Post pobrano z: 15 Best Tools and Resources You Should Check Out

Whether you are building a bridge, a house, or a website, it doesn’t matter how good your plans are if you don’t have the best design tools for the job. The task could take longer, the results could be substandard, or the project could fail completely.

We have assembled this collection of 15 top tools, services, and resources for designers for 2021. The primary reason is to help you build a successful online presence for your business and build upon an existing one. Or simply improve upon an existing business-related process.

We believe that you will find one or more of the following products and services useful. They will be not only beneficial but possibly a game changer for your business or the quality of the product you are creating.

1. BeTheme | Limitless Website Builder for WordPress

BeTheme is limitless in terms of its website-building capabilities and the quality and performance characteristics it embeds in the software products it is used to create.

The reason lies in its 40+ core features, including its library of 600+ professionally-crafted, responsive, and customizable pre-built websites.

These pre-built websites cover 30+ industry sectors and are complemented by other key core features such as the Admin Panel, Shortcode and Layout Generators, and the popular Muffin Builder.

The Muffin Builder is gone. The good news is that it has been replaced by Muffin Builder 3. 

• Muffin Builder 3 offers users an enhanced, more intuitive UI
• It features an array of pre-built sections, 200+ shortcodes, and a variety of styling options
• Layout revisions can be stored and restored, making it easy to customize content without losing information
• Blocks or sections of content can be exported or imported

Be’s Theme Options 3 is also new. With this feature’s 600+ settings you can globally set the styles of your blog, portfolio, and shop pages.

Click on the banner to find out more.

2. Total WordPress Theme

Total is another WordPress theme that, because of its multiple style options and flexible page builder, does not place limits on the page layouts you create.

You can build a page from scratch if you prefer, but Total’s users typically take advantage of its selection of Theme Demos to get started. These easy to import Theme Demos address the following product types:

• Business websites
• Portfolio websites
• One-page websites
• Personal and Creative websites
• eCommerce and Shop sites
• Blog sites, and others.

Other Total Features:

• Pre-designed Cards for styling posts and archives and displaying post entries
• Live Customizer for changing site colors, section and column widths, and typography
• WPBakery for front end and back end drag and drop page building
• Dynamic Templates for customizing post type layouts

Click on the banner to find out more about why Total’s user base is 47,000 and growing.

3. Mobirise Website Builder

Mobirise is an offline website builder that is perfect for creating small to medium size websites. It is a particularly good choice for non-technical types who would normally prefer to do their website-building visually.

• Mobirise is offline, so you are not tied to a specific platform, and you can host your site anywhere you wish
• 4000+ website blocks together with 300+ home page templates are included. They have been created with the most recent web design trends in mind.
• Mobirise’s many page-building features include everything from sliders, galleries, images, and videos, to Google maps, forms, and icons.
• Google AMP/Bootstrap4 assures your website will be super-fast and 100% mobile
• Mobirise is free for personal and commercial use
• Mobirise users have created more than 1.5million sites to date.

Click on the banner to learn more about this #1 offline website builder.

4. Trafft

The Trafft booking software app is still in an early stage of release. You can select to join as an early adopter if you would like to have the opportunity of contributing to this apps’ game-changing approach to what businesses’ booking and appointment managing tasks should look like.

Highlights include:

• SMS and email notifications for appointments
• Customizable booking forms
• Employee assignment tracking and management

Start by signing up for the Early Bird plan for $5/month.

5. Uncode – Creative Multiuse & WooCommerce WordPress Theme

Uncode, an Envato top seller with 80,000 sales and growing, is a pixel-perfect multiuse theme for freelancers, bloggers, businesses, and agencies.

• One of this multipurpose theme’s most impressive features is its new WooCommerce custom Builder
• Uncode’s Wireframes plugin with its 450+ section templates enables users to create virtually any page layout
• A powerful Frontend Editor allows pages to be completed quickly and easily
• The best way to see what Uncode can do for you is to view its gallery of user-created websites. 

6. wpDataTables

With the wpDataTables plugin you can take huge amounts of complex data and create tables or charts quickly and relatively easily.

• Tables and charts created with wpDataTables can be made to be responsive, interactive, front-end editable, and easy to maintain
• thousands of rows of data from multiple sources and in multiple formats can be processed in seconds or minutes
• Conditional Formatting features can be utilized to highlight or color code key data

7. Getillustrations – Premium illustrations library

This ready to use library of premium illustrations can change your approach to designing website UIs, apps, and presentations.

