4 min
Workplace Culture: How to Make Hard Conversations Easier
Even people with considerable power — owners, CEOs, board chairs — are often reluctant to have the tough talks that are required for them to achieve the outcomes they desire.
Articles
5 min
How to Improve Creativity and Performance by Optimizing Your Brain
The human brain is not wired to have an "on" and "off" switch for work and play—and operating as if it were will deplete one’s energy and creativity.
5 min
Five Tips for Designing Better Conversational Interfaces
From chatbots to intelligent assistants, conversation interfaces are changing the way that people interact with their computers, and designers have a unique opportunity to shape this medium at the ground level. Like all emerging tech, best practices are still being developed, but here at Blink we’ve had the opportunity to design a few of our own and learned a lot along the way.
17 min
Object Modeling for Designers: An Introduction
As a user experience designer, it can feel as though I am waging an on-going, never-ending battle against complexity, especially when working on enterprise systems. A popular route to simplify an experience is to implement a design system. Design systems are essential, but what I hope to show in this article is that a design system alone — particularly if it’s primarily a component level design system — does not guarantee a simple, consistent experience.
2 min
Redshift Digital Joins Blink for a Golden Gate Future
It is with great anticipation and excitement that I announce that the well-known, high-end, wildly creative, and super fun San Francisco UX studio, Redshift is joining forces with Blink!
5 min
Getting in the Mood: 9 Tips for Better Moodboards
Working as a visual designer, I've learned to use moodboards to successfully pitch concepts to our internal team and clients. Moodboards are more than selecting images that specify type, color, texture, etc. At a higher level, a moodboard should express specific feelings and attributes.
3 min
Better Together: User Research and Analytics
Incorporating analytics into UX processes and research methods can add value in many ways. Project teams should use a combination of different data types to consistently measure data (in the wild) about usability and user behavior.
6 min
How Evidence-driven Design Supports Innovation
At Blink, we believe every interaction can be made meaningful if designed with a deep understanding of human behavior. The evidence we uncover through research drives our design process.
6 min
Hiring a User Experience Design Firm
Thinking of working with a user experience (UX) design firm? You may not know where to start.
6 min
The Benefits of Recreating Physical Products and Spaces in the Lab
We often perform tests on digital devices such as mobile phones, tablets, and computers. However, there are times when we need to observe user behavior that extends beyond a screen – and this always excites us!
10 min
How UX Can Help IoT Products, Part 2
In this follow-up we’ll be diving deeper into some of the specifics of what makes a great user experience for IoT products, focusing on the critical areas of onboarding, support, and security.
12 min
How UX Can Help IoT Products, Part 1
Smart homes. IoT. Connected devices. VR. What happens when buzzy, emerging technologies begin to infiltrate the everyday? Will consumers face a frustrating gunfight-style showdown with new products, or will they discover a frictionless setup process and experience a product that enhances their life? It all depends on how much effort you put into UX.
9 min
Top Five UX Opportunities in Digital Health
Here are five key UX opportunity areas healthcare systems are looking at for improving the patient/provider experience.
12 min
A UX Journey Through Airline Apps
I decided to look at some of the big names in airlines to better understand how well they support users trying to book a flight through their mobile apps (full disclosure, Blink has done work for both Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines).
5 min
9 Tips for Bringing Mobile UX to the Enterprise
If you—a business analyst, solutions architect, IT project manager—have limited UX resources or experience but need to design a mobile experience for your internal applications, we’re here to help with nine handy tips.
10 min
Our 8 Recommendations for Building a UX Research Program
Katie Greiner, UX Researcher at Blink makes recommendations on how to create a solid research practice within a new company.
8 min
Three Tips for Agile UX Research
Here are three tips to embrace the constraints and keep UX research as a fundamental part of Agile.
3 min
Tips & Tricks for Field Research: Intercept Studies
You may wonder what situations are best suited for intercepts and how one would successfully accomplish this type of research. Well, look no further, we have put together an intercept field research guide covering the basics.
8 min
Collaborating and delivering design on enterprise projects
Here are some things we've learned during enterprise projects about navigating complexity, collaborating with stakeholders, and handing design off to development teams.
5 min
Developing Hardware With Natural User Interfaces
Here are five things we think about, discuss, and practice when we're working in the domain of hardware and natural user interfaces (NUI).
7 min
7 Questions to Ask When Choosing a UX Consulting Company
If you're looking for a new UX partner to help you move your product or business forward, here's where to start.
10 min
Five Design Tools for Voice UX
The number of products with a voice component grows daily – just look at the recent announcements of Google Home, the Amazon Echo Dot, and Samsung’s acquisition of Viv. Yet it’s hard to find examples of design tools and artifacts in the voice UX space.
4 min
Why UX teams need diversity
The best UX professionals and teams have a diversity of skills in their arsenals that they use to research, design, and communicate effective design decisions.
7 min
Target These Three Innate Needs to Improve User Engagement
We set design objectives for creating engaging products that will keep a user’s attention, encourage task completion, and be enjoyable to use. However, of those objectives, we find “enjoyable to use” the hardest to design for and measure. This is in large part because humans perceive experiences differently – what one person thinks is clever and clear, someone else may see as complex and opaque.