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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...
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...
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...
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...
10 questions for voice interfaces
For many years now, interface and interaction designers have been designing graphical user interfaces (GUI). But in recent years more and more so-called natural language user interfaces (NLUI) have been popping up. This means human-machine interaction does not happen...
UX Research: Don’t forget the stakeholders
Why understanding the business is part of a successful user-centred design concept. Einstein once said: „If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” You can apply this quote 1:1 to user...
Differences in formative and summative evaluations (and why they matter for UX designers)
A few weeks ago, Steffi spoke at the Berlin Ladies that UX meet-up about the different types of usability tests. Here is a summary of the talk: As user experience designers we constantly run into situations where it will be essential that we urge our team members to...
UX thoughts: Language matters!
Have you ever wondered if by avoiding the term "test" in usability test situations, you may receive better test results? We believe replacing the word "test" with the word "evaluation" is an improved description of the situation and may even help us get less biased...
Are representative users important for usability testing?
YES, yes and yes – of course: Usability testing is a method in user research. You are evaluating a system or product you design by observing people who think aloud while they use that system/product and solve pre-defined tasks and so help us to spot problems with the...
UX Research Methods – In which cases are user interviews actually appropriate?
In the design process, you can use different methods or a mix of methods to make the product, website or app "better" in the sense of "user centered" - meaning: you get valuable insights into the world of users. In UX design, we like to draw on the repertoire of...
Intercultural Interface Design
or: Know who you're targeting. In one of our recent projects, we were asked to do culture research for a client’s website.The goal was to optimize the client’s landing pages in terms of design (& content) as the page was to be rolled out in different countries...
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...
UX trends: what’s coming, what’s staying in 2020?
Happy twenty twenty! We hope you all had a good start into the new year! We are already almost in the middle of January, but still the question: What comes in the new year? What topics and questions are likely to (continue to) occupy us as user experience designers...
Talk: The ROI of a Positive User Experience
Last week, we had the opportunity to give a talk on the topic "The ROI of a Positive User Experience" at the c't conference in Cologne. We were thrilled about the invitation, as the conference primarily deals with topics related to frontend development. n our talk, we...
The USA overseas election process has me asking: am I meant to vote? #myexperience
I have dual citizenship in the USA and Germany but never voted in the US, partially because the last time I lived there was during my kindergarten years. Additionally, I was under the impression that the country was doing fine and would not vote for someone completely...
What a restaurant experience taught me about user experience.
When visiting a restaurant we have certain expectations: We expect to leave the restaurant with a belly filled with yummy food and to have a pleasant experience. While the level of pleasantry and how we define pleasant will depend on the type of restaurant we visit,...
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...
User experience vs. the user’s experience
When we speak of User Experience most people think of human-machine interaction. Wikipedia's second sentence on the subject is: "User experience includes the practical, experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human-computer interaction and product...
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...
We were present at the expert workshop on the Algo.Rules!
In May last year, we were invited to an expert workshop of the iRight Lab and Algoethik, a project of the Bertelsmann Foundation on the topic of "Algo.Rules". Algorules, in short, are ethical design criteria for algorithmic systems. Background Algorithmic systems are...
Talk: The ROI of a Positive User Experience
Last week, we had the opportunity to give a talk on the topic "The ROI of a Positive User Experience" at the c't conference in Cologne. We were thrilled about the invitation, as the conference primarily deals with topics related to frontend development. n our talk, we...
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...
Cannes Lions 2017 – what a trip!
We are back from this year's Cannes Lions and ready to share some memories, while they are still fresh! In Cannes, we were part of BWLions, the official representatives of Baden-Württemberg, the state where our Mannheim studio is based. We spent all week with our nine...
ROOOAAAAR – The Geekettez are part of the bwlions delegation team
We are pleased to report, that our studio will be sending one of ten delegates from the Baden-Württemberg creative industries to this year’s Cannes Lions International Festival for Creativity.While Stefanie keeps the shop running in the capital, Jennifer and nine...
Multicultural User Experience – published Case Study in Universal UX Design
We contributed a case study for a UX publication, which you should put on your reading list. Is technology universal? This is the key question of the book Universal UX Design by Alberto Ferreira. We contributed a case study on culture research we did for a company...
Ladies that UX is coming to Berlin.
To all the Berlin women in the field of user experience – there is another meet-up in town! Together with a few other ladies, Steffi co-founded the Berlin chapter of Ladies that UX, an international organization connecting women in the user experience field. What is...
Lecture: Breaking down software-based barriers in the design process
Last Wednesday at the UIG Spring Conference, we had a presentation on a tool that has greatly simplified our design process, Sketch App. Like many project teams, we are constantly asking ourselves what we can do to simplify and speed up the design process and optimize...
Contact one of our studios
hello@thegeekettez.com
Mannheim
Jennifer Moss
Berlin
Stefanie Kegel