing page meeting the user questions and information needs. (Large preview)

Understanding and mapping the problems users have, the solutions they need, as well as the questions they have when evaluating will make designing this page a straightforward task. If we have an existing but underperforming landing page, we’ll know what content the user is expecting and can evaluate and recommend what needs to change.

Previously, when prototyping we may have used lorem ipsum text. Now, we don’t need to because we have the copy we need. We can design the calls to action to reflect the problems our users are facing, increasing the likelihood of them using our product. No more need for lorem ipsum!

This landing page is just the start. In the next UX life cycle article, we’ll look at further enhancements.

Here’s more great guidance on How To Design An Effective Mobile Landing Page.

User Research The Journey, Including The Landing Page

We can now use the prototype to user test the whole attraction journey, from initial awareness to evaluation. Another Smashing Magazine article has some great suggestions to help with your user research.

Just Scratching The Surface

We’ve looked at how UXers can learn from other disciplines, such as marketing and SEO, to better understand, research, design and improve the attraction phase of the product life cycle.

If you’d like to learn more, I suggest these great books:

Watertight Marketing
Play Bigger (frotos!)
Researching UX: Analytics

In the next part of the series, we’ll look at the next phase, activation: helping users to sign up, onboard and pay for your product.

This article is part of the UX design series sponsored by Adobe. Adobe XD tool is made for a fast and fluid UX design process, as it lets you go from idea to prototype faster. Design, prototype and share — all in one app. You can check out more inspiring projects created with Adobe XD on Behance, and also sign up for the Adobe experience design newsletter to stay updated and informed on the latest trends and insights for UX/UI design.

(ra, yk, il)