“Birds of a feather flock together.” This is a popular proverb in English. We all know what this means: people with similar attitudes and interests often stick together. People with nothing in common rarely enjoy each other’s company, and thus stay as far away from each other as is humanly possible. This is not only…
We have all faced situations in which reading a particular piece of written text ended up giving us headaches instead of furthering our knowledge and understanding. In the vast majority of cases, this is because the text is poorly written. But what do we mean when we say that a text is “poorly written”? Broadly,…
A couple of weeks ago, my company, Parewa Labs, released a new look for our website. The website portrays our journey into being a values-oriented product company and perfectly embodies what we stand for as a company – a company that strives for perfection. You’d agree when I say, a website is the modern-day storefront…
Some of us may look back at some old-school video games we played as kids, and wonder how nice it might have been had they possessed more realistic graphics, instead of the primitive and clumsy 3D graphics in which they were made. While it is natural to yearn for better and more realistic graphics in…
Tracking individual objects can often be an incredibly frustrating task. It doesn’t matter if the “objects” in question are individual animals, plants, clouds, rocks, stars, or whatever other things the world contains. It is so much easier to track and observe them if we can box them into distinct, identifiable groups. This is true not…
As beings who desire order and organization, we are naturally attracted towards objects that look well-placed and well-positioned. After all, proper positioning and placing are important aspects of an organization. In this section, we will explore one of the simplest, yet one of the most fundamental, principles of proper organization: alignment. What is alignment in…
The objects we encounter in daily life (and in UI design) all have different properties and characteristics. In this section, we will learn how to use these varying properties to achieve our design goals. We will also learn which objects to choose based on their respective properties. What does affordance mean? Affordance is a property…
Good design isn’t just about making one’s product pleasing to the eye – it is also about making them easy to use and interact. For instance, one could make a website with beautiful web pages, but if it doesn’t have proper links and navigation section, then the user will have immense difficulty in using the…
What is satisficing? Satisficing is a decision-making behavior where users settle for a satisfactory solution instead of a better solution which would require more effort. For example, when we read articles, we scan through headlines and points to understand the gist of the complete article. This is because users tend to put minimal effort to…
Pareto principle or more commonly known as 80/20 rule has been one of the most useful principles today. From real-world scenarios to massive software systems, it has shown to be effective, time-saving and just generally sensible. So in this article, we’ll see how 80/20 rule makes sense in terms of UX design and how we…