Alan Lavery

Northern Ireland Web Designer Joined over 6 years ago

  • 2 stories
  • 9 comments
  • 1 upvote
  • Posted to Free Artistic Illustrations and Vector Art, Mar 02, 2020

    Was Mailchimp your inspiration for the design of this site?

    0 points
  • Posted to A guide to asking the right user research questions , Feb 26, 2020

    These are great, I've always found asking questions that lead to the discovery of the users goals, behaviours, paint points and context return the greatest insights. Once these are answered, you can use this data for more accurate personas or empathy mapping. I find the three golden questions are:

    1. Why did you visit the app? (Defines the goals)
    2. Where you able to complete your task today? (Yes/No & why not) (defines the paint points)
    3. What would you change about {app name}? What improvements would you make?

    I would always include at least these three questions. I would also include some Likert scale based quantitative questions as well.

    3 points
  • Posted to Dialing It In: Knowing How to Move Through the Fidelity Spectrum, Jan 22, 2020

    This is an interesting way of looking at design fidelity.

    For me, the level of fidelity depends on 2 things:

    1. How far away the audience is from the project
    2. How high a level of problem it is you are trying to solve

    I would go as far as saying that low fidelity designs are as much as sketches on paper. They are sketchy and incomplete and only have some characteristics of the finished product. We can learn about broad concepts and users mental models, find out if users ‘get it’. We can also learn about optimising the flow and if it can be improved. They are fast, cheap, you can catch problems early and don’t require a high level of skill.

    Medium fidelity gets closer to the real thing. Still obviously not finished, they are fairly detailed but objects presented in schematic form. They provide simulated interactive functionality and full navigation.

    From this, you can learn about more detailed concepts and flows, screen layout and hierarchy, basic interactions, navigation structure, terminology and copy and labelling. It’s still cheap and better to test with users. It’s easier to communicate with stakeholders about certain areas and they provide richer data and insights.

    High fidelity designs go another step further and allow much richer interactions and may include a certain look and feel. On top of medium and low fidelity prototype we can learn more about access flows and concepts, screen designs and layout and data in/data out workflows. We can also test the form design and how they perform with users. They convey rich conventions, they are effective to manage stakeholders and to get their buy in as well.

    1 point
  • Posted to Which one is best for UI Designers? Trackpad & Mouse & Touchpad?, in reply to Ali Demirci , Sep 17, 2018

    I've just moved from a Magic Mouse to a Logitech MX Master and I have gestures set up with the secondary buttons and scroll wheel. I was afraid of the same thing but since moving it's been so easy and the Logitech mouse is a much better shape than the Apple mouse.

    1 point
  • Posted to Wheel — a color wheel tool, Jul 17, 2018

    This is a really nice project. Would be great if you could select one of the colours and manually change the hex value e.g if you have a brand colour and you want to see which colours match. Seems like a much more simple tool that Colour Scheme Designer.

    2 points
  • Posted to New portfolio update, Jun 22, 2018

    I'm a fan of the minimalist design however your link text has a failing colour contrast ratio (1.94:1 using WebAIM colour contrast checker). I would perhaps consider a more striking colour for your links for people with a colour vision deficiency.

    2 points
  • Posted to My new website about hip hop, Jun 22, 2017

    Really like the site design and great to see your idea come to fruition! If I had one piece of feedback, it'd be that the 'This weeks theme' section could maybe be broken up a bit. It seems like a lot of unformatted text and looks out of place. The text at the section below it (A Collection of HipHop) looks better with the narrow width so perhaps laying it out in the same way might make it more readable. It would also draw your attention more to the Spotify cards below the text as you could keep those as they are and it would appear to break out of the grid. (see https://postimg.org/image/rz4b9d3y5/). Really like the font choice, big fan of Avenir of here :)

    1 point
  • Posted to After 5 years as a Web Designer, here's my introduction, in reply to Alberto G. de la Cruz , May 31, 2017

    Hey Alberto, thank you for taking the time to go over the site and provide great feedback! I've made some amendments to the intro text. I find phrasing and copy a weak point, something which I hope to improve on soon. As I said in a comment to Ivan, due to a lot of my work being under NDA, perhaps the site may benefit from a case study section. That way I can show the reasoning behind the designs and the process used to get there?

    0 points
  • Posted to After 5 years as a Web Designer, here's my introduction, in reply to Ivan C. , May 31, 2017

    Hey thanks for this :) yea the problem is the big pieces of work that I've done have involved NDA's etc so I can't show those so I have to use other pieces of work I've either done for myself etc. Perhaps a case study section might help get around this issue? This is why I show my blog posts on the homepage as well. Really appreciate the feedback!

    0 points
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