• GetIllustrations 6,800+ illustrations makes up the world’s biggest bundle of its type
• Vector AI, PNG, Sketch, SVG, Figma, and Adobe XD formats are featured

Any illustration you purchase, comes withx` a commercial license. It is yours to keep and use without limitations.

8. Rey theme for WooCommerce

Rey’s integration with Elementor, WooCommerce, and the WordPress engine was most likely a main contributor to this highly modular WooCommerce theme’s gaining a reputation of being the best theme of its type in 2020. 

• Rey features an impressive array of customizing options
• Rey’s authors placed a strong emphasis on performance
• Rey’s design is modern, classy, and SEO friendly
• Rey’s eCommerce custom features and tools are designed to do the job right

9. Goodiewebsite

GOODIE provides web development services for businesses and individual web designers who need to get a website reliably coded and quickly up and running or have other reasons to connect with professional developers to complete a task.

• GOODIE specializes in personal and small business and eCommerce website development and custom website design.
• Other GOODIE specialties include website maintenance, responsive email development, and front-end development

10. Amelia Booking Plugin

Amelia automates and manages appointments and events. In doing so, this application plugin saves businesses and their clients significant amounts of time.

• Clients can make, change, or cancel appointments online 24/7
• Amelia can manage bookings at multiple business locations and unlimited number of events
• Amelia tracks and manages employee assignments and work availability schedules
• Amelia can integrate with Zoom and Google meet for consultation or training purposes

11. Litho – The Multipurpose HTML5 Template

The Litho Multipurpose HTML5 template showcases its modern design and its Bootstrap4 features make it a perfect website-building tool for any type of business, agency, or startup.

Key features include:

• All the design elements needed to build beautiful websites: Hero sliders, contact forms, interactive banners, buttons, tables, tabs, and more
• 37+ home pages and 230+ ready to use templates
• Page styles for blog, portfolio, and shop sites
• Detailed documentation and 5-star user support

12. 8b Website Builder

The brand new 8b online website builder is poised to become the star of the show in 2021.

• This website builder can be used at home on your desktop, or on your mobile device when you are out and about.
• 8b’s futuristic UI is super simple to work with
• 8b’s 250+ website sections and 16 starter templates are designed to get projects off to a fast start

And, not to forget. 8b is free.

13. Siter

You can start using Siter at no cost: affordable monthly/annual subscriptions are available. This website builder is a great choice for design teams or projects where collaboration is necessary.

• While Siter does not require coding, you can insert your own custom code
• Siter has a royalty-free photo search capability and access to thousands of free icons
• You can embed YouTube videos
• Siter offers a free site domain or, you can use your own

14. Heroic Inbox

With the Heroic Inbox app your business can manage its shared inboxes directly inside your website. This is especially useful when communicating with customers and there is a need to refer back to previous email communications.

• Heroic Inbox uses tags to organize emails for future reference
• Heroic Inbox enables staff members to work together to provide appropriate responses
• An Inbox Zero status can be attained promptly and easily maintained
• Key performance metrics are tracked

15. WHATFONTIS

WHATFONTIS allows designers to find a font in a matter of seconds by identifying it from an uploaded image.

• This app’s impressive search capabilities are based on a database of over 700K fonts and a set of powerful AI font-finding algorithms
• Submitted fonts are positively identified 90% of the time
• Premium support is on hand should the AI engine produce a strange result

Cursive fonts can also be identified although the letters must be separated

***** 

You decide to build a website, but you don’t have much in the way of skills or experience to do so. Or you find “techie” talk a bit scary. Then one or more of the designer tools and services described in this article should serve you well.

Once you have a website up and running, you can sit back and relax – but only for a little while. Even the best websites have a habit of requiring periodic updates and maintenance. This is especially true of product-oriented websites, or any website containing time-sensitive information.

With right design tools keeping your site up to date can be a relatively an easy task.

The intent here is to give you what we believe to be the best software solutions for the tasks at hand. Once you put one or more of them to the test, we are certain you will believe that as well.

