In part I and part II of this form design series, I proposed a method of thinking about form design in terms of a user’s cost-benefit analysis, and discussed ways of increasing the perceived value of the form. In this post I’ll discuss the research and methods behind reducing the user’s perceived cost of filling in a form.

In the first part of this Form Design series, I outlined a framework for thinking about form design in terms of a cost-benefit analysis: users’ motivation to complete forms based on the perceived benefit and the perceived costs. This post covers how to increase the perceived value of forms by writing better form headlines and button copy. This post provides an overview of existing research and case studies, and recommendations on how to improve the perceived value of forms you design.

When asked to fill in a form, users ask themselves “Should I bother?” The assessment is often quick and brutal. They perform a quick cost-benefit analysis to assess whether the benefits of filling in the form outweigh the costs (and by how much). Then they fill it in, or move on. As a form designer you want to do everything you can to get them to say “ yes, I should bother!”

If you’ve been in the UX design game for a while, you’ll inevitably have had a client tell you that they don’t have the time or the money to do UX research. These concerns come from a real place. They probably are getting pushback on their budget, and they probably do have a deadline crunch.

In part one and part two of this series, I looked at the figure/ground and similarity Gestalt principle. In this post I’ll be looking at the Gestalt principles related to grouping elements (proximity and uniform connectedness) and how you can use them to improve your designs.

In part one of this series, I looked at the figure/ground Gestalt principle. In this post I’ll be looking at the principle of similarity, and how you can use it to become a better designer.

Understanding Gestalt principles will help you be a better UX designer. This is the first post in a three part series that explains the Gestalt principles by showing clear examples of the principles from around the web. There’s no definitive list of Gestalt principles, but this series covers the ones that I use and think about the most when I’m creating prototypes. This post covers the Figure/Ground Gestalt Principle Figure/Ground Gestalt Principle.

Understanding why users aren’t using certain parts of your site can be a daunting task if you don’t have the right tools. Tree testing is a great way to assess your site’s information architecture and discover problems with your labels and categorization.

We’re a small company with enough things to spend money on. Creating surveys for clients isn’t something we do frequently enough (yet) to justify the monthly cost of tools like SurveyMonkey or SurveyGizmo, so we went on a hunt for the best free survey tool.

We recently redesigned laurenellis.ca for the incredibly talented portrait artist Lauren Ellis. She wanted her art displayed as it would be in an art gallery: beautifully framed and matted, with professional-looking artwork labels underneath the art. In this post, we’ll show you how we created the frame and mat using CSS.

Since VR has come so far in such a short time, there’s still a lot that we just don’t know about design “best practices”. For example, in my last post I told a story of how one of our lab members accidentally walked into a tree in the virtual environment, and spilled some coffee in the real world while bracing himself for the impact (which obviously never came). Safety, possibly for the first time, is a design consideration for UX in virtual reality! In this article, I’m going to talk about some other significant ones.

With the release of the PlayStation VR last week, I thought I’d just take a few minutes to talk about why VR is such an exciting technology and design space, and some of my experiences working in the field.

As part of my MSc, I created a whiteboard animation (aka. a video-scribed animation, or speed-drawing video) that describes the writing process.