It’s a new year, a time of reflection and goal setting. Whether you subscribe to new years resolutions or not, 2020 should be the year you stop neglecting your website. Regardless of how performant your website currently is, it can be do better. You might already know this. You probably realize you should dedicate more […]
Personas are antiquated… this coming from someone who has relied on and written about them for years. For years at 3.7 Designs, we’ve created personas during the design discovery phase. I recently realized that the traditional marketing persona is no longer a relevant practice. The keyword here is “traditional.” At 3.7 we’ve adopted a practice […]
You have less than one second to make the right impression. Almost immediately after landing on your website users will make an uninformed, mostly subconscious judgment about what type of organization they’re interacting with. This initial judgment will largely be influenced by layout, design, and visual tone. It will not only influence the rest of […]
When I first started designing websites in the 1990s, I focused most of my attention on creating striking visuals. In my defense, I was typically designing gaming website with only the occasional local business… but my goal was always to design a site that looked “cool.” In the early 2000s I stumbled across a website […]
Are you a logical individual? Do you carefully consider all options before making a decision? Are opinions shaped primarily through facts and reasoning? If you answered yes to these questions, you’d be wrong. We are all emotional beings, and our emotions are the root cause of our thoughts and behaviors. Our logical, conscious thoughts simply […]
If you’re not familiar with cognitive load and how it impacts interface design, it’s worth reviewing our previous blog post. If you’re already convinced cognitive load is important, the next step is addressing it. Reducing cognitive load is accomplished by reducing or offloading mental effort (which are similar but different concepts.) Reducing mental effort is […]
To design positive emotional experiences you must understand human emotion. The subject of emotions is complex largely because everything we do is either influenced by, or directly caused by, emotion. Factor in the range and capacity different individuals have for emotion, add in the fact most emotions occur subconsciously, and round this out with the […]
Successful design manages cognitive load. Cognitive load is a technical term for “mental effort,” more specifically it’s the total amount of mental effort required for a given task. Completing any task requires some level of mental effort. This includes learning new information, analyzing stimuli, and working with short and long-term memory. Mental energy which has […]
The vast range of design styles should be an indicator of just how different personal preferences can be. A style characterized by high gloss and polish may be loved by one group and hated by another. The design could be viscerally appealing and behaviorally enjoyable and still result in this outcome. Remember logic assigns meaning […]
If you have designed a site that addressed five of the six layers of design you have surpassed most sites on the web. Even great designers will fail to address the first five layers in a design. Stopping here however, would ignore one of the fundamental aspects of being human, having emotions. Emotion is the […]