Post pobrano z: Elementor’s annual virtual web creator conference to feature industry leaders Swan Sit, Seth Godin, and Gary Vaynerchuk

Elementor will celebrate 5 years of revolutionizing web creation at #webcreator2021, which will include keynote speakers and audience questions

This week marks five years since the inception of Elementor, the leading open source website builder platform, and the company is marking this milestone by bringing its community #webcreators2021, a live virtual conference for the entire web creation community, exploring the future of the internet and web creation. Creators, designers, marketers, and digital thinkers alike will converge virtually to learn and discuss some of the hottest topics out there in the web building sphere.  

#webcreators2021 is set to take place on June 16, 2021 at 11 am EST and it will feature respected industry leaders Gary Vaynerchuk, Swan Sit, and Seth Godin. According to Vaynerchuk, “When big changes happen in society, big changes in consumer behavior stick. Covid brought many people different ways to consume information and buy products, and that doesn’t change when we go back to life post-covid — I am excited to talk more about this during the conference.” 

Vaynerchuk, along with Seth Godin, will be speaking about how to prepare your business for what comes next, as well as skills for independent web creators. Seth Godin elaborates, “This conference is not about directing professional web creators to build advanced features, it’s about enabling them the freedom to dream, to make a difference. Building the future of the internet requires an inclusive culture where individuality and collaboration meet to create possibility.” Swan Sit’s presentation will cover brand secrets that are worth knowing for every web creator. 

The headlining speakers will follow their talks with live Q&A sessions in which audience members will be welcome to ask questions. 

Elementor CEO Yoni Luksenberg elaborates on the platform’s approach to web creation. “We are enabling web creators to realize their full potential,” he says. “Elementor unleashes the infinite creative power of web creators by giving them the tools they need to build professional websites, innovate and stretch their creative limits. Our passionate global community of web creators are highly talented, engaged, and supportive of each other, and this event is for them.”

Founded in 2016 by Luksenberg and Ariel Klikstein, Elementor empowers users to create powerful, beautiful websites on its open-source platform through WordPress. With over 8 million active websites and users in 157 countries, the Elementor community continues to flourish. Developers, designers, web creators, and marketers have made Elementor their platform of choice, and almost 5% of all websites are now built using Elementor.

This week’s conference is not to be missed for those who love all things internet. 

Learn about #webcreators2021 and register here. 

About Elementor

Elementor is the leading website builder platform on WordPress. Serving over 8 million websites, Elementor’s code-free, open source platform empowers web professionals including web developers, designers, and marketers in 157 countries. Elementor enables web professionals and agencies to unleash their creative and business potential. For more information visit www.elementor.com.

Media Contact
Shahni Ben-Haim 
NYGC
Shahni@now-you.co.il

Post pobrano z: A Complete Guide To Interviewing A UI/UX Designer For Your Project

Finding a qualified UI/UX designer is not an easy task. An entire month might pass in just looking for potential candidates with a high level of expertise. The interview process may take even longer. After all, you need to assess the skill level and expertise before hiring the right designer. 

But what if you come from a non-design background? How do you interview a user experience designer and ensure that they are the right fit for your organization? 

Here is a complete interview guide with helpful tips on finding and hiring quality UI/UX experts for your project.

Evaluate Their Technical Skills

First and foremost, your UI/UX designer needs to come from an expert technical background. They need to have the right level of skills to complete your project quickly and efficiently. It is also essential for them to have a good amount of experience in the field – bonus points if they have experience in the domain that you are working. 

According to Forrester, a better UI could increase your website conversion rate by about 200%, while a better UX design could deliver up to 400% conversation rates. 

It explains why you should evaluate candidates’ skills accurately when hiring a UX/UI designer, as this person will influence your project success directly. So, how do you check the technical skills of potential candidates for your project? Here are some UI/UX designer interview questions you should ask.

Could You Please Send Across Your Portfolio?

A portfolio is an excellent way to judge past work, experience as well as the interests of your candidate. You will also be able to tell if their level of quality meets your expectations or not. Moreover, this work is about creativity, so you should ensure that your vision is similar.

What is UI/UX?

Sometimes, throwing a curveball in the form of a simple question like this can throw your candidate off their game. However, if they can easily answer this question, you know that they have a good grasp of the basics and have crafted a solid foundation for themselves.

The rest of the questions are designed to assess the UI/UX designer’s skills and the design process they implement. Your candidates need to explain their tools, techniques, and thinking clearly during the interview.

• What are the main design principles for UI/UX?
• Describe your website UI design process for us.
• How do you analyze the target audience, and how does it help in design?
• How do you test your web design?
• What are the biggest trends in UI/UX design now?
• What KPI do you use in your working process?

