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Debunking UX Myths: Yes, UX Can Be Measured – Here’s How
In the fast-paced digital landscape, where user satisfaction can make or break your product, understanding the value of User Experience (UX) is paramount. Yet, many companies shy away from investing in UX because they are unsure of its benefits due to a pervasive...
The Game for the Energy Transition – MDR Reports on the First Tests of the GrowFlowFly Project
Since the fall of 2023, our User Research and Experience Design Studio, The Geekettez GbR and Claudius Brodman have been working on the user experience and visual layout of the research project GrowFlowFly, a collaborative project involving the Technical University of...
How Design Principles can benefit even the smallest business
The glamorous start-up / small business life: limited time, resources, and a few people wearing many hats, all needing attention immediately. In this scenario, becoming responsible for business areas outside one's expertise is common. Anyone who has been in this...
Debunking UX Myths: UX Design Only Happens on Websites and in Apps
There are prevalent misconceptions about User Experience (UX) Design that often distort and diminish the field's significance. From perceiving UX as solely aesthetic to the notion of its immeasurability, various myths abound. In this series, we examine some common...
A Petition for an Online Inclusivity Countdown
A few weeks ago, we attended an event hosted by Digital Media Women Rhein-Neckar and BPW Mannheim-Ludwigshafen, a Future Talk on the Digital Gender Gap with guest panelist Maren Heltsche (Co-founder of speakerinnen.org and special representative for the policy field...
Together for a sustainable future! Collaboration with TU Munich in the Project GrowFlowFly
Together with the Technical University of Munich (TUM) as the project coordinator, along with consortium partners Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU), RWTH Aachen University (RWTH), and aratall GmbH, Osnabrück, we are collaborating with Claudius Brodmann...
taz, die Tageszeitung Successfully Launches New Design for Publisher Pages
In September of this year, the renowned taz, die Tageszeitung embarked on a relaunch that marks the beginning of a new chapter for taz, as the publisher replaces the printed newspaper during the week with a purely digital version. The goal was to enhance the user...
Enhancing User Experience for Sustainability: A Case Study
UX 💚 Earth Day: How can we motivate people to engage in sustainable behaviour? Today is Earth Day, the perfect day to actively consider how we can design technologies that positively impact our environment and are ecologically sustainable. Two quick ideas on what...
What’s Coming, What’s Staying 2023 – Topic #2: Social-Ecological Experience Design
For some time now, there has been a demand for product developers and designers to look beyond their desires, needs, and goals and create products centred on people, adding value in this sense. In this context, an increasing number of terms circulate in the UX design...
A Petition for an Online Inclusivity Countdown
A few weeks ago, we attended an event hosted by Digital Media Women Rhein-Neckar and BPW Mannheim-Ludwigshafen, a Future Talk on the Digital Gender Gap with guest panelist Maren Heltsche (Co-founder of speakerinnen.org and special representative for the policy field...
Use personas and journey maps to make informed decisions and prioritize requirements
Research-based personas and the resulting user/customer journeys simplify requirements and product development enormously, as they help to identify optimization potential. This in turn helps make informed decisions about product features, interactions and navigation...
Ethical aspects and principles in usability testing
As part of the psychology degree, students must complete a certain amount of what is called subject hours for admission to the thesis. This is about 30 hours in total and this has the function of learning about research also from the perspective of the participants...
Which Usability Test Do I Need?
There are two main categories of usability testing - summative usability testing (summarizing results) and formative usability testing (shaping the design). Which type of test is needed depends on what you want to find out. Let's take a look at the two main usability...
Usability Tests – Why They Are Worthwhile
Usability tests are a popular and promising evaluative method for identifying problems with software, websites, and apps. In a usability test, a UX researcher (the moderator) observes the behaviour of a test subject as they carry out specific tasks within a product...
What UX experts can learn from journalists
The problem with surveys as a design research tool. Yes, we know: surveys allow the collection of large amounts of data in a relatively short time. This is why there is conventional wisdom that surveys are easy and cheap, which is not entirely true. A good...
Undercover user research
As we all know: UX – U = X . But, unfortunately, as we all also know: sadly it’s often difficult to get a buy in to conduct user research at the beginning of a project or even establishing an ongoing research culture.Often we have a hard time convincing clients to set...
