In the vast majority of apps, sign in & sign up screens are the first screens a user will experience, and this first impression will affect how users’ perceive the aesthetics, usability, and credibility of an app.

“Unfortunately, people do judge the book by its cover.” — Norman Nielsen Group

They are also largely forgotten about for most designers and developers, which generally means that the user experience for a large portion of people is plain awful when a user lands on these screens. …

More often than not, product design teams spend too little time enhancing their skills.

They get into a rut of always focusing on their product’s industry and never have time to look around at new technologies or trends. This is not a bad thing per se; it is just the way it is. They want to make their product better so they but all their energy into it.

But this approach introduces a big problem; the team can start to lack creativity and designers don’t get to flex their creative muscles. It can become mundane and boring. …

Too much time is often wasted when creating and testing landing pages. We as designers spend too much time making a landing page pretty before we test does the message resonate with our target users.

We open up Sketch, XD, or Figma and spend a lot of time thinking about our visual identity, but the content is often an afterthought. We fill the screen full of lorem ipsum and tell us ourselves that we’ll get back to that later. But the problem is words is what will convey our message to users. …

Simply put, a focus state highlights the current element which enables people to navigate and interact with a website using a keyboard or voice control software or technologies.

They are also largely forgotten about for most designers and developers, which generally means that the user experience for a large portion of people is plain awful when they interact with these user interfaces.

So to make the web a little better here are a few simple tips for improving the design of focus states in a user interface.

1- Know what components need a focus state

Any interactive component in your user interface needs a focus state. It is…

I’ve mentioned a few times now that as a UX designer, I regularly perform user testing. There are tons of user testing methods, but two I like to do are unmoderated and moderated usability testing from time to time.

I often run unmoderated sessions for the following benefits:

• It is usually faster than a moderated session, and I can do other work while users are testing.
• It more closely mimics user interaction of a product in “the wild”.
• I can schedule it to suits a user’s timezone — no need to get up during the middle of the night.

There…

In my previous post, I shared two ways that you can raise awareness and promote UX in your company. One of the methods was to start talking about the ROI of UX Design and how it can make the company thrive.

Today, I’m going to share a simple case study about how a trivial user experience problem was costing us a small fortune in hidden costs each year if we chose not to fix it.

Just an FYI, I’ve simplified and changed the numbers for the sake of this case study. …

I joined Threefold over two years ago, and to say it was a completely different place in terms of designs awareness back then is an understatement.

You see, when I arrived, no one knew what design was, let alone the power it has to boost a company’s fortunes. To be brutally honest, a lot of people in the company thought it was a complete waste of time and money. “Paint by numbers” and “make it pretty” is all anyone thought designers could do. And UX design was not important at all.

How many companies have this mentality? Too many. That…

I have been designing apps — both Android and iOS — since 2012, and over the years, I’ve learned a thing or two about creating award-winning ones. I’ve turned 2-star mobile apps into 5-star apps that ranked number 1 on the Google Play Store.

Here are five articles that will help you improve the user experience of your mobile apps so that they provide beautiful experiences. You too, can improve the user experience of your apps. It won’t happen overnight, but enough small changes will lead to improving the UX of your mobile apps.

First up is an article I…