Evaluate Their Soft Skills

Hiring someone with an excellent technical background and good design skills is undoubtedly important – but none of this is going to matter if your designer’s soft skills do not match up to the standards. Your designer needs to communicate with other team members, especially if they work in a remote environment. 

But how do you evaluate a candidate’s soft skills? After all, if you pose the question, “How do your soft skills measure up?” most candidates are likely to tell you that the soft skills are excellent. 

There are several other questions that you can ask to gauge your candidate’s verbal communication skills, creativity, innovative thinking, and connection with the changing trends in their field. Some of these questions include:

• Why is UI/UX design attractive for you?
• How do you collaborate with other remote team members?
• How do you manage your time when working from home?
• What channels do you use for inspiration?
• How do you react when a client tells you that they don’t like your design?

All these questions will help you understand how the candidate works in a team, solve arguments, and what they do to stay motivated and inspired.

Where To Hire A UI/UX Designer?

There are several channels to find remote UI/UX designers and freelancers for hire for your development project. But it can be an extremely time-consuming and complicated process to find an excellent fit for your team amongst this pool of specialists.

Of course, you will have certain expectations regarding the quality of the work along with a specific price in mind. As such, an immense amount of time goes in just looking for the right candidate. YouTeam suggests that you browse already verified profiles of UI/UX designers before hiring, and the process of finding the right candidate can take only 48 hours.

Summary

The hiring process need not be as much of a pain as you might expect. There is a speedy and efficient way to simplify the entire process while ensuring that you find the best candidates for your project. Simply follow the steps we have given in our guide and ensure that you look in the right places for the best UI/UX designers.

Post pobrano z: 5 tips to get started with online visual collaboration

In 2019, convincing my clients to collaborate online on visual elements was quite hard. In 2020, for obvious reasons known by everyone, it’s much easier to explain to customers what are the advantages of online collaboration. They are still in time to move to a remote environment in a very fast way, adopt methodologies and start using all sorts of software like Miro’s online whiteboard or any of the video call tools, for better distance work.

1. Ensure you get the right setup

To work remotely and collaborate with people who are not in the same room as yourself, you should ensure that no technical issues will get in the way. Test your audio and video setup before getting started, you don’t want to lose precious meeting time and get everyone stressed. Don’t underestimate the importance of having good quality camera and microphone for better interactions. Obviously, having a good connection to the Internet is also crucial, don’t be greedy on the wrong things.

2. Prepare your meetings well

This tip goes for all meetings, but it is specially right for online visual collaboration. For an online visual meeting, you should ensure that everything you want to say is planned out, so you can make the points you wanted to make.

Ever been in a meeting where you felt that nothing of importance was said and that you wasted your time? If it happened, it was because nobody was ready for the working session. Don’t worry though, being ready for working together doesn’t mean that you need to prepare for hours, making a checklist in fifteen minutes is often enough to be ready. You can also dig into preparation principles for a good starting point.

3. Choose the right tools

In terms of tools, it is mostly the software that is worth mentioning. For visual collaboration online, Miro is the perfect companion. Better than your average whiteboard, Miro is an infinite canvas that helps you ideate, strategize, get organized, and work with your team.

You can kick off a project even faster by selecting one of Miro’s many pre-built templates. From business model canvases and user story maps, to fishbone diagrams, mind maps and more, templates provide an easy way to get your team ideating and collaborating.

When you need to meet with your team, use Zoom (which can be integrated with the mentioned whiteboard): after months of confinement, the company has improved its service, becoming the undisputed video call software -the easiest to use and the most secure, and the one that offers more integrations and personalization.

4. Ask the right questions

To collect feedback on your work, there are questions that will help you collect much better answers than others. Explain your design decisions to try to answer questions before they come, and be very specific on the type of feedback you need. For example, asking “What do you think of this logo design?”, you should write “I chose this font for this reason and that color for that reason, do you think it’s a good choice?”.

5. Follow-up

When the meeting is over, don’t wait for the next meeting to act upon what has been suggested and do everything you can immediately, your future self will thank you later. If you do this, not only you are already mentally involved in this task, which will make you more productive, but your colleagues or clients will also be ready and knowing what you are talking about.

Conclusion

The world is ready for online meeting and visual communication through the Internet now, so make the best of it. Use the tips given in this article wisely and you will become a more productive designer.