How our expectations determine how we process information
How do we process information? In cognitive psychology, two famous processes are involved in how we interpret information – and as humans, we constantly use both: top-down processing and bottom-up processing. Please read the sentence below: Now read it again. Now read...
User research biases to be aware of: Demand characteristics
Demand characteristics are one of the so-called experimenter effects in behavioural research. They describe the tendency of interview/usability test participants to give you (the experimenter) what you want based on what the participants think and what you might...
Debunking UX Myths: Yes, UX Can Be Measured – Here’s How
In the fast-paced digital landscape, where user satisfaction can make or break your product, understanding the value of User Experience (UX) is paramount. Yet, many companies shy away from investing in UX because they are unsure of its benefits due to a pervasive...
Debunking UX Myths: UX Design Only Happens on Websites and in Apps
There are prevalent misconceptions about User Experience (UX) Design that often distort and diminish the field's significance. From perceiving UX as solely aesthetic to the notion of its immeasurability, various myths abound. In this series, we examine some common...
Enhancing User Experience for Sustainability: A Case Study
UX 💚 Earth Day: How can we motivate people to engage in sustainable behaviour? Today is Earth Day, the perfect day to actively consider how we can design technologies that positively impact our environment and are ecologically sustainable. Two quick ideas on what...
What’s Coming, What’s Staying 2023 – Topic #2: Social-Ecological Experience Design
For some time now, there has been a demand for product developers and designers to look beyond their desires, needs, and goals and create products centred on people, adding value in this sense. In this context, an increasing number of terms circulate in the UX design...
What’s Coming, What’s Staying 2023 – Topic #1: Inclusive Design
A heartfelt Happy New Year from us! As we did in 2020, we will present topics of importance to us in this series of articles. Topics increasingly discussed in the industry and relevant to product and service development in companies - that is, to Product Managers,...
Cognitive Psychology for Designers: Visual Search using Feature Integration Theory as an Example
Feature Integration Theory is a theory that explains human object recognition using visual attention and assumes two separate information processing stages. The first phase is an automatic process and happens so quickly that we do not notice it. Here we automatically...
UX psychology : how the halo effect can influence the trustworthiness of products and services.
The halo effect is a well-documented cognitive bias. It describes the social psychological phenomenon that a first impression or knowledge of a particular characteristic of a person dominates the overall impression. Other properties are thus neglected or simply...
Use personas and journey maps to make informed decisions and prioritize requirements
Research-based personas and the resulting user/customer journeys simplify requirements and product development enormously, as they help to identify optimization potential. This in turn helps make informed decisions about product features, interactions and navigation...
What UX experts can learn from journalists
The problem with surveys as a design research tool. Yes, we know: surveys allow the collection of large amounts of data in a relatively short time. This is why there is conventional wisdom that surveys are easy and cheap, which is not entirely true. A good...
Cognitive Psychology for Designers: Visual Search using Feature Integration Theory as an Example
Feature Integration Theory is a theory that explains human object recognition using visual attention and assumes two separate information processing stages. The first phase is an automatic process and happens so quickly that we do not notice it. Here we automatically...
New website for the Deutsch-Französischer Bürgerfonds
We created the concept, the information architecture and the UI design for the relaunch. The revised website of the Deutsch-Französischer Bürgerfonds (Franco-German Citizens’ Fund) presents itself with clear user guidance, content tailored to the needs of users and an...
From global to local: How our visual perception develops over time
“We see the forest before the trees” Navon, D. (1977) We live in a complex world, and the proper identification of objects is very important if we are to interact effectively with our environment. Early theories of object recognition often assumed that we first...
How change blindness can affect your user’s experience
In Psychology, there is a phenomenon called change blindness and it explains why your users don’t see what you think they actually should see. Our visual environment changes all the time. We must notice these changes. For example, it allows us to react to potential...
Adapting creative writing methods in digital advertising
We recently worked on a project in which we were asked to create landing pages for marketing messages that would generate active users for a web service. The target group was a very diverse group of consumers. Frankly speaking, a typical advertisement gig. While...
A more effective workflow with GUI Libraries
Or: A different approach in creating visual designs for web and mobile applications. Nowadays, as websites are turning more and more towards behaviour-driven applications, a polished, overall screen design of every page makes – in our opinion – no sense at all. We can...
