Experience Design — Must reads for February 2018

From time to time, I find useful and inspiring articles on the web.

CO.DESIGN: The Design Theory Behind Amazon’s $5.6 Billion Success

Amazon’s design succeeds because it makes use of four key principles that all great shopping experiences embody — whether digital or physical, luxury, or low-cost. At their heart, all great shopping experiences are transparent, tangible, trustworthy, helpful.

CORE77: Today’s Urban Design Observation: Is It Possible to Break Subway Windows to Escape in an Emergency?

The author analyses a subway window and finds out what a FRA Type II Compliance test means.

[…] the window has to withstand both a ballistic test and an impact test. The ballistic test fires a .22 caliber bullet reaching a minimum velocity of 960 feet per second at the glass. The impact test hurls a 12-pound masonry block at the glass at 12 feet per second. Obviously the glass cannot break in either case or it fails.

UX COLLECTIVE: Why are you still recruiting user test participants by gender?

It’s natural to try to break down your audience by demographics (gender, age, education), since that data is quite commonly easier to find and filter. It is also the data that powers a lot of Marketing teams out there. But does that approach really apply for User Experience Research?

WIRED: Covert Replay sessions have been harvesting passwords by mistake

Three user behaviour recording tools are mentioned in the article: Autotrack, UserReplay, FullStory, and SessionCam.

[…] Websites track your behavior online. But some go much further than what you’d reasonably expect, using so-called session replays to create a detailed log of everything you do and type on a site. And new research shows that in some cases these movie-like recordings are even storing your passwords.

DESIGN+SKETCH: User Journey Maps or User Flows, what to do first?

The author looks at the differences between User Journey Maps and User Flows and answers questions about their purpose and how they complement each other.

User Flows and Customer Journey Maps seems to be similar deliverables. They both try to figure out how the user will interact with the solution. However, they focus on different aspects of a created products. It is worth to create both during the design process. The complementary deliverables will ensure that final solution will have better UX. However, there is no simple answer which should be created first.