Post pobrano z: 5 tips to get started with online visual collaboration

In 2019, convincing my clients to collaborate online on visual elements was quite hard. In 2020, for obvious reasons known by everyone, it’s much easier to explain to customers what are the advantages of online collaboration. They are still in time to move to a remote environment in a very fast way, adopt methodologies and start using all sorts of software like Miro’s online whiteboard or any of the video call tools, for better distance work.

1. Ensure you get the right setup

To work remotely and collaborate with people who are not in the same room as yourself, you should ensure that no technical issues will get in the way. Test your audio and video setup before getting started, you don’t want to lose precious meeting time and get everyone stressed. Don’t underestimate the importance of having good quality camera and microphone for better interactions. Obviously, having a good connection to the Internet is also crucial, don’t be greedy on the wrong things.

2. Prepare your meetings well

This tip goes for all meetings, but it is specially right for online visual collaboration. For an online visual meeting, you should ensure that everything you want to say is planned out, so you can make the points you wanted to make.

Ever been in a meeting where you felt that nothing of importance was said and that you wasted your time? If it happened, it was because nobody was ready for the working session. Don’t worry though, being ready for working together doesn’t mean that you need to prepare for hours, making a checklist in fifteen minutes is often enough to be ready. You can also dig into preparation principles for a good starting point.

3. Choose the right tools

In terms of tools, it is mostly the software that is worth mentioning. For visual collaboration online, Miro is the perfect companion. Better than your average whiteboard, Miro is an infinite canvas that helps you ideate, strategize, get organized, and work with your team.

You can kick off a project even faster by selecting one of Miro’s many pre-built templates. From business model canvases and user story maps, to fishbone diagrams, mind maps and more, templates provide an easy way to get your team ideating and collaborating.

When you need to meet with your team, use Zoom (which can be integrated with the mentioned whiteboard): after months of confinement, the company has improved its service, becoming the undisputed video call software -the easiest to use and the most secure, and the one that offers more integrations and personalization.

4. Ask the right questions

To collect feedback on your work, there are questions that will help you collect much better answers than others. Explain your design decisions to try to answer questions before they come, and be very specific on the type of feedback you need. For example, asking “What do you think of this logo design?”, you should write “I chose this font for this reason and that color for that reason, do you think it’s a good choice?”.

5. Follow-up

When the meeting is over, don’t wait for the next meeting to act upon what has been suggested and do everything you can immediately, your future self will thank you later. If you do this, not only you are already mentally involved in this task, which will make you more productive, but your colleagues or clients will also be ready and knowing what you are talking about.

Conclusion

The world is ready for online meeting and visual communication through the Internet now, so make the best of it. Use the tips given in this article wisely and you will become a more productive designer.

Post pobrano z: COVID-19 and UX: What’s the “New Normal” for the User Experience?

Think for a moment about how coronavirus has changed your life. You may have gone from commuting to an office to working at home. Instead of going to the gym, you exercise at home or not at all. You went from socializing in large groups to solely interacting with a small bubble of friends. You have replaced trips to the mall with online purchases. Fancy dinners out have been replaced with whole food delivery.

Individuals who visit your website are experiencing the same changes. As a result, their behaviors and preferences have shifted. This has changed what they expect when they visit your website. What was considered a good user experience at the start of 2020 may now seem out of touch and insufficient. According to the Toptal report, 88 percent of users are more likely not to return to a website after a bad user experience. Some research even showed that a well-designed UX interface could yield conversion rates up to 400 percent.

Now, anyone considering a job as a UX designer will need to value research as well as a proper education. The needs of users are shifting rapidly. Each group of users is unique and has been impacted by the coronavirus pandemic differently. Designers must be cognizant of:

• Behavioral shifts
• Changes in user groups
• Psychological shifts
• Regional effects
• Temporal effects

Let’s look at some of these with the goal of understanding how they are creating the new normal in user experience.

How Behavioral Shifts Changed User Experience

Visitors to your website are not engaged in the same activities that they used to engage in. Or the frequency with which they perform certain activities has increased or diminished. Their motivation has also changed.

For example, your users may desire to use your product but feel afraid of catching the virus or spreading the virus. There are several industries that are affected by this. For example, the travel industry has seen a major downturn. This is true even in countries where people may fly around freely.

The economic consequences of COVID-19 are also changing the buying habits of people. Some people may have felt freer to charge purchases on their credit card because they were relatively confident that they were going to have a consistent paycheck. Now, they may avoid making purchases because they are worried that their future income is not guaranteed.

