User experience (UX) design is the process of improving user satisfaction with a product by focusing on things like usability and accessibility.
User research is key to discovering the inner workings of your users’ minds – their emotional, organizational, informative needs and desires. These are all super important to creating a user experience that is intuitive and meeting your users’ needs in a way that means they feel loved, cared for and considered. All the deep understanding... View Article
Information architecture (IA) is everywhere. Like the best websites and apps in the digital world, information architecture also brings clarity and understanding to the real world. It helps us navigate complexity and clutter, enables us to get things done more easily even with enjoyment, and reduces our cognitive load as we go about our lives. As... View Article
Some of the team at Optimal Workshop HQ, Wellington, NZ
From left: Andrew Mayfield(CEO), Ben O’Grady(CFO), Seth Strumph(CTO), Meiken Bassant(COO) FEB 8TH, 2022, WELLINGTON NZ: Optimal Workshop, a world leader in information architecture (IA) and digital user experience software, today announced a NZ$10 million investment by New Zealand private equity firm, Pioneer Capital. It’s the first investment for Optimal Workshop, a New Zealand company with... View Article
Andrew Millar is a digital designer by trade and ardent UX advocate by day, as Head of Design at Optimal Workshop. We talk to him about the design challenge of keeping it human in the face of voice-enabled technologies that have created the likes of Siri and Alexa.
Having access to the specialist subscription-based tools you need to do your work is a reasonable thing to expect. But what if you’re relying on someone else’s SaaS account to access what you need? Sounds like a good solution but think again. It’s risky - even fraught. Here are 3 good reasons to avoid sharing login credentials and why you need your own.
Mobile app testing before, during and beyond the design process is essential to ensuring product success.
UI and UX are two terms that are often used interchangeably and confused for one another, but what do they actually mean? And is there a crossover between them?
Understanding the gestalt principles can help you to better understand how your users perceive and interpret your products and services.
We’ve come up with a list of our top 20 UX research and design tips for 2020, covering everything from card sorting to visual design and guerilla user testing.