Cognitive Psychology for Designers: Visual Search using Feature Integration Theory as an Example
Feature Integration Theory is a theory that explains human object recognition using visual attention and assumes two separate information processing stages. The first phase is an automatic process and happens so quickly that we do not notice it. Here we automatically...
New website for the Deutsch-Französischer Bürgerfonds
We created the concept, the information architecture and the UI design for the relaunch. The revised website of the Deutsch-Französischer Bürgerfonds (Franco-German Citizens’ Fund) presents itself with clear user guidance, content tailored to the needs of users and an...
Bronze at the ADC 2021 for the taz App.
Our client taz, die tageszeitung made it onto the winners' podium of the Art Directors Club (ADC) with their new app! The app was awarded a bronze nail in the “Editorial – Newspaper – Redesign” category. The app now has an entirely new intuitive interaction...
From global to local: How our visual perception develops over time
“We see the forest before the trees” Navon, D. (1977) We live in a complex world, and the proper identification of objects is very important if we are to interact effectively with our environment. Early theories of object recognition often assumed that we first...
How change blindness can affect your user’s experience
In Psychology, there is a phenomenon called change blindness and it explains why your users don’t see what you think they actually should see. Our visual environment changes all the time. We must notice these changes. For example, it allows us to react to potential...
Project Common Voice goes multilingual
This awesome project we collaborated on with Mozilla just got an important upgrade: „Today, Mozilla officially kick starts the process of collecting voice data for three more languages — French, German, and — a little randomly — Welsh“ Help make the Internet more...
How our expectations determine how we process information
How do we process information? In cognitive psychology, two famous processes are involved in how we interpret information – and as humans, we constantly use both: top-down processing and bottom-up processing. Please read the sentence below: Now read it again. Now read...
The Game for the Energy Transition – MDR Reports on the First Tests of the GrowFlowFly Project
Since the fall of 2023, our User Research and Experience Design Studio, The Geekettez GbR and Claudius Brodman have been working on the user experience and visual layout of the research project GrowFlowFly, a collaborative project involving the Technical University of...
Together for a sustainable future! Collaboration with TU Munich in the Project GrowFlowFly
Together with the Technical University of Munich (TUM) as the project coordinator, along with consortium partners Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU), RWTH Aachen University (RWTH), and aratall GmbH, Osnabrück, we are collaborating with Claudius Brodmann...
taz, die Tageszeitung Successfully Launches New Design for Publisher Pages
In September of this year, the renowned taz, die Tageszeitung embarked on a relaunch that marks the beginning of a new chapter for taz, as the publisher replaces the printed newspaper during the week with a purely digital version. The goal was to enhance the user...
We Are Female Founders
The Female Founders Map of the GIG7 Competence Center for FeMale Business in Mannheim is online. Find The Geekettez Mannheim office on the map! The Female Founders Map campaign was launched to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the GIG7 Competence Center FeMale...
Talk: UX-Maturity and what it means for your project
UX-Maturity is omnipresent in projects, whether it is addressed or not. Because UX-Maturity describes the understanding of companies for user-centred design & their capacity to work systematically user-centred and to deliver results. UX-Maturity models are the...
Lecture: UX – but please inclusive: A plea for a feminist perspective on HCI
"Technology is not neutral. We're inside of what we make, and it's inside of us. We're living in a world of connections - and it matters which ones get made and unmade". - Donna Haraway, 1997 Last year we were invited to contribute to two events - the UIG conference...
It’s a man’s world: Programmed by men – for men
In early March, Stefanie was interviewed for Deutsche Welle's "Shift" program. The topic: equality in design - why does it matter? In the middle part of the show, Stefanie talks briefly about how digital technology is primarily programmed by men for men and why the...
Mannheim’s equality action plan has passed. We were allowed to participate in its development!
Equality and inclusivity are topics close to our hearts, not only in the context of our projects. Naturally, we enthusiastically agreed when asked to participate in the City of Mannheim’s equality action plan. By signing the “European Charter for Equality of Women and...
New website for the Deutsch-Französischer Bürgerfonds
We created the concept, the information architecture and the UI design for the relaunch. The revised website of the Deutsch-Französischer Bürgerfonds (Franco-German Citizens’ Fund) presents itself with clear user guidance, content tailored to the needs of users and an...
Contact one of our studios
hello@thegeekettez.com
Mannheim
Jennifer Moss
Berlin
Stefanie Kegel