UX designers need to design with empathy for their customers’ worries, desires, and needs in mind. They need to dig past the superficial to uncover genuine concerns, needs, and behaviors when interacting with a website.

Designers need to think outside of the box and make websites that offer something that users will benefit from and come back to again and again. For example, people might not be booking flights yet. However, a website that also services as an easy portal to see travel restrictions across the world or that offers an up-to-date map of pandemic outbreaks and the ability to book flights might be a service that users come back to and eventually will opt to use for their flights.

Psychological Shifts and User Experience

Most people understand the immediate dangers caused by COVID-19. The psychological toll the pandemic is having has not yet been fully understood or quantified.

However, the pandemic has led to a lot of uncertainty. People want to feel secure. User design, whether it be of websites or of apps, can help generate less anxiety. Even if it’s not their primary function, digital apps can improve a person’s well-being and productivity. They can add a sense of normality to people’s lives, giving them something that they feel they can rely on.

UX designers must focus on building products that people want to use and want to come back to. They should also build products with their user’s mental health, especially considering the pandemic, in mind. Designers have the privilege and responsibility of creating products that society is going to use for the next years to come. They also have the benefit of years of studying user’s behavior.

This means that designers should be mindful of what they create. They should prioritize the impact of their design over its intent. They should consider the psychological makeup of their users and the long-term impact their designs can have.

It might sound like a stretch to say that websites and apps impact a person’s psychological well-being. However, most people have experienced the anxiety and stress that comes from not being able to check social media. They have experienced the elation that comes from getting positive feedback on something they post. Most know what it feels like to be bombarded with negative responses to a comment or post. This underscores the power of the impact of user design on the psyche of society.

Responding to Changes in User Groups

Not everyone has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic equally. Some groups are higher risk, especially individuals who have certain pre-existing conditions or who are of a certain age group. Some professions are at higher risk, especially those in the medical field. And other groups may feel that they have little to no risk, especially young healthy adults.

The user experience for each one of these groups is going to be different. Each group may respond to the same information differently. For example, a photograph of a hotel being disinfected by an employee in a hazmat suit might cause an older individual or someone with serious concern about COVID-19 to feel at ease and want to stay at the hotel.

Conversely, the same photograph might cause a younger user with little concern about COVID-19 to shy away from the hotel because the image forces them to think about something that is not forefront in their mind. Politics and culture also play a factor. Certain governments have taken COVID-19 seriously, so their citizens have responded in kind. Others have downplayed the risk of the virus, creating a mirrored response in their citizens. Designers will need to take these regional differences into consideration.

Research is key in providing your users the best experience possible. COVID-19 has presented several challenges for businesses in all sectors. It is also providing opportunities for user experience teams to make adjustments to the websites, apps, and products they work on to benefit the lives of their users in ways that were not previously possible.

Post pobrano z: COVID-19 and UX: What’s the “New Normal” for the User Experience?

Think for a moment about how coronavirus has changed your life. You may have gone from commuting to an office to working at home. Instead of going to the gym, you exercise at home or not at all. You went from socializing in large groups to solely interacting with a small bubble of friends. You have replaced trips to the mall with online purchases. Fancy dinners out have been replaced with whole food delivery.

Individuals who visit your website are experiencing the same changes. As a result, their behaviors and preferences have shifted. This has changed what they expect when they visit your website. What was considered a good user experience at the start of 2020 may now seem out of touch and insufficient. According to the Toptal report, 88 percent of users are more likely not to return to a website after a bad user experience. Some research even showed that a well-designed UX interface could yield conversion rates up to 400 percent.

Now, anyone considering a job as a UX designer will need to value research as well as a proper education. The needs of users are shifting rapidly. Each group of users is unique and has been impacted by the coronavirus pandemic differently. Designers must be cognizant of:

• Behavioral shifts
• Changes in user groups
• Psychological shifts
• Regional effects
• Temporal effects

Let’s look at some of these with the goal of understanding how they are creating the new normal in user experience.

How Behavioral Shifts Changed User Experience

Visitors to your website are not engaged in the same activities that they used to engage in. Or the frequency with which they perform certain activities has increased or diminished. Their motivation has also changed.

For example, your users may desire to use your product but feel afraid of catching the virus or spreading the virus. There are several industries that are affected by this. For example, the travel industry has seen a major downturn. This is true even in countries where people may fly around freely.

The economic consequences of COVID-19 are also changing the buying habits of people. Some people may have felt freer to charge purchases on their credit card because they were relatively confident that they were going to have a consistent paycheck. Now, they may avoid making purchases because they are worried that their future income is not guaranteed.

UX designers need to design with empathy for their customers’ worries, desires, and needs in mind. They need to dig past the superficial to uncover genuine concerns, needs, and behaviors when interacting with a website.

Designers need to think outside of the box and make websites that offer something that users will benefit from and come back to again and again. For example, people might not be booking flights yet. However, a website that also services as an easy portal to see travel restrictions across the world or that offers an up-to-date map of pandemic outbreaks and the ability to book flights might be a service that users come back to and eventually will opt to use for their flights.

Psychological Shifts and User Experience

Most people understand the immediate dangers caused by COVID-19. The psychological toll the pandemic is having has not yet been fully understood or quantified.

However, the pandemic has led to a lot of uncertainty. People want to feel secure. User design, whether it be of websites or of apps, can help generate less anxiety. Even if it’s not their primary function, digital apps can improve a person’s well-being and productivity. They can add a sense of normality to people’s lives, giving them something that they feel they can rely on.

UX designers must focus on building products that people want to use and want to come back to. They should also build products with their user’s mental health, especially considering the pandemic, in mind. Designers have the privilege and responsibility of creating products that society is going to use for the next years to come. They also have the benefit of years of studying user’s behavior.

This means that designers should be mindful of what they create. They should prioritize the impact of their design over its intent. They should consider the psychological makeup of their users and the long-term impact their designs can have.

It might sound like a stretch to say that websites and apps impact a person’s psychological well-being. However, most people have experienced the anxiety and stress that comes from not being able to check social media. They have experienced the elation that comes from getting positive feedback on something they post. Most know what it feels like to be bombarded with negative responses to a comment or post. This underscores the power of the impact of user design on the psyche of society.

Responding to Changes in User Groups

Not everyone has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic equally. Some groups are higher risk, especially individuals who have certain pre-existing conditions or who are of a certain age group. Some professions are at higher risk, especially those in the medical field. And other groups may feel that they have little to no risk, especially young healthy adults.

The user experience for each one of these groups is going to be different. Each group may respond to the same information differently. For example, a photograph of a hotel being disinfected by an employee in a hazmat suit might cause an older individual or someone with serious concern about COVID-19 to feel at ease and want to stay at the hotel.

Conversely, the same photograph might cause a younger user with little concern about COVID-19 to shy away from the hotel because the image forces them to think about something that is not forefront in their mind. Politics and culture also play a factor. Certain governments have taken COVID-19 seriously, so their citizens have responded in kind. Others have downplayed the risk of the virus, creating a mirrored response in their citizens. Designers will need to take these regional differences into consideration.

Research is key in providing your users the best experience possible. COVID-19 has presented several challenges for businesses in all sectors. It is also providing opportunities for user experience teams to make adjustments to the websites, apps, and products they work on to benefit the lives of their users in ways that were not previously possible.

Post pobrano z: Victoria Rose Richards Creates Stunning Embroidered Landscapes of England

Art can come in many forms, even the most traditional ones. Embroidery is not typically associated in our minds with high-level creativity. If it was needed, Victoria Rose Richards gives us a creative glimpse of the British fields seen from the sky using embroidery as an art form.

A few of her amazing artworks are displayed in this post, more can be seen on her Instagram account, along with her other work.

Post pobrano z: Victoria Rose Richards Creates Stunning Embroidered Landscapes of England

Art can come in many forms, even the most traditional ones. Embroidery is not typically associated in our minds with high-level creativity. If it was needed, Victoria Rose Richards gives us a creative glimpse of the British fields seen from the sky using embroidery as an art form.

A few of her amazing artworks are displayed in this post, more can be seen on her Instagram account, along with her other work.

Post pobrano z: Volta Pasta Makes Creative Use of Typography

It’s not so often that you find some truly well designed packaging, so I was delighted to stumble upon this wonderful work done for Volta by Stamp.

Focused on typography and elements around it, the design uses lines, waves, and simple shapes to suggest the pasta rather than placing photos on it. The choice of colors and simplicity, along with simple line-based illustrations, are an amazing publicity for this Italian restaurant located in the heart of Osaka, Japan.